Simply the Best No.9 Faith - a case study

Praise to Jesus in His sight, we worship Him. Glory and honor, we give unto You. Receiving Your holiness, and bowing o'er Your throne, You are the Lord of all angels, forever.

Jesus the name, our own God, we sing Jesus. Enter the heart, in His righteousness, we worship Him. Glory and honor, we give unto You.

Receiving Your holiness, and bowing o'er Your throne, You are the Lord of all angels, forever. Jesus the name, our own God, we sing Jesus. The heading is, By Faith.

Now faith is being sure of the hope for being certain of what we do not see. This is what the ancients were commended for. By faith we understand that the universe was formed at God's command, so that what is seen is not made out of what is visible.

By faith, Abel offered God a better sacrifice than Cain did. By faith, he was commended as a righteous man when God spoke well of his offerings. And by faith, he still speaks, even though he is dead.

By faith, Enoch was taken from this life so that he did not experience death. He could not be found, because God had taken him away. For before he was taken, he was commended as one who pleased God.

And without faith, it is impossible to please God, because anyone who comes to Him must believe that He exists, and that He rewards those who earnestly seek Him. By faith, Noah, when warned about things not yet seen, in holy fear, built an ark to serve his family. By his faith, he condemned the world and became air and righteousness that comes by faith.

By faith, Abram, when called to go to a place he would later receive in his inheritance, obeyed and went, even though he did not know where he was going. By faith, he made his home in the promised land like a stranger in a foreign country. He lived in tents, as did Isaac and Jacob, who were heirs with him of the same promise.

For he was looking forward to a city with foundations whose architect and builder is God. By faith, Abram, even though he was past age and Sarah herself was barren, Abram was enabled to become a father because he considered him faithful who had made the promise. And so, from this one man, he as good as dead, came descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and as countless as the sand on the seashore.

All these people were still living by faith when they died. They did not receive the things promised. They only saw them and welcomed them from a distance.

And they admitted that they were aliens and strangers on earth. People who say such things show that they are looking for a country of their own. If they had been thinking of a country they had left, they would have the opportunity to return.

Instead, they were longing for a better country, a heavenly one. Therefore, God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared a city for them. By faith, Abram, when God tested him, offered Isaac as a sacrifice.

He who received the promises was about to sacrifice the one and only son, even though God had said to him, it is through Isaac that your offspring will be reckoned. Abram reasoned that God could raise the dead. And, figuratively speaking, he did receive Isaac back from the dead.

In the last days of Abraham's life, Abraham and his people were still living by faith. They only saw them and welcomed them from a distance. They only saw them and welcomed them from a distance.

Do be seated and have your Bibles open at Hebrews 11, please. And, of course, that's quite right. That old hymn is very often all the hymns do.

And shrines summarize the practical reaction to our faith. There's no other way to be happy in Jesus but to trust and obey. There is a sense in which all of us are called to live the life of faith.

I was saying last week in introducing you to this glorious eleventh chapter of this mighty epistle that as Peter was invited by Jesus to get out of the boat, you remember the occasion, and walk on the unsteady surface of water with the attendant difficulties of a howling wind and gigantic waves. So you and I are asked to walk. There used to be a magazine, all the friends will remember it, a couple of decades, three decades ago, when there weren't the proliferation of magazines that you get today in evangelicalism, called Life of Faith.

And it is the life of faith to which God directs you. And it's not something that's academic. If I can use a colloquial expression, it's not airy-fairy.

When the rubber touches the road, when you're on a bed in Worthing Hospital or wherever, when you're fighting for your breath because your lung has collapsed, or the cancer has randomly taken over your body, you need faith to continue to walk with the Lord. Blind unbelief, says the hymn writer, is sure to err. What does he mean? Belief that is founded on nothing, that is a flimsy basis on which to go through life.

But belief that is founded on Jesus Christ and what He has achieved for you, that will keep you. Oh, it won't always be easy. Faith knows many assaults.

Martin Luther will confess that and help you. Faith will sometimes quiver like a leaf blown by the wind. But even a small amount of faith is all that is required, says our beloved Lord Jesus, for you to cope with life and for you, on saying farewell to life, to move into God's eternal tomorrow.

Who was the founder of the Christian faith? Well, you say the Lord Jesus Christ, and of course you are correct. But there is a sense in which the father of the Christian faith is none other than Abraham. You read of him, of course, in the middle chapters of the book of Genesis, but the theological implications of the life of Abraham and his wife are perhaps made more plain to us in the New Testament.

It was Luther who said of Abraham, he is the first man who responded to the evangelical call. He left everything in order to serve God. He moved into the unknown with only the word of God to go on, and as a result he became the first man in Scripture of whom we are directly told he pleased God.

And I said to you last Sunday morning in defining the church, in terms that can be understood by all, the church is a society of those who strive to please God. This is my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased. Without faith it is impossible to please God.

Therefore, some of the greatest boosts, if you like, to the pleasure of God comes not through the gathering together of the saints here and the listening to the exposition of Scripture, though that's honorable in and of itself. The situations which please God the most is when you find an elderly person whose health has collapsed, when you find a man hanging on despite circumstances out in Southeast Asia which have robbed him of his wife and his children, when you find men and women engaged in a tussle with the evil one and still remaining true to God, that pleases Him. Now here I say in the eleventh chapter of Hebrews Hebrews what you have in effect is a display of the royal art gallery of Christian heroes.

Using the word Christian to describe also those who lived before Christ as well as those who live after Christ. Here we go down this corridor and you see portraits of so many great men and women and when you get to the last verse you discover if you've got any sanctified imagination at all that the corridor hasn't been completed. It goes on through the first century, the second century, the third century, right down to the twentieth century and the portraiture of men and women is still being painted by the Holy Spirit so that in this unending art gallery that is for the honor and glory of God contemporary saints can take up their place.

Now don't abuse yourself. I mean by that don't put yourself down because you're not in the same category or so you think of these early men and women whose names are listed here because the New Christian Herald will never have you on its front page because you will never get any recognition in terms of spotlight being on yourself as though your contribution to Christianity is utterly important and irrelevant. That is not so.

You see the greatest portraits are those that the media never single out because, well, the media cannot be everywhere and our Christian press does us well, does us proud in bringing information of people who are living for the Lord and advancing His kingdom. But don't you see that whether you're an eighty-year-old in a nursing home in Worthing or whether you're an eighteen-year-old contemplating going out to Pakistan you can still be subject to the work of the Holy Spirit who has as an objective to make you like Jesus who was the man par excellence, who pleased God. And Abraham has to his credit as you look into this art gallery that much attention is paid to him because this ordinary man for so he was as God put His hand upon him became extraordinary as he showed an obedience which is staggering.

And so we look at this little cameo three distinct aspects of the life of Abraham as set down here by Faith Abraham when called to go to a place he would later receive as inheritance obeyed and went. Faith and the cities. There were two cities involved in the life of Abraham.

One is easy to describe, it was Ur of the Chaldees and from Ur of the Chaldees he was to move out as God might take you out from your Ur of the Chaldees a place which was knowing economic prosperity a place of security, a place where Abraham and his father seemed to have influence and power. But it's from Ur of the Chaldees that God will call Abraham and it is to the credit to quote a preacher from the fifth century He followed a free and unfettered impulse and departed with all speed from Chaldea a land at that time blessed by fortune at the height of prosperity. Abraham, get up and go, says God.

And Abraham got up and went. Not easy to leave Worthing, to go into an unknown future. Even more hard for Abraham for he did not have the example of godly parents.

Turn to Joshua 24 too later on and you will discover that his father's background was that of paganism. Abraham did not have the ministry of holy prophets in which they were still in the future. All Abraham had to go on was just the command of the Lord.

And there is some intimation in scripture that God's directive came to Abraham before it came to Sarah. I called Abraham alone. You imagine it, brothers? This afternoon as you're engaged following this service in eating your meal you say to your wife, we're going.

We're selling up. And she says, oh yes? Where are we going? Well, I'm not too sure. What's the job that you're going to? A job? Well, that too is a little bit hazy.

Then on what basis are you saying that we should risk moving from what we know and going to an uncertain future? And the answer is, because God has told me. Now that was the sort of category in which you find Abraham working. I called Abraham alone and he left.

He left a city in order to go to another city. And it's the latter city that's not so easy to describe because you know, of course, from your understanding of the Old Testament and from this little summary statement here that Abraham is going to the promised land. He didn't know exactly when he set out where that would be even though he did not know where he was going.

Verse 8, by faith he made his home in the promised land. But there never was a time in Abraham's life when he founded a city in the promised land equivalent to the Ur that he'd left. And if you were to read the Old Testament alone and some of the Old Testament commentators you would think that this is really what Abraham had in mind.

You see, God was going to bring him to a literal land and give him a literal city. And now, of course, there was a sense in which that is true. He took him to the land, the promised land which he gave not only to Abraham but to his descendants.

But Abraham never lived a settled life, never had his own house, lived in a tent, lived as a pilgrim and came to an understanding that the sacrament about which the land was speaking was more important than the element. You say, what do you mean? Here's a piece of bread, it's an element, the piece of bread. Baked as normal bread is baked.

But it becomes sacramental in your understanding as invested in the act of taking bread you recall all the promises of God. The bread, it speaks for what? The broken body of Christ. The communion table, it speaks for what? The shed blood of Jesus.

And this table, well, he will take wine with us again when he comes in his kingdom. The bread speaks the past and looks forward to the future. Abraham goes to a land which has an importance but not a super-arching importance, not an over-arching importance.

For, verse 10, he was looking forward to the city with foundations whose architect and builder is God. And so you move on. In the letter that Paul writes to the Galatians when he talks about the earthly Jerusalem and the spiritual Jerusalem which is from above, and you think of the apostle John as he writes his final book in the New Testament, says, I, John, saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem coming down from God, adorned as a bride.

And you know that these collection of verses in the New Testament are speaking to that wondrous day when this earth shall be cleansed of all unrighteousness, when God himself shall be down in great power and glory, when heaven and earth shall coalesce, when the new Jerusalem shall be entered into by all the citizens of Zion. You see, one thing you have to remember about the promises of God is that the fulfillment is always greater than the promise. The fulfillment is always greater than the promise.

Abraham, I will make your descendants so prolific they will be beyond your computation. If you could count the stars, if you could count the grains of sand, then, Abraham, you might get somewhere near what I have in mind to do. Abraham will not only become a blessing to the Jewish nation, he will become a blessing to the world, for through the seed of Abraham the Christ shall be born.

And as we are welded to the seed of Christ, so there is a sense in which Abraham is our father. The challenge of faith, leave the city, and I will make you a citizen of an even greater city. But, moreover, there is a challenge of faith in regard not only to the city, but his son.

Look at verses 11 and 12, and obviously I am mindful that I am leaving a lot of what is contained within these verses without comment on, because, well, there isn't the time. We need three or four studies to do justice to this passage, and even then, a lot would be left unsaid. Abraham is tested professionally.

Leave Ur of the Chaldees. Now he will be tested domestically. There is another promise made, of which the Scripture makes reference here, and there is a fulfillment.

As to the promise, well, it has to do with Abraham, though elderly, fathering a child. It has to do with Sarah, in an even worse physical condition than Abraham, mothering the child. Last week I gave you a semi-humorous reaction to Abraham's, or a semi-humorous account of Abraham's reaction that God is going to make him the father of a child born through Sarah.

Lord, I'm past it, I said, or something like that. And my wife, well, she's even more past it. And it's true.

You see, the physical problem was basically with Sarah, not Abraham. Oh, yes, Abraham is an old man. Relatively speaking, he's as good as dead, verse 12, but there's still life in the horse.

But Sarah, she's barren. She's beyond the menopause. And Sarah is told that she's going to have a child.

And Abraham receives the same intelligence. It's not easy, actually. That's the difference that there is between the authorized version's translation of this verse and that of the NIV.

It's not too easy to know just what we've got in the spotlight here. Is it Abraham or Sarah? Well, I suggest it's both. Both of these elderly people are told that they're going to be parents.

And Abraham laughs, but it's a laugh of faith. And Sarah laughs, you remember. You recall the story in Genesis.

She laughs in disbelief. And so you say to yourself, well, if she laughed in disbelief because she was so old, what's she doing in the corridor of faith? Well, it's the corridor of people who have lived for the Lord God as best they can. It's not the corridor of people who are perfect.

Thank God for that. Sarah is a woman who has shown great faith. Abraham goes from Ur of Chaldea, and she comes with him.

She knows something of the difficulty that Abraham endures as she, as his partner, is alongside him. And the intelligence comes that Sarah, when she's old, will be a mother. And she laughs.

And then, in awesome reaction to what she has done in the light of God's revelation, she somewhat understandably goes back on her initial reaction and tries to deny that she did laugh. She now comes to an appreciation that God can use her and her husband, to father, to mother, a child. You see, here is this lady battling with this problem of age over against the revealed word of the Lord.

And she eventually comes to a positive faith that this can indeed be the case. And it is this that pleases God. Don't you see this? It's coming to a realization, fighting your way through, sometimes reasoning it through.

And Sarah believes now Abraham, after Sarah's death, will actually father more children. That's why I say his wife's condition was worse than his. After her death, he will take another wife by the name of Keturah, and they will have children.

But this is the important thing, that through the union of Abraham and Sarah, a child, a miracle child is born. In anticipation of an even greater miracle, when a virgin shall conceive, not having received the seed of any man, but rather the seed of God's Spirit, and into this world will be born Jesus Christ. And the very words that Mary received as she is being comforted, as this intelligence is made understandable to her, with God all things are possible, that same disclosure is made to Abraham and Sarah.

They believe. Do you believe? Do you believe God and act on what God has said when He calls you perhaps to leave your heir of the Chaldees, when He checks you in regard of faith in the cities? Do you continue to believe when God works out His purposes for you in the context of your family life? From this one, verse twelve, from this man and he as good as dead came descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and as countless as the sand on the seashore. Yet it was so unlikely, wasn't it? This elderly couple, yet God took them and used them.

The only contribution that they could make was the contribution of faith. With Abraham it was a positive faith at that point, more so than Sarah. But don't elevate Abraham too much.

There were occasions when he got it wrong. There were occasions when he dealt dishonorably with Sarah. And don't be too critical of Sarah because she moves into a position of faith as you and I sometimes are stumbled and then we recover.

Thank God, I say, that Sarah laughed. Thank God for that laugh of disbelief and for the fact that Scripture used the failure of Sarah to eventually coax her to becoming a woman who acknowledged what God would do and the vessel through which Isaac could be born into the world. Don't you see, some of you who are new to the Bible, why those of us who have been studying it for years, reading it for years, love it so much? Because of its crass, down to earth, honest to goodness reality.

It tells us how people react. It tells us about their mistakes. It tells us about their foibles.

We know they had difficulty in Abraham's household. But despite that difficulty, he brings Abraham out of Ur of the Chaldees. He brings Sarah.

He takes them from one city. He gives them an idea of a city that he's yet to be and they retain faith. And despite sometimes the hassles of domestic circumstances, they stay within the parameters of God's will and as it was for them, so it can be for you and me.

Faith in the city, faith in the son, finally faith in the sacrifice. I drop down to verse 17. For the third cameo, though, I think that the context of what follows in between from the 13th to the 17th verse has Abraham very much in mind.

But here in verse 17, you've got the incident of God saying something which is absolutely staggering. If this was at a human level, it would be offensive. Abraham, take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love.

Check the psychology of that. You see, every word builds up on the next word or on the previous word in order to make the test even more grievous. Your son, your only son.

Your son who you love, take him. That's the command. This is what God has told him to do.

Now, remember what faith is. We are told that faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see. Get out of the boat, Peter.

Take your son, Abraham. But don't you see, in the latter example, the command is a denial of the promise. You say, what do you mean? Well, I will make your sea to be as numerous as the stars in the heavens, like the sand on the seashore.

That's the promise. Now, the promise can only be fulfilled through Isaac. But here is a command that not only will have Isaac dead, but the promise dead.

Don't you see? The command is followed by a promise which is contradictory or seems to be. Actually, it's preceded by the promise. And so let's have a look at Abraham's reaction.

Well, it is so fulsome that the historian here, the writer of Hebrews, puts it as though it actually happened. By faith, Abraham, when God tested him, offered Isaac as a sacrifice. And then there's a slight qualification put in in the next sentence, isn't there? Read your scriptures closely.

He who had received the promise was about to sacrifice his one and only son. Now, how did Abraham get to the position of holding the knife ready to plunge it into the back of his son? I mean, this has got to be the most dramatic incident in the whole of scripture with the exception of what happened at the cross. How did he get there? Why did God allow him to get there? I told you that I was with Colin last night.

I love this brother. Half past ten. You see, this is what I mean.

This is the rubber touching the road. This is not just preaching in a kindly, generous atmosphere in Worthing Tabernacle. This is working it out where it really, really matters.

It matters here, don't misunderstand me. But, I mean, this is the practicality. What should we do, Colin? Read me Psalm 91.

So we go through Psalm 91. And the promises in that Psalm seem to be contradicted by the man on the bed. You see, they're not adding up.

Physically there is not the relief to which the Psalm makes reference. You see, sometimes the experience of life is a contradiction of the promise or seems to be. Abraham, your son, I will make your name great through him.

That's the promise. The command. Take your son, your only son, and slay him before me.

What do you do when the command contradicts the promise? And the answer is you reason. You reason. I hold you to account how many times have I told you that from this pulpit.

Yours is a reasoned faith. Yours is not just a happy, clappy faith. A folk who kiss goodbye to their brains.

There is a reason to rejoice before God. Don't misunderstand me. I'll be as enthusiastic as the next man.

But I will not kiss goodbye to my reason. By faith. Abraham, when God tested him, offered Isaac as a sacrifice, he who had received the promise was about to sacrifice his one and only son.

Even though God had said to him, it is through Isaac that your offspring will be reckoned, Abraham reasoned. Abraham, N-I-V, N-E-B Bible, New English Bible, reckoned that God could raise the dead. You see, this is why Abraham is pleasing to the Lord.

He places his circumstances over against what he knows of the character of God. God cannot lie. God will work out his purposes.

Even if he operates on a level that is way beyond your ability to comprehend, Abraham has come to this conclusion that somehow or other, God who will not lie, will either through an atonement to substitution prevent the death of Isaac, or even as seems to have been Abraham's conviction, have Isaac killed but bring him back from the dead. And Abraham's faith is witnessed in Genesis where Abraham, you remember, said to the men when he took leave of them, his servants who were with him on that journey, to offer Isaac that my son and I will be back after the sacrifice, even though he knew what he was going to do or had been commanded to do by God. You see, here is Abraham and he's reaching forward.

He can't work it all out. He doesn't know how God is going to get himself out of this dilemma. But that God can and that God will of that, Abraham has no doubts.

He hopes and is certain of what he does not see. He's sure of what he cannot fully comprehend. Now, don't you see, that's what God is asking of you and me.

When we can't fully comprehend, when the command seems to cancel out the promise, we rest our case on this. The character of God stands inviolable. In other words, he's utterly consistent.

He has ways of working out his purposes, which perhaps are beyond our ken at that particular point. But work them out, he will, and justify himself, he will, so that all the nations of the earth shall realize, as Abraham declared, that God is a just God. All right, I'm through.

Here's Abraham. We've looked at his portrait. It's in this gallery of faith.

He's an incredible man. There's no way in which I want in any sense to devalue the faith of dear old Abraham. I'm glad that I'm one of his sons.

I'm glad that in some measure the faith that he has exercised, I've exercised myself. I stand there, and I salute Abraham, and I salute what God has done through Abraham and through Sarah. I thank God that when the challenge of the cities came, they had a faith to be able to overcome the challenge.

When the challenge of the sun came, the faith was able to overcome the challenge and to realize that God could do, despite their advanced years, what he promised. I thank God that when the challenge of the sacrifice came, Abraham was able to mount to it, to rise to it. But look, he's not the only man who pleases God.

I won't allow that. This art gallery is still having new portraits painted and hung up. I've met them down the years here, and I thank God for it.

Don't you see what I'm asking is this, that you too show a similar faith in Abraham, that you bask in the promises and cling to the promises. And when sometimes the commands seem to nullify the promise, realize God has got time on his side. He's got circumstances on his side.

It's only blind unbelief that errs, but a full-blooded faith in God will never be destitute of a final endorsement as to why it was exercised. So we cope with sickness at Worthington, problems that God puts in front of each one of us, challenges. It's all part of the life of faith.

We believe that our God is going on before, ordering our circumstances, enabling us to please him. Till the day dawns when we no longer walk by faith. We stand in his presence.

We members of Holy Zion, part of the people of God, who will love him and enjoy fellowship with him throughout eternity. To get there, you need to express faith. Have you trusted him? Do you trust his beloved son as your savior? Do you realize that Isaac was just anticipating what would happen to the Christ, but there would be nothing to stop the hand of death being plunged into our Lord Jesus Christ as he takes upon himself the sins of the world? Have you believed that his shed blood was for your account, that his broken body is the means whereby you're saved? Have you exercised saving faith in God's offer of salvation through Jesus Christ, the Lord? Let's pray.

How good is the God we adore! Let's stand. Our faithful, unchangeable friend, whose love is as great as his God, and whose child of nature, Lord, is, with Jesus first and the last, for his spirit divine must take hold. He'll praise him for all that is past, him for all that's to come.

It is thy faithfulness, O God, my Father, that is most glad of all to be with thee. Thou changest not, but all passions may fail not thee. Great is thy faithfulness! Great is thy faithfulness! All in thy glory, new curses I see.

All I have needed, thy hand has provided, is thy faithfulness here. So, Lord, the things we cannot change, we bring to you. The problems we cannot resolve, we leave them in your lap.

Help us to recognize the validity of the promise, even when sometimes your commands are strange. Help us to reason this through. Your love in times past forbids me to think.

You'd leave me at last in trouble to sink. Each bold Ebenezer I hold in review confirms your good pleasure. Just see me right through.

For this fellowship, see us through and enable us to be as men and women who go through this life as pilgrims, living, so to speak, in tents, recognizing that here we have no abiding city, but we look for a city whose maker and whose builder is God. We look for a universe completely redeemed, cleansed of everything that's offensive, Eden returned and made even more wonderful. So send us on our way with our hearts warmed, our minds informed, our wills obedient, and our emotions roused.

Send us out to see you more clearly, to love you more dearly, to follow you more nearly all our lives, and God's people thoughtfully said, Amen. Good morning. God bless you.