Hebrews 11:1

noun, a person of low taste, more interested in himself than in me.

He defines the word year as

noun, a period of 365 disappointments.

But it's his definition of faith that I think will be familiar to you because it's a definition that's become ingrained in our society. He defines faith this way.

Faith, noun. Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge of things without parallel.

It's cynical. And yet so many people have adopted this definition of faith. And I'm not just talking about skeptics, you see it in movies, songs, political commentaries, and even at times, the church. It's this idea that faith is blind, and being naive is almost a virtue. You know, faith is this abstract concept that'll just magically solve all of your problems, and it's usually pinned against reality. You don't need knowledge, you just need faith. You don't need obedience, you just need faith. You don't need understanding because if you understand, is that really faith? And so it's no wonder that so many people walk away from the faith. I mean, if all faith is is this positive feeling, this blind sincerity where you just believe in what you're told but you have no real basis or understanding on which you can ground your belief, then of course that faith is gonna fade away. And so in this age of apostasy, we have to understand what true biblical faith is. And there's no better place to do that than Hebrews 11.1. You see, the author of Hebrews was writing to an early church that was under heavy persecution. And in case anyone was thinking of returning to Judaism, the entire letter he's been exalting Jesus, saying Jesus is better, Jesus is greater. And he's been warning this church of apostasy and he's been encouraging them to endure so that by the time you get to chapter 11, he wants them to understand that it's faith. Faith is God's way of endurance and it's always been that way. If God's people are to endure, the solution he offers at the end of chapter 10 is they must live by faith. Hebrews 11, then, gives us examples of this faith. And it starts in verse one by describing faith, not in this exhaustive, really technical definition, but more as a practical description. And so this verse won't give you everything that the Bible has to say about faith, but it'll give you what you need to know if you're gonna endure by way of faith. So my hope is for the rest of our time, we're gonna look at this text, and I wanna show you that this verse teaches us that faith is our reorienting response to reality. Faith is our reorienting response to reality. And how I wanna do this is we'll actually work our way backwards and see if we can't add some color to our understanding of faith. So look with me again at the second half of our verse. It says that

faith is the conviction of things not seen.

So here we have our first point. We can call it reality. Faith recognizes or faith is grounded in reality. Now the word conviction, it's a legal term. It carries this idea that if you think of a courtroom, you have a lawyer who's trying to shed light on an issue by presenting evidence to the judge. And once the evidence is presented, the judge makes a verdict and there is a conviction. And in the Greek, the focus of this word is specifically on that evidence part, on the shedding of light. In fact, some of your Bibles may even translate it that way.

Faith is the evidence of things not seen.

That would be more literal, because it wants to show that it's objective, it's fact, it's reality. But I think that it also raises a question. How can you shed light on something that can't be seen? The answer, of course, is by faith. You see, faith is almost like a sixth sense. Just as our senses are touch, and sight, and hearing, and smelling, and tasting, and we use them to sense physical things, so we use faith to sense spiritual things. In fact, one of the songs we sang this past Lord's Day describes faith this way. Speaking of life without faith, it said,

I was blinded by my sin, had no ears to hear your voice, did not know your love within, had no taste for heaven's joy.

Faith is a God-given spiritual perception, and it's an insight into the unseen. And it's evidence. For instance, I know you all are sitting here because I see you. My sight is evidence of that physical reality. And so in the same way, our faith is evidence of spiritual realities. The idea isn't that we had some sort of positive mental attitude and we just believed hard enough that we created or manifested things into existence. Rather, those realities were already there. They're a constant. They're true whether we recognize it or not, and faith is now how we see those realities. It was there all along, we just needed faith to see it. You know, this is what separates a Christian from unbelievers. We can both receive the same message, live in the same world, see the same things, but the unbeliever cannot perceive spiritual realities because he does not have faith. And you can think about this even from a personal level. I mean, think of when you became a Christian. You heard the gospel message, like, there is a holy God. But you can't physically see God. You were told, you've sinned against this God, and your sin is deserving of eternal wrath. But you can't physically see sin or wrath. You were told, but this God loves you. But you can't see love. You were told, in fact, this God loves you so much that he entered into this world as a man. And being born of a virgin woman, he died on the cross for your sins, and he resurrected three days later. That happened 2,000 years ago. No one in this room saw that. But you were told that this Jesus now stands ready to save you if you would only come to him. And did you see him? No. And yet, when you became a Christian, there's a sense in which you did see him. God gave us spiritual sight, so to speak. He gave us faith so that now we did perceive those realities, and we came to the conviction that they're true. And whereas before we rebelled against God and hated God, suddenly we now believe his word, and we love this God, and we embrace Christ, and that's all because of faith. And so do you see that faith cannot be blind? There's no such thing as blind faith. That's nonsense. It's a paradox. It's delusional. The same way that if I told you right now, I see standing right in front of me, LeBron James, you would think I was delusional. Because faith by nature is perceiving what is real. It's just unseen. And so faith must be grounded in reality. But there's a second thing I wanna show you from this verse. Not only is faith grounded in reality, but that same faith then reorients your life. Faith is a reorienting response. Look down at the part we skipped over.

Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for.

This word assurance, of course, is the idea of confidence, and what we hope for are the future realities promised by God. We're confident that he will provide for our every need. We're confident in ultimate deliverance. We're confident in future reward. We're confident that Jesus will come back to judge this world, but that those who are found in him shall be saved. We perceive those truths, and now we're sure of it. But there's a fuller way that we can think about this. The word translated assurance is more literally substance.

Now faith is the substance of things hoped for.

And even though this doesn't really change the meaning, it does add a bit more substance. What the author of Hebrews is telling us is that faith is substantial trust in God. Trust that has substance. In other words, faith is so sure of the promises of God. It trusts God so much that it reaches out of this present world, out of our present circumstances, and it grabs hold of future realities. It seizes God's promises and pulls them into the present so it gives it weight now. It gives it a body now. It gives it shape now. That's what it means to have substance. It gives future hope the force of present realities. You know, this is something I think we all understand to some degree. For example, let's say you get a job offer from D.C. You're planning on accepting the offer, and the job starts in a month. What are you going to do from now till then? Well, you're going to look for housing. You're going to look at where you're going to send your kids to school. You're going to start packing. What's going on? You're giving present substance to a future reality. You're so confident in the future that it's shaping the present. There's a significance. There's a weightiness about the future. And that's what faith does. It seizes the promises that God has made so tightly that it affects your life now. And you know, in light of this, I think it's worth reflecting. I mean, sure, God's promises ought to affect your life now, but how much do they really? In other words, how much weight do you give the promises of God? How heavy are his promises in your life? You see, to have faith is to understand there is significance, there is eternity, there is magnitude to the reality of these promises. It's to understand that God's promises are more sure than you waking up tomorrow morning and what you do now matters. There's weight to this God. His promises are heavy. They ought to be at the center of your life. They ought to reshape and reorient your life. And that's only reasonable, isn't it? I mean, if you think for a second, suppose you're at a lake. It's a calm, nice day. The lake is just absolutely still. And you take a pebble and you throw it into the lake. What would happen? Well, the water would ripple for a while and eventually it would settle down so that you could kind of tell that like a pebble hit it or something's going on, but it's not all that significant. And then everything will just go back to normal. But now suppose a giant meteor comes from the heavens and smashes into the lake. What will happen? Everything's going to be reoriented, right? Because of the weight of the rock that slammed into this lake, everything's going to be reshaped and centered around the rock. It can never go back to how it was. Now, what the author of Hebrews is saying is, if you see God's promises and what happens is, you know, there's like some change, like my habits are starting to change. I try to go to church and not do the bad sins, but you know, at the end of the day, I'm just gonna kinda do my own thing. It's like saying God's promises are like a pebble that hits the surface of my life and makes a little significance for a little while. You know, causes a ripple here or there, but that's about it. Eventually everything goes back to how it was before. That's not true faith. Rather, if you're going to have faith, then what has happened is that the things that we hope for, the things that we know will happen because we perceive that God is faithful and powerful and true. We perceive that God has sealed those promises by the death of his son. The promises of heaven have crashed into your life. And if these promises with all of their certainty and surety have come into your life, it's going to radically reorient everything about your life. It's going to change the things you prioritize. It's going to change the way you work. It's going to change the way you pray. It's going to change the way you think about others. It'll even change the way that you get out of bed in the morning and brush your teeth and put on your shoes. Everything will change because you have faith. in God's promise. And so I hope you see how this faith, this faith that's grounded in reality, this faith that reorients your life, I hope you can see that this faith causes you to endure. If I can end with this illustration, what happens is you taste the goodness of God and you realize there's nothing like it. It's so good that it's in a category all on its own. In fact, it's so good that it's completely changed your palate so that now you're disgusted and repulsed by anything else. And so you can't go back. Rather, you're gonna do everything you can to chase after that goodness of God. This is what faith is. Faith is how we see that the God who we serve is merciful and faithful and true, and that ought then to reshape our lives and will cause us to endure. Will you pray with me? Father, we thank you that you've given us this gift of faith. We thank you that you've opened our eyes to see that you are a good and loving father, and we can trust Christ for our salvation. We pray now that your spirit apply these truths to our hearts, cause us to see the weight and gravity of your promises, and guide us to live in light of them. In Jesus' name we pray, amen.