Believing God

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I heard a quote years ago that was attributed to Mark Twain, and I don’t know if he actually said it, because at this point I think every conceivable configuration of words has been attributed to Mark Twain. But the quote was that faith is believing what you know ain’t so. And there are a lot of people who view faith that way.

I don’t view faith that way. That bothers me, as a matter of fact. But I know that there are a lot of people, even Christians, who believe that, who understand faith in that way.

I’ve heard people in church say that faith is believing something in spite of the evidence. That doesn’t sound like any kind of faith I want any part of, to believe in spite of the evidence. And that might be why when, and it hasn’t happened here, but when I’ve spoken on apologetics type things in the past, arguments and evidence for Christianity, reasons why we believe the things that we believe, why I’ve had people almost get offended that you would bring that up and say, you’re just supposed to have faith.

Well, faith in what? Faith is absolutely essential within the Christian worldview, but faith is a really bad way of telling which worldview is correct. Because the Muslims have faith, the Buddhists have faith, everybody has faith, but how do we know what we’re supposed to put our faith in?

all throughout the scriptures God gives us evidence in the world around us God has given us evidence not just so that we can know he’s there but so that we can know him not just know about him but actually know him and know what he’s like and know how we’re supposed to respond to him and faith is more than just believing faith is a conviction I may be getting ahead of myself in my notes here faith is a conviction it is a rock solid conviction but it’s a conviction that’s rooted in evidence and leads us to do something for the last few months we’ve been studying the book of first corinthians and I just became convicted over the last several days that probably a good opportunity now that we’re part way through about halfway through we’re in chapter 10 a little more than halfway through, it might be a good time to take a break from 1 Corinthians. It’ll still be there, Lord willing.

If we’re still here, it’ll still be here when we’re done with this. But I felt convicted to come and spend some time talking about faith over the next few weeks, because that’s something that we all struggle with or will struggle with at some point in our Christian lives. Faith.

We can be doing really well. Everything seems to be going great. And then circumstances change and suddenly we’re faced with the decision, do we trust God or do we not?

And I’m here to tell you, it doesn’t matter how spiritually mature you are, there’s still a struggle there. There’s still a choice to be made. Am I going to trust God with this or am I not?

And our natural inclination is I’ve got to rush in and fix it. I’ve got to handle it. I don’t know how this is going to work out.

One of the hardest things we can do is to say, Lord, I know you’ve got this. And yet the Bible teaches us to have the kind of faith that enables us to do that. to step back and trust God, not as a blind leap in the dark, but because we know him.

And so I want to start this morning with this passage from Hebrews 11 that some of you are probably familiar with, that I think gives us a basic definition of what faith means. So we’re going to start there in Hebrews chapter 11. If you haven’t turned there with me, please turn with me to Hebrews chapter 11.

And once you find it, if you’ll stand with me as we read together from God’s word. Now, if you don’t have a Bible with you this morning or can’t find Hebrews 11, that’s all right. It’ll be on the screen for you up here.

But I want to read the first six verses of this chapter and get a glimpse of what this chapter tells us about faith. It says, starting in verse 1, Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. For by it the men of old gained approval. By faith we understand that the worlds were prepared by the word of God, so that what is seen was not made out of things which are visible.

By faith, Abel offered to God a better sacrifice than Cain, through which he obtained the testimony that he was righteous, God testifying about his gifts, and through faith, though he is dead, he still speaks. By faith, Enoch was taken up so that he would not see death, and he was not found because God took him up, for he obtained the witness that before his being taken up, he was pleasing to God. And without faith, it is impossible to please him.

For he who comes to God must believe that he is, and that he is a rewarder of those who seek him. And you may be seated. Hebrews chapter 11 goes on for quite a bit longer than that.

And Hebrews chapter 11 throughout the whole chapter is making a list of people throughout the scriptures that exhibited faith. And it doesn’t pretend to be an exhaustive list. It’s not saying this is every person in Scripture that showed faith. But it’s hitting the highlights, especially going through the Old Testament, of people who exhibited faith in God and what that meant, how they showed that faith.

And there’s sort of a running commentary going along through it. So you see that it starts out in verse 1 with talking about faith, and verse 2, verse 3. Then you get to verses 4 and 5, and it starts the list. And it talks about Abel, who’s one of the first examples.

It talks about Enoch, who’s another early example. And then you get to verse 6 and there’s some more commentary. Well, if we were to continue this morning in chapter 11, that list goes on, that list continues.

There are numerous, numerous examples found there. But verse 6 seemed like a good place to stop just to get this snapshot of a couple of the stories that it pulls out here with some of the commentary around it, just to get an idea of what the Bible calls faith. And we need to start by understanding that according to the Bible, faith is not blind belief, but it is belief in what we haven’t received yet.

Has my wife stayed with me for the whole rest of my life at this point? Not yet. We’ve still got however we live to go, right?

But based on everything that I have seen and experienced over the years that I’ve been with her, I fully expect that to be the case. So my belief that my wife loves me is not blind faith. even though I don’t have tangible evidence that she’s going to do what she promised at the altar, and even though she doesn’t have tangible evidence, we haven’t seen the fulfillment, she doesn’t have tangible evidence that I’m going to fulfill that promise I made at the altar.

Everything in our history up to this point gives us reason to trust each other. And that’s the kind of faith the scriptures are talking about here. Blind belief would be walking up to somebody you’ve never met in a place you’ve never been and assuming that they’re trustworthy enough that, here, hold my life savings.

Would any of us do that? I can’t think of a scenario where I’d do that. That would be blind faith.

But on the other hand, biblical faith is looking at the evidence and based on that, being willing to trust that something that has been promised that you just haven’t received yet is going to be fulfilled in the way that it was promised. And that’s why he says in verse one that faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. Another way of saying and this is in my native King James, that I was raised memorizing that faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.

And all of those are good translations because these are some complex Greek words that don’t necessarily have an easy translation. But the point that the writer of Hebrews here is trying to make is that faith is what provides the basis for our belief. It’s sort of what bridges the gap between what we have seen and what we hope for.

Because the way we use the word hope a lot of times is a very empty word. I hope the weather’s going to be nice next weekend for live nativity. We hope that every year, but sometimes it has been not so nice, right?

I’ve heard the stories of when it was in negative temperatures and wind, and y’all had to have a wall of hay built to block the wind, and I just thank God I was still in Seminole when that was going on. That sounds awful. So we can hope, but we have no assurance that the weather’s going to be nice, even if the weathermen say that it’s going to be nice.

I’m appreciative of our weathermen up until there’s a zero percent chance of rain and I’ve pulled everything out of my garage and it starts raining. That happens. That has happened.

There are lots of things that we say, oh, I hope for. Oh, I hope the economy gets better. It may, it may not.

Who knows? who knows anymore. I hope fill in the blanks.

We do that all the time. But there are things that we hope for that are more concrete because God has promised them. And the world will look at that and say, well, how do you know?

Because you don’t have it in your hand. How do you know that he’s going to do that? Well, I don’t in the sense that I have it in my hand.

I don’t in the sense of proof as they’re looking for. But we look back at God’s track record. And we’ll come back to this in a minute.

But our faith in God is what gets us to the point of that hope being something that we treat with certainty. And the conviction, the evidence of things not seen, it’s what offers validation to our belief. But again, it’s not just blind faith.

It’s not just, well, I chose to believe this. We were listening to an interview with Jim Wallace from, I forget what his ministry he’s called. I don’t know.

He does forensic evidence. And anyway, he does investigations about the evidence for Christianity. We were listening to him on the way down here this morning, and he was talking about the main reasons why people say they’re Christians.

And he says the number one answer that he’s given is, well, I was raised a Christian. I’m thankful that I was raised in a Christian home. I look back on that and I’m grateful for that.

But just because mama and daddy told me doesn’t make it true. There came a point when I had to learn for myself, is this true or is it not? We need some validation for what we believe.

And he talks about faith, biblical faith, being what bridges that gap. Faith is our reason for believing what we hope, where it’s not just an empty hope, but where it’s something we trust is really going to happen. Faith provides evidence when we can’t yet see the fulfillment with our own eyes.

Have I seen the fulfillment of everything God’s promised? I’m not in heaven yet as far as, I mean, I like y’all and I like Central pretty well, but I don’t think this is heaven. So I haven’t seen the fulfillment with my own eyes, but I believe it because God’s given reason to believe it.

God’s given reason to believe that he’s going to do what he says he’ll do. And that’s where I say that faith bridges the gap between the promises that are already fulfilled and the promises that are still in progress. You look at what’s in progress and know there may not be a guarantee that you can hold in your hand, but you look at all the promises that have already been fulfilled and say, I have no reason to doubt that the one who did all of this is going to do what he says over here.

And for that reason, the writer says in verse 2, for by it, by faith, the men of old gained approval. So throughout the generations, throughout the history of the world, there has always been those people who’ve trusted God, who’ve believed God, who’ve put their faith in God, who’ve taken God at his word. And by doing so, they’ve obtained a good testimony. And that’s what that list in Hebrews chapter 11 is all about.

These people who really, if they had nothing else going for them, they trusted God and it made all the difference. Verse 3 says, By faith we understand that the worlds were prepared by the word of God, so that what is seen was not made out of things which are visible. And if you didn’t understand Hebrews to be the word of God, you’d still have to remark at how wise that statement is.

Now for me it’s not that amazing because I believe God inspired it, so of course God knows what happened. But in their day and age there was a lot of Greek philosophy that went into how the world came to be in its current form and what it was made out of. Now we understand, even non-believing scientists believe, generally speaking, that the universe had a beginning.

The Greeks thought matter was eternal. We understand now that’s not the case because the things that lead them to the understanding of the Big Bang, they understand the universe had a beginning. We also understand that anything that has a beginning requires a cause outside of itself. So if the universe had a beginning, there has to be something outside the universe that led the universe into being.

We know from scientific testing and study over centuries that life doesn’t come from non-life. And so here the writer of Hebrews is expressing things 2,000 years ago that science has only recently, relatively recently, caught up with the idea that the world that we see in front of us was made of things not seen. And yet he says we knew that all along by faith.

We knew that if God said it, it must be true because God’s never lied to us. And even our most basic assessments and assumptions of the world around us, they require a degree of faith when we don’t see the answers right in front of us. Everybody has faith.

Understand that. Everybody has faith. Everybody, whether they, it may be blind faith, but even if we look at the, even if we look at evidence and things around us in our daily lives, we look at evidence and then we make a leap based on that evidence, make the next step.

I shouldn’t say leap like it sounds like blind faith. But even if looking at the evidence, we take that next step of saying this is what I think the evidence means, There’s some faith involved there. Every person has faith.

It’s just a matter of finding out what the object of that faith is. And so looking at faith, we come to verses 4 and 5, those examples that I mentioned to you earlier of Abel and Enoch. We’re given these examples to show us that real faith looks a lot like obedience.

That’s where I said this ties in with Miss Janie’s message to the kids this morning. Real faith looks a lot like obedience. You go through chapter 11 here, and you’re going to see people, even in the parts of the chapter that we’re not going to get to today, you see people who believed God and did something about it.

Abel, verse 4, talks about Abel’s sacrifice. By faith, Abel offered to God a better sacrifice than Cain. If you don’t remember that story, Cain and Abel were sons of Adam and Eve, and they’d been told, it’s not recorded to us in the scriptures, it’s not recorded to us in Genesis when they were told, but we know from piecing it that they were told that they were supposed to offer an animal sacrifice.

That probably begins with God sacrificing the animal in the garden to cover Adam and Eve with a covering of skins. That animal lost his life in order to cover the sins of the guilty. I think that set the precedent for the animal sacrifices.

And so they were told they were supposed to bring a sacrifice to God. Abel brought a sheep and offered a sheep, and it’s not because God needed a sheep. The sacrifices were always a picture of the innocent dying to cover the sins of the guilty, to point people to Jesus.

Abel did that. Probably, I’m sure, didn’t understand all the theology that was going to lead from the sacrifices to the cross. But Abel did what God said.

Cain came and brought God vegetables. God ordered steak, and Cain brought him salad. Wouldn’t you be upset?

No, the real problem with that, the real problem with that is that it didn’t meet the requirement of being a blood sacrifice, of showing that the innocent die for the sins of the guilty. It wasn’t a sacrifice that pointed to the ultimate sacrifice, and it wasn’t what God told him to do. And you say, what’s the big deal?

He brought what he had. He brought what he was willing to offer God. And that’s always a problem when you and I look at God, and God says, here’s what I want from you, and we say, yeah, well, here’s what I’m willing to give you, like this is a negotiation.

Abel simply believed God and brought what he asked for. And it says he received a good testimony. And by the way, it cost him dearly.

Abel was murdered by his brother out of jealousy. You say, how did that work out well with Abel? Abel’s with the Lord.

He trusted God, and despite what it cost him, Abel’s with the Lord. Enoch is another one who’s with God. We don’t know much about Enoch, except that he walked with God in a unique way.

When Genesis goes through the list of all these people that lived, Enoch is listed, and in addition to the begetting, you know, so-and-so begets so-and-so, they mention that Enoch, and I don’t know if it’s Enoch or Enoch, so I’ve probably used both pronunciations, and I’m talking about the same guy. It says that he walked with God, and then he was not, for God took him. There was something about Enoch’s walk with God that was so close and so trusting that God looked at him and said, you know what?

You don’t have to die. I’m just going to take you. I don’t know how that works, but I’d kind of like to have that kind of faith that God said, I’m just going to take you when I’m ready.

And if we look at these and the other examples in chapter 11, we see a couple of common characteristics of their faith, a couple of things that they have in common. The first is that they believed God when he said something, and the second is that they acted like it. They did something about it.

And so we have to understand faith is not simply an intellectual belief. It’s not just, oh, I believe that’s true. Oh, yeah, I believe that’s probably right.

I believe that if I spend more than I bring in, eventually I’m going to be broke. I believe that. And most of the time I act like I believe that.

Okay, we’ve all been in that boat. It’s Christmas season. Everybody’s running around buying gifts.

There’s a difference between believing something and acting like it. And real faith combines the two. They believed God and they acted like it.

It’s a belief so deep and so strong that we’re willing to act like it. We’re willing to act on it. And in the case of faith in God, it’s accompanied by obedience.

Now in a couple of weeks, we’re going to talk about how faith alone justifies us before God. And we tell people that there’s no way to earn your salvation. It’s just by faith.

How does that fit when we say faith is obedience? It’s because it’s not obedience to every letter of the law of God that constitutes faith. When God says sinned against Him and we need to repent and trust in Jesus as our Savior, then repenting and trusting in Him is obedience.

Believing He’s the one and only sacrifice for my sins. He’s the only way I can be right with God and putting our entire trust in Him. That is an act of obedience.

It’s obeying the gospel. So why should we have faith? We know that it looks like obedience, but obedience is not a fun word.

It’s not a popular word in our culture. I’ll do just about anything somebody asks me to do, but tell me what to do. And I don’t like that.

Most of us are that way. So obedience is not a fun word. And so why should we have faith in God?

And it’s because as his children, faith is the basic requirement for how we please him. And I think I could take a poll this morning, even a secret ballot. So there’s no, there’s, there’s no peer pressure.

But if I were to take a secret ballot vote in here this morning of everybody who is, who has trusted in Christ as their savior and been born again? Do you want to please God with your life? I think the results would be unanimous that we do.

And if not, we need to check our hearts. But our desire as his children should be to please him. And he says right here in verse 6, without faith it is impossible to please him.

If we’re not walking by faith, we can’t please God. It doesn’t matter how hard you work to serve him. It doesn’t matter how many good deeds you do.

It doesn’t matter what a good life you live. if you’re not trusting God as you do those things, if you’re not doing it out of faith in Him, then it’s not going to please Him. Because we can easily do the right thing for the wrong reasons.

We can do the right thing and not be happy about it. Can’t tell you how many times as a child I was told to clean my room and how many times I cleaned my room as a result. But I can tell you how many times I was happy about it.

Zero. Did I clean my room because it was the right thing to do? Because I trusted my parents?

No, I cleaned my room because I didn’t want to get in trouble and because I didn’t want to hear about it anymore. So we can do the right things for the wrong reasons. If we’re not operating by faith, we’re never going to please God no matter what we do.

And the reason for that is faith humbles us. Faith requires us to acknowledge our dependence on God. And we are dependent on God.

We just have to be reminded to acknowledge it sometimes. And when we’re walking by faith, when we’re saying, I trust you, there’s an element in there of I’m dependent on you. When my kids, especially the little ones, you know, we’ll talk about going somewhere, and Jojo will say, well, who’s going to take care of me?

Like we’ve ever left her to fend for herself, right? But she has to make sure we have a plan. So Charla goes to the ladies thing yesterday, and Jojo says, who’s going to stay with me?

I’m going to stay with you. Okay, you’re going to take care of me? Yes.

Okay. And there was faith there, believing that I was going to take care of her, but it came from a place of dependence because she knew she needed me to take care of her. Although there’s a part of me that thinks she could take care of all the rest of us, but I don’t tell her that.

When we walk by faith, we’re acknowledging our dependence on God. There’s an element of humility there, and because faith results in obedience. That’s why we should have faith, because if we want to please Him, it’s the way to do it.

And I want to leave you this morning with what enables us to have faith. And it’s God’s record of faithfulness. God’s record of faithfulness is the basis for our faith.

You look at the evidence. I mentioned at the beginning there are a lot of people who are Christians because mom and dad said so. Or it’s because of how I was raised.

Or this works for me. And if that’s your thought process, I’m not here to beat you up about it. I’m just telling you I’m too much of a skeptic to go that route.

I want to know, is it true? I want to know, is there a reason to believe that before I put my trust in something, before I rely on something for the direction of my life and where I’m going to end up in eternity, I want to know, is it true? That applies not just to the truth of Christianity, but that applies to can I trust God?

I want to know, can I trust God? And he’s given us ample evidence. That’s why verse six says, for he who comes to God must believe that he is and that he is a rewarder of those who seek him.

When it says believe that he is, it’s not that the writer forgot a word there that he is fill in the blanks. No, we have to believe that He is. We have to believe in Him, and our faith is rooted in who He is.

Because you and I are called on by God, we’re called on by circumstances to trust Him in a lot of areas where we don’t know how it’s going to work out. We’re called on to trust Him in a lot of circumstances that get very dark, and we see no way forward or no way that we’re going to be able to handle these things. Have you ever been in a situation where you saw no way out or had no idea how it was going to work?

And in circumstances like that, or if I even think there might be circumstances like that, I start running through every scenario in my mind. What if this happened? What if this happened?

Looking for all the ways out. You’d think I’d be a better chess player than I am, but I’m terrible at it. But I start imagining these scenarios.

How’s it going to work out? And I don’t find any way forward that I can see. And I have to stop and realize I can’t trust my plans to get me out of this.

I can’t trust that circumstances are going to line up in just the perfect way that’s going to magically fix all this. I don’t know enough to make things work, but I know God. I know who He is.

I know His character because it’s written on the pages of His revelation to us. And yes, there are things about God’s character that our world finds objectionable, but not if you love Him. We see the faithfulness of God to His people.

We see his character revealed in the way that he took care of Israel for generations, even when they treated him like dirt. God was faithful when they repented to give them grace they did not deserve. I’ve seen in my own life God’s faithfulness.

That’s one thing I have to do is stop and remember, wait, God has handled this circumstance. God has handled this circumstance. God has handled this circumstance.

And I know it was God because there’s no other way that things would have worked out in the way that they did. We can know the character of God by the way he’s dealt with our circumstances, by the way he has revealed himself in his word, by the way he’s revealed himself in the person of Jesus Christ. Hebrews starts out by saying God, who in the past revealed himself through the prophets, has now revealed himself through his son. So he’s shown us who he is through his word, but he’s shown us through he is by the word made flesh.

And if ever there’s been a person on this earth I could trust, it’s the man I read about in those red and white pages. Our faith is in who God is, where we may not see a way forward, we know there’s a God we can trust, and it’s rooted in what He’s done. I’ve mentioned to you before that there was this common practice that we see throughout the Old Testament, and sometimes into the New, where they would stop and they would remind themselves of all that God had done.

And they’ll go through a list of the way He took care of Abraham, how He took care of Moses, how He took care of David. They’ll make a list. And that’s something that if we’ll do it too, make a list of how He’s taken care of His people Word and how He’s taken care of His people in our own history. It’ll strengthen our faith in God, but it’s always based on this evidence of God’s past record.

Past performance is probably the best predictor of what’s going to happen in the future. And it’s inconceivable that we would look at the God who’s kept all of His promises up to now and say, yeah, but I don’t think He’s going to take care of these few. Why would we expect God from eternity past to suddenly stop being God?

And that’s really what faith is. It’s just the trust. It’s not the conviction that God is going to do anything that we ask, but it’s the conviction that God is going to continue being who God always has been, and that God is going to continue doing the things that God always has done. And so I want to leave you with this this morning.

I think I said that once before, but now I really mean it. I want to leave you with this, that if you are a believer, if you’re somebody that belongs to Jesus Christ because you’ve put your trust in Him for salvation, He’s called you to serve him and sometimes we have to step out in faith to do that. And it’s hard.

And so there are times, I know from experience, there are times that I’ll hold off on doing something. I don’t think I can do that. I don’t think I can afford that.

I don’t think I have the time. It’s going to be inconvenient. It’s going to be uncomfortable.

It’s going to be this. It’s going to be that. Come up with all the reasons and what it really is is I’m not trusting God enough.

Whatever God’s called you to do that maybe you’re holding back and not being obedient about. Maybe it’s time for you to look at his record of faithfulness and step out and obey him and recognize that you can trust him with what he’s given you to do. And if you’re not somebody who’s trusted Christ as your savior, the first and most important step of faith you can ever take is to trust Jesus as your savior, to recognize that each of us has sinned against God.

We’ve disobeyed him and we have earned ourselves a penalty of separation from him, not only in this life, but in the world to come. And you and I can do all the good we could ever think to do. We could try hard.

We could be super religious, church-going, giving good people, and it would never be enough to make up for what we’ve done. Jesus Christ came to pay the full penalty for our sins so that we could be forgiven, so that we could have a relationship with God. And he did that by being nailed to the cross, taking responsibility for our sins, and shedding his blood and dying.

God offers. God offers forgiveness and salvation if you’ll trust Him. If you’ll stop trusting in yourself and your efforts, you’ll stop trusting that I’ll just be good enough on my own.

Stop trusting in those things and instead trust in the fact that Jesus paid for your sin and rose again to prove it. And if you’ll do that this morning, you can have the forgiveness that He promised.