Hope Church LV Sermons
Not by Sight :: People of Faith
Henry C. Morrison and his wife served the Lord as missionaries faithfully for 40 years on the continent of Africa, 40 years of service as missionaries, and after 40 years just after the turn of the 20th century, God brought them back to the United States of America. So at that time, the way that they came back, they boarded a ship, was leaving Africa headed for New York Harbor. Obviously after 40 years of serving faithfully as missionaries, their hearts were filled with a lot of emotion, a lot of questions. Now unbeknownst to them, there was somebody else on that same ship that was very well known. The 26th president of the United States, Teddy Roosevelt, had been on a hunting trip in Africa and was returning back to the United States of America on the exact same ship that Henry Morrison and his wife were bored. As the ship began to sail in a New York harbor, you could see all along the deck there, all along the harbor, the thousands of people that had gathered to welcome home the 26th president of the United States. They had banners and bands and posters and people were shouting in the streets and they were celebrating as the president had returned back to America. After all of the fanfare and they escorted the president off and the throngs followed them, Henry Morrison and his wife made their way down the deck plank to the shore, suit cases in hand, and nobody was there to greet them. Henry took his wife by the hand and they went to the little bitty hotel room that they had rented there in New York City for the night and he sat down on the bed, dejected, discouraged. He looked at his wife and said, "Forty years, 40 years we faithfully serve the Lord." And when we come back to America, nobody is here to welcome us home. His only wife can put it. She put her hand on the shoulder of her husband and she said, "Oh, Henry, you've forgotten something very important. We are not home." If you're visiting with us, we're studying through the eleventh chapter, the book of Hebrews. The eleventh chapter of the book of Hebrews describes for us people of faith. As people of faith, this world is not our home. And one of the great mistakes we make in this journey of faith is when we begin to live as if all of the promises of God are meant for this life. We mistakenly think that all of God's promises will be fully experienced in whatever time we have here on this earth. But as we read the story of these men and women of God in Hebrews, chapter 11, many of them receive promises from God that they didn't even see the fulfillment of in their lifetime. They only saw the very beginnings of those promises in their life. Some of the promises of God that these men and women received are still being fulfilled today in your lifetime in mind. What we're experiencing here this morning in some ways is the direct result of the promise of God made to the men and women that we're reading about in Hebrews, chapter 11. If you have your Bible, I want you to turn to Hebrews, chapter 11, and we're going to continue to walk through this passage. And for the first 12 verses that we've covered so far, the writer of Hebrews has been dealing with specific individual examples, characters, Sarah, Abraham, Noah, Enoch, Abel, but this weekend he moves to more of a general tone and he speaks in generality about some characteristics of people of faith. Just look at it in verse 13, all these, that all these refers to all of these that he's already referred to in Hebrews 11, it refers to all of those that he's going to refer to in Hebrews 11, it refers to all of the characters that we read about from Scripture that aren't mentioned in Hebrews 11, and I'll be honest with you, that all these is really referring to us as well. There's application to you and me as we read these verses, all these died in faith without receiving the promises, but having seen them and having welcomed them from a distance and having confessed that they were strangers and exiles on the earth, for those who say such things make it clear that they are seeking a country of their own. And indeed, if they had been thinking of that country from which they went out, they would have had opportunity to return, but as it is, they desire a better country. That is a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared a city for them. We've been talking about what it is to live by faith, and every weekend we've given you this definition, what does it mean to live by faith? I want to put it back up on the screen, and I want you to read it out loud with me this morning, all right? You ready? Here we go. To live life, not trusting in myself, but resting moment by moment in his very life in me. That's what it is to live by faith. It's to live life, meaning living by faith is not just a piece of my life, it's not just Sunday morning, it's not just small group, it's not just in my quiet time. This idea of living by faith permeates every aspect, every dimension of my life, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year for the rest of my life. It's to live life, but not trusting in myself, not looking to my own wisdom, my own understanding, my own discernment, but resting, trusting my whole weight, moment by moment, on his very life in me. And as we begin to live that way, the Scripture here gives us some characteristics of what it looks like in the lives of people of faith. And I want to give you three of them this morning. The first one is simply this, people of faith are people of passion. People of faith are people of passion, the word passion is defined in Webster's dictionary as ardent affection, a strong desire for or devotion to some activity, object or concept. You hear that? Passion is a strong desire or a strong devotion to someone or something. When you talk about it in the realm of spiritual passion, it is a fiery devotion to the truth and the promises of God. Did you hear that first phrase? All these died in faith. And then it says something that you really, if you're reading it from most Christian perspective, it's not what you expected to say. We would expect it to say all these died in faith riding off into the sunset on the promises of God, right? All these died in faith without receiving the promises. Let's not go sell a lot of books. What does that mean? It meant that the promises that God had made to them were bigger than their lifetime. They would see portions, they would see aspects of the promises of God in their lifetime fulfilled, but they wouldn't get to see. There's still parts of it that we're seeing fulfilled today. This is what it means for these people. This life of faith was not just an emotional high. It wasn't just a mountaintop experience, it wasn't just a stirring of their emotions for a moment. We all know what that's like, right? I mean, we go off to a conference or we attend a great worship experience, man, our emotions are stirred, our passions are high, we're charged up spiritually, we're ready to take on hell with a water pistol, right? I mean, we just go to a conference or we come to service, man, God speaks, we get all moved inside, we're all stirred up, and man, we've gone off to youth camp and we come home and we're ready to take on the world. This wasn't a conference high. The emotion of the promise had worn off. The special feeling of a word from God had waned. They simply had passion. Listen to the way John MacArthur describes it. For the person of faith, God's promise is as good as reality. These men and women of faith did not know what was happening. God had given them no inside information, no word as to when or how the promises would be fulfilled, He only gave the promises, and that was enough. You see, they were willing to live by faith, but they were ready to die in faith, live or die hell or high water. They took God at His word and they passionately lived by faith in His promise. Let me give you an example from the Old Testament that's not in Hebrews chapter 11. It's an example that I'm sure you've heard of before we all love this character in the Bible. His name is Job. How many of you have heard the story of Job? Let me see your hand, right? Yeah, just about all of us. Why? Because we love the story of Job, right? Why do we love the story of Job? When things in our lives are not good, we like to go read Job's story, right? So we can read about somebody that had it worse off than we did, right? It gives us comfort to know, well, well, there's always Job. I mean, he, look at Job's life. When we think the wheels have completely come off, we find encouragement in Job, because he had it worse than we did. What happened to Job? Let me tell you the story briefly in chapter 1, Job was a righteous man, a man of faith, a man who lived for God, so righteous that God pointed him out on the earth. Have you seen my servant Job? He's a man of God, a man of integrity, a righteous man who lives by faith, and he allowed the enemy to begin to test Job. Job was a man of influence. He was a man of great prosperity. He was a man of a great family, a man of great respect, a man of great wealth, but he walked with God. The enemy came and began to test Job, and in chapter 1, the Bible tells us that one by one, he began to lose all of those things. The enemy came in, first of all, slaughtered all of his livestock. Different raiding bands and armies came in and they slaughtered all of his livestock, which in that day was the symbol and status of wealth and prosperity, and he lost it all. Not only that, they killed every one of his servants, except in each occasion they left one servant alive who could come back and just report to Job. Job, you've lost it all. In one day, he lost everything he had from a material possession standpoint, and if that's not enough, he had many sons and daughters, and the sons and daughters were all having a party at one of their homes, and the Bible records for us that the enemy came and a storm came and it destroyed the home, and it killed every one of Job's children in one day. You imagine all of his material wealth, all of his reputation, all of his children, one day, listen to what Job cries out at the end of chapter 1. Job says, "Naked I came from my mother's womb and naked I shall return there. The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away, blessed be the name of the Lord." So the enemy says, "Well, you hadn't affected his health yet. That's when Job will lose his passion." So the enemy comes and he literally takes Job's health and Job is inflicted with a wicked disease that creates these boils all over his body and he's physically at the point of death. And those closest to Job, his wife comes and his wife says, "Job, what are you doing? Just curse God and die." His wife loses her passion for God and she begins to question and she tells Job, "Just quit this God thing, just curse him and die." And then in the next several chapters it describes how Job's closest friends come to him, one by one and they've got all the answers, right? They come and they start telling Job, "Well, the reason things are going wrong is because you're doing this and you're doing it." Even though Job hadn't done anything, Job was a righteous man and his friends start, "Job loses his wife and his friends and his respect." And then Job chapter 13, listen to what he says, "Though he slay me, I will hope in him." This was no spiritual high, I promise you the emotion was gone. So he slain me, what enabled Job to have such passion? You see, Job had a word from God, he gives it to us in Job chapter 19, a little later on in the book. Listen to what Job says in chapter 19 verse 25, he said, "As for me, I know that my redeemer lives, and at the last he will take his stand on the earth, even after my skin is destroyed, yet from my flesh I shall see God, whom I myself shall behold, whom my eyes will see, and not another, my heart feints within me." Job says, "I'm longing for another world." Our faith, Job had laid hold of something that was bigger than this life. He had a passion, a fiery devotion, let me say it another way, it was unconditional faith. Every year I get on an airplane and I go to Africa and I get on a plane a week from Monday and headed to both North Africa and then Southern Africa. We have the opportunity to train over a thousand national leaders and pastors in that part of the world and we'll be in North Africa for a few days and then down in Southern Africa. In Southern Africa every year we see this unconditional faith. There's this group from Zimbabwe that comes every year to this conference. This group from Zimbabwe, you got to understand Zimbabwe. If you understand your current events, if you're a student of governments and what's happening in the world today, Zimbabwe for the last few decades has been ravaged by a wicked dictator named Robert Mugabi. When this dictator took powers, Zimbabwe was known as the breadbasket of Africa. It fed most of Southern Africa out of Zimbabwe. It was the most prosperous, flourishing nation in Southern Africa. Today it is financially bankrupt and it has been in a famine for several years to the point where people have to walk for hours to find clean water. They have to work a month to earn a loaf of bread. They no longer even use the Zim dollar because it became useless. It took millions of Zim dollars to get one American dollar and every year these Zimbabweans make their way down. They have nothing. I mean they have nothing and they make this trek down to this conference where we can spend a few days pouring into them and we watch them every year. The conference begins as the Zimbabweans come down the aisle singing it as well with my soul. You see their faith is not rooted in their circumstances. It's a passion. They've got a joy about them that is indescribable. I wish you could see it with your own eyes, it's as if they have the world and they have nothing. How is that possible because they've laid hold of something that is beyond this life? It's an unconditional faith. When I see that I have to ask a question, how does that compare to the lives of faith we live? What is your response to inconvenience? I mean we think because we're in a high school setting up and taking down we're making a big sacrifice and then quite honestly there are some making more sacrifice than others. Then just come and enjoy it and you think it looks like this all the time, it doesn't. One o'clock yesterday this was a gym floor. We think because I travel across the country and get the opportunity to speak in some unbelievable places. I speak in churches of seven, eight thousand seats and they've got building space. Sometimes I get that woe as me thinking about our banners and bleachers. How do you respond a little inconvenience? What's your response to pain or suffering or sacrifice when it comes to trusting God? Let God not answer the promise inside of seven days and what do we start doing? We complain with question, sometimes we even quit. God how could I lose my job, I serve, I give, I, how could this happen to me? Lord how could I get this diagnosis? Lord we're faithful, our faith is so weak. We expect that every promise of God is about us. We've lost sight of the biblical reality that there's a picture that's bigger than us. That God may be doing some things in our lifetime that transcend us and that the real fulfillment of that may be seen in generations to come and we begin to question and complain and wonder. Why is it that our faith is so weak? Let me give you I think the answer, Romans 10, 17. So then faith comes by, what, hearing. It could literally be translated listening. Faith comes from listening and listening by the word of Christ. Here's what that's saying, faith is cultivated, faith is grown through listening to the word of the Lord. Now doesn't that just make sense? I mean think about it, don't give me your church answer right now but other than God, who is the person in your life, you trust the most. Don't answer out loud, I want you to get that answer in your heart and I want you to grab ahold of that name. Other than God, who's the person in your life, you trust the most. Now let me ask you a question, how well do you know of that person? It goes without saying right, you know I'm really well. That's why you trust them so much. You spent much time with them listening to them, hearing their heart and their passion and their character and because you know them so well, you have extreme confidence in them. Think about it. If you were going to take a trip, you were going out of state and you were going to leave your home and your possessions to someone, it'd be that person right, you'd call that person you trust the most, you'd say here's my house keys, here's my car keys, maybe even, here's my check card, whatever you need, I trust you with my life. Now when you leave, you don't worry, right? Why? Because you know them. You trust them. Why? Because you've listened, you've grown to understand them, you know their character. Here's what you're not going to do. You're not going to have this plan. You're not going to just leave heading out of town, stop at the gas station and bump into somebody at the pump and say, oh, hey, my name's Vance, here's my house keys, here's my car keys, here's my bank card, I'll be back in a month. You don't do that, right? And if you do, what are you going to do when you leave? You're going to worry, right? Why are you going to worry? Because you don't know that person at all. Now they may be a person of character, but you don't have any track record. You haven't listened. You don't know them. The Barna group is a group that studies things in America and they did a poll of self-identified Christians. These are people that profess to be followers of Christ, listen what it said, 46 percent, if you're doing the math that's less than half, 46 percent of self-proclaimed Christians read the Bible at least 15 minutes a week, not including being at a church event. 31 percent of self-identified Christians have not even attended a church service in the past six months, and we seriously wonder why we have trust issues. We wonder why we can't handle the circumstances and situations in our lives. We really ask the question, why can I trust God more? You know the issue, we don't know them. Listen to me, if you know him, you will never worry again about anything in your life. You have left the keys and the cards with somebody you can trust in the good times and the bad times. You can trust him. Listen to what Clyde Cranford said. He said, "We must spend time with God, time for real communication. If we ever expect to really know him, we cannot, however, get to know God just by being in his presence. We must talk to him and listen to what he has to say. We speak to God in prayer, and he speaks to us primarily through his word. Thus as we spend time in prayer and in meditation on the word, God begins to reveal himself to us little by little, then we begin to know him." Let me give you a reality. The more you know God, the more passionately you trust him. The more you know him, the more passionately you trust him. People of faith are people of passion, unconditional devotion to the promises of God that is not rooted in my circumstances. Number two, we've got to do this one quicker. People of faith are people of vision, the people of vision. Vision is a buzzword that means a lot of things to a lot of different people. I want to give you a, it's not the best definition, but it's at least a working definition on spiritual vision. Here it is. The spiritual ability to see the future as reality based on a promise from God and to live in expectancy of its fulfillment. It's the spiritual ability to see the future as reality based on a promise from God and to live in expectancy of its fulfillment. That's vision. That's spiritual vision. Vance Habner said it this way, "Faith isn't believing God can." Everybody knows that. Faith is believing that he will, it's vision, and what the writer of Hebrews here does is he begins to give us some evidences of spiritual vision in the lives of people. And I want to give them to you. Number one, they saw what God was doing. Do you hear it? It said, "All these died in faith without receiving the promises, but having seen them." They didn't receive the promises, but they saw them. It means to understand. Here's the point. They saw the big picture of what God was doing and they recognized that their life of faith was bigger than them and their lifetime. Listen to me. I don't know how that affects you, but it fires me up to know that what God is doing is bigger than me. It's bigger than our church. It's bigger than my lifetime. Here's the point. You and I are connected to a God who is eternal. He exists outside the parameters of time, and he has an eternal plan, a purpose that he is accomplishing on this earth, and as I live my life of faith, I'm connected to something that is bigger than me. Let me illustrate it. 150 years ago, 150 years ago, in a rural community in North Georgia, 150 years ago, in a rural community in North Georgia, a small group of people came together and planted a church. They had all the passion and vision that God had called them to plant this church. It was going to touch their community and touch the world for the glory of God. I mean, they were on the backside of nowhere. This little dot on the map, this rural area, 30 miles away from any big city. And for the first 120 years of that church's existence, that church never reached more than 300 people in weekend attendance. 120 years, most of the people that had founded the church were now in heaven. After 120 years, God began to do a stirring, and that area began to grow. That little rural community began to be absorbed by the expansion of this metropolitan area called Atlanta, Georgia, and people began to move in, and God began to do a work of saving and changing people's lives in this little rural town called Woodstock. And now it's a church there in Woodstock, Georgia, with over 10,000 people who attend that fellowship. Thousands of people have been changed by the power of the gospel. Currently, their ministry is such that they say that the sun never sets on their ministry. 24 hours a day, seven days a week, somewhere in the world, God is using relationships through that church to train and to lead and to share the gospel. It's a global movement of God. Now, those people, 120 years ago, 150 years ago, they didn't see any of that. You say, "Vents, what in the world does that have to do with us?" Here's what it has to do with us. It was that very church that 11 years ago contacted my family and two others and put us together as a team and sent us to Las Vegas, Nevada, to be about launching a new church in the fastest-growing city in North America. Now, 150 years ago, they didn't get to see this, but they saw it. They didn't see it with their eyes, but with their heart, they believed what God had called them to do, and they wrapped their heart around it, and by faith, they invested in something that was bigger than them, and hey, as we're about to take this next step on the journey, moving into a campus, listen, here's the exciting part. Who knows 10 years from now, 50 years from now, 100 years from now should the Lord teary. Who knows? God's invited us into this moment in time to be about laying a foundation. It's an eternal plan. God's at work all over the world. God's expanding his kingdom. He's moving towards a glan climax when he's coming again to restore things as he initially created him to be, and we get for a season to be a part of it. If we'll just open our eyes and realize hope church was never about us having a place to worship. It was never about Cactus Avenue, so we could be more comfortable. No, God birthed our church. God brought us together for something bigger than us. It transcends our lifetime, and we're to be faithful in this moment because we can see because of the promise what God is doing. People of vision, they see what God's doing, but number two, they embraced what God was doing. Did you hear it? Having seen them and having welcomed them from a distance. That phrase, "welcome," it means to embrace or to receive gladly, and it speaks about their attitude. You see, not only did they realize that God's activity was bigger than them, but they joyfully embraced their peace. They welcomed it, and for some of them, that was a harder part of the journey than others. For some of them, their peace on the faith journey was difficult. There's some of you right now going through some things, and you don't understand what you don't realize is God is teaching your children something, and God is going to use your children to teach your grandchildren something, and you have no idea that God may have for your grandchildren, and I was going to use them, and I was going to use the very circumstance and situation in your life today to build something into the life of your grandchild. It's going to enable them to touch the world for the glory of God, but these people embrace their part of it. There was no complaining, there was no whining, there was no quitting, they just wrapped their hearts with great joy and said, "Whatever my peace of it is, by faith God, I trust you." When God called our family, "Christian, remember this, we left our home, we moved to Woodstock, Georgia, we lived there for nine months with all of our belongings and storage, we lived out of a few small boxes, and then it came time to move to Las Vegas, and we packed all of our stuff that we had left that wasn't in storage into this little minivan, and we had that time three kids, our fourth child was born here in Las Vegas, and we pack up in the minivan for a four-day drive across the country to Las Vegas. I mean, we're looking like the Beverly Hill Billies, right? Stuff hanging out on windows, we get a half day into the drive, we're somewhere in North Mississippi, Bubba in junior country, right? And the minivan just breaks down. Here I am with my wife and our three kids and everything we own that's not in storage loaded in this van, somewhere in God knows where Mississippi, don't know anybody. I remember looking at each other and smiling and saying, "Well, the joy is in the journey." You see, that's our part of it. In the great moment in my life, somebody pulled over and said, "Hey, y'all need some help?" We said, "You better believe it." I spoke the language, I understood. He went off and got Bubba somebody, his cousin, and they came back with a truck, and I know it's illegal. I said, "Let me put this up, here we are riding in the back, me and my wife, three kids, and everything we own in the back of this truck." But let me tell you what it was. It was fun. You know why it was fun? Because God had made a promise. And that was our part of the journey. We got to wrap our hearts around it and enjoy it. So be some pieces of the journey that you don't understand, but people of faith, because they have vision, they welcome it, they embrace it. Hey, we got 90 days of setting up and taking down, "What's our attitude going to be?" Let's embrace it. Maybe some of you that hadn't gotten off the seat can come help some of these for the last 90 days and just bring some life into those that have sacrificed unbelievably for the last three years. But you know why they did that? For three years? Every Saturday? Because they embraced their part of it. The good thing, people with vision, they lived in anticipation of what God was doing. We don't have time to go into it, but it says they confessed. They confessed that they were strangers and exiles on the earth. The word confess means to say the same thing as to agree with. They agreed with God. Here's what they agreed with. God, this world is not our home. We're just strangers here. Lord, if all the promises don't come to fruition here, we understand this isn't the final stop. How messed up we get in our theology when we measure God's faithfulness simply by what happens in this life? This life is but a blip on the radar of eternity with the Father. Number four, they weren't distracted from what God was doing. The Bible says in verse 15, indeed, if they had been thinking of that country from which they went out, they would have had opportunity to return. Here's what that means. On this journey of faith, the enemy will provide distractions and he will give you opportunities to detour and if you're looking for them, you'll take them. But when you have vision, not distracted, I'm living in anticipation of a promise. Hey, every day we ought to wake up with the reality that one day the Lord himself would descend from heaven with a shout with the voice of the archangel and the trumpet of God. The dead in Christ will rise first and we who are alive and remain are going to be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. This world is not our home. This is it. Hey, in 90 days we're moving in somewhere but it ain't nothing compared to the way we're moving one day. This is not the end, when we have that vision, we're not distracted. Last thing I'll give you this morning, the people of faith are people of reputation. Therefore, God was not ashamed to be called their God. It's interesting in the Greek text because it implies not that they called themselves the people of God but that others so saw their life of faith, others said of them. Those are people of God. They saw their passion, their vision, said though, there's something about those people. They're not like us. They don't live just for retirement. They do math different. They compare different. They don't value some of the stuff we value. Those are people of faith, they had a reputation with others but listen, they had a reputation with the Father. You hear what it said? He's not ashamed for them to be called his people. Now, that raises a serious question. What's your reputation? What's your reputation with others? What's your reputation with the Father? People of faith, we don't live by sight. We live by faith. We live by faith, we live by faith, we live by faith, we live by faith, we live by faith.