|
This is a text reader for the article below:
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
Sunday 11/30/25
Title: Faith begins when Christ is revealed
Click for Message Video
Message Audio Player:
Podcast: Download (Duration: 1:30:16 — 93.2MB)
Faith begins when Christ is revealed
Go ahead and turn, if you will, to Hebrews 11.
As I was seeking God yesterday, asking Him, where to go next, now that we had finished our little series on Face-to-face and the prayer of Paul to the Ephesian, Philippian & Colossian believers.
So I began to pray for each one of you individually, I only got to the first person, when the Lord dropped this in my heart.
The thought He brought to my mind was faith. A topic we have learned MUCH about in the history of our church through its various manifestations over the years.
So I began to study and write and when I was done I had a pretty decent outline to work from as I taught. This morning, much to my surprise, the Lord told me to set that aside and simply instruct you as we read through Hebrews chapter 11.
So we are going to walk in faith this morning whose first expression is obedience to God’s known will and crack open Hebrews 11.
Beginning in verse 1, and I’m reading from the NKJV this morning…
Hebrews 11:1-2,
“(1) Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. (2) For by it the elders obtained a good testimony.”
Now this is a very mechanical definition, but it serves the purposes of the Holy Spirit who inspired the writer of Hebrews and we will see why as we move forward.
Now as we progress past this definition, the chapter breaks into examples of people who lived by faith, and because of their faith, they obtained a good testimony. This is the very same kind of testimony we’ve been talking about possessing ourselves, since the beginning of 2025. That we might be living witnesses… living testimonies before the world, light and salt. These beautiful men and women both mentioned by name and example had obtained that. They obtained a good report or a good testimony through faith.
These are referring to people who obviously were approved by God, but as we go into chapter 12, it starts off with “therefore seeing that we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses”. This is of course referring to all these witnesses that we’re reading in chapter 11. The word witnesses there means testifiers. People whose lives testified of faith in God, and the impact that it made in their life. These obtained a good report, a good testimony with God, and with man because of trust, because of this faith defined for us in the starting verse.
So the writer first defines faith as “the substance of things hoped for”.
What does that mean?
Well, the word “substance” essentially means the concrete platform underneath your feet. It means the foundation, the support, of things hoped for.
Now we know the biblical concept of hope literally means a favorable expectation.
So we are being told that our expectations are supported by our faith!
Now that understanding alone, begs the very questions which would allow believers to side step many o the pitfalls which have come to be associated with faith in our generation of selfishness.
I’d say, “IF” faith is the support for your hope, but I must say “SINCE” faith is in fact the support for your hope, then it becomes immediately obvious that our expectations need to be grounded in God.
Teri and I are doing some premarital counseling right now with a couple and one of the first things you always need to address with any couple that are looking to get married is expectations.
We all bring a ton of them into relationships, and most of them are unfounded. Most of them have no basis in reality. In fact most of them we are not even really aware of, until they fail to be met! They are often little more than some weird ideals we have, and we bring it into the marriage as a hidden land mind ready to be tripped by our mate. And these will often will be the basis upon which a marriage is judged by the individual as a success or not. They will often be the very thing that causes a marriage to quickly fail. All of this is because expectations were brought into the marriage that were not discussed and therefore had no basis for expectation.
This is a powerful example of how expectations which are not grounded in the PERSON of Christ will inevitably lead to failure and a crisis in your relationship with God. It is a crisis of faith.
As I said, many times we are not even aware of our expectations until they fail to get met. So when that happens it catches you off-guard, and it can literally throw your life and relationship into a deadly tail spin.
It can shipwreck your faith!
So, expectations are an important thing!
So, here the writer is referring to godly hope. Which means that if we are expecting this from God, we better know that it is something He is offering TO YOU! If you begin your journey into trusting God, you better know He has spoken – not just in general, but to YOU about this very thing!
So, when it says that faith is the underpinning or the foundation of things hoped for, it means hope that was given to you by God.
EVERYTHING God does is rooted in WHO He is, so this expectation will come as a revelation of God Himself… of His person. In other words it comes from having God revealed to you!
Knowing God. We are so used to the delusion of control that we often, unthinkingly, approach faith in God as something only we need to sign off on. We just come up with some idea, something we hope for, and say, “well my faith will support that just because I want it – I hope for is”. Man are you in for a wakeup call!
Are you hearing what I’m saying? That’s not what the writer is saying here. This will become clear as we move forward with the reading of the examples offered in this chapter!
Two of the very first ones that are brought up are Noah and Abraham.
Their expectation that they had faith regarding wasn’t even theirs! It did not originate in ANYTHING they were dreaming of or even desiring!
In fact, I’ll give you one better than that. Their hope wasn’t even something they initially even ask for!
- Noah did not ask God for a flood.
- Noah did not want to build an ark.
It probably was not on his radar to spend a hundred years, of their notably long lifetime, constructing an ark and preaching to a world in which he got absolutely zero converts!
It was not Noah’s dream or hope to endure going through the flood, only to land on a stripped world and have to start from scratch.
When we think of “things hoped for”, this is probably not on the top ten!
So are you understanding, hope doesn’t necessarily mean something YOU initially wanted. It may begin with something God alone wanted!
Oh now Pastor Mark, I don’t know about that! I mean, faith is all about approaching God regarding needs and desires in your life isn’t it? Well, it certainly CAN be, but we need to consider that there was a really good reason why God offered these examples FIRST when inspiring the writing of a chapter which has come to be known as the Bible’s “hall of faith”. People whose lives, the Holy Spirit goes on to tell us are our examples and who we need to pattern our lives after so as to obtain a good and approved testimony as did they!
This chapter and its contents… it’s lives it points to were chosen by the Holy Spirit ON PURPOSE. So we would be wise to keep that fact foremost in our considerations as we move forward!
So lesson #1 – Faith in relation to God, BEGINS with knowing God. It is based upon God and His character, not on us and our weird, silly desires.
The other primary example we are going to read about was Abraham.
Abraham, if you remember, did not go to God about a “promised land” or even initially about a child. God, upon calling Abram while still in Ur of the Chaldeans told him, He would make of him of Abram, a great nation. It wasn’t until much later that Abram circled back around in Genesis 15 and asked God, “What will you do for me since I remain childless…?”
Now you remember that when it didn’t happen in what Abraham would have considered proper timing, he moved ahead and did things his own way and then asked God, “hey, why can’t we just go with this one? I’ve already got Ishmael.”
To which God essentially said, “because that’s not what I said.”
So obviously, even though he had a child, it wasn’t enough. Abraham had to trust God for what God wanted, not what he wanted.
Abraham would have been fine if he just kept Ishmael, but this wasn’t about what Abraham was fine with. Are you learning anything?
Now, you remember, in the early days of our church, we had always been kind of inclined to go with the idea that faith begins where the will of God is known.
Now that’s not a terrible statement. It’s a good starting point for things we’re going to trust God regarding like…
- initial salvation
- financial provision
- intervention in the life of a loved one
- for personal or national security
- for healing
- for our church community
…etc.
But in truth, faith should never be viewed first and primarily as a means of obtaining our own personal desired results. We are told in Galatians that what matters is faith working through love. Now that IS in the context of referring to justification, but there is no indicator in scripture that there are different “flavors” of faith. So if the means by which faith works or is effective in love, then selfishness cannot be part of it!
Long ago, I forsook the tendency of treating God like my personal slot machine and we made that determination here as well. We were no longer going to be people like that Amen?!
And if you will remember, not long after we started dealing with the whole issue of elders and other necessary topics when we reformulated as a church, I started dealing with faith.
What faith really is as opposed to what we always thought it was.
How it worked as opposed to how we thought it worked.
And at the time I could see disillusionment on every face. It was like everybody was saying, “well, what do we do now? I always thought that I could just go through and find whatever scripture I wanted and just pace the floor confessing it and get my mountain moved. So now what do I do?” And I have to tell yout… that communicated an awful lot to me of the spiritual condition of our church at the time.
We had treated faith as something very, very self-motivated and very, very self-oriented. It was not very kingdom-oriented at all.
So that gave me the spiritual temperature of where we were coming from. As a result we spent a LOT of time rediscovering faith from a biblical framework. Afterwards, I think what was read into those teachings was an understanding outside of what I was actually teaching.
I wasn’t saying that we could not go to God in request for some of the very same things we used to go to Him about, but our approach had to be something different. It could not be coming from the privileged standpoint of “this is what’s owed me as a child”. No, no, no… a thousand times no! This cannot be something that we make “demand on the covenant” because a lot of the things that we were looking for, the Bible actually identifies as a mercy! Not rights!
So we had to learn how to approach things differently and I spent probably a few months on it. One of the primary topics was physical healing. The series was called, “…and He Healed Them All” and it started on January 1, 2013.
I spent time going through the New Testament Scriptures, showing that healing was still very much a thing that we could approach God in faith regarding and that there were very few exceptions to that. I even spent a few of those services, addressing the few exceptions to that general rule.
So that in the end, we discovered that from scripture, it appears that about 98% of the time or more, you have every reason to expect that you would receive healing from God if you exhibited genuine trust in Him. And even at that, you would have thought that I just literally deflated the entire world for you. And that was a very concerning thing for me back then. So at that time I began to press you (and myself) on our terrible tendency to treat God like a personal vending machine. Where our thinking was that if we were to gather enough “faith tokens” put them in and pull the lever out would come our prize!
Now, of course this is not to say that there are not distinct and clearly stated advantages of following God and believing Him which can affect both our needs and our desires, but we must never allow ourselves to slip into that old mode of turning our heavenly Father into our personal sugar daddy.
Such does not treat Him with the deference, respect, majesty and honor that He is so deserving of.
Can we agree on that?
Not to mention that in a mindset such as that our souls waste away with a type of self-induced cancer of selfishness, because we fail, as created beings, to honor and magnify the God Who created us. Making faith and our life in Christ about ourselves instead of God is deadly – there literally is NO life in it! It’s counter productive in virtually every way conceivable.
Now I do believe that you cannot have genuine faith in regards to God without knowing His will. So the above statement of “faith begins with the will of God is known” is not terrible – doctrinally. However,
I strongly believe there is a better way of saying it.
I really believe that the kind of faith that affects change in our lives is more personal and should therefore be said something like this… “Faith begins when God makes Himself known” NOT just where we know about what He wants.
I mean, you can know what God wants and it still be very impersonal and that’s the danger of the way faith has been treated.
“Well, I know what God’s will is and so I can pray that and I can stand on that and I can, I can, I can, I can, I can, I, I, I, I, I, I, and get what I want.”
Now God will indulge that for a short period of time in our infancy because He expects us to act like children when we ARE children. But when we grow up, He expects us to make it about relationship with Him and about others.
This is a good season for recognizing a good illustration of that. To a certain degree, it can be forgiven children to make Christmas all about the gifts they’re going to get. I don’t think it ever dawns on most little children that maybe they ought to GIVE a gift.
It’s all about getting them! But you know, if they’re still acting that way at 12, there’s a problem!
Can you agree with that?
Well, faith is the same way! There are some things God will let slide in our infancy in Christ that later on He can no longer tolerate and still be a good Father.
A statement which would be even more accurate still would be that “the potential for faith is only available when God reveals Himself in Christ”.
It’s a solid and biblical statement to say that you cannot trust God if you do not know Him and He can only be known by those that He reveals Himself to.
Furthermore the way God reveals Himself, meaning God the Father, is through a revelation of Jesus!
Remember we’ve read, that it pleased God that “inJesus all the fullness of the Godhood should dwell”.
Jesus Himself said that
“If you’ve seen Me, you’ve seen the Father”.
And of course the scriptures go on and on about the fact that that’s how we know God the Father is through the Son.
So God reveals Himself to us through Jesus. That’s an absolute fact.
Now as I taught you for years, everything in Christ is personal and relationally intimate. In keeping with that, we have learned that faith is not FOR THING, it’s IN GOD.
You cannot divorce faith from relationship! To do this is to shift from true worship, to a man centered religious exercise.
So since faith requires that God reveal Himself to you, how do you become that person? Meaning the person God is revealing Himself to?
By seeking Him… by drawing near! The letter from James is very clear on this point. But even THAT was stated in a greater context of selflessness.
If you remember James chapter 4, which is where he says that he starts off by calling them “adulterers and adulteresses”. He then asks them, “Do you not know that your friendship with the world is violent hostility against God?”
Do you remember that chapter?
And it is in that very chapter that James eventually says, “if you will just resist the devil and submit to God, then grace will be made available to you and you can draw near to God and he will draw near to you”.
But it was in the environment of dealing with the fact that you can’t be having your hand on selfishness and God at the same time.
I mean that is a strong statement – “Do you not realize that your ongoing friendship with the world is violent hostility towards God”? Obviously that needs to change if one is going to exhibit a trusting relationship with God. That’s kind of obvious isn’t it?
If I’m going to have an ongoing systemic relationship with God of knowing Him and trusting Him, I can’t also be having that same relationship with the world.
So let’s circle back to our opening statement in Hebrews 11?
“Now faith is the substance or the underpinning or the substrate, the foundation of things favorably expected of God. Yet the evidence of something you don’t see yet. For by it, by faith, the elders obtained a good testimony.”
Then he starts giving examples of those who lived by this faith – beginning with God as our first example!
“(3) By faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that the things which are seen were not made of things which are visible.”
At this point we went pretty systematically through the chapter, one example at a time – examining the source of hope for which Faith was the foundation.
- Able
- Enoch
- Noah
- Abraham
- Sarah
- Isaac
- Jacob
- Joseph
- Moses
- Rahab
Then other unnamed examples all of which confirmed that these faith giants, if you will, primarily began their faith journey in a hope GOD placed before them. They took on God’s desire and made it their own – trusting God, judging that He was faithful to accomplish what He had said!
Hebrews 11:4-40,
“(4) By faith Abel offered to God a more excellent sacrifice than Cain, through which he obtained witness that he was righteous, God testifying of his gifts; and through it he being dead still speaks.
(5) By faith Enoch was taken away so that he did not see death, “AND WAS NOT FOUND, BECAUSE GOD HAD TAKEN HIM”; for before he was taken he had this testimony, that he pleased God.
(6) But 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 diligently seek Him.
(7) By faith Noah, being divinely warned of things not yet seen, moved with godly fear, prepared an ark for the saving of his household, by which he condemned the world and became heir of the righteousness which is according to faith.
(8) By faith Abraham obeyed when he was called to go out to the place which he would receive as an inheritance. And he went out, not knowing where he was going.
(9) By faith he dwelt in the land of promise as in a foreign country, dwelling in tents with Isaac and Jacob, the heirs with him of the same promise; (10) for he waited for the city which has foundations, whose builder and maker is God.
(11) By faith Sarah herself also received strength to conceive seed, and she bore a child when she was past the age, because she judged Him faithful who had promised.
(12) Therefore from one man, and him as good as dead, were born as many as the stars of the sky in multitude—innumerable as the sand which is by the seashore.
(13) THESE ALL DIED IN FAITH, HAVING NOT RECEIVED THE PROMISES, but having seen them afar off were assured of them, embraced them and confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth.
(14) For those who say such things declare plainly that they seek a homeland. (15) And truly if they had called to mind that country from which they had come out, they would have had opportunity to return. (16) But now they desire a better, that is, a heavenly country.
THEREFORE GOD IS NOT ASHAMED TO BE CALLED THEIR GOD, for He has prepared a city for them.
(17) By faith Abraham, when he was tested, offered up Isaac, and he who had received the promises offered up his only begotten son, (18) of whom it was said, “IN ISAAC YOUR SEED SHALL BE CALLED,” (19) concluding that God was able to raise him up, even from the dead, from which he also received him in a figurative sense.
(20) By faith Isaac blessed Jacob and Esau concerning things to come.
(21) By faith Jacob, when he was dying, blessed each of the sons of Joseph, and worshiped, leaning on the top of his staff.
(22) By faith Joseph, when he was dying, made mention of the departure of the children of Israel, and gave instructions concerning his bones.
(23) By faith Moses, when he was born, was hidden three months by his parents, because they saw he was a beautiful child; and they were not afraid of the king’s command.
(24) By faith Moses, when he became of age, refused to be called the son of Pharaoh’s daughter, (25) choosing rather to suffer affliction with the people of God than to enjoy the passing pleasures of sin, (26) esteeming the reproach of Christ greater riches than the treasures in Egypt; for he looked to the reward.
(27) By faith he forsook Egypt, not fearing the wrath of the king; for he endured as seeing Him who is invisible. (28) By faith he kept the Passover and the sprinkling of blood, lest he who destroyed the firstborn should touch them.
(29) By faith they passed through the Red Sea as by dry land, whereas the Egyptians, attempting to do so, were drowned.
(30) By faith the walls of Jericho fell down after they were encircled for seven days.
(31) By faith the harlot Rahab did not perish with those who did not believe, when she had received the spies with peace.
(32) And what more shall I say? For the time would fail me to tell of Gideon and Barak and Samson and Jephthah, also of David and Samuel and the prophets: (33) who through faith subdued kingdoms, worked righteousness, obtained promises, stopped the mouths of lions, (34) quenched the violence of fire, escaped the edge of the sword, out of weakness were made strong, became valiant in battle, turned to flight the armies of the aliens.
(35) Women received their dead raised to life again. Others were tortured, not accepting deliverance, that they might obtain a better resurrection. (36) Still others had trial of mockings and scourgings, yes, and of chains and imprisonment. (37) They were stoned, they were sawn in two, were tempted, were slain with the sword. They wandered about in sheepskins and goatskins, being destitute, afflicted, tormented— (38) of whom the world was not worthy.
They wandered in deserts and mountains, in dens and caves of the earth.
(39) And all these, having obtained a good testimony through faith, did not receive the promise, (40) God having provided something better for us, that they should not be made perfect apart from us.”
Blessings!
Tri
