Sermon Transcript
Well, take out your Bible. We’re gonna look together at Hebrews chapter 11. We just started today the 40 Days of Faith focus, and so if you’re new with us and you see the Daring Faith on the wall, you wonder what’s going on around here, we’re just for the next 40 days gonna focus on faith, this whole matter of daring faith, but faith that’s bold, that is courageous, faith that ultimately pleases God. We probably, all of us in some way, are people of faith, and of course when we talk about a faith in a God or God, we want to have faith that ultimately God is going to commend or God would be pleased with. The worst thing would be for us to be people of faith and, you know, at the end of this life then we find out that the faith that we had wasn’t commendable.
Or it wasn’t pleasing to God. And that’s a very real possibility. In fact, the Bible talks about the fact that there are going to be people of faith that they’re going to stand before God someday and God’s going to say, I never knew you. So, when you think about the whole matter of faith, you want to be somebody who ultimately has a faith that God is going to commend you for it. He’s going to say, well done.
You know, that your faith isn’t going to be, or my faith isn’t a dead faith. It’s not a phony faith. It’s not a compromising faith, a weak faith, you know, none of that, but it’s a genuine faith that God would be pleased with. Now, why should we be concerned about commendation? Well, it’s just something that is a part of life, isn’t it?
So if you have a job, You want to do things on the job that are commendable. Isn’t that true? You want to do the right work at the right time in the right places for the right people so that when that performance review comes up, you’re given a good word. I don’t think any of us on the job are thinking, you know, I’m going to be as lousy as I can be so that when my performance review comes, then my boss says, you were terrible. You know, that isn’t exactly what’s in our mind.
We want to do that which is commendable on the job. If you’re a student in your studies, isn’t that what you’re trying to do? Say yes, okay? Just humor me just for a second. Yeah, you’re trying to ultimately, you know, commend, do things that are commendable so the teacher says, well done, you know, gives you an A, A+, whatever it is that you’re after here.
And so that’s why you study. That’s why you prepare for quizzes. That’s why you prepare for exams. That’s why you do certain papers. That’s why you read books.
That’s why you listen. That’s why you go to class. Why do we do all that? Because it’s commendable, right? And, and we’re in school on the one hand so that we can be commended.
This is called graduating from one grade to another, okay? We don’t want to stay in the same grade forever, whatever it is. Why do you do certain papers with a certain style? You know, the Teacher says, now the footnotes are gonna be here, and this is how I want them done, and this is the paragraph form that you need to follow, and so forth and so on, because you want to be commended. So this is just very much a part of our lives.
If you’re a parent, you’re hopeful that you’re going to be commended, that your parenting isn’t just parenting, you know, that you’re just doing the thing, you know, you got the job, so might as well just get through it kind of thing. No, you hope that actually you’ll be commended for your parenting. It would be fantastic to have your kids— listen to this, kids— this would be fantastic for you to, you know, commend your parents for their parenting, for all that they’re trying to do for you, for putting, you know, food on the table and all the rest of it and trying to help you go in a direction that’s ultimately going to be best for you. If you’re a spouse, You want your spouse to commend you as a spouse. You know, you’re a good spouse.
I love you. I just love all the things you do. Go take the trash out. You know, whatever it is, just commendable. A friend, you want to be a commendable friend.
Oh, yeah, that’s my lousy friend over there. No, are you kidding? This person is wonderful. As such, I’m privileged to have a friendship with this individual. Or you’re a neighbor, you want to be a commendable neighbor.
You get the idea. This week I taught an old OT live event, Old Testament live event. I taught it for Walk Thru the Bible. It’s the first time that I’ve taught this event. This is a brand new event.
They took me back to Walk Thru headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia this past year and trained me in this and said, okay, we’re gonna start some new seminars, some new live events, and we want you to go out and when we have some events, if you can put it on your calendar, we want you to go out and teach this event for us? Well, I’ve taught for them since 1986. I’ve done a lot of seminars for them. If you’ve been a part or watched what’s happened with Walk Thru the Bible Ministries, it kind of parallels what’s going on in our country where things are getting shorter and shorter and shorter. So this seminar used to be taught on a Friday night, all day Saturday.
Well, we don’t do that anymore because people don’t want to come on a Friday night, all day Saturday. So you get the abridged version, you know, the Cliff Notes and that sort of thing. So it’s been cut down so that now it’s a 5-hour event. Well, that is too long these days, and so that’s why they took me back to walk through headquarters earlier this year, 2016, to train me in the new abridged version, which is half of what the other one is. And so I had to prepare myself to teach this seminar this past week to 3rd through 10th graders.
Okay, it was at a Christian school. They brought me in to teach these students, and you know, they’re sitting there wanting to have a great time and wanting to learn a few things and wanting to please their teachers. And many of them had their parents there and other staff teachers were there and all of that. People from the community also came and all this sort of thing. You know what I wanted to do?
I wanted to do a good job. Wouldn’t you? I mean, you don’t go to an event like that and think, well, we’ll just see if we can get through this, and I’m going to be as lousy as I can possibly be. And no, are you kidding? You want to do the best that you can, so you prepare yourself the best that you can so that when you come to the event, especially when you’re doing it for the first time and you’re trying to leave out half of what you’ve taught over the years, which is an interesting challenge, you know, to try to teach half of what you usually taught over the years.
You wanna, at the end of this thing, feel like you represented Walk Thru the Bible ministry well, right? That you did the job that they asked you to do, that ultimately you would be commended for the job that you did. Now, I mention all of that just simply to say that our faith is something that should be commendable. And when we start chapter 11 of Hebrews, which we’re gonna be focusing on in our worship services over the next 40 days or the next 6 Sundays, 5 more after today, we should be giving thought and attention to the kind of faith that we have because we want to live with the kind of faith that ultimately will please God and ultimately God will commend. Now let me make a distinction right up front.
This is distinguished from saving faith, okay? So commendable faith, this is commendable faith, is to be distinguished from saving faith. Saving faith is not something that we earn or deserve. Saving faith is not something that we can work for. If you know what the Scriptures teach and what we teach here at the church is we believe that a person is not saved by things that they do, by the number of times that they go to church, by how much of an offering that they give, by how nice they treat other people, by any of that kind of stuff.
In fact, the Bible says, for by grace are you saved through faith, and that not of yourselves. It’s a gift, not as a result of works, that nobody can boast. So nobody’s getting into heaven because they earned their way to heaven. The only way we’re getting into heaven is through Jesus Christ who gave his life. He did the work, and then we receive the work by faith.
His credit is credited to our account and we are forgiven of our sins. Problem is, is that we’re separated from God by our sins. We need somebody to pay our sin debt account. And Jesus has paid the debt. He’s paid the debt when he died on the cross, was raised— risen from the tomb.
When that happened, he demonstrated and proved and authenticated the fact that he was the Savior. He’s the Messiah, the Savior. Who can save us from our sins. When a person comes to receive that message, they’re saved. At that moment in time, they’re born again, they’re adopted into God’s family, they’re forgiven of their sins.
So that’s saving faith. It’s not something we earn, it’s not something we deserve. But Hebrews chapter 11 focuses on a different kind of faith. It focuses on a commendable faith. It focuses on a faith that is the outworking of saving faith, that saving faith is ultimately going to produce a changed life.
And this commendable faith is something that God so longs to affirm in us. So Hebrews chapter 11 then begins this way. Listen to the words carefully or follow along in your message note sheet or in your Bible. Hebrews 11:1-6. 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. By faith we understand that the universe was formed at God’s command, so that what is seen was not made out of what was visible. By faith Abel offered God a better sacrifice than Cain did. By faith he was commended as a righteous man when God spoke well of his offerings. And by faith he still speaks even though he’s dead.
By faith Enoch was taken from this life so that he did not experience death. He could not be found because God had taken him away. For before he was taken, he was commended as one who pleased God. And without faith it’s impossible to please God, Because anyone who comes to him must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who earnestly seek him. Now, what we have there is a description of the kind of faith that God is ultimately going to commend, or the kind of faith, as you can see there, that’s pleasing to God.
And you’ll notice it’s not just any faith, you know, faith in faith. It’s not that kind of faith. But we’re talking about faith in God, unwavering trust in God, undoubting belief in God. Now to help you get this, I put together a little, you know, diagram that’s on your message note sheet. You could follow along, just use the diagram.
The points are in the diagram today. But at the very heart of what he is saying here is that we need to, in this faith, first trust there’s a God, believe there is a God. The God who, as he goes on to describe here, who made the heavens and the earth, the God who Abel worshiped, the God who Enoch walked with, the gods that the ancients of old worshiped, the God that’s in focus all throughout chapter 11 here. Well, God wants us to live with the kind of faith that that they lived with, the ancients of old, talking about who we’re talking about here this morning, but in addition, people we’re gonna read about like Moses and Abraham and others, the ancients of old. They were pleasing to God, and therefore God commends them as the ancients, verse 2, were commended, as Abel, verse 4, was commended for his faith.
As Enoch was commended because his faith pleased God, verse 5, we want to be people who are commended as well. So the thought here is that, is that we want to do things that ultimately please God and therefore then result in his commendation. So we want to be both pleasing and we want to experience his commendation. So in some ways you could say, if you wish, that we want to have PC faith, not politically correct faith, but we want to have faith that’s pleasing to God and commendable by God. So what kind of faith is pleasing to God and is commendable by God?
Well, he gives us 3 matters to focus on at the outset of this chapter, 3 descriptors of the kind of faith that God will commend. First of all, it’s accepting faith. Accepting faith. Verse 3 says, by faith we understand. The word understand means to perceive or apprehend or to believe.
By faith we understand or believe that the universe— and this word universe can actually be described as ages or in space and time— so all that came into existence, that it came into existence, was formed at God’s command, so that what is seen was not made out of what was visible.
Accepting faith understands that and says, I believe it. I believe that the universe was formed at God’s command and it was formed out of nothing. Now what you’ve got to ask yourself right now is whether or not you believe that. Do you believe that the universe was formed at God’s command out of nothing? Because what this passage is suggesting to us this morning is, is that if you want to be a person who has faith that ultimately will please God and be commended by him, then you will be a person who accepts the fact that first the universe was created by God.
It was not created by chance. It was not created by man. It was not created by random evolution. The universe was created by God. He formed the universe.
That’s what it’s saying. I’m not, you know, making this up. That’s what it’s saying right there. And it says, and the universe was made by his command. The word is the word rhema, R-H-E-M-A, that he spoke into existence the universe.
He spoke the universe into existence. Do you accept that? That God spoke the universe into existence? Is that your worldview, that God spoke the universe into existence? Now, this is what it actually says in Genesis chapter 1.
You can go through the chapter, let me just give you a couple examples. Chapter 1, verse 3, God said, so he’s speaking, let there be light, there was light. Verse 6, and God said, let there be an expanse between the waters to separate the water from water, so God made the expanse, and separated the water under the expanse from the water above it. So the earth and the sky. And it was so.
Why did that happen? Because God said it. Because God commanded it into existence. Verse 9, and God said, let the water under the sky be gathered to one place and let dry ground appear. And it was so.
So the question here is, is do you accept that? Are you among those that you would read an account like this and say, okay, there’s a God, and I believe that the God spoke the world into existence? Do you accept that? Or as we learned way back in, you know, our children days, where in Sunday school they— we learned this little phrase: God said it, I believe it, that’s good enough for me. Is that reflective of me?
Is that reflective of my faith in God? If he said it, I’m not gonna fight him on it. I’m gonna accept it. I’m gonna believe it. And he says that the universe was created out of nothing.
It was made out of nothing. It was not made out of that which was visible. God did not make the universe out of visible raw material that he purchased at Home Depot, okay? He didn’t go down there and get all the materials together and bring them all together, and then all of a sudden he made this thing. No.
He made the visible out of that which is invisible. Do you accept that? That it was created by the commanding word of God. All of us— there was nothing, and then he commands it, and all of a sudden there’s something without any preexisting material. Do you believe that?
And not only do you believe that, but let’s back up to verse 1 here, even as Laura prayed. Let’s back up to verse 1. Because verse 1 suggests that if we truly believe this with the kind of faith that God wants us to have, then this will be a conviction. It will be a conviction. We’ll be sure of what we hope for and certain of what we don’t see.
You see, by faith— that’s— this is the call here, to have a conviction that I believe God did it even though I don’t understand it and even though I can’t explain it. I believe it. That kind of faith, what he’s saying is, that’s the kind of faith that pleases God, and ultimately that’s the kind of faith that will be commended by God. Believing without seeing kind of faith. Is that you?
Now, it’s interesting when you think about this, you know, in other matters of life. It is not hard for me to believe that the iPhone came into existence because of Apple, because of Apple’s employees, Apple’s founders, because of Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne, because there was a Steve 1 and a Steve 2 and a Ronald. The iPhone ultimately came into existence. No Apple, no iPhone. No iPhone, no text messaging.
No text messaging, no happy faces. And for some of you, no job.
It’s not hard for me to believe that this thing all got started with a few guys who started the whole thing.
And in the same way, when I look at this account, this account that’s asking us to believe in a God who created the heavens and the earth out of nothing, when I look at this account, I believe there’s a cause for what it is that happens. In other words, it’s called first cause, or I like what I learned in philosophy, an uncaused cause. There’s got to be an uncaused cause. How did the whole thing get started? There was an uncaused cause.
That nobody caused. It was the cause that caused— you get the idea— of what’s been caused. God is the uncaused cause. I can accept that just as much as I can accept the fact that Apple was founded in 1976 at a place right here in Los Altos, just off of Foothill, just off of Homestead, on Crest Drive, in a garage there, in a house where Steve Jobs grew up. And they started Apple in this garage right here in our neck of the woods.
There was a founder, there was a creator, there was a team. It all got started right there. And so we could trace our iPhone right back to right there. I don’t see it much different than that, quite frankly. As much as I can believe that there was a team of people that started Apple, I can believe that there is a God who created the universe.
And that kind of belief is a belief that ultimately is pleasing to God and one day will be commended by him. Is that your belief? There’s a second distinction of the kind of faith that is ultimately going to be commendable. It’s the faith of Abel. Verse 4, by faith Abel offered God a better sacrifice than Cain did.
A better sacrifice than Cain did. By faith he was commended as a righteous man when God spoke well of his offerings. And by faith he still speaks even though he’s dead. Now what he does, this writer of Hebrews, is he goes back to illustrate this this faith that’s commendable, that will be pleasing to God, he goes back to the story of Cain and Abel, okay? 2 brothers, the first 2 brothers, the sons of Adam and Eve, both evidently knew that God wanted from them an offering.
So both of them brought offerings, but they also knew that God wanted a certain kind of an offering, a blood sacrifice offering from that which was precious to them. So what happened? Well, Cain, knowing that, basically blew it off. He said, I don’t, I don’t, I’m not gonna do it that way. I’m gonna do it my own way.
In other words, Cain was one of the earliest examples of somebody who thought that they could come to Godless in any way that they wanted to come to him. That my way is as good as any other way. Does that sound familiar? Oh yeah, that sounds a lot like our culture today. That I’ll decide how I’m gonna come to God.
It’s not God who’s gonna decide how I’m gonna come to him. I’m gonna decide how I come to God. And so he chose to come to God in a way that ultimately was not pleasing to God. Abel, on the other hand, did what God said. He brought an animal sacrifice to God, and it was an act of faith, or as you see here, doing faith.
And this doing faith, doing that which God has commanded us to do, is ultimately a faith that’s going to please him, and it’s ultimately a faith that is going to be commended by him. And so what we should desire is like Abel to do what it was that he did. In fact, his faith still speaks to us of the importance of doing that which pleases God. If I want my life to please God, then I need to be doing that which is pleasing to him. And what is pleasing to him?
It tells us right there, righteous acts. He did that which was righteous. Now, what is righteous? Have you ever asked yourself that question? What is righteous?
What is righteousness, for that matter? Well, what is righteous is what God says is righteous, what God says is right. So we want to know what’s right and do what’s right, not in my eyes, but we want to know what’s right and do what’s right in the eyes of God. And in knowing and doing what’s right in the eyes of God, we ultimately are working out our faith. We are doing the faith that we say that we believe.
Do you understand? So when these 3 individuals, Noah, Clay, and Ellen, were baptized this morning, They were doing righteousness. They were doing what it was that God asked them to do. You say, what do you mean by that? Well, when you look at the scriptures, you see baptism as something that Christ commanded.
It’s something that’s to demonstrate a person’s faith after salvation. And so they chose to please God by being baptized. Now that takes some courage to do that. It takes some planning to do that. There’s a lot involved in doing that, but one of the things that every one of them can know is that as soon as they were baptized this morning, you know what?
God was pleased. God was pleased. And that’s something that will come— he will commend. They knew that God was pleased because they did exactly what it was that God asked them to do. They were baptized before others.
And in the same way, when we do what it is God has asked us to do, whatever that might be, especially in this culture today, just speaking to those of you that are single right now, you’ve got basically a world that’s saying, hey, it does not matter when it comes to matters of sexuality. You don’t need to save sex for marriage. Just get involved right now. Hey, whatever your whim or your heart’s desire is, As long as you love them, it doesn’t matter. Just go ahead and have sex.
Well, according to God, that’s not righteousness. That’s not knowing what’s right and doing what’s right no matter what. Living together before marriage now is a huge, huge thing, but according to God, that’s not his plan. His plan is that we know what’s right and do what’s right no matter what. Do you see where we’re going with this thing?
So one of the matters we’ve gotta look at when we think about faith that ultimately is going to please God or be commendable by God is whether or not we’re doing what it is that he has commanded us to do. And every time you or I choose to do what it is he’s commanded us to do, he’s pleased. He’s pleased.
Well, there’s one more here. It’s the whole matter of Enoch. It says, by faith, verse 5, Enoch was taken from this life so that he did not experience death. Would that not be good? You know, no dying involved, just straight to heaven, pass to heaven, no death.
Do not pass death, go straight to heaven. He did not experience death. He could not be found. So evidently they looked for him, you know, where is that guy Enoch? He was around but doesn’t seem to be around anymore because God had taken him away.
For before he was taken, he was— and this tells us before it happened— he was commended as one who pleased God. Now what do we know about Enoch? Well, we know that he lived with what I’m going to call abiding faith. Abiding faith. In fact, it was his abiding faith that resulted in his commendation or his pleasing God.
Why did God give him a free pass to heaven? Why did he escape death? Well, Genesis 5:22-24 tells us it’s because he was a person who walked with God. That’s the description of Enoch. Enoch was a person who walked with God, or he remained in close and constant fellowship with God, and it says that he walked with God for 300 years.
Now that’s a long time, wouldn’t you agree? I mean, that would be fantastic to live 300 years, but he actually lived 365 years, which means— do the subtraction— that the first 65 years of his life he did not walk with God. But then things changed. Do you know when they changed? This is fascinating.
They changed when they had a baby, when they had Methuselah. Now, we don’t know who his wife was. We just know that they had Methuselah. And it says that after they had Methuselah— that’s a fantastic name, by the way, isn’t it? You thinking about naming your kid Methuselah?
That would be awesome. But after they had Methuselah, it says that he started walking with God. And he walked with God all the way to the day that God took him. So for the next 300 years, he walked with God. I love that account because some of us, you know, we’ve been around the church long enough where we see sometimes where families come to church after they’ve had a baby, and all of a sudden in having a baby, they start thinking about spiritual things.
Or maybe after they have a baby, their prayer life becomes more active. You know, I don’t know. Oh God, you’re gonna have to help me. I’m never gonna make it. This is not working out.
I had no idea it was gonna be like this, and all the rest of it. And whatever you do, please undo all of my bad parenting, and you know, all the rest that we’re gonna pray about at that point. I don’t know. All I know is I’ve seen this happen a lot of times where after a child is born, people begin to think spiritually, and they begin to think about connecting with God, and, boy, I better get my kid connected with God. So they come to church and drop them off at the choir, you know, and they’ll help them over there.
And then what happens is ultimately it gets to the family, like perhaps happened here with Enoch. We don’t know the whole story. We just know that something happened that ultimately changed Enoch so that not only did he change in his faith with God, and connect with God after Methuselah was born, but he never let go of that faith. And he continued to walk with God from that day on. See, this wasn’t a— sometimes, you know, we talk about faith being something, oh yeah, I did that once.
No, no, this is a continuing faith. This is an abiding faith. And as a result of this abiding faith, it says that ultimately God said, you know what? Come on home. Let’s skip the death thing.
Come on home. I love how a Sunday school child expressed this in class. She wrote this. Enoch was a man who learned to walk with God, and they used to take long walks together. One day they walked so far that God said, look, Enoch, it’s so far for you to go back, Why don’t you just come on home with me?
So he walked on home with God. What a great picture. He had been walking with God and he just walked on home with God. You know, Jesus talked about abiding, that we’re to abide in Christ. Well, this picture of abiding is a picture of walking with God in a personal intimate relationship, not just occasionally, But over and over again, Bernice, my wife, told me that she was on a retreat, a women’s retreat, and they were talking about abiding.
What does abiding mean? What does it mean to have abiding faith or to remain in Christ, to remain in God? And she said, in this retreat, we talked about the difference between a model home, a model home, and a home that somebody lives in. She said a model home is a home that’s perfectly put together. You know, everything is clean, everything is in its proper places, there’s no clutter, it’s peaceful.
The carpets, they’re vacuumed perfectly, the floors are clean, there’s no dust on the furniture. That’s a model home. But a home that people live in, a home that people abide in, that’s a home that’s filled with life and noise and clutter, and you find socks underneath the couch and toys are on the floor and books are left open on chairs because life happens there. All kinds of life happens there. The good and the bad times, that happens there.
The challenges And the victories, they happen there. It’s all a part of life, and it’s all a part of abiding, that you don’t turn your back and walk on God when things aren’t going according to your way and when challenges come into your life, but you abide in God. And he’s saying here that this is the kind of faith, this faith that Enoch had, is the kind of faith that ultimately God is going to commend. Then he finishes this thought with verse 6 and says, and so without faith, without this kind of faith, without accepting faith and doing faith and abiding faith, without faith it’s impossible. It’s impossible.
Let that sink in. It’s impossible to please God. And should we want to please God? That’s the point of this. Yes, which means it should be our desire to manifest this kind of faith.
And then he says, because anyone who comes to God, to him, must, and look at this, believe that he exists. So if our faith is going to be pleasing to him, we gotta really believe he exists. We can’t see him, but we believe it. And secondly, and that he rewards those who earnestly seek him. This is fascinating to me, that we are to believe that God exists, but we’re also to believe that God commends those who walk in faith, that there is a reward coming for those who walk in faith.
And whether it’s not now, ultimately there’s going to be a bema seat, a judgment seat, where we’re gonna all appear before it. The Apostle Paul, who wrote about that matter, talked about how he was going to appear before the judgment seat. This person of faith was going to appear before the judgment seat because we’re all gonna appear before the judgment seat. If you’re a Christ follower, you’re gonna appear before the judgment seat so that he may reward you.
And pleasing faith is faith that believes that God exists and Pleasing faith is faith that believes that there’s coming a day where there’s going to be rewards, where God is going to commend us for those things that we did that ultimately pleased him. And so this verse is saying, so how should we live? Should we live where we, like, we come to faith and then, well, got that done, take it off my checklist? Are you kidding? We need to live like Enoch where this faith is a part of our life so that our life is a continual testimony of our faith and we are truly desiring to please the Lord.
Now, some of us are sitting here thinking, I don’t know how I feel about this. Let me try to just help you as we close. If God wants to commend me, if God wants to commend you, should you not want to be commended?
If that’s his desire, if his desire is that we live the kind of life that ultimately pleases him, should we not want to please him? Should that not be something that is motivating us to be people who live with pleasing faith? Should that not be the case? Now, of course, this isn’t going to be done in our own strength. Can’t.
I mean, we can’t pull this off without faith in God. It’s going to be impossible to please the God who wants us to please him. So this is the result of the work of God in us as we live in congruence with what it is that God is doing in us. But the desire should be that our lives are ultimately pleasing in his eyes, just as much as we want to please the boss. Why are you doing what it is that you’re doing right now?
Well, because I want to keep my job. Good. It’s good. You want to be commendable to your job, to your boss, is that right? Yes.
Good. Why are you doing what you’re doing in your classes right now? Well, because I want the commendation of my teacher. I don’t want to be in this grade forever. Good.
That’s good. Parents are really happy about that. That, that’s really good.
And should we not as parents want to be commendable in the eyes of our children?
And kids, shouldn’t you want to ultimately be commendable in the eyes of your parents? Sure, of course we want that. If you’re a spouse or a friend, you want to live a life that’s commendable. And certainly at the root of all of that should be faith, that this should be a driving force in our life. Now I know that there are a lot of things in life that I am never going to be commended for, never, okay?
I’m not gonna be commended for skiing. I was talking to somebody yesterday about the places that they’ve skied, and I’m still working on, you know, the easy slope. But anyway, I’m never gonna be commended for my skiing. I’m never going to be commended for my basketball. That’s why I’m not out on the basketball court.
That’s fine. I’m not gonna be commended for that. I’m not gonna be commended for my golf swing. I’m not gonna be commended for my ability to write code.
I don’t even know if I would know what code is if I saw it, okay? So, I mean, all of you, many of you are sitting here this morning, code, I love it, man. I do it all the time. That’s why my primary job is to do code. Fantastic.
I would come and I would give you all kinds of commendation for what it is that you’re doing and the skills that you’ve developed and the education and the background. There’s no chance in the future that any commendation is coming this way when it comes to the area of code. Oh, Dave, we love the code you write. That sort of— it’s not going to happen. But look at this list.
Every one of us could ultimately be commended by God for having this kind of faith, accepting faith, that I’m gonna believe what it is that God says.
And as I don’t question it, I believe it, that’s commendable, that’s pleasing to him. And that I can have a faith that does what it is that God desires. Every one of us can do that. You don’t have to have another skill or something and, oh well, I can’t do— no, no, no, wait a minute. You can.
Through the strength of God, the work of Jesus Christ in you, you can live a life that’s ultimately going to please Him. Now, of course, we’re going to sin along the ways, but the idea here is it’s the direction, not the perfection, and that our lives are moving in the right direction so that ultimately we are seeking to please God. And every one of us here can live with abiding faith in an intimate, walk with God. And that’s what the desire is. That’s what the hope is, is that that would be true of us.
It struck me this morning that I should— this struck me at 5 AM— that I should pull up my LinkedIn page. So I went to LinkedIn, and many of you are on LinkedIn. You have a page at LinkedIn. You know, you’re networked, or you could be networked, and people could go there and they could find out about your employment and, you know, the skills that you have and the expertise and all these other things. And so I pulled up my page and I went to the page where, you know, people are recommending me.
And if you’re at LinkedIn, you know what this is. This is a page where people desire to endorse you for something, for some kind of skill or something like that. And so I went to this page, and by the way, you know, I’ve not called up people and said, could you endorse me for, or, you know, sent them an email, would you endorse me, or any of that stuff. It’s just, this is just a part of the system, if you guys are familiar with the system, right? And so anyway, I went to this page and I just took a quick glance at it for one reason.
I said, you know, the one thing that God wants to commend me for Is it anywhere on this page?
And the answer is no. You see, the number one thing that I should more than anything else be concerned about is whether or not my life is a life of faith, of faith. Now, how I do those things can be a demonstration of faith, but the bigger question is, Is the driving motivation of my life, is the driving motivation of your life, to please God? Is that your one ambition, as Paul talked about? Is it my ambition more than anything else to live a life that ultimately pleases God and ultimately therefore will be commended by him?
You say, I can’t do that. Yes, you can, through the power of Jesus Christ working within us. We’re not talking about skiing here. We’re not talking about coding here. We’re talking about a life that walks with God and he transforms us and he begins to change us from the inside out and we begin to live a life that ultimately is the kind of life that will please him.
So that’s where we’re going with this series. My hope and prayer is that it helps every one of us individually and it helps us as a church become people of daring faith, because daring faith is commendable faith. Let’s stand, we’ll close with prayer.
Lord, we are so thankful that you’ve put before us this topic for these several days ahead, these 40 days. I pray that we would get the most out of it and that we would listen to your voice speak. I pray, God, for every person who is here, that first they would have a relationship with you, they would be saved by faith, and if they are not yet in your family, that they would soon come to believe in Jesus Christ and receive the gift of life that is found in him. Even today, Lord, if If they’re ready to receive the gift, we pray that they would just in their hearts respond to your work to help them believe, and that this would even be the moment of salvation for them as they receive Jesus the Savior and are adopted into your family. And for those of us that are already in your family, Lord, we wanna be people who live with the kind of faith that’s ultimately going to please you, like Enoch, Like Abel and like the ancients of old.
And so help us even today sort that out. What does that mean today? What does that mean right now in my life? Help us take a step forward in that direction with conviction that we might be the people that you long for us to be and make progress in this relationship with you and each other in ways that would ultimately lead to the betterment of the witness that we have in the world, and the love that we share. And so help us this week, we pray.
We know we can’t do this without you, and so as we go, we want to just live in your power, manifesting faith. For your name’s sake, may you be pleased. And it’s in Jesus’ name we pray, amen.
