The book of Hebrews up to this
point has been setting forth Jesus Christ, the Son of God,
our prophet, the one who makes God known to us. our high priest,
the one who makes us holy and brings us to God, and our king,
the one who subdues our enemies and gives out of the riches of
his blessings all of our blessings to us. Because of his righteousness,
he is the sole possessor of all spiritual and heavenly blessings.
And the book of Hebrews sets him forth because the Bible sets
Christ forth. And that same book, the book
of Hebrews, shows how that the Lord Jesus Christ is the fulfillment
of all that came before in the Old Testament. That His coming
into the world established the New Testament in His blood. It
was by His blood that He made the New Testament, put it into
force, and fulfilled His conditions, and brought His blessings to
us. And this is set forth in the exposition in Hebrews of
the Old Testament, how Christ fulfilled all of those shadows
and types, offering himself to God as a sacrifice for our sins,
to God, instead of us, as our substitute, as our surety, the
one who owned our sins and bore our obligations and fulfilled
all righteousness and made satisfaction to God in his holy justice. And
these things are set forth to us as scripture. This is the
truth of heaven. This is the way God sees things.
This is the way things are. And in the end of chapter 10,
he ends the chapter with these words in verse 35. Cast not away
therefore your confidence, which hath great recompense of reward. For you have need of patience,
that after you have done the will of God, you might receive
the promise. He goes on, for yet a little
while, and he that shall come will come and will not tarry.
Now the just, the righteous ones, shall live by faith. But if any
man draw back, my soul shall have no pleasure in him, but
we are not of them which draw back unto perdition, but of them
which believe to the saving of the soul. In the book of Hebrews,
he's addressing these Hebrew believers who were tempted to
go back to the old covenant and find confidence and assurance
in those outward physical things, in those things that depended
upon them to meet God's conditions for blessings. But he sets all
that aside by presenting Christ as a complete fulfillment of
all that, the perfection of it, the eternal perfection of all
of God's Word fulfilled in Christ for his people. That's our confidence,
he says. Don't cast away your confidence.
You have need of patience in this life of faith in Christ. that after you have done the
will of God, which is to believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, is
that not the will of God? This is the work of God, that
you believe on Him whom He has sent. These things were written
that you might believe on Him, that you might believe that Jesus
is the Christ, the Son of God. This is the will of Him that
sent me, that of all which seeth the Son and believeth on Him
might not perish, but have everlasting life." These are the words of
Scripture, and this is the will of God. He has determined that
we would believe on His Son, and He's given us promises. The
Old Testament contains the law. It exhorts us to works. to obedience
and threatens us with punishment. It makes us a condition in all
of God's blessings. The New Testament proclaims God's
promises fulfilled by Christ and given to us because of His
obedience. And faith is coupled with the
New Testament. Faith lays hold on what God has
said in his promises. And so he says we have need of
this patience to keep going on. Once believed is not enough.
A continuous believing is what is given to the people of God.
We don't just believe as a decision once in our life and then live
our lives independent. But we live in complete dependence
upon God in Christ because he's made known the truth to us. He's
put His Spirit within us and made it clear to us. He's persuaded
us of it. We've embraced Christ and we
go on looking to Him. So we do not fall back to perdition,
but we believe to the saving of the soul. So now He's going
to give us an exposition of this subject of faith, this gift of
God, which is at the root of every other gift. The Spirit
of God is what gives this gift to us. It's a gift out of His
grace. We don't have it within ourselves
naturally. It's not part of us naturally.
Someone said it's like an exotic flower. It doesn't occur naturally
in the soil of man's heart. God has to plant it there. And
so we want to look at this. We want to look at this. And
I want you to see the words that follow in Hebrews 11. as supporting
what he just said here. You have need of patience. You
have need of believing, holding fast to confidence. Don't fall
back. We don't fall back. We won't
fall back because we believe to the saving of the soul. God
has done this. Now, look at verse one of Hebrews
chapter 11. Now faith is the substance of
things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. I was trying
to think of an illustration, if I was, you know, maybe a father,
and I wanted to give my son a car when he turned old enough to
be able to drive a car. And I wanted to tell him about
the car that I was going to give him one day. I promised to give
him a car. What would I do? I would tell
him. I might write it down. I might give him that written
note saying, I, your father, the one who loves you so much,
I'm going to give you a car at this age of your life. So he
would hold that promise, that written promise in his hand.
I might also give him a little toy car, a token, a symbol, just
a model of that large real car. And he might hold that car, he
might set it on the shelf in his bedroom and look at it and
think, that's a token of my father's promise to me that he's written
down here. He put it in writing, but he's also given me this token.
It's the substance It's that tangible part of what I expect
in anticipation that he will one day give me. Hope is an expectation
and anticipation. But what is the substance of
that hope now that we have of all that God has said in all
of his promises? What is that tangible thing that
we have now? It's faith. And that's it. That's all we have, is faith.
It's the precious gift of faith. It's the substance of things
hoped for. All that God has promised, because
we believe God, because we trust Him, we're confident, we're assured,
that because it depends on Him who promised, upon His ability,
His faithfulness, His righteousness, His provision in Christ, that
He will surely give us everything that He's promised. And the only
token we have of that, the only substantive thing we have of
it now, is that gift of faith. And what a precious gift that
is. It's the substance, it's what we have now. We don't have
the fulfillment in our experience, but we have something else. This
something else glorifies God. It's given to His sons. to his
children, his sons and daughters. It's called faith, faith in Christ. And he goes on. Now faith is
the substance of things hoped for. It's the evidence of things
not seen. We have physical eyes and physical
senses. We can see the world around us,
we can hear, we can smell, we can taste, we can touch, we can
sense things in the physical world with physical senses. But
the spiritual world, the truth of God is completely invisible
to us unless God gives us something by which we may lay hold on it
and perceive it and be persuaded of it. And that gift is faith.
We have no evidence that what God has said is true except his
written word and his gift to us of faith. All that is of God
that he said in his word to us is now invisible. We can't see
it. In fact, by our senses, it seems
as if the appearance of the way things are now contradicts the
truth of God. He says that the Lord Jesus Christ
rules over all things. It seems like men rule. He says
that the righteous are blessed in Christ, but it seems like
the righteous are persecuted and downtrodden. It seems like
that we've been declared to not be servants of sin, but servants
of righteousness. But it feels like, in our experience,
that all we do is fall in our sins. Sin plagues us in our thoughts
and motives. And our words were constantly
tripping up. And in our actions, the things
that we would do, we don't do. And the things we don't want
to do, that's what we end up doing. And there's this warfare.
And so it seems to our senses, the appearance of things, to
contradict what God has said. And yet, we have evidence that
what God has said is true. And that evidence is faith. And so he says, now faith is
the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not
seen. That's what he's given to us.
So this raises a number of questions. Faith, what is faith? Well, he's just described it,
but he didn't describe it in the way that men like to describe
faith. Men like to describe faith as our psychological action,
what we do when we believe. And I know this because over
the course of my few years, I've encountered people who always
want to define faith by what you're thinking, what you're
feeling, what you're asserting by your will. and they want to
describe faith in terms of those things, what you understand,
what you assent to, what you consent to, and what you determine
in your will, commit to. And so what is faith in terms
of those things? Well, God describes faith in
terms of those things, but it's a lot unlike what men describe
in many ways. And that surprises us. Faith,
if you look at it historically, if you look at the way that it
has been explained by theologians, is very complicated. I have found
it to be very complicated, and I have dived into and tried to
understand it from that perspective, and I've come up frustrated.
It turns out that faith is very simple. is believing God, is
taking God at His word. And I'm not going to just make
that statement. I'm going to show it to you from
scripture. And I also want to address this psychological activity. That's a big word. It's like
a $20 word. And I want children to understand.
When I say psychological, I mean what's going on in your thinking.
the way you understand things. What's happening inside when
you believe inside of you? And where does it happen? Does
it happen here? Does it happen here? Does it happen here? What
is this thing called faith? Now notice in this first verse
of Hebrews 11, God doesn't give us a mental description of faith. in the sense that he doesn't
describe the human psychology, the way that our minds work in
believing. He simply gives us a functional
view of faith, how God has given it to us and what it does for
us as a gift from God. It allows us to lay hold of the
truth of the way things are from God's perspective. In other words,
it allows us to think the same way that God thinks about things.
In 1 Corinthians 2.16 it says, we have the mind of Christ. That's
what it means. We think about things the way
our father does. We're the children of God and
that's the evidence of it. We think about life, about heaven,
about sin, about Christ, about righteousness, about grace, about
our own works, the way God thinks about it. and that the way that
we're able to do that is through this gift of faith. And so faith, as it's described
here, teaches us that this gift from God enables us to have and
hold in our hand the substance of a possession God has promised
to us and committed himself to give to us in Christ. This possession
that we have is certain and sure, it's in heaven, it's in Christ,
it's ours in him. And yet all we have now is this
gift of faith. And he says that this gift of
faith enables us to see the invisible things, the realities of heaven,
the realities of what's true on earth, though men, mankind
in his natural state cannot perceive them. The wisdom of men, it is
pleased God to make the wisdom of men foolishness in this aspect. We cannot understand the things
of God unless he gives it to us. And the way he does that
is through this gift of faith. We see invisible things. They'll
tell you in school and science and stuff that the world is made
up of little tiny things that you can't see. They're invisible.
You can only see them through a microscope. And some of them
are so small you can't see them even with the most powerful microscopes. And so in a sense, when someone
looks through a microscope at something, what was that? I didn't know that was there.
Look at that, all these things swimming around in this little
droplet of water. I didn't even know they were
there. The microscope is giving you an insight into invisible
things. Faith gives us an insight, a
perspective, an understanding of things that can't be seen
without it. Okay? So God doesn't describe
our psychological or mental activity in this thing of faith. He doesn't
describe it from that perspective. He gives us a functional description
of it. But he also tells us how this faith comes to us and what
it really is, that it is God, it is just simply taking God
at his word. But also, faith, that is saving
faith, has a particular object. Do you know what, when we think
of faith or trust or whatever we want to use to define faith,
we find that in our natural condition, we know what faith is. We know
what trust is. Our mom or our dad might tell
us something and we hear what they say and we believe them
and they'll react. So we act accordingly, don't
we? They might tell us that they're
going to do something for us. We believe them and we expect
them to do it. And if they don't, we ask them, what happened? or
they might tell us the way things are. They might tell us how we
should act, and we begin to act that way. They say, you need
to do your chores, because when you grow up, I'm not gonna be
there to tell you to do your chores, and you're gonna have
to learn to work while you're young, so that when you're old, you'll
have this work ethic that you'll be able to do what's right and
support your family. and it's God's will that you
work. So we put them to work and they believe our words and
they understand it and they begin to understand the world by what
we tell them. Now that natural inclination of a child to believe
their parents, that's faith. We believe people, don't we?
If you tell me that you did something, I take you at your word. I, you
know, you might say, I built that house over there. I didn't
see you build it, but if you tell me you did, okay, that's
good. What part did you build? Well, I did this part of it.
So we believe people and we trust them, don't we? If Bob tells
me he's gonna give me a job on Monday for $15 an hour, if I
believe Bob, I'll show up on Monday, I want the job, and I'll
start working for him. And I'll expect him to pay me
$15 for every hour I work. So because he said it, and I
believe Bob, and I trust that he'll keep his word, I go to
work on Monday, and I probably receive $15 an hour. That's faith,
that's trust. But in our natural condition,
we believe things that may be true and trustworthy, and we
may believe things that are not true and are untrustworthy. If Ralph tells me he'll give
me a job on Tuesday for $20 an hour, and I believe Ralph, and
I don't go see Bob about the job on Monday, and I show up
to Ralph's place, and he says, sorry, I can't hire you today
because we ran out of work. Ralph didn't keep his word, and
I lost the job with Bob. I trusted Ralph to keep his word,
but he was untrustworthy. He didn't tell the truth. So
we do believe things and we do trust things. We trust objects
like a bridge. We walk across the gorge, what's
it called? The Royal Gorge. And we look
down, it's like a mile down. We trust the bridge to hold us
up. We put our confidence and our trust in the bridge. That's
an object. We believe the man who promised to give me a job.
I trust he's gonna keep his word. We trust the man. But it turns
out that we can believe and trust things, like I said, that are
either true or untrustworthy, or true and trustworthy. It's
still faith, right? If I put my trust in the bridge,
and the bridge was built a long time ago, and it's weak, and
I fall through, it doesn't mean I didn't believe the bridge.
It just means I put my trust in an untrustworthy bridge. Now,
that's true of faith as well. And people have tried to dissect
faith in order to say, well, your faith is not saving because
it's not of this kind. You didn't have the right mental
activity going on when you believe. But the Bible doesn't make a
distinction between the way we psychologically process information
with faith. What it tells us is that it's
the object of our faith that determines whether or not we're
saved. It's not how hard we believe or how sincerely we believe,
because I might sincerely believe the lies taught by false religion. I might believe that my idol
can save me from my enemies or that can provide food, but my
idol doesn't talk, smell, think, feel, do anything. So I obviously
had put my trust. I believed what's false. I imagined
it in my mind. I created it, I bowed down to
it, and it failed me. That's called false faith, not
because the act of believing was different, but because the
thing I believed was wrong and false and untrustworthy. And
so it is with faith in scripture. What is going on in our head
that there's the same thing. There's no distinction between
that kind of faith and the other, except the thing in which we
put our trust, the way we come to truth. And so, what we find
is, is that naturally we can understand things about this
world, but none of it is really the truth because the truth is
only known in one way. Now it turns out also that there's
this big question in the world throughout history and even today.
How do we know anything? I remember my uncle was, he liked
to kid around with us when we were kids and he said, I can
prove that you are not here. Now as a child, that was just
a challenge to me. I know my uncle, he's older than
my dad, is smart like my dad, and I can show that he's wrong
because he cannot prove that I'm not here. And so he had this
little challenge. It was a mental thing. He says,
well, I know you're not in the South Pole, right? No. And you're
not in Mexico, right? No. Well, you're not in Kansas,
are you? No. No, I'm right here, he says. Well, if you're not in Kansas,
and you're not in the South Pole, and you're not in any of those
places, then you must be somewhere else, right? Yes. If you're somewhere
else, then you can't be here. See, that was his way of trying
to confuse me as a child. But God doesn't, he doesn't teach
us things that way. We come to an understanding through
what men say. But what men say is not necessarily
true. There's only one way to come
to the true understanding. Men, historically, and even today,
think of coming to the true knowledge of things in two ways. One, the
first way, the most common way, is through their senses. I see
it. It must be true. I heard it.
It's got to be the way things are. I feel it. I just know this
is true. I just know this is true. Well, how do you know?
Well, because I sense that it is. That's called coming to truth
by our senses. And another way that people think
of coming to truth is by what they think. their rational part
of them. I've thought about it and I've
determined that God must have created the world because it
just makes sense to me. Well, how did you come to that
conclusion? Well, I thought it through. I mean, I came to it
with my logic. I set all these possibilities
out and I logically went through each one and I've concluded this
is the only one that makes sense. Everything else is false. But
both of those ways are wrong. We do not come to an understanding
of the way things are through our senses, nor do we come to
the understanding of the way things are through the rational
or the logic of our mind. There's only one way we come
to the truth. And how is that? It's revealed. It has to be revealed
to us. And faith comes by God's gift
of grace, because it's not resonant, it's not of yourselves, it is
the gift of God. They believed by grace. How does
it come? By hearing the word of God. You see, the only way you can
know the truth is if it's revealed, and upon hearing the truth, God
has to give you a persuasion, an understanding of it, so that
you Personally, it's like it dawns on you. This is the way
things are. Look at the book of 2 Peter. In 2 Peter chapter 1, the Apostle
Peter is telling about his experience when he was on the Mount of Transfiguration.
He says in verse 17, All right, verse 16, he starts this way,
2 Peter 1, verse 16. We have not followed cunningly
devised fables when we made known to you the power and coming of
our Lord Jesus Christ, but we were eyewitnesses of his majesty. He's talking about when he saw,
Peter, James, and John saw the Lord Jesus Christ transfigured
before them on the mount. You can read about that in Matthew
17, for example, but notice, Verse 17, for he received from
God the Father honor and glory. When there came such a voice
to him from the excellent glory, this is my beloved Son in whom
I am well pleased. They heard that. They heard God
the Father speak from heaven concerning Christ, this is my
beloved Son in whom I am well pleased. Notice, and this voice
which came from heaven we heard when we were with him in the
holy mount. Verse 19, we have also a more sure word of prophecy. Were unto you do well that you
take heat as unto a light that shineth in a dark place until
the day dawn and the day star arise in your hearts. Knowing
this, knowing this first, that no prophecy of the scripture
is of any private interpretation, for the prophecy came not in
old time by the will of man, but holy men of God spake as
they were moved, carried along by the Holy Ghost." What he's
saying here is phenomenal. He's saying we experience firsthand
with our eyes and with our ears What God the Father said about
his Son on the Mount, this Mount of Transfiguration, we saw Christ
transfigured before us. We heard God the Father speak
from heaven and yet we have something more sure. What is it? Scripture. It's the prophecy
God gave through the Holy Spirit when he breathed out the truth
of heaven to them and they wrote it down by that infallible word
from God. And he's saying that when the
scripture comes to us, it's like when the sun rises, it dawns
on us. The light from God shines upon
us. And though we're not aware of
hearing his voice, we're not aware of the activity of God. It's suddenly under the hearing
of that, we come to the realization as if it's a new, wow, This is
true. It just dawned on me. Well, yeah,
you think it just dawned on you, but it was because the day star
arose in your hearts. The morning dawn. Look at Matthew
chapter 16 as another example of this. In Matthew 16, Jesus
asked his disciples, whom do men say that I am? It says this
in Matthew 16. in verse 13, he said, whom do
men say that I the Son of Man am? Jesus posed the question. Now the Lord Jesus Christ asking
this question is actually going to instill within them, or you
could say God is going to do this, it doesn't matter, the
Lord Jesus Christ is the Word of God. His words are spirit
and life, and the spirit of God applies what he says, the truth
of it, to us. But the question is actually
gonna set it up so that this operation of God, the day dawning
and the day star arising in our hearts through the word of God
is gonna take place right here in the scripture. So he asked
the question, whom do men say that I am? I the son of man am,
verse 14, Matthew 16, 14. They said, some say that thou
art John the Baptist, some Elijah, and others Jeremiah or one of
the prophets. He said to them, but whom do
you say that I am? Now he's drawing out what they
truly believe here. Out of the abundance of the heart,
the mouth speaketh. And Simon Peter answered and said, thou
art the Christ, the son of the living God. Christ means the
anointed of God, the anointed to save his people, the one who
is the prophet. God makes himself known to us
through, who speaks God's word, who is that word, who fulfills
that word. That word speaks of him. He's
the high priest, the one who makes us holy and brings us to
God. and intercedes for us and advocates for us before God and
stands in God's presence for us. And we stand there in Him. And He's the King. He's the one
who subdues our enemies and receives all blessings from God and gives
them to us out of the riches of His treasury. All things heavenly
and spiritual. He's the Christ. And He says
here, thou art the Christ, God's Christ, God's anointed, God's
Messiah for His people. the son of the living God. Now,
Peter said this, phenomenal, because notice what Jesus said.
And Jesus answered and said to him, blessed, oh, how blessed
art thou, Simon Bar-Jonah, for flesh and blood has not revealed
it to thee. It didn't come in any natural
way. It came supernaturally. But my father, which is in heaven,
how did he come? How did the day star arise? the
Lord Jesus Christ had spoken to him, and God, the Holy Spirit,
had given that knowledge to him. And for Peter, it was like, when
the question was asked, suddenly, in trying to answer it, he answered
out of what he truly believed, and he found himself answering
according to the truth of Scripture, that Jesus himself was the Christ,
the Son of the living God. And he said, that is a blessing
for the Father himself has made this known to you. Look at 1
Corinthians. 1 Corinthians chapter two, actually
chapter one. It doesn't come through sense.
Knowing the truth does not come through our senses, nor does
it come through our ability to reason. It comes by revelation. That's why the wisdom of this
world is of no value when it comes to spiritual things. Because
they do not have the revealed will of God from scripture as
the axiom of all of their understanding. They start with something else.
What do they start with? Their own ability to perceive.
I just saw a hundred flamingos and they were all pink. By my
judgment, all flamingos are pink. Yeah, but what about that part
of the world where they're white? You see, we rely on our own senses
to perceive things. You get up in the morning, you're
still half asleep, and you go, where am I? What am I? What's
the purpose of living? You're confused. It just shows
you how fickle we are. But notice here, in 1 Corinthians
1, Verse 22, actually let's start with verse 20. Where is the wise? You could put the philosopher.
Where is the wise? Where is the scribe? Where is
the disputer of this world? You take them all together. The
wisest of men. Hath not God made foolish the
wisdom of this world? Whatever a man can come to on
his own, or whatever he can come to collectively, It's foolishness. For after that in the wisdom
of God, it seemed good to God in his wisdom, the world by wisdom
knew not God in their understanding, in their own ability to perceive
and to dive into and to investigate. You're not gonna come that way
to knowledge. It pleased God by the foolishness of preaching,
the revelation of God's will to save them that believe. Under
the hearing of his word preached concerning Christ, God gives
faith and that day, that dawning occurs, that day star arises
in our heart. The word of God is spirit and
is life and God gives it to us to see the way things are concerning
our eternal salvation and the truth of heaven. And he gives
us this gift of faith to see things that are invisible. It's
the evidence of things not seen. So he says here, Verse 22, for
the Jews require a sign. They were always asking, show
us a sign. The Greeks seek after wisdom. Remember Aristotle and
Socrates and all those big swells. Completely ignorant when it comes
to real truth. But we preach Christ. We preach
Christ. Who is Christ? He's the Son of
God. He is the Word of God. The Word
of God. Realize that what he's saying
here is that Jesus Christ is the full containment, the revelation,
the content, the subject matter, and the fulfillment of the truth. He is himself the truth. What
he says and what he is is indistinguishable. When he speaks, he speaks of
the way things are out of himself. It's consistent with the Father
and with the Spirit. And the subject matter he says
is absolutely true. He cannot lie. Now he goes on. We preach Christ and him crucified
unto the Jews a stumbling block, to the Greeks foolishness, but
to them that are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ, the
power of God and the wisdom of God. How do we know anything? How do we know the mind of God,
the wisdom of God? Christ and Him crucified. The revelation of God is His
Son, and His revelation of Himself is in His Son, and when that
revelation is made to us from the gospel of Scripture, God
gives us that gift so that we see things and we say, oh my,
this is the way things are. This is the truth of God. This
is the way God sees me. This is the way God has done
things in order that he might accept me, the sinner, and I
can come to him in truth and in holiness because of what he
has done and declared to me the truth that's in his Son. Because the foolishness of God
is wiser than men and the weakness of God is stronger than men.
You see your calling, brethren, how that not many wise men after
the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble are called, but God
has chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the
wise, and God has chosen the weak things of the world to confound
the things that are mighty and base things of the world, and
things which are despised hath God chosen, yea, and things which
are not to bring to nothing or to naught things that are, that
no flesh should glory in his presence. The fact that God has
made the truth of eternity only available to us by His sovereign
revelation and given to us with this gift of faith, you know
what it does? It brings men down to nothing, because that's what
they truly are. And it raises them up by God's
Word, because God's Word gives life and light. In Psalm 119,
verse 130, it says, the entrance of thy words giveth light, it
giveth understanding to the simple. What gives us understanding?
The entrance of thy words. How do we know anything? The
entrance of thy words. Thy word is a lamp unto my feet,
a light unto my paths, right? Go on in chapter two, 1 Corinthians
chapter two, look at this. He says, and I should read all of it,
but I'm gonna jump down right to verse seven. But we speak
the wisdom of God in a mystery. Even the hidden wisdom which
God ordained before the world unto our glory. Hidden wisdom
means it's with God. It's hidden Christ. He's gonna
make it known. He has to make it known or we can't know it.
He says, which none of the princes of this world knew for had they
known it, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.
They did not know it. The princes of this world did
not know it. Therefore they crucified the
Lord of glory. Then how do we get this wisdom? Notice verse
eight, verse seven, verse nine. But as it is written, I, the
physical eye of man, hath not seen nor ear heard, neither have
entered into the heart of man. It doesn't come in any other
way but this. The things which God hath prepared
for them that love him, but God hath revealed them unto us by
his spirit. For the Spirit searches all things,
yea, the deep things of God. For what man knoweth the things
of a man, save the Spirit of man, which is in him? I don't
know what's going on inside of you unless you tell me. Even
so, the things of God knoweth no man but the Spirit of God.
Now we have received not the Spirit of the world, but the
Spirit which is of God, that we might know the things that
are freely given to us of God. Notice verse 14, but the natural
man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God, their foolishness
to him, neither can he know them, because they are spiritually
discerned. This is teaching us that our
faith comes by the Spirit of God, who speaks from the Word. He breathed it out. and he has
to give us faith. Faith comes by hearing and hearing
by the Word of God, Romans 10, 17. Not only that, but that Word
of God has a particular subject, a particular content that we
must believe. What is it? What is it that faith
that comes by hearing and hearing by the word? What is that? It's
the gospel. He says, who have believed our
report. And to whom is the arm of the
Lord revealed, the power of God to salvation. And he talks about
Isaiah 53. Therefore, faith comes by hearing
and hearing by the word of God. So it's the declaration of Christ
as the salvation of God, his power unto salvation, which is
expounded in Isaiah 53. And he says that message is the
gospel, that's the report, which when we hear The Spirit of God
revealing it, first of all, in the writing of it, and secondly,
in the hearing of it, He's pleased to cause the dawning to occur
in our heart, and the day star arises. And with Peter, we say,
you have the words of eternal life. We're not gonna go anywhere
else because we see and we know, we're convinced that Jesus is
the Christ, the Son of God, and our salvation is in Him. We now
hold fast the truth of heaven. We see things as God does. We
see ourselves as sinners, therefore we come to God to be received
by God because of the propitiation He provided and made His Son
to be, and received all from Him for us. And as sinners, we
know that God has said in His Word, Christ Jesus came into
the world to save sinners, we know ourselves to be sinners,
and that Christ died for our sins according to the Scripture.
Therefore, we're sinners. God laid our sins on Christ.
He died because of our sins. And it was because he died for
our sins that we're saved from the wrath of God. We're raised
with him. He died, he was buried, and he
rose again according to the scriptures. We're justified because God received
him from the dead. We believe what God has said.
We lay hold on it. That's faith. Okay, I wanna look
at one more verse with you, and I should close now. We'll pick
this up because we're gonna spend some time in Hebrews 11. But
look at Hebrews chapter 11. I'm gonna jump ahead to verse
13. I said, what is faith? He's given
us here the functional definition of faith. This is what it does.
It gives you a substance of hope for things. Things you possess
you now possess by faith, but you certainly possess them, even
though now all you have is faith. Why does God use faith instead
of something else, like a little toy car? Because faith glorifies
God. Faith ascribes to God all the
credit in salvation in all things. Faith says, by faith we understand,
or through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by
the word of God. Our children know more than Einstein
if God has given them that faith. They understand what God said
is true as the truth. It's like it says in John 3,
33. He that hath received his testimony hath set to his seal
that God is true. God has spoken. Faith given by
God to us has enabled us to receive it as the way things are. We're
convinced of it. How did things get here? Not
by things seen, by the Word of God. All things came into being
by the Word of God out of nothing. God said so. And we believe it. I'm very content that that's
the way it was. I'm completely convinced. Someone
asked me once, how do you tell someone at school who doesn't
believe how you can know that the world was created, that God
created the world and it didn't evolve? I said, there's only
one answer to that question. Because I believe it. God said
it. I believe it. That's the way I know it. Because
I believe it. And I'm not gonna apologize for
that. There's nothing more fundamental than what God has said. There
is nothing true but what God has said. And faith is God-given
ability to believe that. Now look at verse 13. Here is
another definition of faith that helps us too. It shows us the
activity that goes on in our minds when we believe the gospel.
These people that he'd been talking about, starting with Abel, then
Enoch, then Noah, then Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob, and Sarah,
and on down, and Joseph. Notice, he says here, these all
died in faith, not having received the promises. Oh, they didn't
receive them in their lifetime. They didn't receive them in their
experience, but they received faith, and so they were absolutely
convinced of them, the token. These all died in faith. They
didn't believe once and then go out and not believe. They
continued in faith until they died. Not having received the
promises didn't mean that God was unfaithful. This is the way
God ordained it. We're gonna live our lives and
die, and we will not receive the fulfillment of those promises
in our experience, but we will be given faith in Christ. Not
having received the promises, but notice, having what? Seen
them. Not with physical eyes, but with
this eyesight of faith. We walk not by sight, but by
faith. The blind men healed by Christ
were given eyes to see that was a picture of God-given faith. To see things that are invisible,
things that are true in heaven. He says, but having seen them
afar off, because they were yet to be fulfilled, and were what?
Persuaded of them. Where did that persuasion come
from? Not from yourself, it came from God. He persuaded you. How
did he do it? By declaring the truth. And they
embraced them. What does faith do? They gladly
trust Christ. Faith says, this is the way it
is. It's so wonderful. This is all my hope. And faith
causes us to lay hold on Christ with a clinging grip, God-given
grip. We flee to Him. We cry to God
through Him. We come to God by Him. He's all
of our hope. He's the one thing this big eye
of faith sees. It's a single view. It's Christ
and Him crucified. So they saw, they were persuaded,
and they embraced him. And then what did they do? Because
they believed. And they confessed that they were strangers and
pilgrims on the earth. We're strangers. This world and
all that we see in it is not eternal. It is passing away.
Christ and his word is the one thing that continues. Faith comes
by hearing. It's the gift of God. It's not
of ourselves. It has one object, Christ and
him crucified, and comes to God by him. Let's pray. Lord, thank
you for this precious gift of faith, which comes to us because
of the righteousness of Christ, comes to us by your Spirit, opening
our hearts and minds to receive the gospel as the way things
are in heaven, the way things were established from before
the world began, the way things that shall be after this world
is done. And we look for, we anticipate,
we expect what you have said to come about because you're
faithful and because it all rests on the redeeming work of our
Savior, on His acceptance and ours in Him, on His sacrifice
and our sins purged by His sacrifice, on His obedience and our righteousness
by that obedience. And so we trust Him. And thank
you, Father, for giving us your word. Thank you, Father, for
giving us this faith by your Spirit, revealing Christ to us. We pray, Lord, for an increase
of it, a sustaining of it, a maturing of it, a continuance and preservation
in it. And we pray, Lord, that you would
cause us to persevere in this faith. We would have this patience.
We would not forsake our confidence. We would believe to the end.
Help us not to draw back to perdition, but through the daily experiences
of our life, strengthen our faith, Lord. Help us to seek you in
your word, knowing that through the reading and meditation and
hearing of your word, you are pleased to bless this gift to
us in greater increase of it. that we might know the things
that are in your heart and mind, things that are true from eternity
and to eternity and true about our salvation and ourselves.
Help us to seek you, Lord. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen.