11 is where we find ourselves this morning.
Hebrews chapter number 11.
If you've been in church for any amount of time
and any significant amount of time,
you've probably heard a sermon
from Hebrews chapter number 11.
It's called the Hall of Faith.
You guys are on it.
If you're new here, don't worry that you didn't know that.
That's fine.
This is a sermon that comes from the beginning of Hebrews 11
and it's about faith.
That's the subject.
If you study the Bible at all,
you can figure that out in terms of Hebrews 11
because the word faith is used in these verses 24 times
throughout the chapter.
24 times.
Some form of pistis or pistuo is used.
That's the Greek word for faith.
And when many people think of the word faith,
in fact, I was thinking about it last night.
I said, I wonder what, if I Google faith,
what's the definition of the word faith
that Google would give me?
Because Google's so smart, right, amen?
And when you Google that word,
it has two definitions that were right at the top.
At least that's where it was at my house.
That's the thing about Google.
It doesn't give everybody always the same results,
but that's a whole nother thing.
It says as a top result, it said this,
complete trust or confidence in something.
So that's one definition of faith.
Another one was this, strong belief in God
or the doctrines of a religion based on spiritual
apprehension rather than proof.
Which is kind of interesting, as if there's no proof, right?
It's the second definition in the speaking of proof
that seems to me to confuse people.
So many people believe that you have faith
and you have proof and to have faith in God
means to put blinders onto evidence.
That either you have to have faith
or you have to have evidence, but you can't have both,
if that makes sense.
That you either are just blindly believing in God,
blindly believing in something because there's no evidence
or you believe in science.
Like that's another way of thinking about it.
And nothing can be further from the truth.
In fact, the preacher writing of this passage
in Hebrews chapter 11 is making a case.
He's making a case for faith.
He has been making the case for some 10 chapters
that Jesus Christ is greater.
It's on the sign, guys.
Jesus is greater in every conceivable way.
It's everything that went on in the Old Testament.
In fact, he's been making the case that the Old Testament,
the laws and the prophets and all they said
in the Old Testament, so many of those things were shadows
of the real thing in Jesus and what Jesus was going to do.
And don't you think that the author
has made a pretty good case?
He's been teaching us how that Jesus is greater
in every conceivable way.
Jesus is the fulfillment of all that God was revealing
in the Old Testament.
Those things were shadows of the real Jesus Christ
who has come and died and prays to the Lord,
he rose again.
And at the end of chapter 10,
leading us up to this particular passage,
he tells the Hebrews, that's the name of the book
because he's writing to people who were Hebrews,
some of them were saved, some of them who were not,
many of them who were convinced of Jesus and who he was,
but maybe had not believed in him.
And of course, many who had believed in him,
he says this to them right at the end of chapter 10
as you get into verse 38, he says,
Now the just, those who have been justified by God,
declared righteous given the Holy Spirit,
the just who are justified by faith shall also live by,
what, faith?
The just shall live by faith, but if any man draw back,
my soul shall have no pleasure in him.
And of course he's quoting the Old Testament
when he says, verse 39,
But we are not of them who draw back unto perdition,
but of them that believe to the saving of the soul.
He's saying, we Jewish people, we Hebrew people
are people who come from a long line of people
who had faith in God and were granted righteousness
because of that faith.
And who proved that God had declared them righteous
and given them righteousness because they lived on to the end,
they never drew back towards perdition,
not that they never sinned, but they never denied God,
they followed all the way to the end.
Isn't that awesome?
And he's saying, hey, we're not of them that draw back,
we're of them that believe to the saving of the soul.
And that's when he gets into this chapter 11
and begins to talk about faith.
And over the next few weeks,
you're gonna see many and many, many examples
of Old Testament believers who were people of faith.
You guys are on it.
I don't even know if I need a preach.
We should just have an invitation,
you guys come forward, that'd be great.
We can make a case for faith.
That's what I wanna do today, to make a case for faith.
And not just faith in any old thing,
faith in the triune God of the Bible,
faith in God the Father, God the Son,
and God the Holy Spirit,
by using these three aspects of faith
that we'll see them in this particular passage.
This should be a very fun sermon.
Verse, the first aspect of faith that we see here
in this particular passage is a description of faith.
He gives a description of faith, verse one.
It's not a definition as much as it's a description.
Here's what he says.
Now, faith is the substance of things hoped for,
the evidence of things not seen.
Now, we see several interesting words in this description.
The first word that I find interesting,
of course, beyond faith, as we'll talk about it,
is this word substance.
Now, substance is not nothing.
The word substance here means literally a setting,
a sunder, a setting below, or a foundation.
The idea is that faith becomes a foundation
of what we're looking forward to,
as he says here in the future.
In the New Testament day, that word substance
was sometimes used to describe a business transaction
or a title deed to a piece of property.
If you bought a piece of property or a house,
then they gave you the title deed.
That was your substance of what you hoped for.
So faith is the evidence of things in the future,
the substance of things hoped for, things in the future.
What do we believers hope for?
What do we hope for?
Well, we hope for a few things.
Faith is what gives me the title deed
to experiencing the second coming of the Lord Jesus Christ.
Jesus is coming back.
Titus 2.13 says that we look toward what we are to live.
This is what he tells us to do, live to look for
that blessed hope in the glorious appearing
of our great God and Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ.
He's coming back.
That's a great hope.
Who's ready for him to do it today?
I want him to come back, even so come Lord Jesus.
That's a great hope.
I don't know about you, but I'm looking forward
to that substance of the thing I'm looking to.
It's also something we're looking forward to.
What's another thing we're looking to?
Our own resurrection.
If we die in Christ, then we're gonna have a resurrection.
If he comes back and we're raptured,
we won't prevent those who are asleep.
They'll go first, then we'll go.
Who's excited?
It's awesome.
And so we're gonna be resurrected.
Our loved ones will be resurrected.
I hope I'm not.
I hope I get to go rapture.
I don't wanna go down.
I wanna just go up first.
That's gonna be great.
First Peter 1.3 says he has begotten us again
to a lively hope by the resurrection of Jesus Christ
from the dead.
So Christ is coming back.
We'll be resurrected.
We'll come back with him or we'll be raptured
and then we'll come back with him.
And then that's when we see our future glorification.
1 John 3.2 says, beloved, now are we the sons of God
and it doth not yet appear what we shall be,
but we know that when he shall appear,
we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.
And every man that hath this hope in him purifies himself
even as he is pure.
If I know Jesus is coming back, man,
he could be today.
He could be right now.
I don't live like he's coming back today.
Like he's coming back right now.
It's by faith that we reach out to that hope
and of our glorification becoming like Jesus.
Faith brings the future into our present experience.
As we live by faith, we reach out to things in the future.
So he says, faith is the substance of things hoped for.
We have a lot to hope for.
It's evidence, it says, of things, what?
Not seen, even though something is not seen
doesn't mean that it doesn't exist.
Life is full of joyous, full and joyous
by all kinds of things that are unseen.
Everyone lives by faith in something just about every day.
We put our trust in all kinds of things.
In fact, it's impossible to live without faith at all.
All of you exhibited faith by turning on that car today
and believing that it wouldn't blow up.
You exhibited faith by driving with people
that drove by you much closer
than you probably should be driving, right?
And you sat down and see it's believing
they would hold you up.
We all exhibit faith.
Every person that's ever lived has based their behavior
on a set of beliefs.
We live our lives based on what we've been taught,
what we observe and what we assume will happen.
If I were to ask you of all that there is to know,
if you knew 10%, would that make you smarter than you are now?
If you knew 10% of all there was to know,
who thinks I'm getting a lot smarter?
You're like, you never thought of that?
Think about it.
How much sand is on the beach by grain
at St. Pete Beach, Florida in 1994?
Is that something you could know?
You can't know it, but guess who does?
Are you with me?
Okay, let me ask the question again.
If you knew 10% of all there was to know,
would that be an increase in your intelligence?
Okay, you get my point.
Is it possible that there's something in the 90%
that you don't know that could be God, right?
For us to know God, he had to reveal himself to us.
He had to prove himself to us.
But there's nobody that knows everything by definition.
There's not very many people that know.
I would think, is there anybody that's ever gotten
to 1%, half a percent?
There's a lot to know.
Have you ever seen the universe?
They've ever looked at the stars?
There's a lot to know.
The materialists believe that because they have never,
that they have never seen anything supernatural,
that the supernatural cannot exist.
They live their life on the assumption
that everything that exists is the end
of a material process.
The problem with that thinking is that if it is true,
your brain is the end of a material process.
Your brain then is just chemicals in motion.
How could it be trusted if all your brain is
the end of a material process?
The hedonists, those who live for pleasure,
they believe that life is just about getting all the pleasure
you can and just get all the pleasure you can out of it.
There's an assumption that there are no consequences to that
or that this kind of living will not catch up with you.
It assumes there is no judgment in this afterlife.
There is a trust in the idea that one can live this way
and the consequences can be managed.
It assumes that there's no judgment.
That's the faith they put in how they live.
The authoritarian believes that because they can,
then they should.
They assume that might makes right.
They assume that those who live by the sword
and have therefore died by the sword in the past
are dealing with things that they will never
have happen to them.
They assume that they are the highest authority
and that they will answer to no one.
The everyday American, I believe, is a deist.
Maybe there's a God, but he's a far off.
You may assume that because you're a good person
that a good God should let you into a good place
if there's something, anything after this life.
If you think about it at all, the assumption is that
you'll be okay after you die
because you're basically a good person.
The belief is that your sin isn't that big of a deal.
The religious person may assume that because they did
some kind of religious ceremony or participate
in disciplines of religious piety, that they kind of,
that these kind of good works will make them good with God,
the gods, the universe, or whatever scale is used
in the afterlife if there even is one.
Do you see the point I'm trying to make?
Everyone has faith in something.
Are you convinced?
We're all living with some kind of assumption in mind.
We're all believing something and living out of that belief.
They are making a foundation on which they are living
their lives.
So when the author of Hebrews says that the just shall live
by faith, he's saying that those who have been made right
with God can trust that they have been made right with God
by believing what God has said and then acting upon it.
They live with the applied assumptions that whatever God
has revealed is true.
It's the foundation by which they do everything.
But he's not saying that the faith is the only evidence
of things not seen.
He's not saying it's all the evidence.
He's saying that when people live out that faith,
like the people he's about to describe,
and they experience a meaningful and rewarded life,
it's evidence to the faith that they say they have
and evidence that God can be trusted.
Am I making sense to anybody?
I believe the Bible is God's word.
It's not my believing that makes it so.
I believe it because it's based on evidence.
I have faith in something that has evidence.
I do not believe that that out of a mere blind faith.
One preacher said it this way and I love this.
I'm gonna memorize this because I think it's so good.
The Bible is a reliable collection of historical documents
written by eyewitnesses during the lifetime
of other eyewitnesses.
They report super-sense,
eyewitnesses, they report supernatural events
that took place in fulfillment of specific prophecies
and claim that their writings are divine
rather than human in origin.
Is that a good statement?
Let me say that again.
The Bible is a reliable collection of historical documents
written by eyewitnesses during the lifetime
of other eyewitnesses.
They report supernatural events that took place
in fulfillment of specific prophecies
and claim that their writings are divine
rather than human in origin.
The Bible is a book of fulfilled prophecies,
some yet to be fulfilled.
It is supernatural in its ability to tell the future.
It is reliable in its description of mankind and who he is.
It's reliable in what it says has happened in the past
and I want to make it very clear to you
that it is an air and an infallible.
It is the word of God.
And I'm not just saying it because I'm Baptist.
I'm a Baptist because I believe it.
Because I believe it.
I'm a Christian because I believe it.
Does that make sense?
We have incredible evidence that the Jesus of history
and the Jesus of the scripture are one and the same.
The Bible has proven itself to be reliable
and air and infallible.
You can trust it.
You can use it as the basis to which you live your life.
What do beleaders look forward to in the future?
We look forward to the end of sin,
the resurrection of our bodies of ourselves and our loved ones.
We look forward to a new heaven and a new earth.
What is unseen that believers trust in?
What's unseen that believers trust in?
God himself.
That does not mean there's no evidence to believe.
Faith is the evidence but that does not mean
that there is no evidence to help us
to be affirmed in putting our faith in God.
The description of faith in this verse,
in verse one points to how faith works
for those who place their faith in God.
So not only do we have a description of faith,
we also have in this passage a commendation of faith.
Look at verse number two, a commendation of faith.
Verse two, for by it, what's the it?
What's the it?
Faith, it's by faith, the elders,
those who went before the patriarchs,
all the ones he's gonna describe,
obtained a good report.
A couple questions.
Who are the elders?
Well, this is the book of Hebrews.
It's written to Jewish people.
They would have described those people of God
in the Old Testament who had believed God by faith
and been saved by the righteousness of Jesus.
He's about to give us examples of these elders
who are people of faith.
What was their report?
Well, over the rest of the chapter,
the preacher names 10 elders and how 10 of these people
from the Old Testament and how they lived out their faith
and live by faith.
He also refers to six more named and many unnamed people
in verses 32 to 38.
None of these people were notable
because they did good on their own.
In fact, interestingly enough,
if you go look at these people, he commends their faith.
He doesn't always commend their works.
Did Moses ever mess up?
Yeah, did Abel, did, I mean, these people were not sinless,
but they believed God and what was commendable about them,
Abraham and Moses and no, these are people that had faith.
They believed God.
They lived by faith.
The just shall live by faith.
As God revealed himself to them,
they believed what he revealed and they acted upon it.
Acted upon it, they lived by faith.
And as they did, they received a good report.
Who is a good report directed to?
What is this good report?
Well, the good report of their life was not just to us,
to readers today.
We're gonna read this passage over the next couple of weeks
and we're gonna get a good report of what they did.
Does that make sense?
So it's a good report for the reader, but what else?
The report was also to God.
This was the ultimate, the ultimate audience,
as we shall see in verse six.
Go down to verse six.
I'm gonna get to it a little ahead of schedule.
Here's what he says.
But without faith, it is impossible to what?
Please God, to please him.
For he that comes to God must believe that he is
and that he's a rewarder of them that diligently seek him.
Their report was to God.
He was the audience as we shall see in verse six.
Faith pleases God.
In fact, it's impossible to please God without faith.
As we study the lives of these Old Testament believers,
that will teach us how to live our lives by faith also.
Have you ever had someone else's faith
be an encouragement to your own?
You ever seen somebody go through something
and they are just faithful, they do the right thing
in a difficult time and that helps you to be obedient?
That's the point of this particular passage.
We're gonna see their faith
and it's gonna encourage us to be faithful.
To please God by being faithful.
Paul wrote in Romans 15 that the things
which were written back in the Old Testament,
days were written for our encouragement,
or our notification, it says this,
that we through patience and comfort of the scriptures
might have hope.
The faith of these Old Testament elders
is an illustration to us of how to live our lives by faith.
And that's how we get to number three.
Here we see the first illustration.
We've had a description of faith,
we've had a commendation of faith.
Number three, we have an illustration of faith.
Here's what it says.
Through faith, verse three, we understand
that the worlds were framed by the word of God.
So the things which are seen
were not made of the things which do appear.
The word for worlds here is the word Ion.
It's a word that encompasses time, space, and matter.
We find the same word in Matthew 28, 20,
where Jesus says that he will be with us,
with his disciples, even to the end of the world,
that word for world there is Ion,
or age, or world.
He's talking about the creation here
through faith we understand that the worlds were framed.
Here he's talking about the creation of the universe,
the origin of the universe.
The scientific word for the study of the origins
of the universe is cosmology, not cosmetology.
By the way, the reason it's so easy for us
to make that mistake is because the Greek word is cosmos,
the word cosmos for world, the word cosmos means
to arrange and to put into order,
cosmetology, to arrange and put into order, right?
Every experience that you and I have ever had
has been in time, space, and matter.
You're like, well, have you,
Pastor Ben, are you saying
that you've never experienced something spiritual?
Yeah, I have, but I've experienced that spiritual thing
in a body at a point in time.
Are you with me?
We are bound to our bodies.
One day I'm getting a resurrected body.
It's gonna be awesome.
But everything that we've ever experienced
has happened in time, space, and matter.
And the only one that was there when the world began
was God, in the beginning, God created the heaven
and the earth.
And it's my faith that we know that
because no one was there to see it.
Everything we've ever experienced has been in that way.
Time has three parts, past, present, and future.
Space has three parts, length, depth, height.
Matter has three states, liquid, solid, and gas.
It's difficult to deny.
There are worlds.
In the past few years, there's been the development
and launch of the James Webb Telescope.
How many of you guys have ever heard of that?
You've not heard of it?
You should look it up.
It's incredible.
They spent a bunch of your money on it, I could tell you that.
It launched on Christmas Day in 2021,
and it's a space telescope specifically designed
to conduct infrared astronomy.
The Hubble Telescope is a satellite
that's been up for a few decades,
and it orbits our earth.
This is a telescope that has gone way, way beyond
anything the Hubble could get.
It goes into space, deep into space.
Its high resolution and high sensitive instruments
allow it to view objects that are too distant
or faint for the Hubble Telescope.
The pictures that we have been given back
from this telescope that's orbiting, get this,
940,000 miles beyond the Earth's orbit,
not the Earth's circumference, the Earth's orbit,
around the sun, here's what it shows.
It shows that the universe is expanding.
We are finding that every patch of sky in the night sky
contains not only stars, but galaxies of stars.
Most of the points of light they're saying
that you see when you look in the sky are not just stars,
they're galaxies, sometimes groups of galaxies.
We have a huge God, don't we?
And expanding universe points to a time
where it all came from one source.
Materialist scientists do not like this
because it points to the idea that everything
came from something uncreated.
There is an uncaused first cause, and that's God himself.
The universe bears the marks of design
because of exactly, and this verse points to it,
it says literally, what does he say?
Back to Hebrews chapter 11, three,
through faith we understand that the worlds were framed
by the word of God.
The word frame means literally fit together, put together.
It's a word for design.
It's a word for Bill Van Hoos engineering.
It's a word for God's smart.
This is the second time today that's come up.
Jesus was smart and God's smart,
but it's not enough to say that they're smart.
He's all knowing.
He is perfectly powerful and intelligent in what he does.
And as this verse put it, the things which are seen
were not made of things which do appear.
Times, space, and matter must have had a beginning.
It also must have been created at the same time
because you cannot have one of those things
without the other.
You can't have time without space and space without.
Are you with me?
Whatever creates something cannot consist
of whatever it creates.
Whatever made wood couldn't be itself made of wood.
Are you with me?
I'm gonna blow your mind.
This is amazing.
Therefore, whoever or whatever,
and I believe it was God, don't miss me on that.
Whoever created, let's see,
whatever creates something cannot consist
of what it creates.
Therefore, whoever or whatever began time, space,
and matter must be timeless,
spaceless, and immaterial.
Whoever created our world must also be personal
to decide to create, whoever created our world
must be powerful, this person must be intelligent.
So when I describe a timeless, spaceless,
immaterial, personal, powerful, intelligent
cause of the universe, that's exactly in keeping
with the God of the Bible who revealed himself in history.
Who is that but God?
In the beginning time, God created the heavens,
space, and the earth matter.
The scientists are just now catching up to Genesis 1-1.
Now some may criticize us for looking even at evidence.
Other may criticize us for valuing faith.
The truth is on this issue,
everyone is putting their faith in something.
We believe the word of God and trust him.
We do not do this blindly.
The evidence points in the direction of the Bible.
Romans 1-20 says it this way.
For the invisible things of him
from the creation of the world are clearly seen
being understood by the things that are made
even as eternal power and Godhead
so that they are without excuse.
I've pointed to the stars to make a case
for the evidence of God.
The Bible says the heavens declare the glory of God
in the firmament show with his handiwork.
Now I wanna point to,
I've talked about the vastness of the universe.
Now I wanna talk about the smallness of a cell.
The cell, you know your body's made up of cells
and in those cells there's DNA and genes.
Stephen C. Myers, a scientist,
he pointed out the following in a recent video he published
so I don't claim to get all this on my own.
Here's what he says.
In 1953, James Watson and Francis Crick
mapped out the structure of the DNA molecule.
Along the interior of the famed double helix
they discovered a four character code at work.
They soon realized that sequences
of precisely arranged chemicals called nucleotide bases
store and transmit the assembly instructions,
the information for building the crucial protein molecules
that cells need to survive.
Let me put that in terms that I can understand
so that maybe you can understand them too.
Basically they're saying they discovered
that there's a blueprint for in every cell of our bodies
for us.
There's information in every cell of our bodies
that guides and directs how we're made up.
It's information.
Note they soon realized that these precisely arranged
chemicals called like I said, nucleotide bases
are the assembly instructions for building
the crucial protein molecules that cells need to survive.
No protein molecules, if there's scientifically speaking,
if there's no protein molecules, there's no life.
Crick later proposed that the four characters
of the DNA function like letters in a written language
or digital symbols in a computer code.
Just like a well functioning computer code
relies on precise sequencing of zeros and ones,
so does the DNA molecule depend on the specific arrangement
of the chemical bases along the spine
of that double helix in the cell?
So the question is this, where does this information
come from?
Life depends on building proteins.
Proteins depend on genetic information or code.
No theory of, and here's what evolution proclaims,
that the way that we got life was through undirected
random processes and mutation, natural selection.
That it's undirected, it's bottom up.
That this just happened by chance.
If you roll the dice enough times,
that eventually you'll get the right code.
The question is, who's rolling the dice first of all?
Where did the dice come from?
I know not specifically dice, but how did you get
to that place where there's even chemicals in the first place?
But that's a whole nother conversation.
Where does the information come from?
No theory of undirected chemical evolution
can explain the origin of the digital information
needed to build the first living cell
from simpler non-living chemicals.
There's too much information in the cell
to be explained through chance alone.
The probability, and here's the point,
to have life you have to have proteins,
at least one, have a functional protein.
The probability of generating a section of DNA code
capable of building just one functional protein
by chance is vanishingly small.
It's one in 10 to the 77th power.
That's one with 77 zeros behind it.
So one shot in 10 to the 77th, that's a lot of zeros.
Who wants to check with that many zeros on it?
That could be cash, right, it's a lot.
One in a million would be incredible chances
compared to one in 10 to the 77th power.
The problem is that even the simplest living cells,
and that's just for one DNA molecule,
sorry, one protein in a DNA molecule,
the problem is even the simplest living cells
require hundreds of proteins.
So you have to do the math,
hundreds times one in 10 to the 77th power, do you get it?
Code of the day, that's a lot.
That's what he said.
We find hundreds of proteins in living cells
with precise information, code, sequence,
that provides exactly what's needed for life of all kinds
to survive and replicate.
If you came up to the church
and you saw a book on the front row,
you came in, you came to the front row,
you're getting ready for the service,
and on the front row it said,
a biography of Gene Millioni.
That's the former pastor of our church,
and it's 200 pages long.
You would not think, by the way,
that 200 page long document shows signs of intelligence,
you agree, you would not think,
look at how time and chance produced this book.
Look at how something must have exploded and made a book.
You wouldn't say that, you wouldn't say,
man, Rhonda really needs to clean,
the dust is forming books in here.
Would you say that?
Of course you wouldn't, why?
Because information always has at its source a mind.
Books have authors.
Paintings don't happen because there's paint falling
from the sky and making landscapes.
Paintings need what?
Artists, painters.
Inventions have inventors.
You say, well, man, you're saying that this world
was invented, was designed, was, yes.
That's what I'm saying, if you can't believe it about a book,
why would you believe it about everything else?
The heavens declare the glory of God.
The firmament shows this handy work.
The invisible things of him are from the creation
of the world are clearly seen being shown
by the things that are made, even his eternal power
and Godhead.
Everybody knows it, that's why everybody worships something.
Every creature in the world worships,
every person in the world, every culture in the world
worships something.
You don't think our culture,
even though they're not worshiping God like the other,
is not worshiping something.
They're worshiping a lot.
We have idols all over the place,
we just don't see them as idols.
We're all worshiping something,
because we all realize that we didn't cause ourselves
to be here.
Through faith, we understand that the worlds were framed,
were fitted by the word of God,
so that the things which are seen
were not made of things which do appear.
You and I are made up of three parts,
body, soul, and spirit.
While our bodies may die,
our soul and spirit are eternal.
When I acknowledge the fact by faith
that God made the worlds,
that he designed them and that he sustains them,
it helps me to remember who he is compared to who I am.
He's got the whole world, the whole universe in his hands,
and he's big enough to handle Ben Jennings,
Trinity Baptist Church, the Jennings family.
He's bigger enough to handle your life and your problems.
Colossians says,
by him worth all things made,
and by him all things consist,
that means are held together.
If I'm playing a pickup game of basketball in the gym
with Michael Jordan and his prime,
I didn't say LeBron, I said Michael.
My success is dependent on me trusting MJ enough
to get him the ball.
It's a silly illustration,
but if God can handle the cosmos,
why not trust him with the details of my life?
Why not trust him with my finances, family, and future?
But here's the most important thing.
Why not believe him and trust him
about what he says is true?
The most important thing, why not believe him and trust him
about what he says about eternity?
How do you do that?
Through faith that leads to obedience.
This God who breathed out the stars
and formed you in your mother's womb,
also sent his son to die for you.
He became flesh and dwelt among us,
and we beheld his glory even as the only begotten
grace and truth.
You know, God, when we say that God is good
or that God is love, we're not saying,
and this is not what the Bible teaches,
that God conforms to some external standard
called love and goodness.
God doesn't have some external standard called morality
that he submits himself to.
Morality is moral, ethics are ethical,
love is love, good is good because it describes who God is.
God is those things.
Are you with me?
I know this is heavy.
That's why the Bible says that all have sinned
and fallen short of the glory of God.
It is saying something about our immorality.
It is saying something about the fact that we're sinful.
And what makes it sinful is that we don't measure up
to the person and work of who God is morally.
Does that make sense? God is the standard
and we all fall short of that standard.
And he knowing that we fall short of that standard
sent his son who became flesh and lived a perfect life
and died on the cross, keeping all of that law,
being exactly who he ought to have been
and dying on the cross for you and for me.
And God poured out his wrath for your sin
and my sin on his son
so that he can legally dismiss our case, declare us righteous.
How does that happen? It happens by faith.
The Bible says this way in Ephesians 2, 8,
for by grace are you saved through faith
and that not of yourselves, it's a gift of God,
not of works, lest any man should boast.
God wants to offer you eternal life
and he responds to us when we put our faith and trust in him.
That's what happens on salvation.
It's also how we ought to live our life,
the just shall live by faith.
God says I ought to do this with my finances.
I don't know if I want to do that with my fans,
but you know what? He's a good God, he loves me,
I'm going to depend on him.
God tells me how to do this with my sexuality.
I don't know that I want to do that with my sexuality,
but God tells me that's what I ought to do,
so I'm going to do what he tells me I ought to do.
Are you with me? That's how we live, we live by faith.
And when we do that, God brings incredible blessing
to our lives.
And we have a hope that we can look forward to,
being with God forever, changed bodies,
with him for all eternity.
Are you glad for that?
So if you're today, faith is the number one issue,
but it's not just faith and faith,
it's faith in the identity of Jesus Christ
and who he is and who he said he was.
He died on the cross for your sin.
And today it's so important for you
to put your faith and trust in him.
Would you bow your head?