Hebrews 11:1-2

All the world is made of faith and trust and pixie dust. Peter Pan said that. And as much as I would love to fly and to hang out with the Lost Boys and harass pirates in Neverland, I'm never jumping out my window. You see, we talk about... Even if he tells me to believe. See, here's the thing. I don't trust Peter Pan. I don't trust that if I just believe that I can fly, and if I get sprinkled with a little bit of pixie dust, that my feet are just gonna magically leave the ground. But people today talk about faith in a similar way to Peter Pan. It's this magical ingredient that will give us the ability to have whatever we hope for, or whatever we desire. That's not biblical faith. And tonight, we're going to take a look at Hebrews 11, 1 and 2, which is the most blatant definition of faith that the Bible has to offer us. So look down with me. Hebrews 11, 1 and 2 says this, Our main point tonight is this, that faith is assurance about the future that results in God's commendation. Faith is the assurance about the future that results in God's commendation. We're gonna break this down into three points tonight. One, that faith is assurance. Two, that faith is future-oriented. And three, that faith is commendable by God. So our first point, faith is assurance. In this passage, the author of the Hebrews gives us this full-orbed picture of the definition of faith by using two different words, assurance and conviction. Someone who is assured is someone who has confidence. They have certainty. They have resolve. Hebrews 10.39 contrasts faith with shrinking back. Faith means not shrinking back, but having this resolute and this complete certainty. Saving faith is also profoundly Externally, it's conviction. Someone who is convicted about something, they don't just feel a certain way or say certain things. They follow through on what they believe. They order their lives in a particular way. They give their time and their energy toward what they're feeling. And conviction exists where that inner resolve, when that inner resolve leads to action. So conviction is the proof. So ultimately, it's the evidence of what you believe. Convictions like an engine. When we see a car driving down the road, we don't see the engine. It's covered up by the hood and by the exterior. But we know that an engine is in that car because the car is moving. When an engine is running, work is produced. And our convictions are what causes us to move and to work and to act. If we see godly faith in the saints of old because of the work that they produced. Let's take Abraham, for example. Abraham had confidence in God and he left his life and his family to go out to a land that God hadn't showed him yet. He refrained from passing along his inheritance and he continued to lay with his wife because even though she couldn't bear a child, and when that child did come, that promised child that he had hoped for, that God had promised, that God was going to give him, Abraham was so confident in God, he was willing to bring him to the altar and sacrifice him. The essence of our faith, it consists of that same confidence. We too are called to live lives of assurance and of confidence and conviction. When James writes that faith apart from works is dead, he's not introducing legalism into the Christian religion. No, he's just writing about what has always been true of saving faith, faith and works. They've always been inseparable. And yet one of the biggest lies of our world today is that faith is simply this cosmic prescription that enhances our lives. If you just have faith, if you just obtain faith, then it will passively and magically just provide you with benefits and cures to your physical and spiritual ailments. A biblical faith is not a magic pill that suddenly makes you happy and healthy. It's assurance. It's conviction. It's work. Second point is that faith is future-oriented. Hebrews 11.1, it also tells us that the right object of our assurance, or what we place our confidence in, is critical. The Old Testament saints placed their assurance in whatever God told them. The object of their faith was the revelation of God. And every time that God promised them something, they acted on it. but they also did not know what was coming in the end. See, God spoke to these saints through angels and prophets, and they took him at his word. They acted on it, and they knew, and they believed, and they trusted. They had confidence that whatever God said was going to come true down the road, even if it was unseen. The essence of faith is completely the same for God's people, but for us, unlike the Old Testament saints, the assurance of our faith and the object of our assurance is no longer unseen. God has provided us something better than angels and prophets that the Old Testament saints received revelation from. He's given us his son. Hebrews 1 says that God spoke to us by His Son, and that Jesus is the total radiance and glory of God, and He is the exact imprint of God's nature. The saints of old only had shadows of salvation to place their hope in, but our hope lies in the revealed Savior. In what was unseen to the Old Testament, saints have been gloriously revealed to us in Jesus Christ. See, as we go through the Old Testament, we see what the Old Testament saints had to put their faith and their hope, and they had to put their faith and their hope in a serpent crusher, in a nation blesser, in a sacrificial lamb, in one that would be greater, and someone else who ultimately would be greater than all these things. And we know that all of these promises of God have been fulfilled in Jesus Christ. Every promise of God has come to us in the Messiah. and God's anointed one, the one who lived a perfectly sinless life, who bore God's wrath for sinners on the cross, and defeated death by rising from the grave. He justified us by becoming the righteousness of God for us, and then he established us in that very righteousness. The author of the letter of Hebrews wrote his letter to encourage the church to persevere in their faith and not return to the old covenant law. And his strategy for doing that was to show us that all the ways that Jesus was better than what these believers had before. Brothers and sisters, that encouragement is true for us as well. Don't go back to your old ways. Don't go back to that checklist of good deeds that you relied on. Don't go back to that approval of that guy or girl. Don't go back to that bottle or that pipe. Don't go back to your former religion or belief system. You've been given something better than all of those things. You have Jesus Christ who is willing and who is able to save you from your sin. So what's still unseen for us Now that Christ has been revealed is the consummated kingdom, that eternal, fully established kingdom of God on earth as it currently is in heaven. In Christ's coming kingdom, that's the lifeblood for Christian hope. You see, Jesus has already revealed himself as our king, and he's also inaugurated his kingdom on earth. But he will return to usher in his kingdom on earth fully and completely. And when that happens, there's gonna be no more suffering, there's gonna be no more sorrow, there's gonna be no more pain, and there's gonna be no more sin. That hope, that patient dependence on Christ's return, doesn't leave us idle. No, that hope is what drives the Christian life. That hope is what drives us individually and corporately as a body. Individually, if we had hoped that Christ's kingdom would If we had no hope that Christ's kingdom would be completely sin-free, then we would have no reason to fight temptation. Every time we push back against sin, we're staking our hope in a day when sin and death will be no more. No matter how overwhelming temptation may seem, it doesn't remotely compare to the overwhelming glory that's ahead. Corporately, our future hope in the kingdom of God is what binds us together as a church right here and right now. A church is not just a community center or an affinity group or a social club. It's an embassy of the kingdom of God. The church is the people of God. It's the place of God. It's the current declaration that Christ is king. So even right now, as we're gathered together, we're proclaiming that Christ will return. We're staking our faith and our hope in that promise. And finally, point three, faith is commendable by God. As we go throughout Hebrews 11, we're gonna witness some very, very dramatic events. The authors of Hebrews said that the saints of old, by their faith, were able to conquer kingdoms and enforce justice, obtain promises, stop the mouths of lions, quench the power of fire, escape the edge of the sword. They were made strong. They were mighty in war. and they put foreign armies to flight. As we go through that list and we think about those things, it's tempting to see these great acts of faith and think that God is only going to commend the epic feats that we accomplish in his name. That's not ultimately what these men were commended for. They were commended for their assurance and their hope. They were commended for believing God and taking him at his word. Looking to Abraham as an example, he believed God and it was counted to him as righteousness. So don't confuse the results of faith with the essence of faith. God spoke in many ways and in many times in the Old Testament. He also called people to do many things. But those various acts of God were for the sake of revealing one thing, that Jesus Christ is the Savior and the Lord. If you're wrestling with your current place in life, if you feel inadequate in the things that you're accomplishing for God, and maybe you feel like you're the least in the kingdom of heaven, I hope you're encouraged by the book of Hebrews. I encourage you to even take time over the next couple of days just to read through it in its entirety. See, ultimately, we're not called to look to the faith of Abel. We're not called to look to the faith of Abraham or Moses. We're called to look to Jesus Christ, the author and the perfecter of our faith. We're approved by God. We are commended by God by placing our assurance and our hope in the finished work of Jesus Christ, our Savior and our Lord. Let's pray. Father God, Our hope is built on nothing less than Jesus's blood and righteousness. May our assurance in you, our hope in the coming kingdom, and the convictions of things not seen be the source of our strength and endurance as we continue to live in this fallen world. It's in Jesus' name we pray, amen.