Introduction
This morning, we want to survey the life of Abraham to learn what it
teaches us about faith. Because of the large amount of material involved,
we will use Heb. 11:8-16 as our base text, also looking at the relevant
passages in Genesis and other biblical books.
The author of Hebrews uses two critical issues in Abraham's life to help
us understand biblical faith: the Promised Land and the promised son . . .
The Land
Read Heb. 11:8. If you've been with us over the last few weeks,
you know about this. Abram was from Ur of the Chaldeans (Babylon), and
when God called him, he was living in Haran (MAP). God simply called him
to go west to a land he would show him (12:1). The author of Hebrews distills
what 12:4,5 say (read). This provides us with our first insight into biblical
faith.
Imagine getting into a time machine, going back to 2166 BC, and stepping
out onto Abraham's veranda in Haran. You're sitting there, sipping a
cold one with Abraham, and he starts telling you about God's promise
to give him a land to the west. You ask him if he believes that promise,
and he says "Of course." Eventually, you would probably say,
"If you believe God's promise, what are you doing here? Why aren't
you packing? Why haven't you left?"
What would be the proof that Abraham believed God? Wouldn't we be
safe in saying that if he didn’t leave, he didn't have faith?
This is exactly what the author of Hebrews is emphasizing in Heb. 11:8
("By faith Abraham . . . obeyed by going . . . ").
So the first insight into biblical faith that we learn is that it is
active rather than passive. It involves a willingness to act on God's
truth. Like James says in Jas. 2, if there is no action on
God's command, there is no evidence for others or for yourself that
you believe God's promise. This is only mental assent, which even the
demons have, and which God rejects as necessary but insufficient for
faith.
Yet there is another aspect of faith present with Abraham--one just as
important as his willingness to act. Read Heb. 11:9,10. God promised
to give him the land, yet when Abraham got to Canaan, he found that others
already lived there and owned it.
What Abraham did not do at this point is just as instructive
as what he did do by going to the land. He did not try to buy
up real estate, even though he was very rich (13:2). Neither did he
try to conquer the land, even though he has military ability as we saw
last week in Gen. 14. Instead, he just hung around, living in a
tent, taking tour after tour of the Promised Land throughout his life.
He was propertyless his whole life. When Sarah died eventually, he had
to buy a burial plot for her (chapter 23) even though God had promised
him the whole land.
Why was he so passive about taking the land? Because the same God
who had said "Go to the land" had also said "I will
give you the land."
So here is another aspect of biblical faith. It involves not only the
willingness to act according to God's truth, but also depending on
God to perform his will for you instead of taking matters into your
own hands.
Repeat both aspects of faith. This may sound paradoxical at first glance,
but it isn't. Because God has decided to accomplish his will through human
beings who freely choose to cooperate with him, he always calls on us
to do something (action). But because God is the One who is ultimately
supplying the power and resources to do what will glorify him, we will
always need to depend on him because his will is humanly impossible. Let's
apply this to the way you come to God.
As you sit here today, you may be unsure whether you actually belong
to God's family, whether you have actually established a relationship
with Christ. You may think, "I already believe that Jesus came
and is the Son of God. I've believed that ever since I was little. I
come from a family that believed that. Therefore, I must belong to Christ."
Or you may be responsive, but aversive to making a decision. ("God
will overwhelm me" or "I'll just wake up and it will have
happened.")
But God calls on you for more. He calls on you for specific action.
It doesn't have to be an action that other people see (ALTAR CALLS),
but it is nevertheless a real action between you and him. He calls
on you to choose to personally receive Christ (Jn. 1:12; Rev. 3:20),
and until you take this action, you do not belong to his family and
Christ is not in your life.
On the other hand, becoming a Christian isn’t all action. God
is calling you to actively receive Christ, but he is also calling on
you to depend on him to do something for you that you could never do
yourself. When it comes to being accepted by God, you cannot do anything
yourself to make yourself acceptable to him (VOWS; RITUALS; GOOD DEEDS)--you
have to depend totally on him to make you acceptable. He calls on you
to throw away all confidence in your works for him and depend totally
on Christ's work for you (Gal. 2:16). He also calls on you to depend
on him when he says that the changes he will bring into your life will
be good (Rom. 10:11). This attitude of dependence is just as important
as the action.
Now let's look at another example from Abraham's and Sarah's life that
illustrates biblical faith . . .
A Son
Read Heb. 11:11,12. The most important part of God's promise to
Abraham was that through his descendants God would bless all the people-groups
of the world. This refers primarily to God's gift of the Bible through
the Jewish people, and his gift of a Savior, Jesus Christ. But these blessings
depended on God granting Abraham and Sarah a son who would be his heir
(Gen. 12:2; 15:4; 17:19). Yet there was a major obstacle to the fulfillment
of this promise--Sarah was 65 and had always been barren, and Abraham
was 75 and no longer exactly a stud. What would it look like for Abraham
and Sarah to exercise faith in this situation?
Obviously, it involved a certain kind of action. God never said
(like he did to Mary) that he would bring about a conception without
sexual intercourse. Neither did he say that they would conceive the
first time they had sex after he made this promise. So the action side
of their faith involved having sex and continuing to have sex until
they had a son (from 75/65 to 99/89)! To have stopped having sex would
be to stop having faith.
I like to think about what it would have been like as a member of
Abraham's household during these years. You're sitting around on a
Saturday evening over dinner when you see Abraham and Sarah heading
off to their tent. "Hey Abe! What are you two doing tonight?"
"You know what we're doing." "Why?" "Because
God promised he would give us a son." (INCREDULOUS LAUGHTER)
After 14 years of this without a son, God gave Abraham a couple more
actions through which to express his faith. You can read about them
in Gen. 17.
He called on him to change his name from Abram ("exalted father")
to Abraham ("father of a multitude of nations"). "Hey
Abe, has God been telling you to do anything else lately?"
"Yes, as a matter of fact he has." "What's that?"
"He's asked me to change my name." "Oh yeah--to what?
'Childless but happy?'" "No, 'Father of a multitude of
nations.'"
"And he's asked me to do something else to demonstrate my
faith in his promise." "Oh yeah? What's that?" "He's
asked me to get circumcised . . . (INCREDULOUS
LAUGHTER) . . . and to have you circumcised,
too!"
And yet their faith involved more than just action, didn't it? It also
involved radical dependence on God to perform his will through
and for them--because they knew they couldn't pull this off by themselves.
They had no human power to conceive a child, and God had rejected
their attempt to fulfill his will by their own ingenuity and power
(HAGAR & ISHMAEL - see Gen. 17:20,21).
In Rom. 4:19-21, Paul says that Abraham thought long and hard
(katanoew) about the utter human impossibility of them pulling
this off by themselves (vs 19). But he continued to look at the situation
in light of God's power, and decided (rationally) that "what
God had promised, he was also able to perform."
NOTE: This statement does not mean that Abraham and Sarah never
had any doubts about this (read Gen. 17:17; 18:12-14). It means,
rather, that in spite of their contrary thoughts and feelings which
they expressed to God, they never decided to reject God's veracity.
I don't know about you, but this is very comforting to me . . .
So we see the same working definition of faith. Now let's apply this,
not to how we become Christians, but to how we grow spiritually.
Because the Bible says that both justification and sanctification are
by faith. In area after area of your life, God has concrete, deep-seated,
radical changes he wants to make. In his own perfect timing, he goes
to work on these areas, and he wants your cooperation. What does this
look like?
He'll call on you to take specific action. If you think that God
will change you apart from your active cooperation, you will learn
by painful experience that this is not true. Through the personal
work of his Spirit, he will call on you to take specific steps of
faith toward what his Word commands.
He'll call on you to regularly participate in the means of growth
(NAME). This will seem strange at times, because it is not related
directly to the changes you want to see in your life. But this is
the way you make yourself available to the changing power of God.
He will call on you to forsake the idols in your life. This
will be terrifying because even though they don't satisfy (NAME
SOME), they offer some security. But he'll call on you to let them
go and trust that he will fill the void in another, better way.
He will call on you to step out to serve him and love people
(NAME SOME WAYS). This will push you out of your comfort zone into
areas you feel inadequate to handle. But this is how God forges
deeper faith and builds character into your life.
In my own life, such steps have included: laying aside drugs, telling
my parents the truth about my lying and drug use, admitting my biblical
ignorance and attending teachings and asking questions, sharing
my faith with my non-Christian friends and family members, opening
up to Christian friends about my loneliness and moving in with other
Christian brothers, giving up my writing idol and pursuing a college
major that had no economic potential, being willing to teach the
Bible and lead others when I felt inadequate, breaking up and passing
up romantic relationships because of various reasons, moving to
a different city for two years to attend an unaccredited seminary,
confronting people who are intimidating to me, praying for work
and turning down job offers instead of panicking when I had no money,
choosing to give significant amounts of money to God's work, etc.
In each case, the steps were doable, but scary.
Like Abraham, change will not happen overnight. Like Abraham, there
will be times when you wonder if change will ever occur. Like Abraham,
you may attempt to change by your own power and ingenuity, and like
Abraham these attempts will be rejected and fail. Like Abraham, you
will find yourself more and more deeply convinced of your own ability
to accomplish God's will, and that God will have to empower you and
come through if his will is going to be accomplished. In other words,
you will have to depend on God's wisdom and power rather than
on your own. What does this look like?
It will involve regularly praying for God's resources. Not
in some formalistic way, but personally calling out to him because
you know unless he comes through you cannot change or fulfill his
will.
It will involve patiently persevering in spite of no immediate
change. You will have to wrestle with contradictory thoughts
and feelings, say choose instead to keep to your course, trusting
that God know what he is doing and will bear the fruit at the proper
time.
It involves actively doing God's will, but relaxing in the confidence
that God will have his way. God grants us his peace that we
are on the right course, and that he is going to come through. This
is what the author of Hebrews elsewhere calls entering into God's
rest.
Like Abraham, over time you will see God gradually change your
life and accomplish his purpose through you more and more (LANDMARKS;
FEEDBACK). This brings increasing confidence that God is good and
faithful, but the challenge continues for your whole life.
Conclusion
One important aspect of biblical faith that we have not looked at this
morning is the evidential aspect. Next week, we will temporarily discontinue
our series on Genesis and begin a three week mini-series entitled "Evidence
in the Balance." This series will explore the two most important
lines of evidence for Christianity, beginning with the evidence for Jesus'
resurrection. This is a great opportunity to expose your non-Christian
friends . . .
Copyright 1998 Gary DeLashmutt