The Crisis of Belief - Jeff Ryan - 3TC Podcast - 10/6/2024

Jeff Ryan discusses the importance of faith, using Hebrews 11 as a foundation. Faith is certainty in God's character and promises despite visible challenges. We can trust God's power, wisdom, and trustworthiness to grow in faith through engagement with Scripture and faith-filled communities.

Transcript

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Welcome to the three timbers podcast. We hope this will encourage and uplift you today. Good morning, church. Let's pray before we hear the word of God, Father, God. We thank you that Your word is a lamp unto our feet, Lord. We pray that this word would just illuminate your truth to who we are and to who you are. I pray, Lord that you would get me out of the way in my sinful heart, and Lord Your Spirit would fall fresh upon each of us, and Lord that You would speak to each of us. We ask this in the name of Jesus. Amen. You know, I really admire people who know how to use words. I am in awe of writers, whether it is a book, whether as a novel, whether it's an article, people who know how to put words together can have a huge impact. In fact, if you think of certain words when you put them together, they have a huge impact. If I'm standing in a locker room of football players and I say, Let's go, well, that's going to get them excited. If I say to people, stay strong. That lets them know that I'm with them. If I say slow down or be still, keep calm. I'm trying to lower everybody's blood pressure from all of us, from when we were little, our parents and grandparents always taught us to say thank you, the words that we often see on bumper stickers and and T shirts that say Be kind, and how powerful are the words when you put the word miss you together or the word love you? Now maybe those words resonate with you. Maybe those words don't resonate with you, but what I want to do is introduce two words that I think resonate with everybody. It does not matter what your age is. I think when you hear these two words, they have an impact on you. And those words are happy birthday. We love when we hear the words Happy Birthday, because we get this idea of gifts and presents, and we know it's going to be great, so we're assured of a celebration and a gift, but we also have some anticipation, because we don't know exactly what it's going to look like, and that feeling that we get about our birthday when we hear the words Happy Birthday, really kind of elicits some of the same emotions when we start to think about faith. So many people want to have faith, but so many people don't understand faith, the faith in God's past faithfulness to us and the future faithfulness of God to us. But many people are confused about what is faith. So I'm hopeful today to introduce two new words that can help us understand faith better. I'm going to read from Hebrews chapter 11, the first six verses I'm going to be reading from the NIV version. Now, faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about 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 what is seen was not made out of what was visible. By faith, Abel brought God a better offering than Cain did. By faith, he was commended as righteous when God spoke well of his offering. And By faith, Abel still speaks, even though he's 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. As we get into this text, I really as much as we want to gravitate towards verse one, I want us to begin with verse six, which says And without faith, it is impossible to please God. And how can we please God if we don't understand what faith is? Now, when we look at chapter 11, it's often called the hall of faith or heroes of faith, because when you read it, you read these amazing stories of these people throughout the Bible and the amazing things that they did. And if you're like me, you can feel pretty bad about your own faith. But what makes all of these characters heroic was not their skills, was not an act of bravery. What makes them heroes is who and what they place their faith in. They placed their faith in God. And when you read chapter 11, sometimes you can get caught up in the bigness of the chapter and all of these amazing people and what they've done that you miss, I think, and a very important point of this chapter is that we experience God through faith. So if we are going to experience God, we need to understand what faith. Faith is the audience that was being written to, and we believe Paul was the author. These were those who professed Christ as their Savior and Lord, but they were being persecuted for that profession. So this letter was to encourage them to have perseverance, because future blessings were coming. The blessings may not have come in that moment, but the original audience said, we welcome these blessings from a distance. And again, these were professing Christians who have been and were being persecuted. And let's just talk about persecution for a moment, because what they were going through was they were having stones thrown at them until they died. They were sought in half, they were killed by the sword. They would become destitute, they were mistreated, they were thought of as unworthy. And I know that we like to believe that we are persecuted in our world today for being Christians, but we really don't understand persecution. So how could a group of people who profess Christ, who are going through all of this persecution, some which ended their lives, how in the world could they have faith? Because I think there are two things, and these are the two words I want to introduce to you today. They had faith because they were sure of who God was. They had faith because they were sure. The second word is certain. They were certain of the promises of God we read later in this chapter, these words, these were all commended for their faith, yet none of them received what had been promised since God had planned something better for us, so that only together with us would we be made perfect? This is pointing us to Christ and that word sure, that word Sure, it's not vague. It's not some imaginary thing. Faith is not some blind optimism that we that we subscribe to. It's not a feeling. It's not a intellectual understanding of biblical doctrine. What faith is is not letting our eyes deceive us so often. We can see our circumstances, we can see our challenges, we can see our problems, and we can say there's no way forward here. But what faith is is don't always trust what you see, because they had confidence this original honest. They had confidence in the future because of God's will, because of God's purpose, because of God's power. See, they were sure of the character of God. God is all powerful. There is nothing more powerful than God. God is more powerful than our problems. God is more powerful than our past. God is more powerful than our addictions. God is more powerful than our sin. God is more powerful than anything else. And when you have confidence in the character of God that he is more powerful, you have the beginnings of faith. God is infinitely wise. There is none wiser than God. I saw a report this week that one of the founders of AI says that in 1000s of days, not too long, that AI will be smarter than humanity, and it might, but it won't be smarter than God, because God is infinitely wise. God is wiser than anything we can read, than anyone that we can know God is wiser and God is eternally trustworthy. Look, I don't even trust myself. I don't trust myself to do the right thing, but I trust God to help me do the right thing. And when you understand the character of God, that he's all powerful, he's infinitely wise, he's eternally trustworthy, what you're really doing is faith is a confession of who and what we believe in. And when you say that I believe God is real and he's all powerful and he's infinitely wise and he is eternally trustworthy, you are professing that you have faith in God. Listen to what it says in John. But these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life. We have faith that we have life in Christ. Now, these heroes of the faith in chapter 11. Now they they triumph despite the trials, because they understood the character of God. And when you understand the character of God, you can trust in God's word. You can adhere to the promises of God. You can depend on the Word of God, and you will remain faithful to the Son of God. Faith can be so challenging, but would you be surprised if I told you that everybody here has faith? Now I would call that a natural faith. If you're going to go out and you're going to get lunch or dinner today and you go to a restaurant, you have faith that the food that you order will not make you will. You don't know the chef, you don't watch them prepare, but you have faith that's natural faith that the food you get will not make you will. You have natural faith in the company that you work for, that if they tell. You that this is the day that you get paid. You have faith that you will get paid. And all of us have to have faith when we go to the doctor and say, here's how I'm feeling, and they say, well, here's what's wrong and here's how we fix it. See, those are all called natural faith. But there's a difference between natural faith, or spiritual and biblical faith, and that's not something that we can acquire. It says this in Ephesians, For it is by grace that you have been saved through faith. And this is not from yourselves. It's a gift from God. God has given us faith because He is all powerful. He is infinitely wise. He is eternally trustworthy. I want you to think about this thought for a minute. Everything in our world was created out of something that previously existed, whether it be chairs, whether it be phones, no matter what it is, it was created out of something that was already in existence. But when God created the universe, He created it's called ex Nilo, which means he created something out of nothing. Why is that important? Because we can have faith in a God that is that powerful, that is that wise, that is that trustworthy, we can be sure of the character of God. German theology professor Zacharias your sinus said this in 1563 true faith created in me by the Holy Spirit through the gospel, is not only knowledge and conviction that everything God reveals in His Word is true, but also deep rooted assurance that not only others, but I too, have had my sins forgiven, have been made forever right with God and have been granted salvation. These are the gifts of sheer Grace earned for us by Christ. Faith is being sure of the character of God and certain of the promises of God. All of these heroes of the faith that we see in this chapter, they were directed towards a future. How could they have faith in a future that hasn't happened yet? Because they were certain of God's promises despite what their eyes would see, they had faith beyond what they could see. They had faith beyond their past. They had faith beyond their future. They had faith beyond their struggles, their pain, their anger, their sorrow, their addiction, they had faith that was beyond what their eyes could see. All of us have heard of the faithfulness of God, from generation to generation, from great grandparent to grandparent to parent, that we pass on to our kids, because that's what we are as the community of God. That's why it says in the very next chapter, the first two verses says in Hebrews 12 one, therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles, and let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us fixing our eyes on Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of our faith friends, we are a part of that cloud of witnessing to the character of God and the certainty of the promises of God, and that's what encourages each of us, every time we're together, to tell the certainty of the promises of God and the character of God. And see we fix our eyes on Jesus. See that goes again. That's fixing our eyes beyond our problems, because Jesus is not only the Pioneer, but the perfecter of our faith. We talked about natural faith, certain promises that come with natural faith. If you got in the shower this morning, take a hot shower, you had faith that when you turned it to hot, it would be hot. You may not know how all of that worked, but you had faith in the promise of the shower, that when you turn the knob, hot water will come out. If you drove here today, when you put your key in the car, you had faith that that car was going to start up, the pistons would fire, the engine would go because you had faith in the promises of the automaker, and when you go home today and you're going to watch NFL, Sunday Ticket red zone, that when you want to go to a game, you have faith that that's the game you're going to get to watch, because you believe in the promises of the cable company or the streaming company that you subscribe to see just because we don't know how the hot water gets Hard, or how the key starts the car, or how the remote gets it, we have faith in certain promises that are given to us. We need to have faith in certainty, in the promises of God. See being sure and certain those two words, they are powerful when you put them together for faith, because faith is not in our head. Faith is in our heart. Now the first century, Jews thought faith was all about works. They had twisted Judaism, Judaism, into some legalistic self effort, personal glorification. It wasn't about faith, but they thought they could still be righteous. But Paul reminds us the righteousness is given through faith. Faith in Jesus, Christ to all who believe there's no difference between Jew and Gentile, For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and all are justified freely by his grace, through the redemption that came by Christ, Jesus, we all know the expression live by faith, not by sight. We need to be sure of the character of God, certain of his promises. And then we can, you know, these heroes of the faith were remarkable. I mean, when you think about Moses, he could have had a very easy life, a life of royalty, a life of luxury, a life of resources. And if any of us had the chance to have a life that was comfortable and inconvenient, had anything and everything that we wanted. Why would we not take it? Why did Moses not take it? Because he was sure and certain about the character and promises of God and those were more valuable to him than anything else, because that's the only reason why you wouldn't take that. Think of our friends, Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego. They were told that if they did not bow down to King Nebuchadnezzar, that they would be thrown into the fiery furnace. And they didn't, and they were willing to go into the fiery furnace, not knowing what would happen. Why? How could you basically say, I don't care what you do to me, you can throw me in a furnace. They had to be sure of the character of God and certain of the promises of God, and we know that they went into the fiery furnace and not a hair on their head was singed. How about our friend, Noah. Noah's story is known not just in the church, but outside the church. God came to him and said, Noah, I need you to build me a boat. I'm going to make it rain and there's going to be a flood. But here's the thing, up to this point in recorded history, we have nothing that tells us there was ever anything like a boat. It had not rained up to this point of anything that we know of and a flood. What's that so God came to know and said, I need you to build something that you've never heard of, because I'm going to make something come out of the sky that you are unaware of, and then I'm gonna bring a flood, which you don't even understand. And yet, why would Moses spent, or why would Noah spend the next 120 years building something he didn't know of for something happening he had never seen because he was sure of the character of God and certain of the promises of God. See. Our eyesight is what we see in the physical world. Our faith is what we see in the invisible world. Faith is putting on the right glasses connective if I take my glasses off, I can't see anything. I can't make anything out. But when I put them on, I can see much more clearly. That's what faith does. It allows us to see who God is, who we are, and what God has done for us. Behind everything that is visible in the world is the invisible command of God. See faith in eternal life and the future rewards God promises in heaven, they may not be seen now, but through faith, not only will we experience them, we will experience God with faith. Anything is possible without it, everything is frustration. So if you want to grow in your faith, if you want to grow in being sure about the character of God, if you want to grow and the certainty of the promises of God. Two things. Number one, get in Scripture. Learn about God's character. Learn about God's promises in Scripture. Secondly, be around other people whose faith you admire. Spend time with them, see how they live their life. Words have power when we put words together, they can change everything, like Happy birthday. I love you. Be kind today. I hope that we put together the words sure and certain when it comes to faith, let's pray, Father, we thank You that we can be sure and certain of your character and your promises, Father God, you are always faithful. I pray Lord, that we would not just hear these words, but do what these words say and put our faith in you. We ask this in the name of Jesus. Amen. Thank you for joining us to learn more about three timbers. Please visit three timbers.org. 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