Hebrews 11:8-22
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. Therefore, from
one man and him as good as dead were born descendants, as many
as the stars of heaven and as many as the innumerable grains
of sand by the seashore. 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 that 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, God is not ashamed
to be called their God, for he has prepared for them a city
by faith. Abraham, when he was tested,
offered up Isaac and he who had received the promises was in
the act of offering up his only son, of whom it was said, Through
Isaac shall your offspring be named. He considered that God
was able even to raise him from the dead from which, figuratively
speaking, he did receive him back. By faith, Isaac invoked
future blessings on Jacob and Esau. By faith, Jacob, when he
was dying, blessed each of the sons of Joseph, bowing in worship
over the head of his staff. By faith, Joseph. At the end
of his life, made mention of the exodus of the Israelites
and gave directions concerning his bones. This is God’s holy
and inspired word for us. Let’s pray now for his grace
and help. Pray with me. Our great God,
we pray that in these next moments that we would hear your voice
and that you would speak with thunder clarity and that our
ears and our hearts and our minds would recognize your voice. its
authority over us, its desire to be in us and to to shake up
our lives and to grant us faith and to strengthen what is in
us already and to help us land safely on Canaan shore. Or we
live in a crazy world, a crooked world, a depraved world. We live
with all kinds of odds against us. And yet you tell us as strangers
and exiles, as pilgrims making our way to Zion, to the heavenly
city, that you will be with us. and that you give us your church
to nurture us and strengthen us and encourage us. And so we
pray now that our eyes would see what others cannot and that
our hearts would rejoice in what you provide for us and that our
hands and feet would continue to faithfully plod along step-by-step,
day-by-day towards Zion until we land safely on Canaan’s shore.
Of this we ask and pray in the name of Jesus, amen. What does
a person of faith look like? If you were to describe a person
of faith, what would you say about their outward appearance?
I mean, would you speak of the color of tie they wear, the color
of their suit, the pressing of their dress, the pew they sit
in? Would you speak of their Bible? Is it creased or is it
nice and neat? Would you speak of their church
attendance? Would you speak of their action in the community
and their action in the life of the church body? What outward
things would you describe? What skill sets would you explain
to the person asking the question? What? What features and characteristics
of their way of life would you say these characterize the person
of faith? Well, it’s funny when you come
to the Bible, when you come to Chapter 11 of the great Hall
of Fame, the heroes of the faith, you find a list of people you
may not expect to be there. I mean, Rahab, come on, folks.
Rahab, the prostitute of Jericho who saved Israel. Or think of
Noah after the flood was found in a drunken stupor by his boys. Or the list could go on and on. And what this points us towards,
we need to understand, is that often the heroes of the faith
were just ordinary sinners like we are. Ordinary sinners, but
saved by grace through faith in Jesus Christ. You know, if
we began to describe what a person of faith looks like, our list
would be one that is really unattainable. It would list things and characteristics
and features that we would probably not want to aspire to or would
feel we could not aspire to. But friends, take encouragement
today from the life of Abraham. Abraham was like you. He was
much like me. He was a man of faith, but a
person who struggled deeply in life. Yet God found him faithful
and commended him as righteous because he did not look to himself. He did not look to his achievements
or his riches, but he kept his eyes on Jesus, the promised one,
the author and the perfecter of his faith. Now consider Abraham
today. Abraham was the one in the old
covenant who received first the covenant promises of God. And
you’ll notice the sort of funny title of our sermon today, Grapes
and Grandkids. And if you want to summarize
the covenant promises of God. If you want to summarize, what
does God promise to his people as a covenant making covenant
keeping God? Well, he promises simply two things, grapes and
grandkids. He promises grapes and a promised
land. He promises grapes in a land
flowing with milk and honey. He promises a land that you did
not plant the vineyards, houses you did not build. He promises
a place for his heritage to live. But he promises also offspring.
He promises that you will have children and your children will
have children and their children will have children. And so you
see, you can simply summarize the covenant promises of God.
I will be your God. You will be my people. I’ll give
you a land. I’ll give you offspring. And
my dwelling place will be in your midst. Now, in this passage
of Hebrews today, we hear mention of a couple of stories that we
may know well from our Old Testament studies and Bible reading. It
mentions a handful of significant stories in the life of Abraham
and by virtue of the promises to Abraham through his son Isaac
and his son Jacob and his son Joseph. And so today we break
apart Hebrews 11 into a little section that speaks to the patriarchs. It speaks to Abraham and his
boys, Abraham and his sons, his grandson and his great grandson. He says to Abraham, pack up,
leave the land you live in and love, move, and I’ll show you
a place that will become yours. And by the way, in your old age,
you’ll have a baby. And from that little one, From
your very loins, but from this little one will be. A nation,
a people, a people that I will love and set my affection upon,
they will be godly and holy and set apart, and the rest of the
Bible will tell the story of your offspring and how they live
before the face of God. Now we can. We can read an account
of Abraham and a passage like Hebrews 11 and say, well, he
was a man of great faith. He was a godly man. He feared
God. He shunned what is evil. But, you know, there’s a lot
about Abraham that’s not rosy. It’s not perfect. He was called
out of idolatry. He was living in the land of
Ur of the Chaldeans. He worshiped idols. And God,
like he has done for all of us, has said, you will no longer
worship idols, but you will follow me. Abraham would go on to live
in the promised land where he would build altars and worship
God. He would make treaties with other nations and make peace.
He would become a very well-respected patriarch in the ancient biblical
days, much like the person of Job. But you know, Abraham would
have his weaknesses. When famine would come to the
land, he wouldn’t trust God, no, but he would go to Egypt.
And when he would go to Egypt, he would sell his wife not once,
but twice into Pharaoh’s harem of his household. He would take
matters into his own hand when the child of promise continually
never made his appearance. And he would take a wife and
his wife’s concubine and he would he would have a childish male
through her. But God would say, no, that’s not the child of promise.
One will come from you and your own wife. Now, Abraham had enemies. Abraham had that pain in the
neck nephew named Lot who caused him great trouble. He had to
bail him out of all kinds of strife and difficulty. Abraham
saw signs and wonders, but he had to wait. He had to wait day
after day, hour after hour, century or decade after decade, even
a century. to see certain blessings and
promises of God to be fulfilled. He’s much like us. He’s blessed
by God, but he often doesn’t see it. Well, as we are studying
this subject of faith, we’re seeing that faith faith leads
us to action. First week, we looked at chapter
11 of Hebrews, we considered that faith is the assurance of
things hoped for. It is the conviction of things
not seen. It’s it’s it’s holding a title
deed in our hands. It’s holding the evidence of
God’s promises and the other and saying, no matter what the
world says, I can see with eyes of faith and I will live for
God because he has promised and his word must be true. Last week,
we considered that faith worships, faith walks with God, faith works
like Noah for 100 years on the ark, faith wonders at the God
of creation. And today, from this little section
on the patriarchs, we want to consider three aspects of faith
that I think will help you in the day to day trenches of life
as you are slugging it out, so to speak, as you are working
in the world and making your way to heaven. Faith leads to
action. And as verse 16 says, these were
commended. These were recognized by God
as having faith, and they were found righteous in his sight. Abraham was a friend of God.
Abraham was a great man. What does his faith show us?
Well, it shows us three things. Faith obeys, faith reckons, and
faith strives. First thing is this faith obeys. Consider the story of Abraham.
He was called by God to pack up his bags and move to a foreign
land. He was called by God. And the
passage tells us by faith, he obeyed by faith. He went out
from the land where he lived with his fathers and his family.
And he went to a land that God would show him a land he did
not yet know. But he went nevertheless, because simply put, God said,
so God commanded and he went, he was called to go out and he
obeyed by faith. And then if you bump a few verses
down in the passage, you’ll see that Sarah received the power
to conceive. And, you know, the story of Abraham
and Sarah, 90 years old, she was 99 year old years was his
age. And God comes to them and says,
you’re going to have a baby. And do you remember their response?
They laughed. But nothing is impossible with
God. And it says here simply, God gave her the power to conceive. She received the power to conceive.
And what do we know from the rest of the story? There was
little Isaac, the joy, the son of laughter in their lives. He
came in the midst of a lot of heartache, a lot of struggle
within their home, a lot of uncertainty about where God’s promise is
actually true. But she was called to conceive
and she received the power, even though she was old. And even
though, as the passage says, her husband was as good as dead
from Sarah and Abraham came descendants. And, you know, the book of Galatians
says that if you have faith, you are a son or a daughter,
you are of the offspring of Abraham. Well, you skip on down the passage
just a little bit more and we read of a terrible event and
Abraham’s life. God comes to Abraham one day
and says, Abraham, take your son, your only son, Isaac, the
one whom you love, not Ishmael, not the son of your servants,
but the one you love. Yes, the one of promise. Yes,
the one of whom I have said from him shall all the offspring of
the earth come forth. And he was called to offer up
Isaac. And our passage says he offered him up. It says he was
in the act of offering him as a sacrifice there on Mount Moriah. He was in the act of giving up
his only son, the son that was hard to come by, the son that
came in, humanly speaking, impossible circumstances. He took him. You remember your flannel graph
Bible stories from Sunday school and There was an altar built
and there was Abraham and there was Isaac all tied up and bound
and the fire and the night. But what was in the distance?
There was the ram and the thicket. Abraham obeyed God because he
believed that God on that mountain would provide. And then you skip
on towards the end of our passage for the day and we read of Isaac
and Jacob and Joseph and how how they passed on the covenant
promises from their children to their children. And on and
on, they laid their hands on their sons before their death
and blessed them with the blessing of God that he had promised to
their father, Abraham. And so that covenant blessing,
much as we do the same in baptism, was placed upon their children
because they believed that God required of them to bless their
children, to speak of the future generations of that which would
come. He believed that their offspring
would outnumber the stars in the heaven and the grains of
sand on the seashore. Even Joseph said before he died,
be sure, be sure to take my bones out of Egypt where he had been
prince and place them in the promised land. I want my bones
buried with my people. You see from these couple little
stories here that faith obeys. Faith hears the word of God.
And there’s a sense in the language that the writer of Hebrew uses
that while God was still speaking, while the ring was still in the
air from his voice, Abraham was packing his bags. There was no
delay. There was no let’s calculate
the cost. There was no let’s think about it. Let’s see what
living over in Palestine will be like. Let’s check out the
school systems. Let’s let’s see what their economy is like. Will
I find work? No, they just packed up at the
voice and at the command of God. And they went, they obeyed. And
so, brothers and sisters, let me encourage you as often as
you sit under the word, as often as you are in the presence of
God’s word and it speaks. It is a divine command that always
leads to action. It speaks about our marriage.
It speaks of our children. It speaks of our work. It tells
us maybe not of all the details of life, but it shows us the
way of life and godliness. Or as our catechism says, it
shows us how to love God and live well in the world he’s made.
It shows us how to have faith and how to live life. And so
when God’s word is ringing in our ears, That means that we
have put ourselves in the hearing of it. We’re sitting under its
sound proclamation. We’re reading it in our own time
at home and listening on the radio or podcast, whatever the
course may be. But we hear the voice of God.
But here’s the difficulty. Do we obey it? While it is still
ringing in our ears, the command of God, are we marching forward
under the blessing of his commands, under the threat of his commands,
under the desire of his heart for you, are we marching forward?
You see, faith obeys. Oh, we sing it so well, don’t
we trust and obey for there’s no other way to be happy in Jesus,
but to trust and obey what he says we will do, where he sends,
we will go. There’s no other way but to trust
and obey. But oh, we’re we’re we’re lawyers of the fine print,
aren’t we? I’ll trust and obey tomorrow. What he says I’ll do
when I get around to it, where he sends I’ll go when the timing
is right. Friends, that’s not the way Abraham.
or Isaac or Jacob or Sarah or other people of faith acted.
No, they listened to the voice of God. And when he spoke his
divine command, it led to action. There’s a second thing that faith
does. Faith obeys, but faith reckons. There’s a good word
for you southerners. We say very often, I reckon so. But that’s a that’s an old covenant
word. That’s a has a little bit of a Hebrewism from the Old Testament.
It simply means we have we have thought about it. We have wrestled
it through. We have figured it. We have done
the math. We have counted the cost. We have considered. We’ve
been awake at night on our couch. And we’ve come to the conclusion
that there is no other way. but this way. There is no other
way but God’s way. That’s a good word for us to
consider. I reckon, I reckon God can raise
the dead. I reckon God can make water come
from a rock. I reckon God can send manna daily
from heaven. I reckon God can send his own
son, Jesus. Because that’s the kind of God
he is. That’s the kind of God the scripture says he is. And
so it must be the way of thinking in our minds and hearts. And
don’t you figure Abe did a lot of reckoning. Don’t you think
he did a lot of thinking? I’m going to pack up my bags
and move to a foreign land. I’m going to have a baby. And
then I’m going to be asked to give this baby up on an altar.
You think he did a lot of reckoning. in his mind and his heart. How about Sarah? 90 years old. Now I know ages were a little
different back then, but not a lot different after the flood.
And I would imagine there are very few nanogenarians who have
it in their mind to have another baby. Probably that shop was
closed up a long time ago. The crib was given away and even
grandchildren are somewhere in the distant past because they’re
growing up as well. But here’s Sarah saying, having
been told by God, you’re going to have a baby. You’re going
to have a son and from him will come the blessings of the earth. But, you know, she did a little
reckoning. I mean, I can’t imagine most 90 year old husbands and
wives would be excited over having a baby. It would be a rather
strange event, but you can imagine the twinkle that came in her
eyes. She laid in her tent in ancient near east, childless,
sad for a lot of years. But then God, God says it’s going
to come to pass. The angels who come say it’s
going to come to pass. And how about Isaac and Jacob
and Joseph? The promised land was far off.
They’ve been living in Egypt. They’ve been enslaved by Pharaoh. There was no promised land in
sight for them. Yet they bless their children
at their death. God will bless you. He’ll give
you grapes. He’ll give you grandkids. He’ll,
he’ll, he’ll, he’ll do what he said he would do. And even Joseph
had the faith to say, take my bones out of Egypt and bury them
in the promised land. The promised land was such a
wonderful future reality to him that he said, my bones must be
buried. I reckon, I think, I know God must want us there. Now, can you imagine the pillow
talk at Abraham’s house? Comfortable. Living in Ur of
the Chaldeans. And we’re going to move to where?
I mean, this would be like living in New York City, the central
hub of culture and art and everything available to a human being and
moving to somewhere maybe in eastern North Carolina, say a
hog farm. And you can imagine the pillow
talk, honey, there’s not even a Walmart in that town. Honey,
we’re happy here. We’ve got aunts and uncles and
cousins and sisters and brothers and grandparents. We’ve got a
life here. There’s amenities here. We’ve
got the house paid off. And God wants us to do what?
And Abraham, being the good leader, says we go because God has commanded. We go because his voice has thundered. And we reckon, we think it through
in our minds and hearts, he must He must have a way we don’t see.
He must have a plan we don’t know. And what he says we will
do where he sends, we will go. And you can imagine some years
later, the pillow talk, are we really going to have a baby?
As old as we are, are we really going to have a child? Is this
possible? And so you can imagine the pillow
talk in their house. God is big. God is amazing. God is powerful.
He is the one that spoke creation into existence. He is the one
who upholds the world by the word of his power. As one has
said, Abraham’s faith and reckoning must have been like the. Has
a story of the 90 year old that marries a 34 year old wife. And
he buys a big house with a lot of bedrooms right next to an
elementary school. No, his faith was even greater
than that. His faith was to say to his 90 year old wife, we are
going to have a baby and our babies are going to fill heaven. Because they reckoned, they thought
it through and they realized that God could do what he said
he would do. Now, I imagine on the next divine
errand, there was no pillow talk. I would imagine that when God
came to Abraham and said to Abraham, take your only son, Isaac, the
one you love, and take him to a mountain, I’ll show you and
worship there. And when you worship, build an
altar and sacrifice him. I would imagine Sarah was not
included in that pillar talk. I would imagine he slept in a
different tent that night. He wrestled and wallowed and
flipped and flopped the entire night, saying to himself, how
can it be that the God of the universe wants me to sacrifice
my son, my only son, the child of promise? But we read in that
account of Genesis that Abraham arose early the next morning.
He gathered the firewood, he saddled the donkey. And as some
have suggested, he could have had servants do all of that labor.
But in nervous energy and with resolve, he packs and he goes
again, not on a journey to move. But on a journey to put his only
son, Isaac, to death. And can you imagine the angst
and the wrestling and the turmoil, the sick stomach, all that goes
on through this? This is these are the moments
of faith. And I can imagine, as I have
done, that you have gone through these moments as well. God wants
me to do what? God wants me to serve him at
this cost. God wants me to follow him at
this price. And there are moments of weakness
in Abraham’s life, just as there are, I’m sure, in ours. No baby
coming? We’ll go to Hagar, the concubine,
and have a son. Or there’s not food in the land
of promise. We’ll go down to Egypt and rely
on Pharaoh. You can imagine many a sleepless night under the stars. Friends, pilgrims get weary.
Abraham got weary. God had to do some utterly amazing
things in the life of Abraham to say, I am still here. My promises
are still true and you need just but hold on until I fulfill them
before your very eyes. You see, what did Abraham and
Sarah and Isaac and Jacob and Joseph, what did they reckon?
They reckoned that God could do what he said he would do. You know, in Martin Luther, the
great German theologian and reformer was down in the dumps. His wife
came into a study one day, all dressed in black and the clothes
of mourning. Weeping, and she says to his
wife, why, why are you mourning? And she said, because God has
died. And he said, that’s insane. God has not died. And she said
simply this, well, you are acting as if it is so. And their relationship
and their, their their friendliness together, their joking together.
He realized what his good wife was doing. She was saying to
him, dear husband, snap out of your stupor for God is not dead. He is still alive and at work. And we read all kinds of places
in the scripture where God has to snap his fingers before our
very eyes and say, you need to reckon my way and not the world’s
way. I can do as I please. I can keep
the promises that I have made. And so, dear brothers and sisters,
not only should our faith obey. But our faith should reckon that
whatever God says is true, it is trustworthy and it may be
illogical in the eyes of the world. For a 90 year old to have
a child of promise. But friends, God can do the amazing
and the supernatural. And in the case of Isaac. Late on that altar. Abraham was
in the act of offering up that son because he reckoned that
God could raise the dead. There’s a third aspect of faith,
final aspect, and that’s that faith strives. Faith obeys, faith
reckons, but faith strives. You know, we live in a world
that wants instant results. Just this morning, I was cooking
my eggs for breakfast, and I kept lifting the top of the pot to
see if they were done yet. Well, you’re supposed to time
them, right? I’m always getting fussed out. You don’t cook them
long enough. Well, if I would time them and just wait, they
would come out perfectly fluffy and just the way they’re supposed
to be. But what do I do? I sit there and flip the pot
lid, which supposedly messes up their cooking process. But
we want instant results. We want it now. And we want heaven
now that God has called us to live on earth. And friends, the
promises of God, some are now. Some are future, but some are
only to be realized in eternity. We’re to obey first. We’re to
go. When God says go, the answer
that should be after our name, if we were written up in the
scripture, should be, and he went out. And he was in the act
of sacrificing. And he was in the act of doing
what God had commanded. We obey first. We reckon it out.
God can do this. And then we strive for it. You
know, we give up so easily. We start sweating. The sun comes
out. The heat comes. We’re thirsty. We’re tired. We’re
weary. And so we say, I can settle for second best because I really
don’t want to wait on the promises of God. We want our eggs cooked
in 10 seconds and not three minutes or whatever the correct timing
is. And God says to us, faith strives. Notice how he says it
in the verses of our passage. They did not have the promises
realized in their lifetime. They looked at them from afar,
yet they were striving. They were yearning. They were
desiring after the promises of God. You see, all we can see
very often is the horizon. We can see the light in the distance.
And God is saying to us, you strive after that. You long after
that. And what’s promised will come.
You believe, you watch, you wait, and you expect. You see, in the
life of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, they go out in faith. They live a nomadic life. They’re
living in tents. They have 1.0 children. And you know, the humorous thing
about Abraham, remember there’s a little point in the story where
Abraham goes from being called Abram to Abraham. Abram is simply
the Hebrew word father. And you extend the name Abraham,
it means father of many. And can you imagine Abraham for
all those years in the promised land? Hey, guy, what’s your name? My name is Abraham. Well, how
many kids you got? Well, none yet. But God’s promised. You see the irony, the humor
in God’s economy. It’s a start, though. Abraham
has not yet seen all the children that have come after him, both
in the offspring of his family, but in the offspring of faith.
Yet one child was all it took. One start began. The church and the people of
God, and so you You look at what God has promised you, you look
at what you’re striving after. And some of it may take a lifetime,
some of it may take an eternity to see, but God is faithful.
God promises and God fulfills. You see, he promised Abraham
greats and grandchildren. Yes, some of it was far off.
He did die before receiving and realizing the promises. But these
died in faith, recognizing from afar. that they were citizens
of a different homeland, that they were different citizens
of a different city, a city that had foundations built by God,
not a city with earthly foundations. This morning, I read in the,
I think it was the Greensboro headlines that a new restaurant
opened and the first hundred people through the door would
get a lifetime or no a year supply of burritos or whatever they
serve. And so this lady, camps out and writes of her experience.
And we hear of this with football tickets, basketball tickets,
concerts, all the rest. But these people camped out for
burritos. I mean, I would probably do it
too. But friends, Abraham camped out
for a land. He camped out for promises that
he would never see in his own lifetime, but many of which you
have seen realized in your lifetime. And you see the commitment it
takes to strive after the promises of God. So, dear Christian, let
me encourage you in this way. If you’re longing for heaven
and looking to Jesus, you simply put one foot in front of the
other and you continue to do that for the rest of your life,
walking by faith, eyes up to heaven, eyes on Jesus. And though
the world says you’re a fool for your faith, you take God
at his word. And though there are all kinds
of shiny things in this life that are attractive to you and
even seem permanent to you, you continue step by step by step
and you making your way to heaven, to that heavenly city whose designer
and builder is God himself. And he inhabits that city. And
it is a lasting city that will not fade and it will not fall
away. And it’s a city where he desires
for you to dwell with him. But he requires that you have
faith in his son, Jesus. You remember Jesus telling his
disciples, you know the way to the father. I am the way and
the truth and the life. No one comes to the father except
through me. And so, dear brothers and sisters,
if you want to obey, you reckon that Jesus is the way, truth
and life and you strive for heaven and God will get you safely there.
Let’s pray together. Our great God, we pray that you
would help us in our walk of faith to keep our eyes on Jesus,
to long for heaven, to put away the cares of this world, and
to land safely on Canaan’s shore, into the bosom of Abraham, as
the scripture says, where your people will be gathered forever.
Lord, we cannot wait, but until then, give us endurance to run
the race that is set before us. In Jesus’ name we pray, amen.