Living by Faith in God | Hebrews

Hebrews 11:1-40

Well Good Morning!

If you have your Bible this morning, I am going to read from the book of Hebrews 11. If you have been here in recent weeks you will know we have been looking into this book in the, towards the end of the New Testament.

And I am going to read part of this chapter and then we are going to talk about some of the issues here which I think are relevant to you and relevant to me.

Hebrews 11:1:

“Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see.

“This is what the ancients were commended for.”

And then in the following verses he names some of these ancients, as he calls them, and talks about, each name is prefixed by “by faith”. So, by faith Abel, by faith Enoch, by faith Noah, by faith Abraham, by faith Isaac, by faith Jacob, by faith Joseph, by faith Moses, by faith Rahab; those are the named people in this passage.

And then in Hebrews 11:32 he writes there,

“And what more shall I say? I do not have time to tell about Gideon, Barak, Samson, Jephthah, David, Samuel and the prophets, who through faith conquered kingdoms, administered justice, and gained what was promised; who shut the mouths of lions, quenched the fury of the flames, and escaped the edge of the sword; whose weakness was turned to strength; and who became powerful in battle and routed foreign armies.

“Women received back their dead, raised to life again. Others were tortured and refused to be released, so that they might gain a better resurrection.

“Some faced jeers and flogging, while still others were chained and put in prison.

“They were stoned; they were sawed in two; they were put to death by the sword. They went about in sheepskins and goatskins, destitute, persecuted and mistreated –

“The world was not worthy of them. They wandered in deserts and mountains, and in caves and holes in the ground.

“Yet all of these were commended for their faith, yet none of them received what had been promised.

“God had planned something better for us so that only together with us would they be made perfect.”

Lots in those verses, and we are going to pick out a few things in just a moment.

It has been said that history hinges on wars. If you look back into the 20th Century, of course, you would see there is much truth in that. The First World War, the Russian Revolution, Second World War, the Chinese Revolution, the various wars of independence in colonial occupied nations across the world, and all these wars certainly marked changes in the affairs of the people.

And of course, history then is written by the victors usually. And so, the stories become very much spun in favor of the victim. Have you ever noticed that cowboys are always the good guys? Because they write the stories.

Winston Churchill was a very astute observer of history. He said after the Second World War, “History will be kind to me. I know that because I will write it.”

Well, it is also true that history turns on individual people as well. Go back a couple hundred of years and you have got Napoleon who changed Europe, Abraham Lincoln in the United States. You have got Hitler as an individual who changed Europe and much of the world. Churchill; you have got Karl Marx, Mahatma Ghandi in India, Mao Tse Tung in China, Nelson Mandela in more recent days.

And these individual people were really the catalysts for some of the events of history that did change the way that history has since developed.

That is true of the record of men and women that we have listed in Hebrews 11. There are 15 named people in this chapter and all their names are familiar to anybody who has read through the Old Testament. Some have bigger stories; some have lesser stories, but nevertheless 15 named people. Plus there are scores of unnamed people whose events, whose contributions all aided and transformed things.

And what they have in common is they are described as living by faith. That’s the recurring theme through this chapter.

In fact, 28 times in this chapter it talks of people who did things by faith. It may surprise you to know that is far more than all the references in the whole of the Old Testament to people living by faith.

There are 16 references in the whole of the Old Testament to faith. That’s the only times the word faith occurs. Here is 28 times in this summary of Old Testament history that were given to us here.

Let me first define the word faith because there are a lot of ideas that people have that aren’t founded on the actual meaning of the word faith.

And faith is used in the Bible both as a noun and as a verb, and the distinction of course is important.

As a noun we use it when we speak of the faith. And when we speak of the faith we are talking about creeds and catechisms and statements in faith and doctrines that embody the content of what we believe as a Christian person.

In the New Testament it is used quite often when it speaks of the truths of the faith. It speaks of being sound in the faith. It speaks of those who wandered from the faith. It speaks of those who have denied the faith.

Paul says at the end of his life, “I have kept the faith.”

So, in this context it is used as a noun to speak of the fundamental set of doctrines without which Christianity will collapse. It is the necessary infrastructure that holds everything together and from which the various parts find their significance and their meaning.

Faith is a noun. But faith is also used as a verb. And when it is used of a verb it is speaking of active dependence on God that leads to situations that become inexplicable apart from God, apart from God Himself being active.

They have taken faith as a noun. These are the things that I believe, these are the grounds on which I believe them, and therefore I am going to trust that they are actually true and actually work. And God does, and they live by faith in God.

Faith of course is only as valid as the object in which it is placed. Faith has to have an object. You cannot just have faith on its own any more than you can have love on its own.

If you ever met a girl whose eyes are rolling and she is giddy and off of food and say, “What’s the matter with you?” She says, “Oh I’m all in love.”

“Really? Who are you in love with?”

“Nobody – I’m just in love.”

Can you just be in love with nobody? No, of course you don’t; your love has to have an object. It might be a car, might be a cat; could be a person.

And the all-important thing about your love of course is the object that has awakened that love within you.

Similarly faith has to have an object and it is the object in which we place our faith that determines the validity of the faith.

If you put faith in some thin ice, all the faith in the world; you put it in thin ice you will sink by faith.

If you put a little bit of faith in some thick ice and very nervously, very tentatively step onto the thick ice, you will walk on the ice. Why, because you had more faith? No you might have had less faith but the object in which you put your faith was stronger.

And so the all-important thing about faith, of course, is where you place it, the object in which you place it and the capability of the object that you put your faith in to function in a way that you were expecting and believing that it would.

And faith in God is a disposition of trust towards God that expects God to work.

Now if faith is a noun without being a verb, our Christian lives may be true, they may be sound, they may be orthodox, but they will be dead; they won’t function.

They may be intellectually stimulating but they will be experientially barren.

On the other hand, if faith is a verb without being a noun, that may leave us full of confidence and expectation, but because it will be devoid of substance, it will fail you eventually because God won’t live up to the expectations we have imposed on Him by our zeal rather than receive from Him as being the truths on which we may trust Him to become active.

There are some great faith “verbers” if I can invent a word who are weak faith “nouners”. And they are concerned with high expectations of God, but in due course they do become disillusioned because they have to live with the failure of their expectations because they are not based on the biblical truth of what we may expect.

Equally there are some great faith “nouners” who are weak faith “verbers” and they may be orthodox and sound and every “i” is carefully dotted, every “t” is carefully crossed but they have no living experience. And so their Christian life becomes dull and dry and routine and legalistic and usually judgemental into the process.

What we need, of course, is an intelligent understanding of the faith, as a noun, that leads to full experience of faith as a verb.

And here in Hebrews 11 this catalogue of men and women that the writer talks about as having lived by faith is using faith as a verb. They didn’t live simply under the weight of a body of doctrine; they lived in a living experience of God.

There are some well-known ones in this list of course. Much of the aristocracy of the Old Testament, if we can describe it that way, are here.

Moses and Abraham have the biggest space given to them. They are the two towering figures behind the nation of Israel. And they both experienced things in their lives which are inexplicable; they defy any explanation other than the fact that God was doing something and God was intervening.

Now I want to look at three things in these next minutes with you that I hope will help us understand this more clearly.

I want to talk about the relationship of faith to circumstances, first of all. Hebrews 11 has both good and bad stories in it. It has both victories and defeats, success and disappointment. They are all in this section.

The first section is all about the good things. It talks about Abel, Enoch, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, etc. And all their stories end well.

And they are summarized along with a few others who are just named without detail. In Hebrews 11:32, where he says,

“What shall I say? I do not have time to tell about Gideon, Barak, Samson, Jephthah, David, Samuel and the prophets, who through faith conquered kingdoms, administered justice, and gained what was promised; who shut the mouths of lions…”

(That sounds like Daniel to me.)

“…who quenched the fury of the flames…”

(That sounds like Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego.)

“…and escaped the edge of the sword; whose weakness was turned to strength; and who became powerful in battle and routed foreign armies.

“Women received back from the dead their men raised to life again.”

I mean this is powerful, exciting, positive, victorious, celebratory events, aren’t they? Characterize those stories by success, by triumph, by victory.

And if you just read those verses you might come to the conclusion that faith in God will give you an easy ride through life, faith in God will smooth out the rough paths, will eliminate the difficulties.

But you will in the course of time become disappointed and possibly become disillusioned when that doesn’t happen because that is not the whole story.

Let me read on the next verses. Middle of Hebrews 11:35:

“Others were tortured and refused to be released, so that they might gain a better resurrection.

“Some faced jeers and flogging, while still others were chained and put in prison.

“They were stoned; they were sawed in two; they were put to death by the sword. They went about in sheepskins and goatskins, destitute, persecuted and mistreated – the world was not worthy of them. They wandered in deserts and mountains, and in caves and holes in the ground.”

I find 18 descriptions there of discomfort, of brokenness, of suffering and of death. And it looks, when you look at that list of people, that these were the people for whom everything went wrong.

But you know what the next verse says? Hebrews 11:39:

“These were all commended for their faith, yet none of them received what had been promised.”

In other words, there was a much bigger picture going on than the picture that started and finished with their personal lives and personal experience. There is a bigger picture being painted on a bigger canvas than simply themselves, than simply ourselves.

None of them received what was promised, it says, but they were able to look beyond their own limited span to see “there is a much bigger picture here of which I am a part.”

Now most of us find it difficult to see the value of things beyond our own experience of them, beyond our own life span. We want everything to be within my life span, that I can appreciate and see and be glad about, and looking beyond that seeing, you know, we want to play center stage when really we have just a cameo role, is the picture being given there.

A few years ago, when we were in Israel we were down at the Dead Sea, which is the lowest place on earth, more than 300 metres below sea level. And the only inlet into the Dead Sea is the River Jordan and the only outlet is by evaporation. And there has been for centuries a fine balance between input and evaporation, so it stayed pretty well static.

But in recent years Israel, on the west of the River Jordan has taken off water to irrigate, and Jordan, the country of Jordan on the east side, has taken off water.

So, by the time the River Jordan gets down to the Dead Sea it is little more than just a trickle. And so, the Dead Sea is evaporating. And I first went there 45 years ago and it is hugely smaller now than it was when I first saw it.

And Hilary and I were talking to a guide we were with down there and he said that there is the possibility of piping water in from the Red Sea to the Dead Sea - have to come up or through mountains to get there.

He said, “But the cost of it is so high, the desalinization process it would have to go through is so expensive,” he said, “no one wants to take it on because they will never live to see the completion of it.

I thought, how interesting. If people feel they cannot see the completion of it they don’t want to take something on.

And yet a person who is going to live by faith in God is signing up for a story they may never know the ending of because we, as I just said, have a cameo role on a big stage.

And these men and women who equally lived by faith, who had as much trust in God as the big story people did, and yet what they experienced in this life was only tough and hard and difficult.

We live in an instant culture and so these things are hard for us to look beyond the instant and give value to what we don’t yet see and may never experience.

Where we live, they are building new houses all the time. They put up, you know, a row of houses and you go by one morning and there is a whole manicured lawn that wasn’t there the day before. It has just been rolled out and nobody today would till the ground and plant some grass seeds and fertilize them and watch it come up little by little because that’s not what we do in our day and age. That’s not what we want. We want it now.

You can cook oatmeal now in 60 seconds – take much of the goodness out of it in the process, but time is a higher value than quality in the day in which we live.

You can sign up on a dating site and not have to go out and meet people and all the hassle of going around trying to make introductions – sign up; they will find a profile; they will send you one you can meet; know exactly why you are meeting because “we are both looking desperately.”

You can bypass all the hard work. You can take a pill to lose weight, which is a lot easier than not overeating – if they work, I don’t know.

There was a credit card advert in England that had as its slogan, “Take the waiting out of wanting.”

You notice how many adverts are on now that talk about “why wait because you can have it now.” You go into debt of course but avoiding debt is not a huge value either.

But you see if we are going to live and work with God, we have got to get rid of that kind of instant mentality and say, “As I give my life to God, as He begins to work in my life, as I trust Him, there are things we will see along the way that will encourage us, yes.”

But what is the big picture? Some of us will never know. Some of us, of course, may see some exciting things, but it is the bigger plan that we become part of when we live by faith in God that says, “God, You have the right and the freedom to do what You will in my life and with my life and through my life.

And so even those who seem successful in the earlier part of this chapter, in Hebrews 11:13, he says of them,

“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 the earth.”

And that was a different verse than the verse I read just now. The verse I read first was at the end of these seemingly failed lives that had been broken. This one was after the seemingly successful lives. They didn’t receive what was promised either because there was a bigger picture that was at work.

There is a verse - I quoted this to you before – I think it is a great verse in Isaiah 5:19:

“Woe to those who say, ‘Let God hurry, let him hasten his work that we may see it. Let it approach, let the plan of the Holy One of Israel come, so we may know it.’”

Woe, he says, to say, “Let God hurry, let Him finish what He is doing.” Why? “So I may see it; so I may know it.”

No, he says, if you cry out for that then woe to you because you may never see it and God may never hurry. In fact God works slowly through history.

So that’s my first thing – the relationship of faith to circumstances.

The second thing that I think comes out in this chapter is the relationship of faith to character. What I mean by that is that in this list of people who live by faith there are quite a few rogues.

Jacob, you remember; he was a real rascal, certainly in the earlier part of his life. He turned right at the end.

Rahab is listed here. Rahab ran a brothel in Jericho. Joshua sent a couple of spies to find out what was going on in Jericho and they stayed in her brothel, which would have aroused least attention because men were forever coming to stay in her brothel, so no one looked twice.

And then they left and two men came and said, “There are some spies here in Jericho. Did they stay in your house?”

She said, “No, not at all, don’t know anything about them.”

Again, there were forever people knocking on her door saying, “Did so and so come to your house?” Denial was the normal procedure.

So, she lies to them and eventually the information the spies had got enabled them to come and conquer the city.

And Rahab, the prostitute, the brothel keeper, is promoted into Hebrews 11 as a woman of faith.

Samson, you read his story; there is nothing good in Samson. He was a bully; he was violent; he was a womanizer. In the last event in his life, he called on God and as a result God answered and he died in the process. It’s a messy story. People talk about the story of Samson because several chapters on Samson are just what not to be, what to avoid, how not to behave, how to dodge temptations. And yet he is suddenly elevated in Hebrews 11 to the catalogue of people living by faith.

Jephthah is mentioned; he celebrated his victory in the battle with the Ammonites by sacrificing his own young daughter in gratitude, sacrificing his daughter. What a fool! But he is up here in this catalogue of people.

You know the Bible never flatters its heroes. It always and only tells the truth about them. And the Bible, and the truth should I say, is as you read through the Bible, you see the truth is a mixture usually of great acts of faith along with pathetic acts of failure. And they co-exist together.

Now I am going to ask you a question in a moment – which do you think is more important, faith or character? Now think about that for a moment. I am going to have some audience participation at this point because I am going to ask you to say yes, that faith is more important than character or that character is more important than faith.

So, if you think character is more important than faith just raise your hand. (You think there is a trick in this don’t you?)

If you think faith is more important than character, raise your hand. Wow, you have got it! I usually ask these questions in such a way that the majority get it wrong because that is how you teach people. But the majority got it right.

But it is a very important thing. If character is more important than faith, then your Christian life may become little more than a course in behavior modification and your Christian life may become a little narcissistic. How am I doing? Am I improving?

And those who make character the goal of the Christian life tend to gravitate towards legalism. And legalism always produces judgementalism.

But if faith is more important than character, putting your trust in God is the goal, being reconciled to God, enjoying a relationship with Him is the goal, relationship to Him is the goal, as a by-product character is going to change.

That’s why when it speaks of character change in Scripture often it speaks of it as being a consequence of something. For instance, it speaks of the fruit of the Spirit and lists love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. If it is a fruit, it has behind it a life source that causes that fruit to appear and grow. It has a root.

And so, these characteristics which are part of the Christian life, that we grow in them, they become part of our experience, is not because this is my goal, I am resolving to be more loving and resolving to be more kind, I am resolving…we make those resolutions on January the 1st and we’ve got to ditch them on January the 3rd.

This is relating to God, putting our trust in God, bringing God into every facet of your life. And as a result you find that the fruit flows out from that.

When you look at Rahab, who I just mentioned, in her sordid lifestyle which was all part of the culture, the Canaanite culture of which she was a part, she had seen evidence that Israel’s God was the God. Because she said to the spies when they came and stayed with her – I will read you a bit of what she said in Joshua Chapter 2:9-12,

“I know the LORD has given this land to you and that a great fear of you has fallen on us, so that all who live in this country are melting in fear because of you.

“We have heard how the LORD dried up the water of the Red Sea for you when you came out of Egypt, and what you did to Sihon and Og, the two kings of the Amorites east of the Jordan, whom you completely destroyed.

“When we heard of it, our hearts melted and everyone’s courage failed because of you, for the LORD your God is God in heaven above and on the earth below.

“Now then, please swear to me by the LORD that you will show kindness to my family, because I have shown kindness to you.”

So, she says to these two men, “We have been living in Jericho for donkey’s years and for forty years there have been rumours coming across the desert, ‘there is a nomadic tribe heading your way.”

And that nomadic tribe had crossed the Red Sea by the parting of the waters in an incredibly miraculous situation and they also talked about the kings at Og and Sihon (and that was just the year before this). “And we know that your God,” she said “is the God in heaven above and God on the earth below.”

Now you know someone is really doing business with God when they know God is God in heaven above and on the earth below.

There are a lot of people who know God is God in heaven above, but they don’t experience very much. She said, “I recognize your God is God in heaven (sovereign) but He is God on the earth below. He is the God who is going to walk into Jericho when you walk into Jericho.”

“So please,” she said “I want to be on His side.”

And what do you think they said to her?

“Well, Rahab, you know, now that we have been in your house, you know, it’s not very pretty is it?”

No, no. We come just exactly as we are and when there is that spark of faith that looks up to God, He ignites it.

Don’t worry about your character; that will take care of itself in due course.

But I think because we tend to place more emphasis on character than faith we modify our behavior the best we can but live equally a lifeless Christian life as far as experience of God is concerned.

That’s why you and I need not be intimidated by our failures or intimidated by our defeats. We all have them. We don’t experience God on the basis of character – that’s never a criterion in Scripture.

We experience God on the basis of trust that we put in Him.

And so, we come with all our brokenness, we come with our defeat and say, “God, here I am, mess, everything and I want to trust You, I want to put my faith in You. I want to expect that You are with me and in me and work in my situation.”

And the third thing I wanted to mention, more briefly, is the relationship of faith to confidence, you know, how confident you have to be to trust God.

Sometimes this phrase “living by faith” implies some ambiguity, you know, the very word “faith” sometimes conveys uncertainty, ambiguity, keep your fingers crossed. It’s a lot of guess work here, and we are flying blind.

But remember the validity of our faith is determined by the object of our faith. And therefore, it is not how much faith we might muster up, how much we might whip ourselves up into believing something; it is how well do we know the object of our faith, how well do we know God.

Because I will make a statement and I will explain this: the more confident we are in the object of our faith, the less conscious we are of the exercise of the faith.

The more confident we are in the object of our faith, the less conscious we are in the exercise of our faith.

Let me give you an illustration to help you to understand that.

If you had the choice of driving from here to Vancouver – it’s four and a half thousand kilometres – and you were given the choice of one of two vehicles in which to make the journey, and one vehicle was a brand new BMW and the other vehicle was a 1965 Volkswagen Beetle, and you were asked which of these two vehicles would you like to take, and you chose the 1965 Volkswagen Beetle, I can guarantee you this: somebody will talk to you about your faith.

They will probably say, “Wow, have you got a lot of faith!”

What are they saying? They are saying, “I don’t trust your car.” Because the less confident you are in the object of your faith the less conscious you are of the faith itself.

If you chose the BMW nobody would talk to you about your faith. They wouldn’t say, “Man, you have got a lot of faith in that BMW.” No, because the more confident you are in the object of your faith the less conscious you are of the faith itself.

And that’s why, when you say of somebody, “Well he’s a man of great faith, she’s a woman of great faith,” what you are saying is, “I don’t trust the God they trust so I am impressed with their faith.”

But the more confident they are and you are the less conscious you are of the faith element.

And of course, it takes a while to become confident, it takes risks to become confident. We learn most things about God not by reading the Bible – that’s good, that’s where we get our understanding – but our experience of God is where we learn most things about Him.

And in that experience is often situations we don’t know which way it’s going to go. We don’t know if God is going to intervene or not and we discover that He does and we say, “Aha, I can trust Him now.”

A number of years ago now I did a bungee jump off a bridge in New Zealand 36 metres down into a ravine. I won’t say how it came about really – it’s too long a story, but we were making a TV program and we needed somebody to do a bungee jump to illustrate a particular point.

And the guy who was producing the program used to run a bungee jump company. So I said to him, “That would be a good idea to have a bungee jump as an example.”

He said, “Yeah great,” so he got the arrangement for it. And I thought he was going to do the jump. When we got there he said, “No, no, you have got to jump.”

I said, “Have you never heard of stunt men?”

He said, “You are going to do it. We are going to film you. We are going to recognize you.”

And I had to go and stand on this plank like walking the plank, you know, on a pirate ship out from the side of this bridge. They first put a harness on my ankles that has a certain amount of elastic and then it’s rope.

And I said, “How do I know if this is going to be safe?”

They said, “We could drop off a bus off here and it would bounce back with this elastic.”

I said, “Really?”

He said, “You see all the many thousands of strands of elastic which were making up the cord?”

I said, “Yes.”

He said, “If one of those strands is broken, by law we have to discard it and get another one – one little strand.”

So, I had to go and stand out on this thing. I had all the evidence this was supposed to work. It’s worked before. I watched somebody do one before me.

But I tell you, it took all the courage in the world to fall.

He said, “Don’t look down. Anybody who looks down doesn’t fall. Just keep looking out. There’s a tree on a hill over there – just look at that tree and I will count you down, 321, bungee…”

He said to me, “Do you want to touch the river?”

I said, “I don’t want to go anywhere near the river.”

He said, “Well, I’ll take you to three feet.”

You know they weigh you and they can be pretty exact about that.

And he said, “When you are three feet from the river you are not going to go in so just relax but then the elastic will have reached its limit and you are going to come back up, so you flap around for a while in the breeze.

But entrusting myself entirely to that rope, I didn’t know – I mean I knew the theory; I didn’t know the experience – and when I jumped, as the guy said to me afterwards, “If you do it once, you will want to do it twice because you enjoyed it so much.”

Well, I didn’t do it twice and my wife has put a ban on my doing it again ever anyway, though I haven’t put that ban on her. So we’ll see what happens one day.

But actually, my daughter Hannah did a bungee jump at Victoria Falls between Zimbabwe and Zambia. There’s a bridge over the falls there and it’s one of the most scenic places in the world to do a bungee jump.

And they told her that they could drop 16 elephants on that rope and it would be safe. So she did her jump.

Just a few weeks later there was an Australian girl who also did a jump and the rope snapped just as she was at the lowest part and she went into the water only a few feet from the water but there were crocodiles in the water and she get to a little island and got rescued. So sometimes you put your faith in a weak object.

But the point is this: there are those of us in situations in our lives – I don’t know where you are; don’t know what is going on in your life, don’t know your work life, your home life, family life – there are situations where you say, “I can’t cope with this; is God relevant? Is He alive? Is He interested? I am going to trust Him. I am going to put my faith in God and say, ‘God I give myself to you in this situation’ and trust Him.”

Many of these folks in Hebrews 11 were fearful but they put their trust in God and God operated.

And one last illustration, then I am finishing. If you are a strong faith “nouner”, you get all the facts right, that’s good, that’s important, that’s very important; you understand Christian doctrine. But that in itself won’t do you any good.

If I knew there was an aircraft leaving from Toronto to fly to Vancouver; if I knew that and believed that, that wouldn’t get me to Vancouver. I have actually got to get on the plane.

Because believing something in itself doesn’t do you any good.

On the other hand, believing in something in itself doesn’t do you any harm. If I was told this glass was full of arsenic and that one sip I would be dead on the floor here, I might believe it but it wouldn’t do me any harm.

What you believe in itself doesn’t do you any good, doesn’t do you any harm. It will do you good if you got on the plane, do me harm if I… (It’s water).

You can believe with absolute orthodoxy the Scriptures, God, Jesus Christ and live as though they were non-existent unless you are willing to say, “Because what I believe I am going to trust. I am going to put my faith in God, put my faith in Jesus Christ.” And the act of faith itself then becomes the evidence of His reality, for Hebrews 11:1 started,

“Faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see.”

What makes it certain? The fact you have exercised faith and you look back and you say, “God, thank You; You were present there, You did that, You guided me.”

And the more you experience Him, the more you will trust Him. And the more you trust Him the more His work in you will deal with character, will transform you.

Does that make sense? Let’s pray together.

Father, we are grateful this morning that Your Word doesn’t just put our heads into the clouds in some detached remote cerebral way but it puts our feet on the ground, enables us to live in the real world with all the real issues that we do face, all the real threats and fears because You Yourself are our strength, You Yourself are our life, You Yourself are the one who carries us through.

And I pray that where we don’t know You in that way that we will come to know You in that way and experience You present and active.