See with the Eyes of Faith

Good morning.

Happy to be with you all today, and thankful for the service so far. I'm going to continue my series in Hebrews, and we're going to be talking about Hebrews chapter 11 this morning. It sort of goes along with the theme of the morning. We've been talking about faith. I hope that you're not tired of hearing about faith because we're going to hear about it some more. And let's see here now.

The title of the message this morning is "Seeing with the Eyes of Faith." And I have three points that I want to discuss: faith defined, what is faith, faith demonstrated, and then faith demanded.

And Hebrews chapter 11 is a very familiar chapter. I think we've all read it many times. I think we've heard messages preached on this chapter.

And I don't know that I'm going to share anything new or earth-shaking, hopefully mountain-moving, however. And it was a little bit hard to know what to say because it feels like a well-trod pathway. But faith is a topic that's central to Christianity. You can't have Christianity without faith. And therefore, it's very important for us to understand. And so in this message, I want to talk about what faith is, how belief in God and obedience to His commands are rational, and what faith produces in our lives and in the church.

And just a little bit of review at the end of chapter 10. And in chapter 10, we talked about how we can enter into the holy place by the blood of Jesus boldly. And that's the result of what Jesus has done for us. And after He talks about that discussion, then He talks about the danger of falling away and how worse the punishment is of rejecting the gospel if rejecting the law was a death penalty.

And at the end of the chapter, He talks about, and I think I'll just read from verse 35 to the end, "Therefore do not cast away your confidence, which has great reward; for you have need of endurance, so that after you have done the will of God, you may receive the promise. For yet a little while, and He who is coming will come and will not tarry. Now the just shall live by faith; but if anyone draws back, my soul has no pleasure in him.

But we are not of those who draw back to perdition, but of those who believe to the saving of the soul." And then He has this expansion on faith that takes up the whole of chapter 11, all 40 verses.

And we've seen this before in Hebrews, almost these parentheses where He expands on a topic. And that quote, "The just shall live by faith," is a quote from Habakkuk 2:4, which says, "Behold the proud, his soul is not upright in him, but the just shall live by his faith."

So I'm going to go ahead and read the whole passage, reading from the New English translation this morning. "Now faith is being sure of what we hope for, being convinced of what we do not see. For by it the people of old received God's commendation. By faith we understand that the worlds were set in order at God's command, so that the visible has its origin in the invisible. By faith Abel offered God a greater sacrifice than Cain, and through his faith he was commended as righteous, because God commended him for his offerings. And through his faith he still speaks, though he is dead.

By faith Enoch was taken up, so he did not see death, and he was not to be found because God took him up. For before his removal he had been commended as having pleased God. Now without faith it is impossible to please him, for the one who approaches God must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him. By faith Noah, when he was warned about things not yet seen, with reverent regard constructed an ark for the deliverance of his family. Through faith he condemned the world and became an heir of the righteousness that comes by faith. By faith Abraham obeyed when he was called to go out to a place he would later receive as an inheritance, and he went out without understanding where he was going.

By faith he lived as a foreigner in the promised land as though it were a foreign country, living in tents with Isaac and Jacob, who were fellow heirs of the same promise. For he was looking forward to the city with firm foundations, whose architect and builder is God. By faith, even though Sarah herself was barren and he was too old, he received the ability to procreate because he regarded the one who had given the promise to be trustworthy. So in fact, children were fathered by one man, and this one is good as dead, like the number of stars in the sky and like the innumerable grains of sand on the seashore. These all died in faith without receiving the thing promised, but they saw them in the distance and welcomed them and acknowledged that they were strangers and foreigners on the earth.

For those who speak in such a way make it clear that they are seeking a homeland. In fact, if they had been thinking of the land they had left, they would have had opportunity to return. But as it is, they aspire to a better land that is a heavenly one. Therefore, God is not ashamed to be called their God, for He has prepared a city for them. By faith Abraham, when he was tested, offered up Isaac. He had received the promises, yet he was ready to offer up his only son. God had told him, "Through Isaac descendants will carry on your name," and he reasoned that God could even raise him from the dead, and in a sense he received him back from there.

By faith also Isaac blessed Jacob and Esau concerning the future. By faith Jacob, as he was dying, blessed each of the sons of Joseph and worshiped as he leaned on his staff. By faith Joseph, at the end of his life, mentioned the Exodus of the sons of Israel and gave instructions about his burial.

By faith when Moses was born, his parents hid him for three months because they saw the child was beautiful and they were not afraid of the king's edict. By faith when he grew up, Moses refused to be called the son of Pharaoh's daughter, choosing rather to be ill-treated with the people of God than enjoy sins fleeting pleasure. He regarded abuse suffered for Christ to be greater wealth than the treasures of Egypt, for his eyes were fixed on the reward.

By faith he left Egypt without fearing the king's anger, for he persevered as though he could see the one who is invisible. By faith he kept the Passover and the sprinkling of the blood so that the one who destroyed the firstborn would not touch them. By faith they crossed the Red Sea as if on dry ground, but when the Egyptians tried it, they were swallowed up. By faith the walls of Jericho fell after the people marched around them for seven days. By faith Rahab the prostitute escaped the destruction of the disobedient because she welcomed the spies in peace. And what more shall I say? For time will fail me if I tell of Gideon, Barak, Samson, Jephthah, of David and Samuel and the prophets.

Through faith they conquered kingdoms, administered justice, gained what was promised, shut the mouths of lions, quenched raging fire, escaped the edge of the sword, gained strength and weakness, became mighty in battle, put foreign armies to flight, and women received back their dead race to life. But others were tortured, not accepting release, to obtain resurrection to a better life. And others experienced mocking and flogging and even chains and imprisonment. They were stoned, sawed apart, murdered with the sword. They went about in sheepskins and goatskins. They were destitute, afflicted, ill-treated. The world was not worthy of them. They wandered in deserts and mountains and caves and openings in the earth. And these all were commended for their faith, yet they did not receive what was promised.

For God had provided something better for us so that they would be made perfect together with us."

So at the beginning of the chapter here, he gives a definition of faith. And I've never maybe been too satisfied with this. But I think it's a good definition, and I think if you study it a little bit, it'll make a little bit more sense. So he says in the first verse, "Faith is being sure of what we hope for, being convinced of what we do not see." And I think the New King James and the King James talk about the substance of things hoped for. And the Greek word for substance is it means a setting or placing under a thing, put under a substructure, a foundation. That which has a foundation is firm. That which has actual existence, it's something that's real, something that's real.

And I want you to keep that in mind. Faith is not something that's way out there that there's absolutely no proof of. Faith is real. And then he talks about evidence. And that's what the New King James says, "The evidence of things not seen." The next says, "Convinced of what we do not see." And it's a proof, that by which a thing is proved or tested, a conviction. And I think as we talk about this, we'll see that faith is proof of what we do not see.

And I think faith, like I said, is tangible, and we're going to talk about that as we go along. So what are we hoping for? Because it says that this faith is being sure of what we hope for. And I don't know, we tend to think that hope is a weak word. I hope the sun comes out tomorrow. I hope I don't have a crash on the way home. I hope my lunch is good. But that's not really what hope is in the Christian sense.

Those are valid ways to use the word in the English language. But I'll tell you what I'm hoping for. I'm hoping for the resurrection, that someday I'll be resurrected into a perfect body. I'm hoping for the redemption that Jesus offers. And I think I'm experiencing that in a measure, but I'm waiting for the day when it's complete. That's what my hope is in. I'm hoping to live in a place where righteousness dwells and there's no evil.

And I hope that you all are looking forward to those things. And so if we're being sure of those things, faith is being sure, we need to make sure that our hope is based on something that we really want and not.

And then he talks about in verse three, he says, well, in verse two, he talks about how the people of old, the ancient people, received God's commendation or a good report. God was pleased with them. And in verse three, he talks about the creation. He says that by faith we understand that the worlds were set in order at God's command.

And you know it takes faith to believe in any theory that explains our origin. It takes faith to believe in the creation theory that I trust that all of us believe in. But it also takes faith to believe that the world could have evolved from nothing.

In fact, it takes a lot more. It's a lot more of a stretch to believe that it just happened. And because the evidence of an intelligent designer is overwhelming. And the reason that there is a theory of evolution is because people were trying to explain how we got here without God. And so I'm not going to spend a lot of time. You can spend a lot of time in research on the proofs of the creation. There's many. But I'm just going to talk about two here briefly. There's the fact of irreducible complexity.

And I should have brought one along, but of course the classic illustration of that is a mousetrap. And one of those good old spring traps that's made by Woodstream over here in Lyttits, or maybe they make them in China now, I don't know. But they're really simple. They have a wooden base, and maybe nowadays they have a plastic one. And they have a spring, a strong spring, and they have that little arm and the trigger. And they have a little place to stick the bait.

If you take the spring out, will the mousetrap work? Leave the base behind. You have a working mousetrap. Now you just have a handful of parts. If you take the trigger off, it'll never go off. And that's the way life is.

If you want to be able to see, your eye has to be complete. How can you even begin to see if you don't have the pupil and the retina and the lens?

And so on and so forth. And the muscles to move the eye and the optic nerve and the brain to interpret what it sees. We were listening to a talk by a very educated man. He was a microbiologist or a biochemist or something like that. And he pointed out a proof for creation that I had never really thought about before. And he said, "If a cell, and a cell is the basic building block of life, there's, I don't know how many trillions and trillions of cells in this room at this very moment. And if you have the chemical compounds that make up a cell, somehow you have to get this thing to reproduce.

And not only does it need to be able to replicate itself, but what if a cell only replicated itself accurately 50% of the time, just half the time? And it just happened to be able to do this. That would be miraculous in and of itself.

But cells replicate themselves millions and millions of times with an accuracy of 99.99 something. Because while I'm talking, I don't know how many millions of cells have replicated in your body and in mine accurately. And we know what happens when they don't accurately reproduce. You get cancer.

Or if it happens, you know at conception, you have these genetic problems, holes in your heart, Down syndrome, trisomy, whatever the other one is, 18 or whatever. They're genetic flaws, and they don't happen very often, really. And of course, all the plants that you can look out the window and see have trillions and trillions more cells that have all replicated themselves with the same level of accuracy.

That's incredible. And it speaks of a designer that has an infinite amount of wisdom to be able to design that where it has the DNA and it can replicate itself over and over again with this just dependable accuracy.

And I was really impressed with that. And that was one thing that turned him. He was an atheist. And that was one of the things that convinced him of Christianity. And you can see this in nature. It's all around us. And so when we look at the things that we can see and we realize that there's no way that it just happened, it just came to be, then we can understand that the visible has its origin in the invisible. And so that's one of the ways that faith is rational because we can start to base what we believe on what we actually can see. I don't believe in blind faith. Blind faith is me putting on a blindfold and trying to walk out those doors without hurting myself, trying to walk to my house without hurting me.

It would be ridiculous. You guys would stop me before I got to the end of the driveway if I didn't fall and break my leg before that because you would say that you're being ridiculous. And that's blind faith. And I don't believe in blind faith.

So that's a little bit of an overview, a brief overview of maybe where the beginning of getting your faith can come from. And I know in my experience before I became a believer, I thought about this. Is God real? Can He say something to me about my life? Can He speak to me? Do I owe Him anything?

And I thought about these things. And I just sort of, in a way, wanted to be able to explain that away, but I couldn't. It was too much evidence for me to say there's no God. I don't need to answer to Him. He doesn't have anything to say to me.

And I think that if you're willing to be objective, every person can see that. And that's why in Psalms he talks about the heavens declare the glory of God. The firmament shows His handiwork day to day. Utter speech night to night shows knowledge. There's no speech or language where their voice is not heard.

God has given us this generously. So that brings us to faith demonstrated. And I'm going to go down through these people that he lists, and I'm going to talk a little bit about them, and then we're going to go back through them again a second time and talk about what faith's demands are. So he starts out talking about Abel. And I think we all know that Abel was one of the very first people that ever lived.

He had an older brother named Cain. And when they became adults, they decided to worship God by offering sacrifices.

Now how they knew to offer sacrifices, the Bible doesn't really say, but I'm sort of assuming that it was some kind of a direct revelation to them from God, to them or to their parents, that you need to come and worship with sacrifices.

The Bible doesn't say anything about what those sacrifices should have been or should not have been. There's been a lot of ink spilled about the fact that Abel sacrificed an animal and shed blood and that Cain didn't. I don't know if I'm in a position to tell you that that's why God accepted their sacrifice or not.

It may have been, but they were also commanded to bring the first fruits when God gave the law. They were allowed to bring the fruit of the field, produce, grain, whatever. So I don't know that what Cain brought in of itself was the problem. It may have been. But somehow it was very obvious that God was pleased with Abel, that God accepted his sacrifice. It was obvious to Abel, and it was obvious to Cain.

And I don't know how God demonstrated that to them. But it made Cain really mad. And we know that he went and murdered his brother. And they apparently had a conversation before he actually did that. And maybe you could imagine what Abel told him. But I think Cain was doing things that were bad before he went to the sacrifice. That's my conclusion. I think he knew that he was doing wrong and that when God didn't accept his sacrifice, that pushed him over the edge.

And instead of making his life right, he eliminated the source of the conviction. If we get rid of him, then I'll be free.

And you know what Abel did was powerful because the writer of Hebrews says that he's still speaking to us today by the act that he did. And that's happening right here this morning, isn't it?

Well, let's move on to Enoch. He was also very early. And it says that Enoch didn't die. God just took him right up to be with him. He didn't suffer death.

That, as far as I know, has only happened twice in the whole history of mankind. And why did God do that? Because he was commended as having pleased God. And I don't know what kind of a picture that brings to you, but I think that Enoch decided somewhere along the way, Enoch decided that having a relationship with God was the most important thing that he could do.

And he put that into practice. And it paid off, didn't it?

God commended him. And I don't know what you would like to have written about you in history, but I would like it to be known that I pleased God.

And so he gives a little commentary here in verse six. Now, without faith, it is impossible to please him, for the one who approaches God must believe that he exists and that he rewards those that seek him. So if you want a relationship with God, there's two things that you have to do.

You have to believe that God exists, that he's out there. And the other thing that you have to believe is that it's worth your while to seek after him. And I think this word seek, I didn't do a lot of research on it. I think

the King James says, "Diligently seek." And I don't know if you've ever lost something that was really important, but how hard do you work to find it? Some of you are mechanics, and you know how this feels. But I've dropped stuff before that was almost irreplaceable down into the abyss of the engine compartment and even a few times into the abyss of the engine itself.

And you do what you're willing to go pretty deep to get that thing, whatever it is. If you lost your driver's license, you would do the same thing. You would turn the house upside down if you had to to find it.

You would call your friends and say, "Did I leave my wallet at your house?" You would retrace your steps wherever you had gone since you had seen it last. So we're not talking about someone who just looks out there and says, "Oh, there's the Big Dipper. There's a God out there." We're talking about someone that's willing to devote their life to this diligent search because you've become convinced that God will reward you.

Enoch did. That's the testimony. That's who he uses to illustrate that point, Enoch.

Noah. And again, pretty early on, you know these men didn't have any, as far as I know, really any written revelation of God. I think there were probably some things written down, some history. But God met these people. And Noah, he had a relationship with God too. And God was elsewhere.

And God told him, "There's going to be a flood. I'm going to destroy the world, and I'm going to give you the opportunity to prepare." And so if you build this huge boat, and some of you have been down to the Ark Museum and you've seen, I haven't, but you've seen the dimensions of it. I think it's pretty big. And he believed that what God said was going to happen.

And he was so sure that he devoted 120 years of his life to build this ark. Now, is there anybody here that's 120 years old? No.

What I was thinking about, I've worked at my job for 21 years, and some of you have worked maybe double that time at your trades or a little longer.

And 120 years is almost something that we can't comprehend to work on one project. We were with friends last night, and we were talking about, you know I put this transmission in this weekend, 10 hours. And they said, "Well, how do you stand there and just work at one little place for 10 hours?" Well, it gets old after a while, and you're ready to drive the car away and go on to the next one.

And this man worked on this object for 120 years. And we think 120 hours in a project is a long time, three weeks, maybe.

And I was just thinking about this. You know his work there, his boat was the number one tourist attraction in the whole entire world. How many people do you think came up there in that 120 years and laughed at him? That old guy, he's off his rocker. He's building this boat, and there isn't water that will float this boat for miles around. Ha, ha, ha. He's nuts.

And based on what they had experienced, he was. They'd never even seen it rain, had they? They probably did have some boats, but they probably, I mean, this thing took a tremendous amount of timber to make, so he probably built it near the woods.

And it says he preached to them for 120 years. He didn't even make a single convert. And I think a lot of that preaching was the fact that he got up every morning, and he got his hammer, and he got his measuring stick, and he went to work on this impossible thing.

And it says he did it with fear, with reverent regard to what God had said. He was absolutely convinced there was going to be a flood that was going to wash the world away. And it says, by his faith, he condemned the world and became the heir of righteousness, the righteousness that comes by faith.

Now we move on to Abraham. And he talks a lot about Abraham in this chapter. Abraham is a real challenge to me. And the first thing it says about Abraham, after it talks about that he had faith, he obeyed.

So Abraham's faith produced action.

And it's not like God gave him a map and said, "Axe marks the spot." Or nowadays we see that little exclamation point, almost little point on the map. He said, "I want you to get up. I want you to leave your family. I want you to pack up your stuff, and I'll tell you where I want you to end up."

And so he did. He packed everything up, and he got on his camel, and out across the desert he went.

And he says he didn't understand where he was going. And when he got there, he kept on living in tents because God said, "I'm not going to give you the possession. It's going to be your descendants."

And it says the reason that he kept on living in tents is because he was looking forward to being in the city that God built. Somehow he had that conception.

And then God said, "Well, I'm going to give you a lot of descendants. They're not going to be able to count them all." But he didn't have any children. And he was an old man, and his wife was an old lady.

No children.

And finally, God said, "You're going to have a child next year." And so it says that because of his faith, he believed that God was going to do that, and he fathered children. He trusted the one who gave the promise.

And then he had Isaac. Isaac was born. And one day, one night, God said, "I want you to take your son, your only son, and I want you to go to a mountain. I'm not going to tell you where it is, but when you get there, you'll know. And I want you to offer him to me."

And it says in Genesis that he got up early in the morning, and he went, and he got Isaac, and he got the wood, and he got the knife, and he set off out across the countryside. Didn't know where he for sure he was going, I guess.

And he got to the top of that mountain, and he built the altar, and he laid the wood on. And Isaac, who was like, I don't know, 30 years old or something, left himself, left his dad tie him up and stick him on the altar.

He trusted his dad a lot.

And Abraham took the knife, and he was ready to do the deed. And God said, "Stop. Now I know that you trust me, that you really believe me." And it says that Abraham was so convinced of God's promise to him that even though no one had ever come back from the dead, he was sure that Isaac would resurrect.

That's why he was willing to take the knife. I don't know about you. That makes cold shivers go down my spine.

He reasoned, it says. It was logical. I like that. Not a blind faith. He was sure that God was going to come through.

And then I'm going to skip. Not that Isaac and Jacob and Joseph are unimportant, but I want to skip down here to Moses. Talk a little bit about Moses. You know Moses's parents had faith because they hid him for three months, even though they put their own lives on the line for that.

And then he grew up in Pharaoh's household. And I don't know. I don't know if we can really imagine the difference between how most of the children of Israel lived and how Pharaoh and his household lived. Maybe, maybe we can. But there was a huge difference in their standard of living.

And he had the opportunity to be very high ranking in the Egyptian world, was very high ranking. Some people think he was in line, maybe to be Pharaoh. I don't know that that can be proven. But generally, if you're the son of the princess, it gives you a good bit of standing in those kinds of societies.

And somehow in that palace, he decided to serve God.

I'm not quite sure how, but he saw it.

And he chose to be ill-treated with the people of God than to enjoy sins fleeting pleasure. And it talks about all the things that he did. He kept the Passover by faith and the sprinkling of the blood. He led them out of Egypt. They crossed the Red Sea, it says, by faith. I'm not sure. I think it was more his faith than maybe anybody else's, because it was only a few days after they got across that they started to complain about how God was treating them and how they didn't have food and they didn't have water and they didn't like the food and they didn't like the water.

But the Egyptians, they didn't have anybody there, apparently, that had any faith because the Red Sea swallowed them up.

And he talks about how the walls of Jericho fell after the people marched around it and how Rahab had faith and escaped that destruction. Because when she welcomed the spies, she was welcoming more than the spies, wasn't she?

She was welcoming the God that they served.

And you know she's in the genealogy of Christ as a result of that. And then he talks about the prophets. And I'm going to say the same thing he says. For time will fail me if I tell these about these.

But you know they didn't all experience this miraculous deliverance, did they? Some of them were killed in some pretty gruesome ways. And they didn't actually receive the promise, it says, because Jesus had not come yet. But they saw it afar off. Now I want to talk about faith demanded.

And what's our response to this passage? It's really inspiring to read this chapter about the heroes of the faith and what they did, their exploits. But this passage demands a response. And what is your response going to be? And I think that each one of us here today has the opportunity to be listed as a hero of the faith. I don't think that this list is reserved for Noah and Abraham and Moses.

I think it can and should include everyone who believes in God. And so I have several points that I want to make about this demand. And some of these things I've talked about a little bit already. But when we look at creation, creation demands a response.

Yes, God made it. No, God didn't. And so are you going to allow the natural wonders around us to convince you that there's a designer? And not only that there's a designer, but that he cares about people and wants to have a relationship with them.

And I think that as we look at this passage, even though it looks as though some of these people didn't have a lot of evidence to base their faith on, I think God gives each individual enough evidence of who he is and what he wants from them that you don't have to have blind faith. As I said before, I don't believe in blind faith. And we have more evidence today than any of them had. Maybe we haven't seen a personal appearance of Jesus or of God or whatever, but there is a lot of evidence. We have this whole book that's been preserved, plus whatever you see out the window and when you look at yourself.

I preached a message here not too long ago about Caleb. And I was so impressed. And I think I shared it here a number of years ago. But I was so impressed. You know he stood alone. He and Joshua did against a million people. And they said, he said, "God wants us to go and walk into the promised land, and he's going to deliver it to us." And that wasn't a stab in the dark for him because they were all worried about the giants. But if you read, you know there were giants where the Edomites dwelled, and they kicked them out. And there were giants where the Moabites lived, and they ran them out. And there were giants where the Ammonites lived, and they kicked them out.

And so these people didn't have the ark. They didn't have the pillar of fire. They didn't have the cloud. The Israelites had all this evidence. And how many people believed? Two out of 600,000. But it's not blind faith. There's evidence to back up your position. And I want you all to really grab a hold of that today. You're not taking a leap off the diving board and have no idea where you're going to land.

Elton Trueblood said, "Faith is not belief without proof, but trust without reservation." Faith is not belief without proof, but trust without reservation. And that you see demonstrated by every person on this list. Trust. And the next thing that faith demands is faith demands an offering.

Abel's offering was accepted by God. Has your offering been accepted by God? What are you offering?

Romans 12 says, "Therefore I exhort you, brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a sacrifice, alive, holy, and pleasing to God, which is your reasonable service. Do not be conformed to this present world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so you may test and approve what is the will of God, what is good and well-pleasing and perfect."

Cain held back in his offering somehow.

But if we're willing to offer ourselves, and not just a little bit of ourselves, but the sum total, that's what he's talking about in this passage. Present your bodies as a sacrifice, something that's alive, that's holy, it's one piece and pleasing to God. And he says, "Don't sweat it. That's your reasonable service."

And there we have that word reasonable again, where this whole thing is very reasonable. I think Abel's offering was accepted by God because he was living right. I mean, finally, that's what righteousness is. It's living right. And Cain was not because he was wicked.

Proverbs 15, verse 8 says, "The Lord abhors the sacrifices of the wicked, but the prayer of the upright pleases him."

And so if you're not living a right life, then whatever sacrifice you bring is not going to be accepted. And so I just want to challenge you.

Bring an offering. Offer yourselves and don't hold back. Remember, the one who approaches God must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him. The next thing that faith demands is a relationship. And we talked about this a little bit in Sunday school. I said that Enoch decided that having a relationship with God was the most important thing that he could do.

How about you? Have you come to the conclusion that having a relationship with God is the most important thing that you will do? Is there a testimony about you that you please God?

You know when we stand before God, if we've pleased him and he says, "Well done," nothing else will matter. Whatever it costs you to get to that point will not matter, not one bit, because that is the reward.

You know I really like it when people say, "You did a good job." I think we all like that. And when God, the God of the universe, says, "Well done," everything that it cost you will just roll away. And there won't ever be anything that you'll experience like that moment. God rewards those who seek him. Faith demands obedience.

And we see that especially with Abraham. And one thing that every person mentioned in this passage, one thing they all have in common is action.

Action.

Abraham heard God speak. He obeyed quickly and without reservation. He didn't hold back. Not even his son, the most dear thing on the earth to him, he didn't hold it back. And I skipped a spot when I went down through the first time. But it says that in verses 13 to 16, it talks about how these people died in faith without receiving the things promised, but they saw them in the distance and welcomed them and not acknowledged they were strangers and foreigners on the earth.

For those who speak in such a way, make it clear that they're seeking a homeland. In fact, if they had been thinking of the land they had left, they would have had an opportunity to return. But as it is, they aspire to a better land that is a heavenly one. Therefore, God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared a city for them.

And so when you start to take these steps and you start to obey what Jesus has told us, and it's pretty clear, you can start with a sermon on the mount if you want a good place to start.

And those things are hard to do. It's hard to love your enemy. It's hard not to be covetous. It's hard not to look where you shouldn't look and think at things that you shouldn't think about. But when you do those things, it becomes very clear to everyone looking around that you're looking for something that doesn't have anything to do with what's happening here. But it's out there somewhere.

It's what God wants. And that sort of brings us to the next one. Faith demands vision.

And when we look at things with the eyes of faith, it enables us to see what their true worth is. And if you don't take anything else home from this message, I want you to remember that when you look with the eyes of faith, that's how you see what the true worth is. And you see that with Moses.

When he looked, he said, "The abuse, the scorn that I'm going to suffer for being identified with God's people is more valuable than all the treasures of Egypt." And Egypt was probably the most wealthy country in the world at that time.

He could see what was eternal.

What did Jesus say? We just had this in our Sunday school lesson too in Luke 16:15. "But Jesus said to them, 'You are the ones who justify yourselves in man's eyes, but God knows your hearts. For what is highly prized among men is utterly detestable in God's sight.'" And I'm sorry, I guess I got a little ahead of my notes. But think about that. The things that men highly prize are detestable in God's sight. So honor, prestige, wealth, that's like roadkill in God's eyes because that's what we would view as detestable.

But Jesus said in Luke 9, this is what I was referring to earlier, "Then he said to them all, 'If anyone wants to become my follower, he must deny himself, take up his cross daily, and follow me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will save it. For what does it benefit a person if he gains the whole world but loses or forfeits himself? For whoever is ashamed of me and my words, the Son of Man will be ashamed of that person when he comes in his glory and in the glory of the Father and of the holy angels.'" So when you think about value, faith helps you to see that if you gain the world and lose your soul, the scales are tilted the wrong way.

The wrong way.

What will you give in exchange for your soul? And the other thing I think is that it's okay to look for the reward. I know some people feel that that's selfish and Christians shouldn't be selfish. But as we'll see in chapter 12, our leader looked for the reward. Why should we do any less?

For the joy that was set before him, it says, he endured the cross and despised the shame.

And we can see that reward when we look out with the eyes of faith. When we are convinced that God is going to reward the one who seeks him, then the cost is not too high, whatever that is.

And so in conclusion, I hope that this study has encouraged you to examine your faith. What are your priorities? May you use the eyes of faith to discern true worth and make the changes that you need to this week.

Is there any.