"Then Faith of Abraham" - Hebrews 11:8-16

All right. Got a Bible. We're going to be back in Hebrews 11.

Do you have a hero growing up? I don't mean like your mom or your dad,

but I mean like something you watched on TV.

Like for me, it was the White Power Ranger for a little bit.

I know that really doubts me, or not doubts me, but dates me a little bit.

Like you don't know who the White Power Ranger is. Maybe it was,

I don't know, John Wayne or I don't know. Who was you? Who?

Gene Autry. I don't know who that is. See?

Cleen Eastwood. There you go. We have different heroes.

And I can remember, you know, I had a few in my actual life.

I remember one time I was probably 15 and I don't know, maybe not legally allowed to work.

So for legal purposes, we'll say I was 16 and I was going after job sites and

my dad wanted me to work with some of the guys that he really respected.

And there was a guy named Terry and Terry was the best carpenter to this day

I've ever been around. He could build anything.

He could do anything. He could hang any door, fix any problem.

And really the problem with me working with Terry was I left working with Terry

that summer thinking I will never be as good as he is at what I just watched him do.

No matter how many times he explained it to me, no matter how many times he

showed me, I just knew I was in the presence of greatness.

Now I learned all kinds of fun words with Terry and all kinds of fun stories.

But Terry to this day is still the best carpenter I've ever been around.

The problem with heroes though is that's the complex we get is we keep thinking that's who I need to be.

That's what I need to be like. And so when we read our Bibles,

we do that. We read the story of David and we go, I need to be David.

I need to go kill all my Goliaths or I need to be Moses and lead people out

of slavery into the promised land.

Or I need to be Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego and I need to stand up to idols

and stand in the flames and.

And as we get to Hebrews 11 and he's going over all these heroes,

especially as he writes to a group of Hebrews, this would have been their heroes.

The point he's trying to make, like he's been making throughout the whole book,

is not be like the heroes.

The point he's trying to make is Jesus is better than your heroes,

right? Jesus is greater than your heroes.

In fact, Jesus is the hero of the story.

And one of the tough things of being a Christian, not really the tough thing,

but maybe the cornerstone of it is realizing you're not the hero.

You're not the hero of your story, right? You aren't the one who's going to

do all of these wonderful things.

You aren't the one that's going to accomplish everything you think you should.

And the comfort that Hebrews 11 is going to show us is neither was Abraham,

neither was Sarah, neither was Moses, neither was any of these people that you revere.

And so every single hero we have in the Bible is really just a shadow of the

true hero of the Bible, Jesus Christ.

This morning, we're going to zero in on Abraham and what his faith has to teach us.

So as we do that, would you read me? It's Hebrews 11, 8 through 16.

We're just going to read the whole thing.

It says, by faith, remember last week we said faith was a gift given by God.

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.

By faith, he went to live in the land of promise, as in a foreign land,

living in tents with Isaac and Jacob, heirs with him of the same promise.

For he was looking forward to the city that has foundations,

whose designer and builder is God.

By faith, Sarah herself received power to conceive. even when she was past the

age, since she considered him faithful who had promised that.

Therefore, from one man and him as good as dead, always good to describe our

heroes that way, were born descendants as many as the stars of heaven and as

many as the innumerable grains of sand by the seashore.

Verse 13, these all died in faith,

not having received the things promised, but having seen them and greeted them

from afar, and having acknowledged that they were strangers and exiles on the

earth, for people who speak thus make it clear that they are seeking a homeland.

If they had been thinking of the land from which they had gone out,

they would have had opportunity to return.

But as it is, they desire a better country that is a heavenly one.

Therefore, For God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared

for them a city. He's prepared for them a city.

The first question I want to ask you this morning is, where does Abraham's faith

come from? Who is Abraham?

We really don't know a ton about his childhood. In fact, we don't know really anything.

We don't know what his family was like. We don't know what his home life was like.

We get this little snippet, though, in Joshua 24, verse 2, that I think gives

Joshua 24:2

you a clue as to what it would have been like to grow up with Abraham.

It says, and Joshua said to all the people, at this point in the book of Joshua,

he's going to renew the covenant with all of God's people, but he begins like this.

Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel.

What is God going to remind them? He says, long ago, your fathers lived beyond the Euphrates.

Terah, the father of Abraham and of Nahor. So Terah is Abraham's dad.

It says, and they served other gods.

Abraham's family served other gods. Abraham grew up serving other gods?

That doesn't sound like Abraham.

Now when Abraham was called in Genesis, he was 75 years old.

Again, we don't get a clear picture of whether Abraham worshiped other gods,

but there's a really good chance that he at least grew up doing that.

That he grew up in a family that, yeah, they knew who Yahweh was.

They knew who the God of Israel was.

They knew who the God of creation was. They knew that God, but he was just one of many gods.

And when he fit their needs, they worshiped him. But when the Egyptian gods

fit their needs, they worshiped him. And when the other gods fit their needs, they worshiped him.

They served other gods. This is the kind of family that Abraham grew up in.

The reason I say that is he wasn't groomed for the position.

Abraham didn't come from a place where he was really watched and made sure that

he understood everything, understood everything, that he knew who God was and

knew what God was like and knew all the things that God would do.

Abraham grew up in a family that served other gods.

We get no indication in the scriptures that Abraham was some amazing guy that

God looked down on and said, man, this is the guy. He's the one I need.

He's trained. He's ready. He's young.

He's strong. He's going to be able to have kids? No, he looks down at an Abraham

who had worshiped other gods, who was 75 years old, as Hebrews tells us, is as good as dead.

And God's like, that's the guy. That's the one, right?

God has every resume of every human being who has ever lived and who's ever

on earth at the time in Genesis 12 and says, this guy gets it. He's the one.

So what happens to Abraham? Well, God happens to Abraham. Faith happens to Abraham.

I remember faith is a gift.

Read Joshua 24 verse two, this is what Joshua 24 verse three says.

So it ends with, they worshiped other gods.

Joshua 24 three starts like this. Then I took your father Abraham from beyond

the river and led him through all the land of Canaan.

And I made his offspring many and I gave him Isaac.

What happens to Abraham? God says, I took him, I led him, I made his offspring

many, and I gave him Isaac.

That's what happens to Abraham. Again, who's the hero of Abraham's story? It's not Abraham.

What is the writer of Hebrews trying to get his listeners to understand?

That Abraham is not the one you should be looking at if you wanna make it out alive.

If you wanna have a life of faith, if you wanna do what God calls you to do,

if you wanna stand up to the persecution that is coming to your church,

then you look to Abraham not as an example necessarily of what to do,

but mainly look at Abraham as who was Abraham's hero?

Who did Abraham look to? Who did Abraham trust in?

And the Bible makes it clear, Joshua lays it out very succinctly,

that Abraham grew up in a family that worshiped false gods, and then God shows

up and takes him and leads him and fulfills his promises to him.

And we'll see this over and over again as we walk after Hebrews 11,

that it is not the people who made themselves great so that God would use them.

It was there is a great God who is willing to use sinful people to do great things.

And it's a good time to pause and ask, is this how we think of ourselves?

Is this how we think of our story?

Is this how you think of your story on a personal level? Is this how we think

of our story as Trinity Bible Church?

Again, growing up, I remember watching Space Jam as a kid and thinking,

I wish I was Michael Jordan and could stretch my arm out from half court and dunk it.

I remember watching Walker, Texas Ranger with my dad and being like,

dude, if I could do a spinning roundhouse and kick this guy through a screen

door, people would know that I meant business.

And the truth is I didn't really want to be able to do those things.

I wanted the glory that those things offered.

I wanted people to look at me and think, how awesome is this guy?

How smart is he? How much has he accomplished?

How strong is he? I wanted the glory.

And that's the monster that's naturally within all of us.

It's never wrong to want to accomplish great things.

I think especially in the culture we're in, that anybody that's looked at as

someone who tries to accomplish great things or somebody who really tries and

puts themselves to a task and works really hard to do things is almost looked down on as if to say,

well, who are you to think that you're better than other people?

It's like, who are you to try and accomplish these things?

You need to be neat and mild at everything you do. You need to make sure that

everything you do is so humble and so kind.

And if you offend anybody, you need to make sure you say you're sorry and be really nice.

Right. The issue is not ambition. The issue is not trying to accomplish great things.

The issue is why are you trying to do those things?

You trying to do any of those things so that people might look at you and say,

look how awesome you are.

Look how much you've accomplished. Look how much you've done.

Or are we trying to accomplish things so that when people look at us,

they might say, who do you know?

Who's God? Do you know? Who is it that you do this for?

Like Abraham would say later in his life, God is the one who's done everything in my life, right?

Because if not, there's two ditches that we'll end up in. Number one is we will

try and we will fail. We will find ourselves spiritually depressed and distraught.

If we go glory seeking, if we go out and say, I am going to do this on my own,

I am going to accomplish these things, right?

We're going to build Trinity Bible Church and we're going to do this for ourselves.

We will find out quickly that we won't do everything right, that we'll fail,

that we'll sin against the Lord and we'll sin against each other sometimes.

And if we think that we're the ones that need to do everything.

We'll find out that we're just not the heroes that we thought we were.

But maybe even more dangerous than that, we might succeed.

The truth is there's easier ways to build a church, to grow a church.

There's tried and true methods. There's things that you know will work.

There's certain ways of evangelism. There's certain ways of doing

things that you know can draw a crowd in you know

can bring people in you and i both know how this works and we begin to think

hey maybe we are actually heroes of course god would use us have you seen how

awesome we are right of course god needs me have you seen how talented we are

have you seen what we've accomplished.

Again, we learned from Abraham this morning that God is the hero of Abraham's

story. And if we're to be faithful, he needs to be the hero of ours.

He alone is the one who deserves the glory of anything we accomplish.

Anything that we do, he leads us, he guides us, he supports us, he strengthens us.

Abraham's faith, our faith is a gift given by God.

And whatever works that faith produces, the glory of those works belongs to God alone.

That's where Abraham's faith comes from. Number two, how does Abraham's faith work itself out?

So we've received this gift of faith, right? We studied that in Ephesians 2

last week, that faith is a gift.

But once we receive the gift, our faith should be lived out.

The book of James makes this clear in multiple places, that faith without works is dead.

James says, show me your faith without works, and I'll basically show you that

your faith is non-existent.

A quote often attributed to Martin Luther, but it's probably somebody else's

quote that's attributed to him.

Because if you attribute quotes to famous people, they get remembered.

But the quote goes, faith alone saves us, but a faith that saves is never alone.

And we see that in Abraham's life.

Abraham leaves his country and his family. This would have been a massive undertaking.

People don't just move like we move, right? Their family is their protection.

Their family is their provider. The family is everything to this culture.

I forgot to say, not only do you need to leave the place that you've lived for

75 years, the place where all of your family is, the place where all your friends

are, the place where you're comfortable,

where they've got your favorite restaurant and the favorite fish and your favorite

everything, you need to leave.

Leave and go where? Well, go live as an alien in a faraway land.

For you will live not in houses that are comfortable with your family who you

know in familiar places, but you will live in tents.

And the people that surround you will be people that you do not know.

The people that look at you will not think that you are blessed and highly favored.

They will think you are weird and stupid.

Can you imagine if a random Canaanite would have met Abram sleeping in a tent

and said, why are you here? Did you get kicked out?

Like, did you murder somebody? Did you kill somebody? Did you do something that

made your family leave? And he was like, no, my God told me to leave and come here.

And they're like, okay, well, where'd you come from? He's like,

oh, I had a family. We had houses. We had livestock.

We had everything going for us. Had a really nice piece of property.

And that Canaanite's going to leave there and go tell his friends like,

hey, I just met this crazy person in the woods.

He's living in a tent. He said he was from a wealthy family and he chose to leave.

And you'd imagine the Canaanite might come back and ask Abraham,

hey, I never asked you why you left.

And Abraham's going to go, because God promised me he would take care of us.

That's it. That's the whole reason he did it.

Because God came to me and said he would make a nation out of me.

And that came, that would go, do you know how old you like the,

you know, it's like, this is my wife, Sarah. And she's like, you know how old she is.

Do you know how anatomy works? Like, you know, you know, like when,

when we see things like this, it should arise some thoughts in our mind.

Like, oh, this is what it looks like to be aliens in the world,

to act in ways and to do things and to live in ways, to spend our money in ways,

to spend our time in ways, to treat people in ways that the rest of the world

looks at and goes, that's really weird.

That is not how I would do that. That does not make any sense.

But that's what it means to live as aliens. It means to live in a way that says,

listen, And all I have is the promises that God gave me. And that's enough.

Hebrews 11, one, just a reminder says, now faith is the assurance of things

hoped or the conviction of things not seen.

If you write in your Bible very much, I don't know, I mark all over mine,

but just write promises over the conviction of things not seen.

That's what those are. You can't see a promise. Can't put your eyes on it. You can't lay hold of it.

But more importantly right here, I want you to see how God works.

Yes, Abraham's faith is working itself out in obedience, but look how God works.

He doesn't just say to Abraham, this is the command, this is what you should do.

Here's what you're supposed to do. Here's my instructions. Now you go do it or else.

Now I have no problem with saying God commands us to do things.

I have no problem with saying God requires obedience. Both of those things are true.

But the issue is if we miss that there's a promise in the middle, we miss the point.

Doesn't say command and obey. He says command and a promise.

God did this for Abraham. He says, go from your country and your kindred.

I will show you where to go and I will make of you a great nation.

Your offspring will outnumber the stars in the sky. He literally builds the

people of Israel out of an old man and an old woman who's barren.

The truth is he's still doing that for you and me. He doesn't just show up in

your life and say, this is how you live.

This is how you live. This is how you spend your money. This is how you spend

your time. This is what you spend your Sundays doing.

This is how you raise your kids. This is how you live. This is what you do.

I'm God. I get to tell you what to do. He has left us with so many promises to take hold of.

As we walk as foreigners and as aliens in this land, as we live our lives in

a place where living for the Lord doesn't make any sense.

He's given us promises, just a few.

I had a list of 37.

I'm going to give you six, but I'll give you the 37 if you want later.

I just didn't think you want me to read that much. So he promises to give us

wisdom if we ask in James 1.5.

He promises to provide you a way out of any temptation in 1 Corinthians 10.13.

Promises that your salvation is secure, that no one will snatch you out of his hand in John 10, 28-29.

He promises to never leave you or forsake you in Hebrews 13, 5.

He promises to finish the good work he has begun in you.

Or I would say it this way, for the sake of our text, he has promised not only

to give you faith, but to continue to keep you faithful until the end in Philippians 1.6,

and he promises to come back to secure his people in Luke 12.40.

Listen, Abraham and Sarah are examples of what happens when faith is truly lived out.

When faith grabs hold, not of what it can see, but what it can't see.

When faith grabs hold of the promises that God has given us and people say,

I will trust you. I will believe you.

Does that mean that you will do it perfectly. Well, no. What Hebrews leaves

out, but what every person would have known in Hebrews 11 is,

yeah, Abraham and Sarah are great, but what about Hagar?

What about that little blip?

When Sarah loses faith that she might have a child and Abraham takes advantage

of that and there's another child born, why doesn't Hebrews mention that? Well, I can tell you why.

Not the point of the story. He mentions it in other places.

I think it'll become more clear here at the end. The point of Hebrews here is

to say, listen, these people were not perfect, but they had their eyes on the promises of God.

They walked towards him. They believed that he was building them something better.

He said, I trust you. I believe you. And ultimately, I will obey you. I will obey you.

Listen, there's no way around obedience in the Christian life.

Mature Christian is to obey what God has asked you to do.

You can only bounce around so long and say, Jesus loves me, Jesus loves me,

Jesus loves me, but not obey him. What's up?

Listen to the words of Jesus. This is at the Last Supper. Jesus has his disciples

crowded around him and he says this to them.

He says, if you love me, you will keep my commandments.

Later on, John, one of the disciples who would have heard that,

says this in 1 John 5, 2 through 3,

by this we know that we love the children of God, when we love God and obey his commandments,

for this is the love of God. How would you finish that sentence?

This is an interesting case study in how you think about the Bible,

for this is the love of God.

What is the love of God? John says this, that we keep his commandments.

That's what love of God looks like. That we keep his commandments.

There is, for whatever reason, an aversion to saying that obedience to God is

a requirement for loving him.

That as long as we feel like we love him, as long as our intentions are really

good, and as long as we really think that we love God, that that's enough.

The Bible is so clear.

To love God is to obey God. To know God is to obey God.

To have faith in God is to obey Him. Now, never perfectly.

I'm not saying you have a Hagar running around in your life. You might. I don't know.

Like, David, I'm not saying you have a Bathsheba running around in your life. You might. I don't know.

But every single one of us has sins and struggles that we look back on and go,

I cannot believe I did that.

I cannot believe I acted that way. I cannot believe I said those things.

And you may be sitting in here right now. I don't want to assume anything.

You may have something like that in your life right now.

A secret sin, something that no one else knows about, maybe some pride in your

life, something that's going on, some anger, some hate, some distaste,

some want of revenge in your life that you're holding onto, some bitterness.

Even now, the same John that tells us that the love of God is that we keep his

commandments is the same John that says, if you say you have no sin in your

life, you're a liar and the truth of God is not in you.

John is not saying that if you don't obey perfectly, you don't love God.

What John is saying is, if you don't obey at all, you don't love God.

But you can't just say, I love God. You can't just say, I feel really cool about

him. I feel like he's good.

He doesn't just stop though. He doesn't stop with that we keep his commandments.

Let me read the whole sentence again. For this is the love of God,

that we keep his commandments. And here's the kicker.

And his commandments are not burdensome.

They're not burdensome.

That's a lot harder. It's one thing for God to ask me to obey him.

It's quite another for the Bible to tell me that not only should I obey him, I should want to.

That's what the love of God is. So we see in Abraham and in Sarah as a man and

a woman who have come to know God and to love God, what flows out of that is a obedience to his word.

The attitude of a true faith in God, a true love for God, isn't just that we do what he asked us to do.

It's that we do it and say, this was better.

This is better. This is a better way to live. This is a better way to do things.

And when people go, why do you think that? Why do you believe that?

You simply go, because I know the one who's telling me to do it.

Because there will be certainly times where you are asked to do things,

when God calls you to do things, when he's asked you to do things in his word,

where you go, you know, it'd be a lot easier if I didn't do those things.

If I didn't forgive, right? If I just held onto this bitterness,

that would be a lot easier. It's a lot more fun.

If I didn't give with a generous attitude, my money and my stuff and my time,

if I just didn't let people into my life, life would be a whole lot easier. Right?

Calls us to different things. He calls us to live again as aliens in this world.

We've all had a boss. Maybe you've had a parent who every time they told you

to do something, you hated it.

Didn't matter what it was. If they asked you to get them a glass of water,

you hated it because you didn't like them.

The commands that God gives us, the obedience that he asked us to give do not

flow from do this or else.

They flow from remember my promises.

Ultimately, at the end, Abram would say, God, you called me out of my idle serving family.

You led me in all the travels as you promised. You made my offspring many as you promised.

You gave me Isaac in my old age when I was good and dead as you promised.

Lord, I trust you and I will go where you say to go. I will do what you say to do.

And I will die when you say it's time to die.

The same way we would say, God, you came to me while I was dead in sin and gave me life.

God, you took my dry bones and placed flesh upon them and placed a new heart inside of me.

You gave me ears to hear your word. You gave me eyes to see.

You gave me a new life in you.

God, I was an orphan, lost, happily walking towards eternity,

separated from you in hell, and you have led me and kept me and guided me as

a father, and I will trust you whatever the cost, wherever you ask me to go,

whatever you ask me to do.

That is what faith looks like lived out.

Say that this morning because you may not be called to be Abraham.

In fact, I can promise you, you are not. You are not.

You were not called to be David. David was called to be David.

You're not called to be Enoch. Enoch was called to be Enoch.

You're not called to be one of the apostles. The apostles were called to be the apostles.

You are called to be whoever God has called you to be.

You are called to be faithful wherever God has called you to be faithful.

And the exact same God that delivered Abraham, that delivered Moses,

that delivered David, that delivered Abel, that delivered all of your heroes

in the faith, he is no different for you.

He does not love you less. He does not value you less.

He does not think of you less. He does not give less of himself to you because

it doesn't seem that your faith or what you're accomplishing for him is greater.

No, the same God that Abraham speaks of is the same God that you know.

Being a faithful father, faithful mother, faithful church member,

a faithful friend, all of those things matter just as much.

They mean just as much.

And in many times, they are just as hard.

So can you say that this morning? Can you say that you are trusting him,

that you are obeying him?

Or is there a place in your life that you at this point would say,

God, I can't let you have that?

Have that. It hurts too much. God, if people found out, they wouldn't think of me the same way.

God, you don't know what that person did to me, how they wronged me.

You don't understand how much it would hurt me to forgive them and move on.

God, I just want this glory for myself. All of those things are things every

single person struggles with.

I would just encourage you, if you've received faith from God.

Let Abraham be an example that you will stumble and fall, but you can trust the Lord to keep you.

When you hear his command, trust his promise and obey his voice.

Let's close here. What is the motivation of Abraham's faith?

We've seen where Abraham's faith comes from. It's a gift from God.

We've seen how it lives itself out in his life in obedience.

What's the motivation for Abraham's face. It's simple. It's the promise of something better.

It's the promise of something better.

Verse 14 says, for people who speak thus make it clear that they are seeking a homeland.

If they had been thinking of that land from which they had gone out,

they would have had an opportunity to return. In other words,

what's keeping Abraham from going back home?

Nothing but God's promises.

Nothing's stopping him. What's keeping you from just going back into the world,

living how you want to live, doing what you want to do, getting your Sunday mornings back, right?

Getting that money back that you're giving to somebody else,

giving that time back that you're spending with other people,

receiving all the glory for all the hard work you put in. What's keeping you

from going back to those things?

Well, I hope it's the promises of God because the call to go back to the comfort

that the world offers is always alive and well. Man, I feel that all the time.

Days where I just want my stuff to be my stuff. I want my life to be my life.

I want whatever I make, whatever comes my way to make me the most comfortable

and happy that I can possibly be.

I want revenge for those that have wronged me, and I want them to be hung up

on a string and everyone to know how awful it was.

I want to wake up and spend my time however I choose, and the truth is there's

just days where I just want to be the hero of my own story on my own terms and

receive all the glory that I think I am due.

What has kept me from that? Well, God has kept me from that.

His faithfulness has kept me from that. I wish I could tell you that I mustered

up all the courage to do anything the Lord has asked me to do.

But every time I do something and people will look at that and go,

man, I can't believe you did that for the Lord. it's like, I can promise you, I didn't want to do that.

I didn't want to go into ministry at all.

When I told my mom that I was going to ministry, she's like,

you just want to be broke the rest of your life? And I'm like, I guess, I don't know.

You just want people to yell at you? Yeah, cool. I think it's great.

I didn't do those things. Now in the moment, I feel like it's me, right?

In the moment, I'm like, no, I'm going to be courageous. and I'm going to do

all these things and I'm going to accomplish all these things.

It's not until later that I look back and I go, oh, the Lord did all of that.

The Lord was faithful. The Lord was kind. The Lord gave me courage that I did not have.

The Lord gave me faith and promises that I did not have.

The Lord allowed me to do things and to be at things and to be a part of things

that I had no business being a part of.

Again, I don't know what call the world puts on you. I don't know what your specific thing is.

Again, if it's comfort, if it's glory, if it's money, if it's stuff.

I have no idea. Pleasure, I don't know.

But I do know it calls to you. I do know it beckons to you every single day.

And the one weapon you have against those things is reminding yourself that

what God has promised to those who love him is far greater than whatever the

world would have to offer you.

This is why Jesus gives the people this morning. What will it profit a man to

gain the whole world but lose his soul?

I think a more positive spin on that would be something like,

why would you give the world your soul when God has promised to save it for eternity?

He's promised to come back and get you. He's promised that you will be with

him forever, that there will be no shame and no sickness and no death and no

pain and no revenge and no sin against you and no sin in you.

God has promised those things. And if you want to live the life that God has

called you to live, you must look at those things from faith.

Last week, if you lack faith, the worst thing you can do is go home and decide,

I'm just going to be faithful.

I'm going to do it. I'm going to muster up my strap. I'm going to strap on my

boots and go to work tomorrow.

No, the best thing you can do is humble yourself before the giver of faith and

say, God, I need more faith.

I'm bitter and I'm angry. I'm upset. I'm sinful.

I've got things in my life I don't like, but God, I know that if you will give

me faith to trust in your promises, to trust in what you have laid in front

of me, then I can be faithful to you.

It's hard to live as exiles and sojourners in this world, but listen to this

final encouragement as he closes in verse 16 here.

He says, but as it is, these people desire a better country that is a heavenly one.

Therefore, listen to this, God is not ashamed to be called their God,

where he has prepared for them a city.

Are you looking forward to what God is preparing for you? Then hear this clearly.

God is not ashamed to call you his.

I mean, think about that again as Abraham is going against God's promise,

cheating on his wife, taking advantage of his servant girl, Hagar.

God never looks down at him and says, I am so ashamed that I called you out of death.

God doesn't look down at Abraham and go, I should have known better than to

pick a son of a false idol-worshiping dad who grew up around that stuff.

I should have known better than to do that.

What was I thinking would happen? Of course, he's not going to trust me.

Of course, that's what he's going to do.

No, God never looks down at Abraham that way, and he doesn't look down at you that way.

He doesn't look at the things and the places that you've failed and say,

man, I can't believe they would do that.

Because when he saved you, he knew exactly what you were capable of doing,

exactly what kind of sins you were capable of committing, exactly what sins you would commit.

And yet he still looks at you as you are stumbling and sinning along and your

shame and agony at times.

And God looks at you and he says, that one's mine.

That one belongs to me. I'm not ashamed to call Abraham, my son.

I'm not ashamed to call them my daughter. I'm not ashamed of my people because

I have brought them out of death into life and they are mine. They belong to me.

Every single hero you have, whether it's someone you know or someone from the

Bible, has failed and stumbled and sinned.

And God looks at them the same way he looks at you and me, unashamed.

God. So we keep walking toward that city.

We keep walking toward what God has called us to.

Listen, I don't know what step is next for you. I don't know what you need to do.

Again, I would love to sit and talk with you about whatever that is,

but I know that the most important step you need to take towards that city is the next one.

Whatever that is, whatever that requires, whatever you need to let go of,

whatever hurts and pains and bitterness you let go of, whatever step of faith you need to take,

the next step that you take towards that city is the most important one.

If you wonder how in the world, how in the world am I going to do that?

Brady, you don't know what you're asking me. You don't know what that's going to cost me.

Well, then you look to Jesus.

Because I think oftentimes we think, how is God going to keep these promises?

How is God going to do this for me? I don't know if you know who I am,

but I know who I am. And I can't imagine that God's actually going to do those things.

And Paul knows this in 1 Corinthians 1.20. He says this, for all the promises

of God find their yes in him.

That is why it is through him we utter our amen to God for his glory.

Do you have a problem trusting the Lord?

Look to his son. Look to Christ.

That is how you know he will keep his promises.

Because he did not even withhold from you his only begotten son,

because Jesus did not withhold from you anything, because the spirit has not

withhold from you anything.

All the promises of God, every single one of them finds their yes in Christ.

Our amen to God. Again, for his glory, we do that, not because of something

we've accomplished or something we've done, but because of what God has done

for us, that he will keep his promises.

Let's pray. Father, as always, thank you for your word.

Thank you that it is truly a lamp unto our feet, a light unto our path.

It is capable to make us wise to salvation, that in it we get to see you clearly,

that we get to see your son clearly.

God, would you continue to open our eyes to what it is it has to say?

Would you allow our hearts to be softened so that we would take that word in and live it out?

God, as we attempt to be a faithful people, both individually and as Trinity

Bible Church, God, will we be reminded that when we are faithless, you are faithful.

When we stumble and fall, God, you have promised to keep us.

But that we would not just be a people that runs around and says,

we believe in you and we love you, but that it would be evident in our lives

that those things are true.

That even though we stumble and fall and sin, that we would continue to take

steps towards what you've called us to.

We would continue to get up and be reminded that the promises that you've made

us are not conditional upon us performing a certain way, but they are conditional

upon your son, Jesus Christ, who is perfect and complete.

God, maybe we just be reminded this morning that you aren't ashamed to be our God.

Despite all of the things that we might look at that we think would be disqualifying,

all the ways that if we were to promise someone else something and they did

some of the things that we did, we certainly wouldn't keep our promise,

God, that you do not treat us that way.

But like a perfect father to his children, you are not ashamed to call us yours.

You are not ashamed to be our God. We thank you for that. Stay and pray, amen.