Good News, Great Hope

How's it going, Sacred Mission?

Man, I am so glad to be with you today on this second Sunday in Advent.

This is my favorite season of the year, and it is a joy to be able to worship with you.

If you have a Bible or an app, open it up to Hebrews chapter 11.

Hebrews 11 · chapter mention

We're going to be working through this whole chapter together to see how Jesus is our hope.

For those of you who don't know me, my name is Justin.

I'm one of the pastors here, and it's my joy and privilege this morning to be able to bring God's word to you.

Here's what I'm going to do.

I'm going to ask you a question, but I don't want you to actively respond.

Like I know how church folk can be.

There's this whole like the pastor asks you a question and you raise your hand.

It's not, I don't want you to do that.

Yes.

What I want you to do instead is really allow this question to kind of dive into your heart and just rest there for a moment as you contemplate its answer.

But here's the question I have for you.

Is your life supposed to be better than it currently is?

Do you wrestle with the thought that your life ought to be better than it currently is?

Many of us probably have different dreams and aspirations and ideas of what our life should have or could have been like.

And then every morning we wake up with the reality of what it is.

And here's what I want to put forward before you.

That question, is my life supposed to be better?

Is both a good and a dangerous question to ask yourself.

Here's why it's good.

Your life is supposed to be better.

We live in light of the reality of the curse.

This isn't how things were supposed to be.

This is not God's perfect plan for his image bearers in creation.

Life is genuinely supposed to be better.

But why is this a dangerous question?

Because you and I are tempted to define better by our own sinful and selfish desires of what we want and the dreams that we fabricate with inside our own being.

And when that happens, we're tempted to abandon what is good and beautiful for an immediate fulfillment of our own desire.

You see, we have to allow God to establish what is better.

We have to allow God to establish the standard of what is beautiful, and that is what our hope should be put into.

So is your life supposed to be better?

Yes.

By what standard?

By his.

This is how we persevere in our faith.

And this is what the writer of Hebrews is trying to communicate to his congregation in chapter 11.

Here in this, the author's working to encourage his audience to remain faithful in this patient endurance.

Because his primary concern is that in the face of their current circumstances and struggles and hardships, that they would shrink back and be destroyed, as he said in chapter 10, verse 39, that they would fail to preserve their souls as he cautions them to obtain the promise of God before them.

And so what does the author do?

He he writes to give them this remedy for such a dreadful plight.

And the remedy that he actually presents to them is the perseverance of faith in the promise of hope.

The perseverance of faith in the promise of hope.

So let's examine this remedy in the passage together, Hebrews chapter 11, verses 1 through 3.

Hebrews 11:1–3

Now, faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.

For by it, meaning faith, the people of old received their commendation.

By faith we understand that the universe was created by the Word of God, so that what is seen was not made out of things that are visible.

So here's what I want us to understand from the beginning.

The author's not trying to give us a comprehensive definition of what faith is.

Instead, what I believe he's doing is defining faith in a direct response to the risk that this congregation is facing.

If they risk failing to preserve their souls, it would be because they had made shipwreck of their faith.

So his definition here is laser-focused on the remedy for those who must endure to the promise.

Now, here in the text, faith fundamentally deals with the future.

It's a fully persuaded belief that God's promises are true and that we will obtain them if we endure to the end.

Listen to how the writer actually sets this premise up in just the chapter before.

In Hebrews 10, 35 through 36, he says this.

So, so hear me out.

The fundamental substance of faith is the confident expectation of God's promises.

You see, the very word faith here, it means to have a persuaded belief that your heart has been so fully persuaded by the work of the Spirit, the hearing and receiving of the gospel of Christ, that you have been convinced of God's promises being guaranteed and authentic.

Now, this persuaded belief is the confidence of expectation.

This is what he means by the assurance of things hoped for.

The assurance of things hoped for.

Now, this word assurance, it's rich in meaning.

And in the original language, it's the word hypostasis.

And what it does, it allows us to see faith from two very powerful angles.

First, this word it can mean substance or nature.

It's actually the same word the writer of Hebrews uses to describe the person of Christ himself in chapter 1, verse 3.

He says this, and he, being Christ, is the radiance of his glory and the exact representation of his nature or substance, and upholds all things by the word of his power.

When he had made purification of sins, he sat down at the right hand of the majesty on high.

So, understood this way, faith lays hold of what is promised, what we hope for, as something real and solid, something with substance to it.

You see, faith makes God's promises absolute and tangible, even though they remain unseen to us.

The writer actually illustrates this beautifully in the verses that follow.

He says that faith is the conviction or proof of things not seen.

And by it, speaking of faith, by this very faith, the Old Testament saints were commended or approved by God.

Now, what did they see?

They saw something more real, more tangible, something of greater substance than anything that their physical eyes could observe.

So when the writer of Hebrews is saying that we have this assurance, what he's saying is that there is more substance in God's promises than there is within our physical world.

You see, they saw God's promises, promises that all pointed forward to Christ Jesus, the Savior King.

And in verse three, the writer makes this stunning argument about the very nature of reality itself.

Look at verse three with me.

He says, By faith we understand that the universe was created by the word of God, so that what is seen was not made out of things that are visible.

Think about what he's saying for a moment.

The entire cosmos, everything you can touch, taste, smell, hear, see, it was spoken into existence by an invisible God through an invisible word.

The mountains you hike, the sunrise that takes your breath away, the laughter of your child's voice, the warmth of a fire on a cold night, all of it, every atom, every star, every living thing, came from what could not be seen.

So here's the writer's logic.

This is the point he's trying to make.

If the visible world, with all of its weight, all of its substance, was created by the invisible word of God, how much more real are the promises of God still to come?

You see, if the earth beneath your feet was spoken into existence by the unseen word, how much more solid of substance is the hope of heaven that same word has promised for you?

If God's invisible power made this present creation, beautiful as it is, but groaning under the curse, how much more glorious will be the new creation that He has promised to us where there is no more curse, no more tears, no more death.

The unseen is more real than the seen.

That's what he's trying to help them understand.

Stop placing your definition and understanding and standard of better and good and beautiful by what you can see with your physical eyes.

It's not as real as what is unseen through the word of God and the promises fulfilled in Christ Jesus.

That's more glorious.

The promised is more solid than the present.

The future beauty in Christ is more substantial than every earthly pleasure you have ever known or could ever desire.

That's the reality that faith grasps for.

That's what enables God's people to endure in the face of present suffering.

Now, if the first part of that word assurance, hypostasis, can mean substance, the second part or understanding of it is foundation.

Faith is the foundation that we plant our feet on as we reach for the hope of God's promises.

I actually love the way that the reformer John Calvin explains this.

He says it so beautifully.

He says, faith, he says, is the prop or the foundation on which we plant our foot.

The prop of what?

Of things absent, which are so far from being really possessed by us that they are far beyond the reach of our understanding.

Now put these two meanings together: substance and foundation.

Faith is the foundation by which we step forward to take hold of the substance-filled promises of God, promises hoped for but not yet seen.

Now, this leads us into the second part of the author's definition.

He says it's the conviction of things not seen.

The writer wants us to understand that we can have proof in our hearts concerning God's promises, even though they remain unobservable to our natural eyes.

We can't see them yet.

We can't examine them by natural means, but we can be persuaded of them.

By the work of the Spirit in us, our hearts can be persuaded of God's promises as being authentic.

Faith isn't controlled by present circumstances.

It's not limited to what you can observe or measure now.

It's fundamentally, as we said before, future focused, anchored in God's promises.

That's why hope is its object.

So faith driven by hope is the remedy for the current struggles and trials that we face.

This is what the writer is working to help his audience understand.

Because he wants to equip them to patiently endure through the hardships of life.

Because each and every one he is writing to has this ache within their chest that life is supposed to be better than it currently is.

And here's what he wants to do: he wants to help them not define better and good and beautiful by their own desire, but by the promises of God.

So I want to submit to you a functional definition for what faith is to help us, just as they needed help then when he was writing this letter.

You and I, we need help even here this morning.

And I would submit that faith is a persuaded heart's confident longing for a future beauty.

Faith is a persuaded heart's confident longing for a future beauty, a future beauty that we do not and will not fully possess now.

But we have a foretaste of it now because of Jesus.

In verses 4 through 12, the writer calls for remembrance these saints of old, whom he says by faith saw something more glorious than their present physical circumstances.

Saints like Abel, who offered a better sacrifice, Enoch, who walked with God and was taken up, Noah, who built an ark when there was no flood in sight, Abraham, who left everything he knew to follow God's promise to a land that he had never seen.

Sarah, who conceived in her old age because she believed God faithful.

Each and every single one of these saints had a persuaded heart's confident longing for a future beauty.

And here's what's remarkable that verse 13 tells us these all died in faith, not having received the things promised.

They died waiting.

We are a culture driven by immediate gratification.

Anything that is gratification deferred, we don't want anything to do with.

But a future beauty has more substance than what you can see and experience and know and have right now.

You see, they died hoping.

But notice what else the text says.

In the second part of verse 13, it says, But having seen them, the promises of God, and greeted them from afar, and having acknowledged that they were strangers and exiles on the earth, it says.

Beholding that promise changed everything of how they lived in the present.

It says that they acknowledged that they were strangers and exiles on the earth.

There was an awareness that came about them.

You see, seeing God's promises revealed to them, that they were these strangers and exiles on this earth, what they saw was that this physical world was not their home.

Their citizenship was elsewhere, their true country was still ahead of them.

And once you see that, once your eyes behold that, gripped by the reality of a heavenly country, you can't go back to living as though this world is all that there is.

That's exactly what verse 15 is getting at.

If they had been thinking of that land from which they had gone out, if they had been longing from where they were delivered from and redeemed from, of where they had traveled out of, they would have had opportunity to return to it.

But they didn't.

They didn't just pack up and go home when things got hard because their home wasn't behind them, their home was in front of them, and they were journeying toward the celestial city that God had been building for them.

These saints, they could have turned back, they could have abandoned God's promises, they could have returned to the life they once knew: the comfortable, the familiar, the visible.

There were plenty of opportunities to go home.

But their home wasn't where they came from.

They realized in that moment that they beheld the beauty of God's promises, that there was a home waiting for them.

They had been fully persuaded that heaven was their true home.

They had caught a vision of a better country that was far more glorious than anything their physical circumstances could have ever offered them.

Abraham, he could have returned to Ur.

Sarah could have demanded they just settle down and stop this vagabond lifestyle.

Noah could have abandoned the Ark as soon as his neighbors.

Began to mock him, but they had seen something.

By faith, they had glimpsed the city of God, and nothing in this world could compare to it.

And here's this stunning conclusion we see in verse 16.

Therefore, God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared for them a city.

God is not ashamed to be called their God.

Let that sink in.

The creator of heaven and earth, the holy one of Israel, the God who needs nothing from anyone.

He's proud to be associated with these faith-filled wanderers.

He claims them as his own.

Why?

Because they lived like they believed his promises.

They embraced this identity of strangers and exiles.

They set their hope on the city that he was preparing for them.

And because of that, he was not ashamed to be called their God.

Now, verses 17 through 38 can continue this, what we would call the great hall of faith of Hebrews chapter 11.

Hebrews 11 · chapter mention

The writer labors through story after story of people whose hope for heaven was more glorious than their desire for right now, whose hope for heaven was more glorious than their desire for right now.

He recounts how Abraham offered up Isaac, trusting that God would raise him from the dead, how Moses chose to suffer with God's people rather than enjoy the fleeting pleasures of Egypt.

How Rahab welcomed the spies in faith and was saved.

And then in verse 32, you can almost hear the writer catch his breath as he's just going over story after story.

He says, And what more shall I say?

For time would fail me to tell of Gideon and Barak, Samson, Jephthah, of David and Samuel and the prophets.

There are too many stories to tell.

And so he starts to just summarize some of them, right?

He says, Through faith, conquer kingdoms, enforce justice, obtain promises, stop the mouths of lions, quench the power of fire, escape the edge of the sword, were made strong out of weakness, became mighty in war, put foreign armies to flight.

Listen to the themes of these saints.

There's triumph and victory, restoration and strength.

But then this whole letter, this whole section takes this sharp turn to the left.

Some were tortured, refusing to accept release, so that they might rise again to a better life.

Others suffered mocking and flogging and even chains and imprisonment.

They were stoned, they were sawn in two, they were killed with the sword, they went about in skins of sheep, goats, destitute, afflicted, mistreated.

The theme of their story is defeat, suffering, destitution, weakness.

And so we see this contrast in experience and circumstance, victory and defeat, triumph and suffering, restoration and destitution, all of them.

No matter whether they faced triumph or torture, success or suffering, they were looking toward a future beauty not yet fully realized.

And it was a beauty infinitely better than anything that the world could offer.

And then the writer drops this stunning phrase, I think, in verse thirty-eight.

Of whom the world was not worthy.

Man, just rest on that statement.

Here's the reality.

You and I spend a gross amount of time seeking the approval of the world.

We want to be counted as worthy among culture.

So the degrees that we pursue, the careers that we chase, the place where our house sits, the bank accounts we acquire, the cars we drive, the name it over and over and over again.

We exhaust ourselves seeking to be approved by the world.

But these suffering saints, the world was not worthy of them.

You see, we we work so hard to be considered worthy of a place at the table of culture.

But these saints, they live with such a burning desire for the true and better country yet to come that the world was not worthy of them.

Because their heavenly citizenship, it mattered more than their earthly reputation.

Heaven's approval mattered more than the world's acceptance.

So they get to be defined as this, one of whom the world was not worthy.

Then comes verses 39 through 40, and this is where everything in the letter kind of pivots, or at least in this chapter, it says this.

Since God had provided something better for us, that apart from us, they should not be made perfect.

What's the better?

For the third time now, the writer emphasizes this stunning reality.

These faithful saints lived with hearts hoping for heaven, but they died without receiving what God had promised.

Because there was something better still waiting to be revealed.

And that something better has now been revealed to us in this age of redemptive history.

That something or better someone is Jesus, the Savior King.

You see, this is the advent of hope that changes everything for us.

The better which has been revealed is Jesus, the fulfillment of every promise of God.

You see, the Old Testament saints, they had the invisible word of God's promises spoken, written, proclaimed through the prophets.

They believed promises that they couldn't see fulfilled.

But we, the New Testament church, we have been given something better than the invisible word of promise.

We've been given the visible Savior King.

The invisible word of God has come in the likeness of visible human flesh.

The promise has become a person.

If we want to know, does God's promises have substance, the coming of Jesus answers it with full clarity for us.

Full of substance, fully in Him, fully satisfied and fulfilled.

You see, Jesus is the substance of God's promises revealed to us.

He's every yes and amen that we could ever desire.

He's the fulfillment of the saints of old that they saw only from afar and greeted from a distance.

They greeted the promise from this distance, but yet we have held the promise near to us, and we have called him Emmanuel, God with us.

The advent of Jesus, his birth, his life, his death, his resurrection, his ascension, his ongoing work to perfect his church.

This is the better that Abel, Enoch, Noah, Abraham, Sarah longed for, but they never saw in their lifetime.

And this is why our faith today should be stronger than theirs.

This is why our patient endurance should be even more resilient than theirs.

We have beheld him.

The word made flesh as the only Son of God who has come to save his people from their sin.

The invisible word put on visible mortal flesh.

Substance was given to the promises of God for his people.

You see, they had promises, but church, we have the promise keeper himself.

They saw from afar, but we have the Spirit of Christ dwelling within us, the down payment and guarantee of our inheritance.

These Old Testament saints, they they tasted manna in the wilderness, but you and I, we feast at the Lord's table, proclaiming his death until he comes.

We who complete the citizenship of heaven should live with hearts even more fully persuaded of the future beauty yet to come, because we have seen the invisible promises of God made visible in the coming of his son.

This is what the author is referring to at the end of verse 40.

Since God had provided something better for us, being the New Testament church, that apart from us, they, the Old Testament saints, should not be made perfect.

You see, you and I, we complete heaven citizenship.

We are the fullness of the church that Jesus' blood has purchased and ransomed, that we all might be made perfect in him and obtain the better that he has for us.

And so this advent, as we light our candles and sing of Christ's first coming, we do so as a people who know the end of the story.

We don't just look back on his first coming, but as a people with persuaded hearts, confident of a future beauty, we look forward to his coming again.

We know the promise kept his word.

We know the king arrived.

We know the word became flesh, and because he came once, church, we can trust with absolute certainty that he will come again.

And when he does, he will come to make all things new, to gather his people from every nation, to present us to the Father perfected and complete.

You see, the saints of old, they had faith.

Church, we have faith with sight.

They had promise, we have proof.

So as the author of Hebrews encourages his audience, let us be encouraged today.

Let us run with endurance the race set before us, looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith.

My prayer for us this morning is that we would have a hope for heaven that is more glorious than our desire for now.

So that you and I might be a people that the world is not worthy of.

Amen.