Guest Speaker Rev. Dave Harvey
Fort Myers Community Church Podcast
Hebrews 11:4-8 "What Faith Sees"
(upbeat music) - You're listening to Fort Myers Community Church. Together, let's grow in faith, hope, and love as we pursue God's purpose for our lives. - All right, everybody doing well? No, okay, sounds good. It's said, we said greet one another. - Oh yeah. - How's everybody doing? Good, good, we're gonna need a little more feedback today. All right, hey, so I get the honor and the blessing to introduce one of my mentors, a friend, and also the president of our Association of Churches. We are a part of the Great Commission Collective. It's a family network of churches that are seeking to create healthy leaders and plant churches. And so we, as one of their churches, that's one of our goals, is to raise up healthy leaders and then the plant churches within our community and in our world. And so Dave is here, he's gonna be bringing the word, I get the honor and the blessing to sit under his teaching and God has got some amazing to share with you. So why don't we welcome up Dave Harvey. Also, I'm gonna ask Dave to share a little bit about the GCC, 'cause God is doing some amazing things in GCC, and so super thankful for you. - Thank you, my friend. - And excited what God is doing in and around the world. - Thanks, my man. - Good morning. I'm grateful, grateful for the opportunity to be back with you. I mean, I love Bill and Lauren and will seize upon any opportunity to be with them, but also, I love being here. And I love being invited back here. I'm not often invited back once I preach, so this is nice to be in a place. So yeah, Bill encouraged me to provide an update on Great Commission Collective, which I'm happy to do. This is an exciting season. We're planting a number of churches, six or seven churches this year, but we also just started our next church planter, training class, and there's 16 couples that are 16 planters and their wives. And I just had our leaders' conference as well, just three or four weeks ago, where hundreds of pastors gathered together, and Alistair Begg taught us and just had a rich time of training and teaching and worship and fellowship together. And we rolled out a multiplication plan while we were there. So what that means is we have a plan now to help the lead pastors and elders of local churches to create a culture which will identify and train church planters. So incubate church planters. So the churches can be planted and the gospel can go forward. So there's wonderful things happening here in the States. Also internationally, our international director right now is in Canada meeting with the church planning director from Pakistan because there's a network that's interested in partnering with Great Commission Collective, and then he'll leave Canada and he'll go to Romania, where our GCC Romanian Pastors Conference is happening. There's hundreds of leaders that are gathered together in Romania for about three or four days just to receive training and worship. And God has been very good, but most importantly for this morning, I just wanna let you know that this local church has a growing role in this partnership, in the model that you're creating, and in the ministry of Bill, and then just through your monthly generosity. So as a guy who's kind of leading Great Commission Collective it's hard to express the gratitude I feel for this church because I just live over in a stereo and so I get to pop in here all the time, but also for the support that we feel from you. So thank you. Hebrews chapter 11, please. Far more important than any church planting network is the word of God. So we will look together at Hebrews chapter 11, the title of this morning's message is what faith sees? What faith sees? So this is a message on the topic of faith. And I wanna shoot straight with you. I'm not chosen this topic because I believe I'm a great example of this topic. I'm the poster child of faith. On the contrary, I desperately need faith. My whole strategy is I preach faith until I have it and I preach faith because I have it. And hopefully I'll preach it until it stirs up in you as well. But let's first understand what we mean by this word, faith. And we'll do that by looking at Hebrews chapter 11, beginning in verses four through verse eight. By faith, Abel offered to God a more acceptable sacrifice than Cain through which he was commended as righteous. God commending him by accepting his gifts. And through his faith, though he died, he still speaks. By faith, Enoch was taken up so that he should not see death. And he was not found because God had taken him. Now, before he was taken, he was commended as having pleased God. And without faith, it is impossible to please him for whoever would draw near to God must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him. By faith, Noah, being worn by God, concerning events, yet unseen in reverent fear, constructed an arc for the saving of his household. By this, he condemned the world and became an heir of righteousness, of the righteousness that comes by faith. By faith, Abraham obeyed when he was called to go out to a place that he was to receive as an inheritance. And he went out not knowing where he was going. Let's pray. Lord, we're not looking to just hear a message this morning on faith, but we need faith, we want faith, we want you to stir up our faith. And we pray that you would accomplish that as we better understand this passage. In Jesus' name, we pray. Amen. Amen. I remember reading a story in Christianity today that was titled The Joy of Suffering in Sri Lanka. And it talked about a woman named Lalani. Now, Lalani was a widow, she was a believer, and she lived in Sri Lanka. And Lalani had been the object of fierce persecution as a Christian. In fact, Lalani had lost her husband who was brutally murdered, he was a martyr for Christ. Later on, in that same period of time, the people in her church had been attacked. And then a month or so after that, her church had been set on fire, and the thatched roof that covered her church had been burned off. Now one day in the months that can't come, Lalani was asked to represent her church in a meeting that was convened to help persecuted believers. And so they were going around the room, and Lalani was asked for the general report of what was going on in her village, and she immediately responded by saying, "Things are going wonderful. "God has been doing so much good." Now, there were people in the room that knew Lalani and knew about the village, and they heard her report, and they were extremely confused, because they knew recently, just recently that her church had been set on fire, and the thatched roof had been burned off. And so they asked Lalani to account for the inconsistency between the reality of what's happened in her village, and the report that she gave that one day, and Lalani responded simply by saying, quote, "Obviously, since the thatched roof is gone, "God intends to give us a metal roof." Now I gotta be honest with you, the first time I heard that, or I read that report, I thought, "I don't know if I would have interpreted "those events in the same way that Lalani did." I mean, when Hurricane Halene and Milton were coming our way, at no point was I saying, "Praise God, "I got a roof upgrade coming." Or praise God, the landscaping, we're gonna get better landscaping as a result of this. But I think the reason for that was that Lalani was seeing something different. In other words, she was casting a different set of eyes upon her circumstances. And I think one of the main differences between what Lalani saw and what I can tend to see can be reduced down to one word. That word is faith, faith. Now this is an urgent word for the Hebrew congregation that is receiving this epistle of Hebrews. Because this is a group of people that could relate to Lalani's experience. This is a group of people that started out in the faith strong and robust. In fact, I've already been through a lot. We didn't read this, but back in Hebrews chapter 10, around verse 32, it refers back to a time where they once suffered. They had endured opposition. They experienced this opposition. They experienced being publicly reproached. It says they joyfully received the plundering of their property. And so they had walked in these days where their faithful witness was profound, and they experienced great power, but despite that experience, they'd begun to drift. And there's been this unrelenting storm of adversity in their life that has begun to erode their faith. And now as of this writing, Nero was the emperor, and the clouds of another persecution were beginning to gather on the horizon, and the effect was not pretty. In fact, if we were to read the entirety of the book of Hebrews in chapter three, verse 12, he says, "They have unbelieving hearts." He says in chapter five, verse 11, "They are dull of hearing." Chapter six, verse 12, "They are sluggish." Chapter 12, verse three, he calls them weary and faint-hearted. And I hear those reports, and I think we can all relate to that in some way, because we've all had these experience, if not these seasons, where we just get, where like an unexpected wave comes rolling into our life and just knocks us silly. And here's the difference, because just imagine you've had one of those experiences, and the wave has just come in, and you're standing up, and you're dizzy and disoriented, and you're dusting off the sand, and you look out of the horizon, and another hurricane is forming, and it's coming right at you. And you're beginning to think, if that hits my life, if that hits my family, I'm just not sure I'm going to stand. I'm just not sure we're going to make it. - I brought a quote with me by William Lane's commentary on the book of Hebrews, he said, "Hebrews was written "to a group of Jewish Christians whose world "was falling apart." And here's the thing, the writer of Hebrews understands the problem. In fact, more importantly, he knows the solution. This letter is part of the solution. And so what he's going to do is he's going to invite these people that have been oppressed, that have lived in opposition, and are about to go in persecution, he's going to invite them to examine their faith. Now, to a world that's been so intoxicated by the therapeutic, to the world that's infatuated with therapeutic thinking, this letter is going to seem so, so callous, so tone deaf. Because rather than immediately exploring their feelings, which there's nothing wrong with exploring feelings, and it's quite important to explore feelings, but he's going to move beyond that to begin investigating the penetration of their unbelief, which is a new category that we hardly ever hear. He's going to begin investigating and exploring the depth of their faith. And the description of faith is set against the backdrop of what pleases God. Again, in talking about Enoch in verse five, he says, "Now, before he was taken up, he was commended as having pleased God." And then it rolls into that description of faith in verse six. And without faith, it is impossible to please God. So verse six then displays the two ways of knowing whether we're walking in faith in order to please God, two ways that I want to cover with you this morning. And they're really simple. Beginning with number one, faith looks up. Faith looks up. Now let me say right out of the gate that we don't start the discussion of faith by, or the study of faith by looking inward. We don't start by talking about how to build our faith. Faith is not positive thinking. Faith doesn't start with us, nor does it move us to the center of the discussion. Faith centers on God. Faith looks up. That's what I mean by looking up. In Hebrews chapter six, verse one, it calls faith, faith towards God, because faith is always, genuine faith is always moving towards God. In other words, God is the object of our faith and faith derives its power from the object, not from the user, which is part of the concern that many Christians have with the teaching that says that faith generates its own kind of creative power, because that's not upward, it's inward. It's not Godward, it's manward. So our faith, in other words, does not create things. Our faith does not create prosperity. Our faith does not create health or breakthroughs. Real faith trusts God. Real faith moves upward toward God. But in order to understand the significance of that, we've got to really locate what true faith really is, and that's where the writer of Hebrews brings genuine help. In verse six, he says, and without faith, it's impossible to please him for whoever would draw near to him, so how do we please him, how do we draw near to him, must believe that he exists, and that he is a rewarder of those who seek him? So faith is revealed by the upward direction of the following two convictions. God is real, God is a rewarder of those who seek him. In other words, the measure of our faith is the degree to which we see in whatever situation that we're in, that God exists, and God is a rewarder of those who seek him. The extent to which we import those two convictions into the reality and rigor and rhythms of our life. And I want to suggest to you that it's the degree to which we import those two convictions into two central experiences that we all share just as life goes on. One is the call to struggle, and the other is the call to suffer. So let's talk about struggle, let's talk about this call to struggle. To be alive, to be a Christian is, I'm sorry, I said to call to struggle, the call to sacrifice is what I meant to say, the call to sacrifice, the call to suffer. So to be alive, to be a Christian is to receive from time to time this call from God to sacrifice. And we've all received it at some point, we've all felt that invitation. And I don't know what it might have been for you, maybe it was to foster a child or go on a mission trip or give sacrificially or take a gap year between high school and college or college in a job to invest in the mission or maybe it was to embrace the risk of speaking truth to someone you love who needs to hear truth, but you don't know if they'll receive the truth, but you're willing to do that. And so we make these sacrifices, but when we go to make them, there is an immediate onslaught of unbelief. It kind of starts this soundtrack in our mind where this self-talk, where if I make this sacrifice, it will decimate our relationship. If I make this sacrifice, I'm not sure we'll bounce back. If we make this sacrifice, there's just a lot we don't know, and we can feel anxious from that. And because the future's uncertain, you know, everything about the future, because we're not omniscient, because we're not omnipotent, because we're not omnipotent, we don't control the future, and the future is just a blank slate to us. And when we confront that, we get worried, we get nervous, we internalize that, and sacrifice calls for that, and therefore, sacrifice can like blur our vision of the God who is real and is a rewarder of those who seek Him. And actually for Christians, you know, the haziness, the blurring, is not typically around God's existence. In other words, the average Christian doesn't just jettison the reality that God exists. Now we'll grant that. The issue that we lay, the issue that we release, the issue that we give up on is that God is a rewarder of those who seek Him, that God's goodness remains intact. You see, sacrifice invites us to trust in the goodness of God, despite the risks we are taking. Because when you think about it, the cost of sacrifice is basically risk and vulnerability. To get sacrifice, you have to put up risk and vulnerability. It's the cost of sacrifice. And reward, the reward of sacrifice is growth and intimacy with God. Remember the passage? For whoever would draw near to God must believe He exists, and He is a rewarder of those who seek Him. So make no mistake. The world, the devil, and the flesh attack us at any point where we are prepared to make a sacrifice for the kingdom of God. Make a sacrifice for the gospel. Make a sacrifice for something that's going to move forward God's agenda. The world, the flesh, and the devil want to infect the hard drive of our faith with a virus. And the virus is called unbelief. And so faith in sacrifice is looking up towards God, is trusting God with the call to sacrifice. And then there's the second area where faith looks up. And that's with the call to suffer. They call to suffer. And again, to one degree or the other, this is not a new category. This is something we have all addressed or dealt with. And I don't know what it might be for you or maybe somebody you love. Maybe it's a long-term illness or struggle with depression. Or you have adult kids. And everything's broken. They're just not speaking to you right now. And you wake up each morning feeling that burden. You see, one of the things about faith looking up is that the best measure of our faith is where we look when we hurt. The best measure of whether faith is at work in our heart is where we look. Are we looking up when we hurt? Where we look when the goodness of God seems absent. When the goodness of God goes AWOL, at least we think that. And I don't know if you can relate to me at all. Like when I don't see God or when I'm either struggling or suffering, I tend to turn inward. I look in. In fact, I struggle with self-pity. I call a party. And I have this party in my mind, this pity party. And I invite me, myself, and I to just kind of reflect over all of the ways I'm being shafted by the will of God. You get that? See, see at the juicy center of self-pity is this conviction that we roll over and over in our mind that says I'm not getting what I deserve. I'm not getting what I deserve in this situation. So self-pity becomes this kind of corrupted counselor within our heart. And it says to me, Dave, your pain is more real than God. And so God is real, but your pain is more real. Or on the reward side, that self-pity will reward you more than God will reward you. God has abandoned you, find another reward. See, we're all wired to find a reward. We're all wired that way. And when we jettison God, we start moving in another direction. We find rewards. We try to find rewards in things that are earthly, things that are temporal. We find rewards in relationships or porn or money or power or social media or whatever. But that which will distract us from God. I remember being this. You can relate to this. You know, you have these weeks where it just feels like they're godless weeks. You know, they're like, God is not here this week. God is not around this week. He just checked out. He went on vacation. I don't know where he is. He said, you know, Airbnb is somewhere, but he's not here. Kim and I are on our way to the small group. No, actually, we're coming home from the small group. And on this night, I was kind of in the small group. Have you had this experience where you'll go to a small group, but you're actually having your own small group in your mind. And you're not even participating. In fact, you don't even hear it. It's just like, oh, you here in the outside are like, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, gospel. You know, and of these certain words kind of drill in. And so it was one of those nights. But like the entire way to the small group, I'm just lamenting to Kim all the ways that I'm not feeling good. And so at the small group, at the end, they said, listen, we just want to pause because we really feel like we're supposed to pray for anyone here who's having a struggle. So is there anyone? And I did nothing. Got in the car with Kim, started driving home, and I immediately picked up the storyline that I left on the way and started telling her about why I was so discouraged. And she stopped me and she said, listen, isn't it curious how we have this conversation on the way over? You pick it up on the way home. But when they were asking to go to God, to look up to God, to flee to God, you said nothing. And I said, well, I just felt too discouraged to talk. Have you ever said that? I mean, there is a certain insane quality to that. I hope you know that because I realized that at that moment, you know, the absurdity of that kind of hit me. Like, I'm too discouraged about where I need help to ask for help. You know, you talk about, like, pioneering new vistas of insanity. It's like walking into an emergency room with a broken arm and saying, I'm in way too much pain to see the doctor. I'm in way too much pain. And, you know, they're looking at you and saying, okay, well, would you like to see the psychiatrist? Because we have them too. See, the point is, I was looking in when I should have been looking up as faith looks up. Now, maybe for you, this isn't really landing because you're in a really good season. And if that's you, I'm really grateful that this season is like that. But I want to encourage you, like, try this exercise just some time today, right down on a piece of paper and right down two statements. God is not here. God is not good. Fold that over, tuck it into your Bible, and then pull that out in the middle of your next trial. Pull that out in the middle of your next time of suffering, and you will be amazed at how accurately that describes your temptations. You'll be amazed at how accurately that describes the soundtrack in your mind because these are the two attack points for unbelief. It's you're in a situation, things are not going the way you expect, and in fact, things are detonating like somebody rolled a grenade into your life, and it's immediately, God is not real. Oh, he's probably real, but here's the big problem. God is not a rewarder of those who seek Him. That's why Lalani, remember Lalani, that's why her example can be so compelling because she saw the fire, she saw the bad things, she endured the suffering, but she's thinking, God is real. God delivers metal roofs. God is a rewarder of those who seek Him. And what's amazing is it's the marriage of these two convictions then that helps us to, quote, draw near to God. And maybe you need that this morning, you arrived here this morning and you are weary, you're thirsty, you just need to draw near to God. You woke up this morning thinking, I just need God, I need to draw near from God, and the problem is you're looking in rather than looking up. And yet this morning, God is granting you this remarkable gift through this passage. He's saying, you want to draw near to me? Well, this is it. Look up and remember, I am real and I'm a rewarder of those who seek Me. Because the best measure of our faith is where we look when we feel hurt. It's where we look when God seems absent. It's where we look when God seems AWOL because faith looks up. And then we just have one other point, which is that faith looks back. Faith looks back. Now, let's go back into Hebrews 11 and remember the context. So the church is living in uncertainty. There is this probability of persecution. In fact, it wasn't just probability. Church history tells us they did experience persecution. So they're in this situation, see if you can relate. They're in bad times and it feels like it's only going to get worse. And they've had a great run in the past, last time it got worse, despite the early days of success, they have now begun to drift. And there is this adversity. See, the thing about adversity, adversity launches a war of attrition. And there is this unrelenting drip or sometimes shower of adversity in their life that is eroding their faith and complicating everything. Complexity is multiplied and there's closure on nothing. They can't seem to live with any sense that they're moving forward. I mean, it's like 2024 writ large. What a year we've had. We've got like assassination attempts, Hamas, war in Ukraine, Iran, who knows what they're going to do. It feels polarized. I mean, it feels like the first 20 minutes of saving private Ryan. Have you ever seen Save a Private Ryan? You know, you go in, you kind of, you know, it goes through all the trailers and all of a sudden it begins and you are glued to the chair. You're gripping the armrests and you're not thinking about God's existence or God's goodness. There's only one thing that you're thinking that is will they survive? We've got to survive. That's where the Hebrews are. And the writer gets that. And so this is what he does. He addresses their eyes. He wants to know where they're looking. He wants to know what they see. What is their perspective? Not long ago, I was listening to a message where the pastor put up a graphic. And when I saw this graphic, I thought, this is great. This introduces the core question of what we're talking about right here. And I think it's in your notes and I hope it goes up on the screen. Does this statement with these words jumbled together, does it say to you God is nowhere? God is nowhere. Or does it say God is now here? What do you see? Because God is using the book of Hebrews to address our gaze. And he's saying that the eyes of faith are not only drawn upward, but also in Hebrews chapter 11, they're drawn backward because faith does something interesting in Hebrews chapter 11. Faith calls us to remember God's best moments in the past. He starts pulling forward these characters, these people from the Old Testament and telling us to remember them, to remember the past, to remember the people. He starts riffing on these Old Testament characters. The point being they persistently personified faith. And so the writer of Hebrews is saying, listen, look up. But also, I want to remind you, you're not the first person to go through this. You're not the first person to feel disoriented. You're not the first person to have difficulty. You're not the first person to feel like you're growing older and weaker. Let's go back into their story. And so we looked at Abel and Abel sacrificed by faith. God accepted his gift and committed him as righteous. He pulls forth Noah and we read about Noah. Noah is constructing this ark. But he says he constructed the ark in faith for the saving of his household. By the way, you know, when you think of Noah, remember, it's like, I think it's 120 years. He starts building an ark. Just think about like, put this in your neighborhood. There's a guy. He's building a boat. And he says it's going to rain. And, you know, he's thinking, yeah, I bet another week or two things are going to get really bad. We're going to have a real downpour. It's going to develop into a hurricane. It's never going to stop. No, it's like, it's not just a decade, decade later. People are looking around and thinking, well, when's it coming? Five decades later, when's it coming? But he's standing in faith. The writer of Hebrews is pulling forward Noah's example saying, remember Noah. Because they trusted the promises of God. They believed God existed and God rewarded those. Yeah, I'm laughing because I'm just thinking about, you know, there are some astonishing names that the writer of Hebrews pulls forward from the Old Testament and uses them as examples for us. For instance, he calls forward the name of Rahab. Okay, do you remember anything about Rahab? Actually, you know what he calls her? Rahab, the prostitute. So it's like her whole story with all of her complications and all of her brokenness. But she displays some faith. And so he goes into the Old Testament, pulls forward her name and flashes her up on the screen and says, behold faith. He does that with Samson. Do you remember Samson's story? I mean, he basically ended terribly and he pulls forward Samson's example and holds it up and says, behold faith. He pulls forward these broken people and he tells us something about faith itself. One of the things that faith does is it remembers people for their best moments. Because true faith can take hard things, can take hard people from the past and can remember God's grace in their life. And if we can't see God's grace in their life, we can see God's grace in our life despite what happened with them because we're sitting here today listening to the Word of God. You know, so this amazing way that faith looks at the past, but faith looks back this amazing way that faith can even take Rahab, even Samson, these people that are broken and can see them a certain way. And then he goes into this extended version on Abraham. He says, by faith, Abraham went out not knowing where he was going. I love this because, you know, it's so filled with like ambiguity and he's talking about Genesis chapter 12 where Abraham's told, Abraham, here's what I want you to do, leave your country, your people, your father's household and go to the land I will show you. And I will make a great nation of you. And like we hear like, okay, go to the country. Where's the country? I'm supposed to leave but go to the country. You know, like as Americans, if you're born or raised in America, you understand something. If you're not like, understand it, but like just, you know, as Americans, we're so committed to our plans, so committed to our strategies that it's hard to imagine a God that would say, I want to set you in motion, but I'm not going to give you the plan because by going forward, you're going to have to trust in me and not in the plans and strategies that you've come up with. See, here's the challenge is that the call to mission is always a call to faith. And when it comes to mission, when it comes to the gospel going forward, God actually withholds some clarity to cultivate our dependence upon Him. And so one of the things that the uncertainty that exists in your life, one of the things that the uncertainty is doing right now is that it's pressing you into God. It requires you to trust God in a way you wouldn't need to trust Him if you had clarity. And sometimes what we really want is we really want like a faithless life. We just want a life where we don't have to exercise faith. But faith exists because ambiguity exists, faith exists because clarity does not. Faith exists because we don't understand the future. We don't understand where things are going. And so God thinks nothing of saying to Abraham, "Hey, leave your country, your people, your father's household, and go to the land I'll show you." And we're like, "No, I'm not doing that, I need clarity. It's how I know you're leading me." And God says, "No, no, that's not it at all." What you want is you want to mission without risk. What you want is a life where you don't have to depend upon me. If you had perfect clarity, you wouldn't need me. If you had perfect clarity, you wouldn't need faith. So where is God calling you to stretch your faith toward him right now? Where is that happening? Maybe you're actually sitting here and saying, "I can't even feel the faith." It's not there, Dave. I don't trust God. My faith is weak. I'm doubting, I'm unmotivated, I feel self-protected. My faith is deeply flawed, to which I would say, "Listen, please hear me. Hear the good news. Hear the gospel of Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ died, so your faith would never need to be perfect. Be walked in perfect trust and perfect confidence toward the promises of God." And it's his record of perfect belief that was imputed to us because of the cross and the resurrection so that when God looks at us, he no longer sees us in our worry and our frustration, in our fretting, in our unbelief. He doesn't see us that way. He sees the perfect faithfulness of his son, like dripping off of us. And when he sees that, it immediately elicits his pleasure and he moves towards us. So we're not trying to live in faith to get God's approval, we're trying to grow in faith because we have God's approval and because we can enjoy God's approval. Now he invites us into relationship with him, where we can enjoy him and know him better, where we can understand him as the rewarder of those who seek him. So, where does this apply to you? Where is your, where's your thatched roof burning right now? Because let's be honest, we're all returning to the same lives that were out there before we came in here. What's it been? Like an hour and 15 minutes. It's not like our life has materially changed a lot as we've been sitting in this room. So that's the life we're returning to. So when you walk out to those doors, what will you see? Ask God to correct your vision. Ask him to help you to look up and look back, to see that despite the thatched roof burning out there, God is real and he is a rewarder of those who seek him. And who knows, maybe by by his grace, a metal roof is on its way. Let's pray. Lord, we, we believe, help our unbelief and help us to trust you and look up and to remember the stories of others that have gone before us and look back because it is these things that will remind us today, not merely that you are real, but that you are a rewarder of those who seek you. We pray you would help us to embrace that and stand in the confidence of that. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen. All right, everybody doing well? No. Okay. Sounds good. It said, we said greet one another. Oh, yeah. How's everybody doing? Good. Good. We're going to need a little more feedback today. All right. Hey, so I get the honor and the blessing to introduce one of my mentors, a friend and also the President of our Association of Churches, we are part of the Great Commission Collective. It's a family network of churches that are seeking to create healthy leaders and plant churches. And so we, as one of their churches, that's one of our goals, is to raise up healthy leaders and in the plant churches within our community and in our world. And so Dave is here, he's going to be bringing the word "I get the honor" and the blessing to sit under his teaching, and God has got some amazing to share with you. So while we welcome up, Dave Harvey, also I'm going to ask Dave to share a little bit about the GCC, because God is doing some amazing things in GCC, and so super thankful for you. Thank you, my friend. And I'm excited what God is doing. In and around the world. Thanks, amen. Good morning. I'm grateful, grateful for the opportunity to be back with you. I mean, I love Bill and Lauren, and we'll seize upon any opportunity to be with them. But also, I love being here, and I love being invited back here. I'm not often invited back once I preach, so this is nice to be in a place. So yeah, Bill encouraged me to provide an update on Great Commission Collective, which I'm happy to do. This is an exciting season where we're planting a number of churches, six or seven churches this year. But we also just started our next church planter training class, and there's 16 couples that are 16 planters and their wives. And just had our leaders conference as well, just three or four weeks ago, where hundreds of pastors gathered together and Alistair Begg taught us and just had a rich time of training and teaching and worship and fellowship together. And we rolled out a multiplication plan while we were there. So what that means is we have a plan now to help the lead pastors and elders of local churches to create a culture which will identify and train church planters. So incubate church planters so that churches can be planted, more churches can be planted in the gospel, can go forward. So these wonderful things happening here in the States. Also internationally, our international director right now is in Canada meeting with the church planting director from Pakistan because there's a network that's interested in partnering with Great Commission Collective and then he'll leave Canada and he'll go to Romania, where our GCC Romanian pastors conference is happening. There's hundreds of leaders that are gathered together in Romania for about three or four days just to receive training and worship. And God has been very good, but most importantly for this morning, I just want to let you know that this local church has a growing role in this partnership in the model that you're creating and in the ministry of Bill and then just through your monthly generosity. So as a guy who's kind of leading Great Commission Collective, it's hard to express the gratitude I feel for this church because I just live over in a stereo and so I get to pop in here all the time, but also for the support that we feel from you. So thank you. Hebrews chapter 11, please. Far more important than any church planting network is the word of God. So we will look together at Hebrews chapter 11. The title of this morning's message is what faith sees. What faith sees. So this is a message on the topic of faith. And I want to shoot straight with you. I'm not chosen this topic because I believe I'm a great example of this topic. I'm the poster child of faith. On the contrary, I desperately need faith. My whole strategy is I preach faith until I have it and I preach faith because I have it and hopefully I'll preach it until it stirs up in you as well. But let's first understand what we mean by this word, faith. And we'll do that by looking at Hebrews chapter 11, beginning in verses 4 through verse 8. By faith, Abel offered to God a more acceptable sacrifice than Cain through which he was commended as righteous, God commending him by accepting his gifts. And through his faith, though he died, he still speaks. By faith, Enoch was taken up so that he should not see death and he was not found because God had taken him. Now before he was taken, he was commended as having pleased God. And without faith, it is impossible to please him. For whoever would draw near to God must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him. By faith, Noah, being worn by God concerning events, yet unseen in reverent fear, constructed and ark for the saving of his household. By this he condemned the world and became an heir of righteousness, of the righteousness that comes by faith. By faith, Abraham obeyed when he was called to go out to a place that he was to receive as an inheritance. And he went out not knowing where he was going. Let's pray. Lord, we're not looking to just hear a message this morning on faith, but we need faith. We want faith. We want you to stir up our faith. And we pray that you would accomplish that as we better understand this passage. In Jesus' name, we pray. Amen. I remember reading a story in Christianity today that was titled "The Joy of Suffering in Sri Lanka." And it talked about a woman named Lalani. Now Lalani was a widow. She was a believer. And she lived in Sri Lanka. And Lalani had been the object of fierce persecution as a Christian. In fact, Lalani had lost her husband who was brutally murdered. He was a martyr for Christ. Later on, in that same period of time, the people in her church had been attacked. And then a month or so after that, her church had been set on fire. And the thatched roof that covered her church had been burned off. Now one day in the months to come, Lalani was asked to represent her church in a meeting that was convened to help persecuted believers. And so they were going around the room and Lalani was asked for the general report of what was going on in her village. And she immediately responded by saying things are going wonderful. God has been doing so much good. Now there were people in the room that knew Lalani and knew about the village and they heard her report and they were extremely confused because they knew recently, just recently that her church had been set on fire and the thatched roof had been burnt off. And so they asked Lalani to account for the inconsistency between the reality of what's happened in her village and the report that she gave that one day. And Lalani responded simply by saying, quote, obviously, since the thatched roof is gone, God intends to give us a metal roof. Now I got to be honest with you. First time I heard that, or I read that report, I thought, I don't know if I would have interpreted those events in the same way that Lalani did. I mean, when Hurricane Halene and Milton were coming our way at no point was I saying praise God. I got a roof upgrade coming or praise God, the landscaping where you get better landscaping as a result of this. But I think the reason for that was that Lalani was seeing something different. In other words, she was casting a different set of eyes upon her circumstances. And I think one of the main differences between what Lalani saw and what I can tend to see can be reduced down to one word. That word is faith, faith. Now this is an urgent word for the Hebrew congregation that is receiving this epistle of Hebrews because this is a group of people that could relate to Lalani's experience. This is a group of people that started out in the faith strong and robust. In fact, I've already been through a lot. We didn't read this, but back in Hebrews, chapter 10, around verse 32, it refers back to a time where they once suffered. They had endured opposition. They experienced this opposition. They experienced being publicly reproached. It says they joyfully received the plundering of their property. They had walked in these days where their faithful witness was profound and they experienced great power, but despite that experience, they began to drift. And there's been this unrelenting storm of adversity in their life that has begun to erode their faith. And now, as of this writing, Nero was the emperor, and the clouds of another persecution were beginning to gather on the horizon, and the effect was not pretty. In fact, if we were to read the entirety of the book of Hebrews in chapter 3, verse 12, he says they have unbelieving hearts. He says in chapter 5, verse 11, "They are dull of hearing." Chapter 6, verse 12, "They are sluggish." Chapter 12, verse 3, he calls them weary and faint-hearted. And I hear those reports, and I think we can all relate to that in some way, because we've all had these experience, if not these seasons, where we just get, we're like an unexpected wave comes rolling into our life and just knocks us silly. And here's the difference, because just imagine you've had one of those experiences, and you know, the wave has just come in, and you're standing up, and you're dizzy and disoriented, and you're dusting off the sand, and you look out of the horizon, and another hurricane is forming, and it's coming right at you, and you're beginning to think, "If that hits my life, if that hits my family, I'm just not sure I'm going to stand. I'm just not sure we're going to make it." I brought a quote with me by William Lane's commentary on the book of Hebrews. He said, "Hebrews was written to a group of Jewish Christians whose world was falling apart." And here's the thing, the writer of Hebrews understands the problem. In fact, more importantly, he knows the solution. This letter is part of the solution. And so what he's going to do is he's going to invite these people that have been oppressed, that have lived in opposition, and are about to go in persecution. He's going to invite them to examine their faith. Now to a world that's been so intoxicated by the therapeutic, to the world that's infatuated with therapeutic thinking, this letter is going to seem so, so callous, so tone deaf. Because rather than immediately exploring their feelings, which there's nothing wrong with exploring feelings, and it's quite important to explore feelings, but he's going to move beyond that to begin investigating the penetration of their unbelief, which is a new category that we hardly ever hear. He's going to begin investigating and exploring the depth of their faith. And the description of faith is set against the backdrop of what pleases God. Again in talking about Enoch in verse 5, he says, "Now before he was taken up, he was commended as having pleased God," and then it rolls into that description of faith in verse 6. And without faith it is impossible to please God. So verse 6 then displays the two ways of knowing whether we're walking in faith in order to please God, two ways that I want to cover with you this morning. And they're really simple, beginning with number one, faith looks up. Faith looks up. Now let me say right out of the gate that we don't start the discussion of faith or the study of faith by looking inward. We don't start by talking about how to build our faith. Faith is not positive thinking, faith doesn't start with us nor does it move us to the center of the discussion. Faith centers on God. Faith looks up. That's what I mean by looking up. In Hebrews chapter 6 verse 1, it calls faith, faith towards God. Because faith is always, genuine faith is always moving towards God. In other words, God is the object of our faith and faith derives its power from the object, not from the user, which is part of the concern that many Christians have with the teaching that says that faith generates its own kind of creative power. Because that's not upward, it's inward, it's not Godward, it's manward. So our faith, in other words, does not create things, our faith does not create prosperity, our faith does not create health or breakthroughs. Real faith trusts God. Real faith moves upward toward God. But in order to understand the significance of that, we've got to really locate what true faith really is, and that's where the writer of Hebrews brings genuine help in verse 6. He says, "And without faith, it's impossible to please Him for whoever would draw near to Him." So, how do we please Him? How do we draw near to Him? We must believe that He exists and that He is a rewarder of those who seek Him. So faith is revealed by the upward direction of the following two convictions. God is real, God is a rewarder of those who seek Him. In other words, the measure of our faith is the degree to which we see in whatever situation that we're in that God exists and God is a rewarder of those who seek Him. The extent to which we import those two convictions into the reality and rigor and rhythms of our life. And I want to suggest to you that it's the degree to which we import those two convictions into two central experiences that we all share just as life goes on. One is the call to struggle and the other is the call to suffer. So let's talk about struggle. Let's talk about this call to struggle, to be alive, to be a Christian. I'm sorry, I said to call to struggle. The call to sacrifice is what I meant to say. The call to sacrifice, the call to suffer. So to be alive, to be a Christian is to receive from time to time this call from God to sacrifice. And we've all received it at some point. We've all felt that invitation. And I don't know what it might have been for you. Maybe it was to foster a child or go on a mission trip or give sacrificially or take a gap year between high school and college or college and a job to invest in the mission. Or maybe it was to embrace the risk of speaking truth to someone you love who needs to hear truth but you don't know if they'll receive the truth but you're willing to do that. And so we make these sacrifices but when we go to make them there is an immediate onslaught of unbelief. It kind of starts this soundtrack in our mind where this self-talk where if I make the sacrifice it will decimate our relationship. If I make the sacrifice I'm not sure it will bounce back. If we make the sacrifice there's just a lot we don't know and we can feel anxious from that. Because the future is uncertain. Everything about the future because we're not omniscient, because we're not omnipotent, because we're not omnipotent, we don't control the future and the future is just a blank slate to us. And when we confront that we get worried, we get nervous, we internalize that. And sacrifice calls for that and therefore sacrifice can blur our vision of the God who is real and is a rewarder of those who seek Him. And actually for Christians the haziness, the blurring is not typically around God's existence. In other words the average Christian doesn't just jettison the reality that God exists. Now we'll grant that. The issue that we release, the issue that we give up on is that God is a rewarder of those who seek Him that God's goodness remains intact. You see sacrifice invites us to trust in the goodness of God despite the risks we are taking. Because when you think about it the cost of sacrifice is basically risk and vulnerability. To get sacrifice you have to put up risk and vulnerability, it's the cost of sacrifice. And the reward of sacrifice is growth and intimacy with God. Remember the passage? For whoever would draw near to God must believe He exists. And He is a rewarder of those who seek Him. So make no mistake, the world, the devil and the flesh attack us at any point where we are prepared to make a sacrifice for the kingdom of God. Make a sacrifice for the gospel. Make a sacrifice for something that's going to move forward God's agenda. The world, the flesh and the devil want to infect the hard drive of our faith with a virus and the virus is called unbelief. And so faith in sacrifice is looking up towards God, is trusting God with the call to sacrifice. And then there's the second area where faith looks up and that's with the call to suffer. They call to suffer. And again, to one degree or the other, this is not a new category. This is something we have all addressed or dealt with. And I don't know what it might be for you or maybe somebody you love. Maybe it's a long-term illness or struggle with depression or you have adult kids and everything's broken. They're just not speaking to you right now. And you wake up each morning feeling that burden. You see, one of the things about faith looking up is that the best measure of our faith is where we look when we hurt. The best measure of whether faith is at work in our heart is where we look. Are we looking up when we hurt? Where we look when the goodness of God seems absent. When the goodness of God goes AWOL, at least we think that. And I don't know if you can relate to me at all, like when I don't see God or when I'm either struggling or suffering, I tend to turn inward. I look in. In fact, I struggle with self-pity. I call a party and I have this party in my mind, this pity party. And I invite me, myself and I, to just kind of reflect over all of the ways I'm being shafted by the will of God. Look at that. See, at the juicy center of self-pity is this conviction that we roll over and over in our mind that says, I'm not getting what I deserve. I'm not getting what I deserve in this situation. And so self-pity becomes this kind of corrupted counselor within our heart. It says to me, Dave, your pain is more real than God. And so God is real, but your pain is more real. Or on the reward side, that self-pity will reward you more than God will reward you. That God has abandoned you, find another reward. See, we're all wired to find a reward. We're all wired that way. And when we jettison God, we start moving in another direction. We try to find rewards in things that are earthly, things that are temporal. We find rewards in relationships or porn or money or power or social media or whatever. That which will distract us from God. I remember being this, but you can relate to this. You know, you have these weeks where it just, it feels like they're godless weeks. You know, they're like, God is not here this week. God is not around this week. He just checked out. He went on vacation. I don't know where he is. He said, you know, Airbnb somewhere, but he's not here. And Kim and I are on our way to the small group. No, actually, we're coming home from the small group. But on this night, I was kind of in the small group. Have you had this experience where you'll go to a small group, but you're actually having your own small group in your mind. And you're not even participating. In fact, you don't even hear it. It's just like, oh, you hear in the outside like, yada, yada, yada, yada, God, yada, yada, yada, gospel. You know, and of these certain words kind of drill in, but-- and so it was one of those nights. And-- but like, the entire way to the small group, I'm just lamenting to Kim all the ways that I'm not feeling good. And so at the small group, at the end, they said, listen, we just want to pause, because we really feel like we're supposed to pray for anyone here who's having a struggle. So is there-- is there anyone? And I did nothing. Got in the car with Kim, started driving home. And I had immediately picked up the storyline that I left on the way, and started telling her about why I was so discouraged. And she stopped me, and she said, listen, isn't it curious how we have this conversation on the way over? You pick it up on the way home. But when they were asking to go to God, to look up to God, to flee to God, you said nothing. And I said, well, I was just-- I just felt too discouraged to talk. Have you ever-- have you ever said that? I mean, there is a certain insane quality to that. I hope you know that, because I realized at that moment, the, you know, the absurdity of that kind of hit me like, I'm too discouraged about where I need help to ask for help. You know, you talk about like pioneering new vistas of insanity, it's like walking into an emergency room with a broken arm and saying, I'm in way too much pain to see the doctor. I'm in way too much pain. And you know, they're looking at you and saying, OK, well, would you like to see the psychiatrist? Because we have them too. See, the point is, I was looking in when I should have been looking up as faith looks up. Now, maybe for you, this isn't really landing, because you're in a really good season. And if that's you, I'm really grateful that this season is like that. But I want to encourage you, like, try this exercise just some time today, right down on a piece of paper and right down two statements. God is not here. God is not good. Fold that over, tuck it into your Bible, and then pull that out in the middle of your next trial. Pull that out in the middle of your next time of suffering, and you will be amazed at how accurately that describes your temptations. You'll be amazed at how accurately that describes the soundtrack in your mind. Because these are the two attack points for unbelief. It's you're in a situation, things are not going the way you expect. And in fact, things are detonating, like somebody rolled a grenade into your life, and it's immediately, God is not real. Oh, he's probably real, but here's the big problem. God is not a rewarder of those who seek Him. That's why Lalani, remember Lalani? That's why her example can be so compelling, because she saw the fire, she saw the bad things. She endured the suffering, but she's thinking, God is real, God delivers metal roofs. God is a rewarder of those who seek Him. And what's amazing is, it's the marriage of these two convictions then that helps us to, quote, draw near to God. And maybe you need that this morning. I mean, you arrived here this morning, and you are weary, you're thirsty. You just need to draw near to God. You woke up this morning thinking, I just need God. I need to draw near from God. And the problem is you're looking in rather than looking up. And yet this morning, God is granting you this remarkable gift through this passage. He's saying, you want to draw near to me? Well, this is it. Look up and remember, I am real, and I'm a rewarder of those who seek me, because the best measure of our faith is where we look when we feel hurt. It's where we look when God seems absent. It's where we look when God seems a-wall, because faith looks up. And then we just have one other point, which is that faith looks back. Faith looks back. Now, let's go back into Hebrews 11 and remember the context. So the church is living in uncertainty. There is this probability of persecution. In fact, it wasn't just probability. Church history tells us they did experience persecution. So they're in this situation. See if you can relate. They're in bad times, and it feels like it's only going to get worse. And they've had a great run in the past, last time it got worse, despite the early days of success, they have now begun to drift. And there is this adversity. See, the thing about adversity, adversity launches a war of attrition. And there is this unrelenting drip, or sometimes shower of adversity in their life that is eroding their faith, and complicating everything. Complexity is multiplied, and there's closure on nothing. They can't seem to live with any sense that they're moving forward. I mean, it's like 2024 writ large. What a year we've had, we've got like assassination attempts, Hamas, war in Ukraine, Iran, who knows what they're going to do. It feels polarized. I mean, it feels like, it feels like the first 20 minutes of saving private Ryan. Have you ever seen Save a Private Ryan? You know, you go in, you kind of, you know, it goes through all the trailers, and all of a sudden, it begins, and you are glued to the chair. You're gripping the armrests, and you're not thinking about God's existence or God's goodness. You're only one thing that you're thinking that is, will they survive? We gotta survive. That's where the Hebrews are. And the writer gets that. And so this is what he does. He addresses their eyes. He wants to know where they're looking. He wants to know what they see. What is their perspective? Not long ago, I was listening to a message where the pastor put up a graphic, and when I saw this graphic, I thought, this is great, this introduces the core question of what we're talking about right here. And I think it's in your notes, and I hope it goes up on the screen. Does this statement with these words jumbled together? Does it say to you, God is nowhere? God is nowhere, or does it say God is now here? What do you see? Because God is using the book of Hebrews to address our gaze, and he's saying that the eyes of faith are not only drawn upward, but also in Hebrews chapter 11, they're drawn backward, because faith does something interesting in Hebrews chapter 11. Faith calls us to remember God's best moments in the past. He starts pulling forward these characters, these people from the Old Testament, and telling us to remember them, to remember the past, to remember the people. He starts riffing on these Old Testament characters. The point being they persistently personified faith. And so the writer of Hebrews is saying, listen, look up, but also I wanna remind you, you're not the first person to go through this. You're not the first person to feel disoriented. You're not the first person to have difficulty. You're not the first person to feel like you're growing older and weaker. Let's go back into their story. And so we looked at Abel and Abel sacrificed by faith, God accepted his gift and committed him as righteous. He pulls forth Noah, and we read about Noah. Noah's constructing this ark, but he says he constructed the ark in faith for the saving of his household. By the way, when you think of Noah, remember, it's like, I think it's 120 years, he starts building an ark. Just think about, like, put this in your neighborhood. There's a guy, he's building a boat. And he says, it's gonna rain. And, you know, he's thinking, yeah, but another week or two things are gonna get really bad. We're gonna have a real downpour. It's gonna develop into a hurricane. It's never gonna stop. No, it's like, it's not just a decade, decade later. People are looking around and thinking, well, when's it coming? Five decades later, when's it coming? But he's standing in faith. The writer of Hebrews is pulling forward Noah's example, saying, remember Noah. Because they trusted the promises of God. They believed God existed and God rewarded those. Yeah, I'm laughing because I'm just thinking about, you know, there are some astonishing names that the writer of Hebrews pulls forward from the Old Testament and uses them as examples for us. For instance, he calls forward the name of Rahab okay, do you remember anything about Rahab? Actually, you know what he calls her? Rahab the prostitute. So it's like her whole story with all of her complications and all of her brokenness, but she displays some faith. And so he goes into the Old Testament, pulls forward her name and flashes her up on the screen and says, behold faith. He does that with Samson. Do you remember Samson's story? I mean, he basically ended terribly and he pulls forward Samson's example and holds it up and says, behold faith. He pulls forward these broken people and he tells us something about faith itself. One of the things that faith does is it remembers people for their best moments. Because true faith can take hard things, can take hard people from the past and can remember God's grace in their life. And if we can't see God's grace in their life, we can see God's grace in our life despite what happened with them because we're sitting here today listening to the Word of God. You know, so this amazing way that faith looks at the past but faith looks back this amazing way that faith can even take Rahab, even Samson, these people that are broken and can see them a certain way. And then he goes into this extended version on Abraham. He says, by faith Abraham went out not knowing where he was going. I love this because it's so filled with like ambiguity. He's talking about Genesis chapter 12 where Abraham's told Abraham, here's what I want you to do. Leave your country, your people, your father's household and go to the land I will show you. And I will make a great nation of you. And like we hear like, okay, go to the country, where's the country? I'm supposed to leave but go to the country. You know, like as Americans, if you're born or raised in America, you understand something. If you're not, I understand it, but like just, you know, as Americans, we're so committed to our plans, so committed to our strategies that it's hard to imagine a God that would say, "I want to set you in motion, "but I'm not going to give you the plan "because by going forward, you're going to have to trust in me "and not in the plans and strategies that you've come up with." See, here's the challenge is that the call to mission is always a call to faith. And when it comes to mission, when it comes to the gospel going forward, God actually withholds some clarity to cultivate our dependence upon Him. And so one of the things that the uncertainty that exists in your life, one of the things that the uncertainty is doing right now is that it's pressing you into God. It requires you to trust God in a way you wouldn't need to trust Him if you had clarity. And sometimes what we really want is we really want like a faithless life. We just want a life where we don't have to exercise faith. But faith exists because ambiguity exists. Faith exists because clarity does not. Faith exists because we don't understand the future. We don't understand where things are going. And so God thinks nothing of saying to Abraham, "Hey, leave your country, your people, "your father's household and go to the land I'll show you." And we're like, "No, I'm not doing that. "I need clarity. "It's how I know you're leading me." And God says, "No, no, that's not it at all." What you want is you want to mission without risk. What you want is a life where you don't have to depend upon me. If you had perfect clarity, you wouldn't need me. If you had perfect clarity, you wouldn't need faith. So, where is God calling you to stretch your faith toward Him right now? Where is that happening? Maybe you're actually sitting here and saying, "You know, I can't even feel the faith." I can't, it's not there Dave, I don't trust God. My faith is weak, I'm doubting, I'm unmotivated, I feel self-protected, my faith is deeply flawed. To which I would say, "Listen, please hear me. "Hear the good news, hear the gospel of Jesus Christ. "Jesus Christ died, so your faith "would never need to be perfect." He walked in perfect trust and perfect confidence toward the promises of God. And it's His record of perfect belief that was imputed to us because of the cross and the resurrection so that when God looks at us, He no longer sees us in our worry and our frustration, in our fretting, in our unbelief. He doesn't see us that way. He sees the perfect faithfulness of His Son like dripping off of us. And when He sees that, it immediately elicits His pleasure and He moved towards us. So, we're not trying to live in faith to get God's approval. We're trying to grow in faith because we have God's approval and because we can enjoy God's approval. And now He invites us into relationship with Him where we can enjoy Him and know Him better, where we can understand Him as the rewarder of those who seek Him. So, where does this apply to you? Where is your, where's your thatched roof burning right now? Because let's be honest, we're all returning to the same lives that were out there before we came in here. What's it been like an hour and 15 minutes? It's not like our life has materially changed a lot as we've been sitting in this room. So, that's the life we're returning to. So, when you walk out to those doors, what will you see? Ask God to correct your vision. Ask Him to help you to look up and look back, to see that despite the thatched roof burning out there, God is real and He is a rewarder of those who seek Him. And who knows? Maybe by, by His grace, a metal roof is on its way. Let's pray. (gentle music) Lord, we, we believe, help our unbelief. And help us to trust you and look up and to remember the stories of others that have gone before us and look back. Because it is these things that will remind us today, not merely that you are real, but that you are a rewarder of those who seek you. We pray you would help us to embrace that and stand in the confidence of that. In Jesus' name, we pray. Amen. All right, everybody doing well? No, okay, sounds good. It said, we said greet one another. Oh yeah. How's everybody doing? Good, good. We're gonna need a little more feedback today. All right, hey, so I get the honor and the blessing to introduce one of my mentors, a friend, and also the president of our Association of Churches. We are a part of the Great Commission Collective. It's a family network of churches that are seeking to create healthy leaders and plant churches. And so we, as one of their churches, that's one of our goals is to raise up healthy leaders and in the plant churches within our community and in our world. And so Dave is here. He's gonna be bringing the word, I get the honor and the blessing to sit under his teaching and God has got some amazing to share with you. So why don't we welcome up Dave Harvey. Also, I'm gonna ask Dave to share a little bit about the GCC 'cause God is doing some amazing things in GCC. And so super thankful for you and I'm excited what God is doing in and around the world. - Thanks, amen. Good morning. I'm grateful, grateful for the opportunity to be back with you. I mean, I love Bill and Lauren and will seize upon any opportunity to be with them. But also, I love being here and I love being invited back here. I'm not often invited back once I preach. So this is nice to be in a place. So yeah, Bill encouraged me to provide an update on Great Commission Collective, which I'm happy to do. This is an exciting season where we're planting a number of churches, six or seven churches this year. But we also just started our next church planter training class and there's 16 couples that it's 16 planters and their wives. And just had our leaders conference as well, just a three or four weeks ago, where hundreds of pastors gathered together and Alistair Begg taught us and just had a rich time of training and teaching and worship and fellowship together. And we rolled out a multiplication plan while we were there. So what that means is we have a plan now to help the lead pastors and elders of local churches to create a culture which will identify and train church planters. So incubate church planters so the churches can be planted, more churches can be planted and the gospel can go forward. So this wonderful things happening here in the States. Also internationally, our international director right now is in Canada meeting with the church planting director from Pakistan because there's a network that's interested in partnering with Great Commission Collective and then he'll leave Canada and he'll go to Romania where our GCC Romanian pastors conferences happening. There's hundreds of leaders that are gathered together in Romania for about three or four days just to receive training and worship. And God has been very good. But most importantly for this morning, I just wanna let you know that this local church, has a growing role in this partnership in the model that you're creating and in the ministry of Bill and then just through through your monthly generosity. So as a guy who's kind of leading Great Commission Collective, it's hard to express the gratitude I feel for this church because I just live over in a stereo and so I get to pop in here all the time but also for the support that we feel from you. So thank you. Hebrews chapter 11, please. Far more important than any church planting network is the word of God. So we will look together at Hebrews chapter 11. The title of this morning's message is what faith sees? What faith sees? So this is a message on the topic of faith. And I wanna shoot straight with you. I'm not chosen this topic because I believe I'm a great example of this topic. I'm the poster child of faith. On the contrary, I desperately need faith. My whole strategy is I preach faith until I have it and I preach faith because I have it. And hopefully I'll preach it until it stirs up in you as well. But let's first understand what we mean by this word, faith. And we'll do that by looking at Hebrews chapter 11 beginning in verses four through verse eight. By faith, Abel offered to God a more acceptable sacrifice than Cain through which he was commended as righteous. God commending him by accepting his gifts. And through his faith, though he died, he still speaks. By faith, Enoch was taken up so that he should not see death. And he was not found because God had taken him. Now before he was taken, he was commended as having pleased God. And without faith, it is impossible to please him. For whoever would draw near to God must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him. By faith, Noah, being worn by God concerning events yet unseen in reverent fear, constructed and art for the saving of his household. By this, he condemned the world and became an heir of righteousness, of the righteousness that comes by faith. By faith, Abraham obeyed when he was called to go out to a place that he was to receive as an inheritance. And he went out not knowing where he was going. Let's pray. Lord, we're not looking to just hear a message this morning on faith, but we need faith, we want faith, we want you to stir up our faith. And we pray that you would accomplish that as we better understand this passage. In Jesus' name, we pray. Amen. I remember reading a story in Christianity today that was titled The Joy of Suffering in Sri Lanka. And it talked about a woman named Lalani. Now, Lalani was a widow. She was a believer and she lived in Sri Lanka. And Lalani had been the object of fierce persecution as a Christian. In fact, Lalani had lost her husband who was brutally murdered. He was a martyr for Christ. Later on, in that same period of time, the people in her church had been attacked. And then a month or so after that, her church had been set on fire and the thatched roof that covered her church had been burned off. Now, one day in the months that can't come, Lalani was asked to represent her church in a meeting that was convened to help persecuted believers. And so they were going around the room and Lalani was asked for the general report of what was going on in her village. And she immediately responded by saying, things are going wonderful. God has been doing so much good. Now, there were people in the room that knew Lalani and knew about the village and they heard her report and they were extremely confused because they knew recently, just recently, that her church had been set on fire and the thatched roof had been burnt off. And so they asked Lalani to account for the inconsistency between the reality of what's happened in her village and the report that she gave that one day. And Lalani responded simply by saying, quote, obviously, since the thatched roof is gone, God intends to give us a metal roof. Now, I got to be honest with you. The first time I heard that, or I read that report, I thought, I don't know if I would've been interpreted those events in the same way that Lalani did. I mean, when Hurricane Halene and Milton were coming our way at no point was I saying, praise God, I got a roof upgrade coming, or praise God, the landscaping, where you get better landscaping as a result of this. But I think the reason for that was that Lalani was seeing something different. In other words, she was casting a different set of eyes upon her circumstances. And I think one of the main differences between what Lalani saw and what I can tend to see can be reduced down to one word. That word is faith. Faith. Now, this is an urgent word for the Hebrew congregation that is receiving this epistle of Hebrews. Because this is a group of people that could relate to Lalani's experience. This is a group of people that started out in the faith strong and robust. In fact, they've already been through a lot. We didn't read this, but back in Hebrews chapter 10 around verse 32, it refers back to a time where they once suffered. They had endured opposition. They experienced this opposition. They experienced being publicly reproached. It says they joyfully received the plundering of their property. And so they had walked in these days where their faithful witness was profound and they experienced great power. But despite that experience, they began to drift. And there's been this unrelenting storm of adversity in their life that has begun to erode their faith. And now, as of this writing, Nero was the emperor and the clouds of another persecution were beginning to gather on the horizon and the effect was not pretty. In fact, if we were to read the entirety of the book of Hebrews in chapter three, verse 12, he says they have unbelieving hearts. He says in chapter five, verse 11, they are dull of hearing. Chapter six, verse 12, they are sluggish. Chapter 12, verse three, he calls them weary and faint-hearted. And I hear those reports and I think we can all relate to that in some way because we've all had these experience, if not these seasons where we just get, where like an unexpected wave comes rolling into our life and just knocks us silly. And here's the difference because just imagine you've had one of those experiences and the wave has just come in and you're standing up and you're dizzy and disoriented and you're dusting off the sand and you look out of the horizon and another hurricane is forming and it's coming right at you and you're beginning to think, if that hits my life, if that hits my family, I'm just not sure, I'm going to stand, I'm just not sure we're going to make it. I brought a quote with me by William Lane's commentary on the book of Hebrews. He said, "Hebrews was written to a group "of Jewish Christians whose world was falling apart." And here's the thing, the writer of Hebrews understands the problem. In fact, more importantly, he knows the solution. This letter is part of the solution. And so what he's going to do is he's going to invite these people that have been oppressed, that have lived in opposition and are about to go in persecution, he's going to invite them to examine their faith. Now to a world that's been so intoxicated by the therapeutic, to the world that's been, that's infatuated with therapeutic thinking, this letter is going to seem so, so callous, so tone deaf. Because rather than immediately exploring their feelings, which there's nothing wrong with exploring feelings and it's quite important to explore feelings, but he's going to move beyond that to begin investigating the penetration of their unbelief, which is a new category that we hardly ever hear. He's going to begin investigating and exploring the depth of their faith. And the description of faith is set against the backdrop of what pleases God. Again, in talking about Enoch in verse five, he says, now before he was taken up, he was commended as having pleased God, and then it rolls into that description of faith in verse six, and without faith, it is impossible to please God. So verse six then displays the two ways of knowing whether we're walking in faith in order to please God, two ways that I want to cover with you this morning and they're really simple. Beginning with number one, faith looks up. Faith looks up. Now let me say right out of the gate that we don't start the discussion of faith by, or the study of faith by looking inward. We don't start by talking about how to build our faith. Faith is not positive thinking. Faith doesn't start with us, nor does it move us to the center of the discussion. Faith centers on God. Faith looks up. That's what I mean by looking up. In Hebrews chapter six, verse one, it calls faith, faith towards God. Because faith is always, genuine faith is always moving towards God. In other words, God is the object of our faith and faith derives its power from the object, not from the user. Which is part of the concern that many Christians have with the teaching that says that faith generates its own kind of creative power. Because that's not upward, it's inward. It's not Godward, it's manward. So our faith, in other words, does not create things. Our faith does not create prosperity. Our faith does not create health or breakthroughs. Real faith trusts God. Real faith moves upward toward God. But in order to understand the significance of that, we've got to really locate what true faith really is. And that's where the writer of Hebrews brings genuine help. In verse six, he says, "And without faith, it's impossible to please him, for whoever would draw near to him." So how do we please him? How do we draw near to him? Must believe that he exists and that he is a rewarder of those who seek him. So faith is revealed by the upward direction of the following two convictions. God is real. God is a rewarder of those who seek him. In other words, the measure of our faith is the degree to which we see in whatever situation that we're in that God exists. And God is a rewarder of those who seek him. The extent to which we import those two convictions into the reality and rigor and rhythms of our life. And I wanna suggest to you that it's the degree to which we import those two convictions into two central experiences that we all share just as life goes on. One is the call to struggle and the other is the call to suffer. So let's talk about struggle. Let's talk about this call to struggle. To be alive, to be a Christian is, I'm sorry, I said to call to struggle. The call to sacrifice is what I meant to say. The call to sacrifice, the call to suffer. So to be alive, to be a Christian is to receive from time to time this call from God to sacrifice. And we've all received it at some point. We've all felt that invitation. And I don't know what it might have been for you. Maybe it was to foster a child or go on a mission trip or give sacrificially or take a gap year between high school and college or college and a job to invest in the mission or maybe it was to embrace the risk of speaking truth to someone you love who needs to hear truth but you don't know if they'll receive the truth but you're willing to do that. And so we make these sacrifices but when we go to make them there's an immediate onslaught of unbelief it kind of starts this soundtrack in our mind where this self talk where if I make the sacrifice it will decimate our relationship. If I make the sacrifice, I'm not sure we'll bounce back. If we make the sacrifice, there's just a lot we don't know and we can feel anxious from that. We can, because the future's uncertain. You know, everything about the future because we're not omniscient, because we're not omnipotent, because we're not omnipotent, we don't control the future and the future is just a blank slate to us. And when we confront that, we get worried, we get nervous, we internalize that and sacrifice calls for that and therefore sacrifice can like blur our vision of the God who is real and is a rewarder of those who seek Him. And actually for Christians, you know, the haziness, the blurring is not typically around God's existence. In other words, the average Christian doesn't just jettison the reality that God exists. Now we'll grant that. The issue that we lay, the issue that we release, the issue that we give up on is that God is a rewarder of those who seek Him, that God's goodness remains intact. You see, sacrifice invites us to trust in the goodness of God, despite the risks we are taking. Because when you think about it, the cost of sacrifice is basically risk and vulnerability. To get sacrifice, you have to put up risk and vulnerability, it's the cost to sacrifice. And reward, the reward of sacrifice is growth and intimacy with God. Remember the passage for whoever would draw near to God. [BLANK_AUDIO]