The Necessity of Faith

January 12, 2025 ()

Bible Text: Hebrews 11:1-3 |

Series:

The Necessity of Faith | Hebrews 11:1-3
Brian Hedges | January 12, 2025

I want to invite you this morning to turn in God’s word to Hebrews 11.

While you’re turning there, let me ask you this question. How many of you have had a close friend or a family member who has gone through something like a deconstruction process or a deconversion process? Let me see your hand. How many of you have had that experience? Okay, that’s quite a few hands in the room.

What I’m talking about are those who we know and who we love who confessed faith in Christ but who go through something like a crisis experience in their lives or in some ways begins to drift away from a committed faith in Jesus Christ or from the church, and eventually declare that they are no longer Christians, that they are no longer believers in Christ. I think most of us have experienced this happening with someone in our lives in some way or another, either a friend or family member or both.

Tim Keller, in his book Making Sense of God, relates a deconversion testimony of someone, and the testimony was titled, “One night I prayed to know the truth; the next morning I discovered I was an atheist.” And he gives a much more lengthy summary of that. But this is someone who, essentially, said they were on the quest for truth, that they were looking for truth, and then ended up in unbelief. Keller says this is a powerful storyline that depicts nonbelief as the result of a quest for truth and the courage to face life as it is, and sometimes that is the narrative that people will share as they journey away from faith in Christ to something like settled atheism or agnosticism or something like that.

But there is a problem behind such stories that Keller points out. He says,

“Behind these stories lies a deeper narrative, namely that religious persons are living by blind faith, while secular and non-believers in God are grounding their position in evidence and reason.”

In other words, the story kind of assumes that those who really are on the quest for truth and are looking at the evidence rationally and with reason will move away from faith, whereas people of faith, people who believe, are doing so against reason. They’re doing so non-rationally and are kind of living in blind faith or something like that.

It really is a demonstration of the inadequate understanding and grasp of both the nature of faith and the life of faith. And it is a misunderstanding, I think, that is current both in the world and in the church. Both in the world and in the church, there is a misunderstanding about what faith really is and what the life of faith really looks like.

And we are facing something like a crisis of faith in the church in the Western world right now. I’ve shared the statistics with you many times that something like 40 million people have left the church, have left anything like confessional Christianity, over the last several decades. There are more people leaving the church than all the people who were converted in the First Great Awakening, the Second Great Awakening, and all of Billy Graham’s crusades put together. So we’re facing a crisis of faith in our world today as people are leaving rather than coming in.

Of course, there are exceptions to that, and we are thrilled with every person who comes to a genuine faith in Christ. We see that. God’s kingdom continues. But we are facing something like a cultural crisis of faith, and I think the letter to the Hebrews addresses us today in a way that particularly helps us with this crisis.

Now you may remember, if you’ve been here in the past couple of years, that we’ve studied through the first ten chapters of this letter. The theme of the letter, we have said, is that Jesus is better. It’s a letter that really reflects on the distinctives of new covenant, New Testament Christianity—Christianity after the death and resurrection and ascension of Jesus Christ, as opposed to the old covenant forms of faith that we find in the Old Testament. And it was written to people who were tempted to give up their faith because it was hard, because they were facing suffering for it, because they were facing persecution for it. And the author is seeking to persuade his readers that Jesus is better; that he’s better than everything in the Old Testament, that Jesus is superior, that Jesus is supreme, and that Jesus is worth it. And he wants them to press on. He wants them to hold fast the profession of their faith. He wants them to endure, to persevere, to continue, to not give up.

The exhortation that he gives is an exhortation that speaks to our hearts today. Even though we’re facing a different kind of crisis of faith—we’re not tempted really to draw back to the old covenant, but still we can be tempted to give up our faith and to let go of our hold on Jesus. And the letter to the Hebrews urges us to press on and to continue in the faith.

That is especially true in these last three chapters, Hebrews 11-13. We’re beginning our final leg of this journey through the letter to the Hebrews today. This is going to take us through the next, probably, eight to ten weeks.

Today we begin with that great faith chapter, Hebrews 11. There’s nothing like this chapter anywhere else in the Bible, Hebrews 11. And today we’re just going to begin with the first three verses, which is something like the prologue to this chapter that recounts the great deeds of faith of the old covenant saints, but how they lived by faith in the promises of God. Let’s read Hebrews 11:1-3, and then I want to ask three questions about faith.

Hebrews 11, beginning in verse 1. It says,

“Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. For by it the people of old received their commendation. By faith we understand that the universe was created by the word of God, so that what is seen was not made out of things that are visible.”

Let’s stop right there.

I want to ask three questions this morning.

1. What Is Faith?
2. Why Do We Need Faith?
3. How Do We Strengthen Our Faith?

1. What Is Faith?

First of all, I’m going to spend a fair bit of time on this first question. Okay? Probably half the sermon is this first question: what is faith? Because we can’t really benefit, I don’t think, from a full exposition of Hebrews 11, with all of these examples of faith, until we really grasp what faith really is. What’s the biblical meaning of faith as opposed to some of the cultural misconceptions and misunderstandings?

Of course, verse 1 tells us what faith is. “Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.”

But I want you to think for a minute about some of the misunderstandings of faith and then how this description of faith in Hebrews 11 counters those misunderstandings.

(1) First of all, we could talk about the misunderstanding of what we call “name it and claim it” faith. You’re familiar with this. “Name it and claim it” faith is kind of the perspective of the health, wealth, and prosperity movements. It’s the Word of Faith movement, it’s the televangelists, it’s the TV preachers, who essentially say something like this: “If you just have the faith to believe that God will do x, y, z, fill in the blank, then God is going to surely do that. But you just have to have enough faith to believe it. But if you don’t have enough faith, well then you’re not going to get it.”

Of course, the things they’re looking at in particular are things like being healthy or being successful in your business or being prosperous in your life. It’s almost like a genie-in-the-bottle kind of faith. It’s looking at faith as if its a magical formula. “If you just get the formula right, just muster up enough belief, then you will be able to have this.” So, “name it and claim it” faith.

(2) Another misconception of faith is blind faith. I’ve already mentioned this in the introduction, but blind faith is the perspective that pits faith against reason, that places faith in contrast to rational thoughts.

Maybe some of the best illustrations of this are from pop culture.

Do you remember Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade? Do you remember this scene when Indiana Jones is in this big cave and they’re searching for the Holy Grail, and there’s this huge chasm, right, that he has to get across. And he doesn’t see a way to get across. But the clue that they’ve received is that, you know, if he just has faith, if he just has faith, you know, “leap from the lion’s head,” he can get across the chasm. He doesn’t know how he’s going to do it, but his dad’s going to die if he doesn’t do it. And so he just takes a leap of faith, this blind step of faith, and when he does, he finds that there’s this invisible bridge.

Now it’s a great scene, and I love the movie, but that’s not what biblical faith is. Biblical faith is not blind faith. It’s not faith against reason. It’s not faith in contrast to rationality.

You have the same thing in Star Wars, right? At the end of Star Wars, when Luke is trying to destroy the Death Star, he puts aside the targeting computer and he’s just using the force. I mean, it’s an act of faith that he’s going to destroy the Death Star. You know, it works great in movies, but it doesn’t work very well in real life, and it’s not biblical faith.

(3) Then here’s another misconception, what we might call nominal faith6. So, here’s the idea that you just have to believe in something. You have to believe in something, or maybe even just believe in God. Say that you believe. Give assent to certain truths, but this is what we might call assent without action. This is faith in name only. That’s what “nominal” means. It’s faith in name only. It’s faith that doesn’t change your life.

This, of course, is very common within the religious world, even of Christianity, that you have many people who would say that they believe in something like God or maybe they even believe in Jesus Christ, but that has no real cash value for how they’re living Sunday through Saturday. I mean, the whole week. Maybe they’re Sunday morning Christians or maybe not even that.

There are plenty of people who would say they believe, but there’s nothing like a faith community, there’s nothing like a walk of faith, there’s nothing like obedience, there’s nothing like personal transformation. It’s just faith in name only. They are nominal Christians.

These are three distortions of faith. And I think when we look here in Hebrews 11, what we see is that the definition or the characteristics of faith that are described here counter all three of those ideas. Okay? So let’s look now at the nature of faith in just this first verse, Hebrews 11:1.

The first thing we see is this, that faith has a rational basis. And the rational basis of faith is God’s word of promise. Notice the author here says that “faith is the assurance of things hoped for, [it is] the conviction of things not seen.” But it’s not faith in nothing, it’s faith in things. It’s faith in something that has substance. In fact, the old translations say, “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for.”

Now what are these things hoped for? What are these things not seen? These are things that God has promised. They are things that God has declared in his word.

Now, the problem with rationalism as a philosophy is that rationalism uses reason abstracted from God’s revelation of himself, but Christianity is not anti-rational. Christianity is not against reason. Don’t let anyone ever tell you that it is. Christianity does not say we should throw away our minds or not use our understanding. Instead, it directs our rationality to God’s revelation of himself in his word. In fact, verse 3 says, “By faith we understand.” There is an understanding component. There is a knowledge component or element or ingredient to faith.

Where there’s no true knowledge, there can be no true faith. Where there is no use of the mind, there is no true faith. Where there is no thinking, there is not going to be a substantial faith. In fact, genuine Christianity and a genuine encounter with God, the God of the Bible, always sets a person to thinking. It’s always going to make you think more deeply. It’s always going to make you start asking questions and put you on the pursuit of truth. And asking questions is not counter to Christianity.

The problem with so many people is they are not asking enough questions, and they are not pursuing those questions to their conclusions. The twentieth-century evangelical theologian Carl F.H. Henry, in his magisterial work (which I’ve not read nearly all of), God, Revelation, and Authority, says this. He says,

“No biblical basis exists for contrasting faith with knowledge, if by faith one means belief in the absence of evidence, and by knowledge what is objectively meaningful and true. In the New Testament, faith presupposes intelligible revelation. Faith links us to realities presently invisible, realities that in the future will be acknowledged by all. Faith is not blind belief.”

Now that’s very important for us to grasp. And we won’t really grasp Hebrews 11 until we get that, and we won’t really be solid and strong in our own personal faith in Christ until we get that. Faith is not walking in blind belief.

Now, of course, there’s a sense in which we walk by faith not by sight. That means that we are not basing our faith on things that we can see. “Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen,” but that is an argument for faith against what we can see merely with our eyes. It’s not an argument for faith against reason in what we can understand with our minds. The mind has to be engaged. There is a rational basis to faith in the word of God, in the promises of God, and in God’s revelation of himself in history, in the person and the work of Jesus Christ.

I’ve said this many times and say this, I think, every Easter: the reason I am a Christian is because I believe that Jesus rose from the dead. And one reason I believe that Jesus rose from the dead is because that’s where the evidence has led me. I’ve questioned my faith much, much more after becoming a Christian than I ever did before, probably because I became a Christian when I was young. I was very young. So I’ve asked all the questions as an adult. And as I’ve pursued the answers to those questions, it always leads me back to Jesus and to the resurrection of Jesus, and then the work of Jesus and the teaching of Jesus in the word of God.

That’s the foundation. Rationale? It would be irrational for me not to be a Christian. Rationality leads me to faith in Christ. So there’s a rational basis for faith; that’s number one.

Number two, there is also a future orientation to faith. So “faith is the assurance of things hoped for.” Faith is “the conviction of things not seen.”

You see there, the objects of faith are things hoped for and things unseen. Hoped-for things are things that we have not received yet, and that’s the thread that runs all the way through Hebrews 11. You’ve got these Old Testament saints—like Noah and Abraham and his children and Moses and the children of Israel and so on—these Old Testament saints who act in faith, trusting in God’s word before they see the promises come to pass. That’s the thread that runs through this.

That’s what the author to the Hebrews wants to get across to us: to walk by faith is to trust in the promises of God that haven’t yet been fulfilled. And, again, we do it on the basis of God’s word and in confidence in the God who cannot lie. But there’s a future orientation of faith, and this counters the “name it and claim it” theology.

Part of the problem with the “name it and claim it” theology is it’s too focused on present realities instead of future promises. It misunderstands what the promises of God actually are.

Here are a couple of parallel verses that I think kind of flesh out what this means.

Romans 8:24-25—here it’s the language of Paul, and he’s using the language of hope, but it’s almost synonymous with what Hebrews 11 means by faith. Paul says,

“For in this hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what he sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.”

Now he doesn’t mean here that this hope is kind of a flimsy wish, that maybe it’ll happen, maybe it won’t. That’s not biblical hope.

Biblical hope, again, has substance, it has content. It’s confidence. It’s an expectation, but it is a confident expectation in something that has not been realized yet, something that we are waiting for.

Or listen to Paul in 2 Corinthians 4:16-18.

“So we do not lose heart. Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day.”

He’s talking about our bodies. Our bodies are getting older, we’re facing disease and decay and the wearing down, the breaking down of our bodies, our physical frame. But inwardly, he says, we are being renewed day by day.

“For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, as we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal.”

Now there’s the contrast. The contrast between the seen and the unseen is not the contrast between the rational and the irrational. The contrast between the seen and the unseen is the contrast between the temporal and the eternal.

But these eternal things are not irrational. They are future realities that we just haven’t received yet. So there’s this future orientation of faith.

Then here’s the third thing, the third ingredient of faith here in Hebrews 11:1. It’s what we might call personal confidence. We could define this as certainty resting in God and acting in obedience.

Faith is the assurance of things hoped for. It is the conviction of things not seen. There is something more than just a mere belief when it comes to biblical faith. There’s something more than just giving mental assent to a collection of facts. There’s something in faith that banks on what God has said. There’s something in faith that acts on what God has promised.

In fact, that’s the thrust of this chapter. Just as these Old Testament saints were trusting in the future promises of God yet to be realized, they are acting. So, something like twenty times in this chapter, we read, “By faith” Noah or Abel or Abraham or Moses, by faith they did such and such, and then it recounts their deeds. It recounts their actions.

By faith they obeyed, or by faith they, you know, left Egypt, forsook Egypt. By faith they did this. By faith they kept the Passover. I mean, over and over again, there’s action to the faith.

And listen, friend, if your faith never leads you to obedience, it’s not a genuine faith. I’m not saying perfect obedience. None of us are perfect. I certainly don’t obey perfectly. But there has to be something more than just assent to a collection of facts in our heads that doesn’t do anything to our lives for it to be biblical faith.

So we could contrast these things in this way. In contrast to blind faith, which lacks knowledge, genuine faith has a rational basis. In contrast to the “name it and claim it” faith that lacks an understanding of the very nature of God’s promises, genuine faith has a future orientation. Alright? This is the problem with “your best life now,” you know, Joel Osteen and, again, the TV preachers. And, you know, they may say some things that are true. I’m not I’m not saying that they never say anything that’s true. But the thrust of the ministry and the emphasis on present blessing, present success, present health, present wealth, present happiness—that emphasis is an emphasis that cuts across the grain of the New Testament focus on future glory.

And then in contrast to nominal faith, which lacks personal conviction, genuine faith is this certainty resting in God and acting in obedience.

So (here’s the end of the first point), this becomes for us three tests of faith. So here are three questions you can ask.

Number one, is your faith based on understanding of God’s word? Faith comes by hearing and hearing by the word of Christ. Faith has to be based on something. It has to be in something. You have to have an object to your faith or it’s not a genuine faith. So is your faith based on understanding of God’s word?

Number two, is your faith oriented to God’s promises? Are you actually believing what God has promised, what he has said in his word?

And then number three, does your faith lead to action? Now, again, we’re not saved by our works, but I agree with the language of the Reformers, who used to say we are justified by faith alone, but not by faith that is alone. Faith alone lays hold of the righteousness of Jesus Christ for us by which we are justified. That’s the argument of Paul in Galatians and Romans. It’s not really what Hebrews is about. But the faith that justifies is not alone. The faith that justifies changes us, and it leads to obedience and to works and to perseverance and to action in our lives. Faith, Luther says, is a living, active thing. It’s an active thing. And if faith doesn’t lead to action in our lives, we need to do a heart check.

Okay. So what is faith? We’ve answered that question. Now, I have two more questions and ten minutes to go.

2. Why Do We Need Faith?

I think we’ve already started to see some of the reasons, but let’s just flesh it out a little bit.

(1) First of all, we need faith for our relationship with God. You see this in verse two.

“For by it [that is, by faith] the people of old—” literally “the fathers,” and it’s a reference back to that word “fathers” in Hebrews 1, which told us that God spoke long ago in many portions, in many ways, he spoke to our fathers by the prophets. And now the author says, “By faith the fathers of old received their commendation.” That carries the idea that they received their approval from God through faith.

Hebrews 11:6 says, “Without faith it is impossible to please him, for whoever would draw near to God must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him.”

So faith is necessary for a relationship with God. You’re not going to have a relationship with God that is pleasing to God without faith. You must believe, and you have to believe him. You have to believe his word. You have to believe his promises. That’s first.

(2) Number two, we need faith for our understanding of the world. Look at verse 3.

“By faith we understand that the universe was created by the word of God, so that what is seen was not made out of things that are visible.”

So on one level, this is the first case in point, the first application of verse 1. “Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen,” and now he’s looking to things that are not seen in the past that faith believes, namely creation. “By faith we understand that the universe was created by the word of God.” So the things that are seen were not made out of things that are visible.

But I think this connects to the broader question of a Christian worldview. And here’s one of the things I want you to get this morning: everybody who has a coherent worldview has to have faith. Whether you’re a Christian or not—you can embrace a different philosophy, you can embrace a different religion, but if you’re going to have a coherent worldview at all, if you were to give any answers at all to the big questions of life—Where did we come from? What is the nature of ultimate reality? What is wrong with the world? What is the solution to the problems of the world? What happens after we die? Is there life after death? Where are we going? Is there any hope for change?

If you try to answer any of those questions, you’re in the realm of faith. And certainly, you see that here. We understand by faith—again, it’s not against reason, but it’s faith resting on the word of God. By faith we understand that God is the creator of the world.

Now, nobody was there when the world was first created. That morning of creation, you take Genesis 1, even Adam was not created till the sixth day. Nobody’s there to witness it. So you can’t use scientific method to record it. Right? The only way you get an answer to where it all came from is by revelation from outside of ourselves.

The naturalist, the person who doesn’t believe in creation, the person who just believes in naturalistic evolution, the person who believes it all began with a big bang, or even the person who believes that the universe is eternal, that matter just kind of always existed—you take any of those different philosophies; it still requires faith, because nobody was there to witness it. And scientific method will not give you that answer. That’s the realm of philosophy. It’s the realm of religion. It’s the realm of the big worldview questions, and it takes faith to have that understanding of the world. But we get that faith from God’s revelation of himself.

Here’s an illustration I found that was helpful; maybe a little bit corny, but I still think it’s pretty helpful. I got this from the preacher Kent Hughes in his commentary on Hebrews. He talks about these people who are like piano mice who lived all their lives in a large piano.

The music of the instrument came to them in their piano world, filling all the dark spaces with sound and harmony. At first, the mice were impressed by it. They drew comfort and wonder from the thought that there was someone who made the music, though invisible to them, someone above yet close to them. They loved to think of the great player whom they could not see.

But then one day, a daring mouse climbed up part of the piano and returned very thoughtful. He had found out how the music was made. Wires were the secret, tightly stretched wires of graduated lengths that trembled and vibrated. The mice had to revise all of their old beliefs. None but the most conservative could any longer believe in the unseen player.

Later, another explorer carried the explanation further. Hammers were now the secret, great numbers of hammers dancing and leaping on the wires. There was a more complicated theory, but it all went to show that they lived in a purely mechanical and mathematical world. The unseen player came to be thought of as a myth, though the pianist continued to play.

Well, it illustrates, doesn’t it, the fact that you can’t answer your questions about the world in which you live from within the world. You have to have information from outside. And certainly, scientists can give us a lot of information about how the universe works, and that’s good. That’s good. But they can’t answer the question of how the universe came into being in the first place. That’s the realm of faith.

(3) So we need faith for our understanding of the world, we need faith for our relationship with God, and then, number three, we need faith for our perseverance in faith.

Friends, that’s the argument of this letter. That’s what Hebrews is about. Hebrews wants to encourage us to continue in faith, to persevere in faith. And you can see this in a number of places in the letter.

In Hebrews 3 and 4 the author talks about that wilderness generation who failed to enter into the promised land, failed to enter into God’s rest, because of unbelief. But he says we enter in through faith.

In Hebrews 6:12, after giving one of the most severe warnings of the letter, he says, “Be imitators of those who through faith and patience inherit the promises.” Then he expounds on the priestly work of Jesus Christ, who through his single, solitary offering on the cross has brought about the new covenant. And on the basis of that, he says (we read this in our assurance of pardon this morning), “Let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith.”

And at the end of Hebrews 10, which leads right into Hebrews chapter 11—remember, there are no chapter breaks in the original—Hebrews 10 ends by telling us, quoting the prophet Habakkuk, that the righteous live by faith. “And we are not of those who shrink back and are destroyed, but rather those who have faith and save their souls.”

Then Hebrews 11, twenty times says, “By faith” we are to live or we are to act, giving us the exemplary record of the Old Testament saints. And, really, Hebrews 11 crescendos with Hebrews 12:1-2, which tells us to “run the race that is set before us.” How do we do it? “Looking to Jesus, the founder and the perfecter of our faith.”

Faith is how you live the Christian life. Faith is how you continue. Faith is how you persevere. Faith is how you endure.

Like Bunyan’s pilgrim, every single one of us are on a journey from the City of Destruction to the Celestial City, and we are going to face swamps of despondency and hills of difficulty and valleys of humiliation, persecution from the world around us, vanity fair, companions that will try to lead us astray. The only way we make it to the city is one step at a time, walking by faith, trusting in the promises of God.

3. How Do We Strengthen Our Faith?

So, final question: how do we strengthen our faith? Let me give you three practical strategies.

(1) Number one, train the virtue of faith. Faith has been called one of the three Christian virtues: faith, hope, and love. You know, the church fathers wrote a lot about this. They would write whole books that were just kind of expounding on those three words: faith, hope, and love. Augustine’s Enchiridion; that’s what it is. It’s looking at faith, looking at hope, looking at love. A lot of the creeds and catechisms are kind of based on this, expounding faith, hope, and love. Faith is considered a virtue.

Now, what’s interesting—C.S. Lewis, in Mere Christianity, has two chapters on faith. They’re back to back in book three, “Christian Behavior.” Chapters eleven and twelve, both titled “Faith.” And in chapter eleven he talks about how he couldn’t understand at first why Christians called faith a virtue. He thought, Why is faith a virtue? Why is it a virtue to believe what you believe? If you believe something, there’s no virtue in that. It’s not a virtue, he says, to believe what you rationally believe to be true.

But when he became a Christian he began to understand that faith is a virtue not because it means you believe in something irrational. (C.S. Lewis is great on showing the rationality of faith.) Faith is a virtue because it requires you to obey and to persevere and to put your faith into action when it’s hard, when you don’t feel like it, when you encounter difficulty, when your emotions or your mood (that’s his word), when your mood is telling you to do anything but. That’s when faith becomes a virtue, because you have to exercise it. You actually have to do what you already rationally have believed to be true, even when it doesn’t feel like what you want to do.

Here’s the key quotation from Lewis. He says,

“Unless you teach your moods where they get off, you can never be either a sound Christian or even a sound atheist, but just a creature dithering to and fro with its beliefs really dependent on the weather and the state of its digestion. Consequently, one must train the habit of faith. The first step is to recognize the fact that your moods change. The next is to make sure that if you have once accepted Christianity, then some of its main doctrines should be deliberately held before your mind for some time every day. That is why daily prayers and religious readings [that last two Sundays, right?] and churchgoing are necessary parts of the Christian life. We have to be continually reminded of what we believe. Neither this belief nor any other will automatically remain alive in the mind. It must be fed. As a matter of fact, if you examined a hundred people who had lost their faith in Christianity, I wonder how many of them would turn out to have been reasoned out of it by honest argument. Do not most people simply drift away?”

You have to train the virtue of faith. You have to feed it. You have to keep reminding yourself of what you believe and why so that you can then live by faith.

(2) That leads to the second strategy: put faith in action.

Again, this is the whole thrust of Hebrews 11. By faith they obeyed. By faith they worshiped. By faith they went into a land, you know, that they had not yet seen. By faith they waited for the city whose builder and maker is God. By faith they suffered and obeyed even in the face of suffering. And we’ll look at the detailed examples in the weeks to come.

What we learn, though, is this: faith is active, faith worships God, faith walks with God, faith obeys God’s command, faith waits for God’s promise, faith endures through hardship and suffering and difficulty and opposition. Faith perseveres. So put faith in action.

(3) Then number three and finally, focus on the object of faith. Look at Hebrews 12:1-2. Again, this is the crescendo of the faith chapter, Hebrews 11.

“Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God.”

The argument of the letter to the Hebrews is: continue in the faith, because Jesus is better. Stay faithful, because Jesus is better than the angels. He’s better than the prophets. He’s better than Moses. He’s better than Joshua. He leads us into a better rest.

He’s better than the priests of the old covenant, better than Aaron. He offers a better sacrifice that is based on better promises. He gives us a better covenant. He leads us into the true tabernacle. He’s better! He’s better in every way; therefore, draw near to Jesus, continue in Jesus, persevere with Jesus.

We can take that principle through every aspect of our lives. Jesus is better. Jesus is better than the best things that this world can give you—your family, good health, every earthly good that we enjoy. He’s better than those things. He is better than all of the things that can pull us away and lead our lives into destruction. He’s better than money and financial security and everything that money can buy. He’s better than every accomplishment we can ever achieve, the prestige and the esteem of our peers and our colleagues. He is better than sexual fulfillment, both in its purity in marriage and in every distorted form of sexual fulfillment.

He is better than power and influence, than knowledge and expertise. He’s better than success. He’s better than the approval of others. He’s better than all the best things the world can give us, which are fleeting at their best. Jesus is better than all of that.

Because Jesus is better and he has promised to us eternal life, he is worthy of fixing our minds and our hearts on him. So focus on Jesus, the object of faith.

I’ll close with Spurgeon, one of my favorite quotes; you’ve heard it before.

“Remember, sinner, it is not your hold of Christ that saves you—it is Christ. It is not your joy in Christ that saves you—it is Christ. It is not even faith in Christ, though that is the instrument—it is Christ’s blood and merits. Therefore, look not to your hope, but to Christ, the source of your hope. Look not to your faith, but to Christ, the author and finisher of your faith. And if you do that, ten thousand devils cannot throw you down.”

Let’s pray.

Lord, we thank you this morning for the clarity of your word and for the great promises of your word that represent your heart for your people, your commitment to our salvation, to our eternal joy, to our well-being, promises that are meant to sustain us and to give us strength and hope, and to help us endure in the face of all the obstacles that life throws our way.

Lord, many of us—probably most of us—are facing things that are threats to our faith in small ways or maybe even large ways. We’re facing temptations. We’re facing trials. We’re facing doubts. We have unanswered questions. Lord, my prayer this morning is that you would strengthen our faith through the means that we have talked about today; that you would strengthen our faith especially through a consideration of Jesus Christ and what Christ has done for us. May we build our faith on the steadfast and firm foundation of your word. And may it sustain us, Lord, in whatever we face in the coming days and weeks.

As we come to the table now, we pray that the sacrament would be a seal to our faith, something that strengthens our faith, something that declares to us in physical and tangible and visible form the truths of the gospel that we believe in our hearts. As we take the bread and take the juice, may we by faith look to Jesus again, trusting in Him and His finished work on our behalf. Lord, draw near to us in these moments. Fill us, Lord, with your Spirit. Help us this week to walk with you, we pray in Jesus’ name and for his sake, amen.