The Power of Faith

Where are you headed?

What are you headed in life?

Now, that might sound like a question you ask someone young with their whole life before them, and certainly for those who are younger, that question will probably take a very different shape. But in a way, the question is just as relevant regardless of your age.

You see, it’s very easy to just plod along in this life of ours, with no real purpose… no real destination… we’ll just see where things head.

Quite often our destination can be very short term, as in, I just want to get through the next couple of days.

You know, sometimes when we think too big… well, that’s what leads to the mid-life crisis. I wonder how many of you have had something that might amount to what we call a mid-life crisis?

The mid-life crisis is actually the natural consequence of the way our society is built.

Your early life is spent trying to figure out what career you want, and then you try to achieve it.

You then get to a point, often somewhere around the forties, although it can be earlier or later, and you either have achieved what you wanted, or not, but either way, you’re like - well, what was all that about? Was there any purpose to everything I’ve just done?

The reality is, while this can be most keenly felt around that sort of mid-life period, I think regardless of age, there is an element to which we ask - why are we doing what we are doing?

Christian meaning

But this is where the Christian message comes in… you’re actually not just doing meaningless laps of the Sun.

There is a purpose to what you are doing - and it is intimately linked with the creator of this universe.

Now, part of the problem is that we’ve been taught that significance is tied in with making a big impact that is noticed by lots of people.

We might be able to think of a few people who have a lasting legacy, where the lives of countless people have been changed by that individual. For example, someone like Billy Graham, who went around the world, and countless Christians today are believers because they heard him.

The reality is, significance on that level is extremely rare - and even on a more localised level is quite rare as well. Thinking like this misses the point of what our purpose is.

You see, your purpose is found in being part of the people of God.

In many ways, this has been an underlying message throughout the book of Hebrews.

Repeatedly throughout the letter, the author is urging the recipients: don’t let go of the good things Jesus has done for you!

Jesus has done the most amazing work in perfecting a plan that can draw us into being the people of God - which is what we’ve been exploring as we’ve gone through this letter - and as the author says in Hebrews 4:11: make every effort to enter that rest.

So, in one regard, this is what we’re trying to achieve.

Last week, when I looked at the second half of chapter 10, it used the language of “entering the Most Holy Place” and that we should “draw near to God”.

Once we move away from our hyper-individualized mindset, we start to see that there is something really meaningful and beautiful about being part of the people of God.

Now, as we come to Hebrews 11, people who have a reasonable level of familiarity with the Bible will likely remember that this is the great chapter of the Heroes of the Faith. It’s the one that tells us what faith is all about.

And that true, but we need to recognise that it’s being told to us in the context of reminding us of the new way that we are entering - the new covenant.

Let me just remind you of the last verse of chapter 10. “But we do not belong to those who shrink back and are destroyed, but to those who have faith and are saved”.

And it was in that little verse that we get the key to how it is that we enter the people of God.

It is by faith.

Faith

And so it is important that we figure out what “faith” is all about.

Well, in everyday speech, we might use faith in the sense of having trust or confidence in someone or something. If there’s someone you trust a lot, you would say that you have faith that what the promises they make, they will keep. We all wish that when a politician makes a promise, that we could have faith that they will keep it, but unfortunately we pick up pretty quickly that that would be misplaced faith.

And that’s just the thing, from an earthly perspective, faith seems futile because nothing and nobody is completely faithful in every aspect of their existence.

Some of you here will remember a comical, if slightly scary example that happened to me at Summerfest in the last Christmas holidays. You could say you put faith in a chair that it will hold you up, but I had a rather spectacular chair failure while sitting in front of a small crowd when it suddenly gave way, and everyone watched in horror as I hit the ground. Thankfully I was fine, but it just highlights how putting faith in anything of this world can be dangerous.

When we talk about faith as a Christian, we’re talking about the object of our faith to be God. And while for those of us here who have learnt how secure this is, if you just allow yourself a moment to think about this from an outsiders perspective, you actually can start to see how crazy an idea this is.

How can we put our faith in something that is unseen?

But that is exactly what the author of Hebrews tells us to do. You see, in the first verse of chapter 11, we get what amounts to a definition of faith.

Verse 1

It says: Hebrews 11:1 “Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see.”

So let’s start exploring this by thinking about this aspect of having assurance about what we do not see.

You see, this is the initial difficulty with having faith. It’s what the skeptic is going to cry - show me the evidence, and then I’ll believe!

Having faith does require a leap. It requires us to accept something, even though we don’t know everything.

This is a step too far for some.

But, if we dig deeper, it really shouldn’t be. You see, having assurance about what we do not see, is not the same as just believing whatever we’re told.

We are not asked to just check our brain at the door and blindly follow along with whatever is said. That’s how cults start. And Christianity is far from a cult like you occasionally see where the members get caught up in some very scary stuff.

Quite to the contrary, God wants us to engage our minds. He wants us to wrestle with what we’re believing.

You see, even when we shortly start looking at the many people who are commended for their faith, if we look at many of them, they actually required quite a bit of convincing.

It’s not blind faith because we actually have a lot of evidence.

We do not see everything. There is a leap. But we have faith because God has shown himself time and time again that he is trustworthy. We have faith, because it all align with what we know is true.

Now, really quickly, before we do our quick tour of the heroes of the faith, there is one other aspect of this definition that is important, and that is that it points us to a future hope.

If you look at the start of the definition, it is confidence in what we hope for.

And what is our hope? It’s a hope that justice is done. It’s a hope that the captive is free and the oppressed are oppressed no longer. It’s a hope that wrongs are made right. Ultimately, it is a hope that we join in God’s kingdom, because that is where all of this can only ever take place in the full sense of that hope. It’s a hope that will only be fully realised when Jesus returns, but it’s a hope that we cling to, and we cling to it with faith.

Heroes of the Faith

Right, well, this chapter is now has a long list of people from the Old Testament,and as much as I’d love to go through each one in detail, I suspect some of you would like to get out of here in time for lunch, so we’re going to have to do a really quick fly through.

But as we go through, what I want you to notice in each of them, is the forward looking nature of where their faith takes them.

Verse 3 starts with creation. This is actually a good example of the type of faith in believing that God did it. There is a leap of faith we need to take to accept this, but it is a faith based on really good logic that the complexity of the world around us could never have been achieved by purely random occurences. But I’ll leave this discussion for another day.

Abel and Enoch then get mentions in starting from verse 4. Both interesting choices because we don’t know much about them from the Old Testament but both were recognised because of their desire to please God.

Noah from verse 7 is a bit more well known to us. He was given what seemed like an absurd task to many, to build a boat when there was no water nearby. He acted in the present moment, even though there was nothing visible. But it wasn’t some wild stab in the dark. It was based on a personal relationship he had with God. One that was predicated on faith but resulted in solid confidence. A confidence that was soon proved a worthy confidence.

We then are reminded of Abraham from verse 8 - and as the author of Hebrews paused on him for a moment, I’m going to do likewise.

You see, Abraham comes at a pivotal moment in the biblical story line. When he comes onto the scene in the twelth chapter of Genesis, things look very hopeless.

God has a plan which will involve passing a blessing through one person and then pass that blessing on to all nations. He needs someone who is able to do this.

But he doesn’t choose Abraham because he is the best or cleverest. God chooses him because he had faith. In faith he was able to have confidence about the future, and assurance about that which is unseen.

God told him to go. He had very little information. Just enough to know that God would show him the direction. And he went.

He moved in a better direction and he did so in faith.

We actually see Abraham’s faith a number of times. We see it in him receiving a promised child. And then we see it again, when God asked him to sacrifice that only child. Something you might think sound barbaric - but rest assured, God stopped him before he went through with it. But it was faith that God would always provide.

Well, we’re now up to verse 20. We get quick mentions of Isaac, then Jacob, then Joseph. Though each have very interesting stories that we could explore, but what we see about them is that they are thinking ahead to the future - anticipating the next generation and what is going to happen. Things are not as they should be, but they know what God is going to do something special.

We then get our next really major character in Moses.

The context at this point is that the Israelites are in captivity in Egypt, but through some divine circumstances, Moses ends up an insider in Pharaoh’s house. But in faith, Moses rejects this privileged position, because he recognises that things are not as they should be.

Now Moses is a good example of having doubts. We sometimes think that doubts are the enemy of faith. Doubts can be bad if left unchecked, but doubts can actually strengthen our faith.

You see, we get this episode, after Moses had left Pharaoh’s house, where God speaks to Moses through the burning bush and tells him to go back to Egypt and tell Pharaoh to let God’s people go. Moses however, doubts that he is capable of doing that.

Interestingly, it is through that doubt that we end up with an even stronger faith in Moses. One that took him back, and saw God work in powerful ways, including an eventual walk through the Red Sea.

Now if you know your Old Testament chronology, after spending forty years in the wilderness, they finally enter the Promised Land under the leadership of Joshua. Interestingly, although Joshua isn’t explicitly named, the felling of the wall of Jericho is.

In fact, that event also included the story of Rahab. The fact that she is mentioned is very interesting because, for starters, she’s a woman, she’s also not a Israelite, and just to make it really interesting, she’s also described in Joshua 2 as a prostitute. This most unexpected character, recognises that this is not as it should be, and in faith, she takes a step to see change happen. She doesn’t know exactly where it’s going to lead, but in faith she trusts that this is what she needs to do.

Well, when we get to verse 32, you get the sense that the author of Hebrews recognises that there are still a lot more characters to get through, but that it is going to take way too long to get through them all, so we get a rapid fire list of names. Gideon, Barak, Samson, Jephthah, David and Samuel.

Like the author of this letter, I also don’t have time to explore each of them as well, but each of them, though they didn’t know exactly where things were to head, but they knew that God was leading them in a the best direction, and so with faith, they did what they needed to. The people of God grew into their own.

The struggle

Now, from verse 33, we move from naming names, to describing what took place by unnamed people by faith.

As you read through, particularly as you move from verse 34 and following, is that in the name of faith, people went through a lot of struggles. People in the name of faith are facing lions and the sword. Some are being tortured, some imprisoned.

Some are put to death by stoning, and another is even listed as being sawn in two. Now, there is actually a Jewish tradition that the prophet Isaiah was sawn in two, so quite possibly this is a reference to that, although Isaiah’s death isn’t explicitly stated in the Bible, so it’s a little difficult to be clear about this.

Now you might wonder, why is this author talking all this stuff about suffering? Wouldn’t you think that if you were going to encourage people to take the way of faith, that maybe you might avoid any talk of anything that could make it sound hard?

But this is just the thing. The way of faith is not about the easy life, but it is about moving somewhere better.

Just look at verse 35 - it mentions people who have been tortured, but refused to be released so that they might gain an even better resurrection.

Now, it’s worth pointing out here, as Christians, we don’t try to seek out persecution in some sort of attempt to gain an advantageous position in heaven.

Rather, when struggles come our way, particularly when they come as a result of living out our faith, we don’t see them as a sign we’re doing something wrong, we are instead reminded of the better future there is before us.

You see, sometimes things are going to get tough. But even in the struggles, when you know that you are part of something bigger… something truly amazing… suddenly the struggle doesn’t quite seem as bad as it might otherwise be.

A better promise

Verse 39 sums up something quite remarkable about the authors reflection on the people of faith of the Old Testament. All these people, though commended for their faith, they did not receive the promise.

These people all lived prior to Jesus who came and set up the new kingdom. We, however, are people who live after Jesus has established the new covenant.

We know about Jesus and what he has done for us. And this changes everything.

And yet, we also wait for something even better. You see, we live in a time when Jesus has already established his kingdom, but yet the final consummation is yet to come. We sometimes refer to this as the “now but not yet”.

A time is coming when Jesus returns, when the kingdom of God will be fully realised. We won’t be living as dual citizens, that is to say, citizens of heaven and citizens of earth, but rather we’ll be with Jesus and all evil be be gone.

We get there by faith. There is a direction, and it is good.

Stepping out

On one level, we just need to call out to Jesus in faith. We just need to tell him that we need him, that we can’t do it on our own.

But faith also means taking steps in new and exciting areas. When you follow Jesus, you will at times be felt to move into new areas. It might be trying a new ministry. It might be building new relationships with others who need your help. It might be using a talent in a new way.

We often don’t know exactly where things are going to go, but sometimes we just need to take that step.

Conclusion

Life can sometimes feel like a dead end. It can feel like we’re just on this path and that we are not really making any noticable difference in the world.

Yet, when we join with the people of God, that all changes. Because as the people of God, we join with the one who created all things, and we find purpose and meaning.

But to do this we need faith. God calls for us to have this faith, a faith that can do extraordinary things, because with it, God is with us.

Faith should give us confidence, because with faith we move forward to something amazing. We don’t see it all, but God gives us what we need, and we can just enjoy seeing how God will continue to reveal himself along the way.

Let me pray...