Sermon Transcript
Are you encouraged? I hope so. Boy, isn’t it great to get together and to be able to encourage each other, to hear music like that, and to sing together? It’s just fantastic if you ask me. I am very thankful.
Well, we’re going to finish the Daring Faith series, uh, the messages today. This week we finished the actual 40 Days of Faith Focus. I don’t know if you’ve been a part of that. If you’re brand new, We’ve been focused for the last 36 days on the matter of faith, and we’re bringing it to a close this week. It’s been a really good thing for the church.
I think it’s been a good thing for us. If you say the church, then you’re saying for us as individuals, because individuals are the ones that make up the church. And I hope that it’s been a great thing for you, that you would be among those that would say, yeah, I’ve really benefited by this. I’ve benefited by the messages or the memory verses. The discussion groups, the DVDs that we’ve been looking at, all that’s come together, the prayer time.
I hope it’s really helped you in a lot of ways. I’ve heard some great stories from people when I’ve asked them about, you know, has this been beneficial? And many people are talking about, you know, at the right moment we were focused on this one thing related to faith and it truly helped me. So I’m grateful that, you know, we said yes to doing this series and And it’s been that helpful. So, so far we’ve talked about commendable faith, we’ve talked about expectant faith, we’ve talked about strong faith, we’ve talked about practicing faith, we’ve talked about living fearless lives, lives that have fearless faith.
And today what we’re gonna do is wrap this all up with perfecting faith, perfecting faith. Just a fascinating subject because So, what we want to talk about is how faith grows. And I wanted to end this, this way this morning. And, of course, the study comes to the life of Abraham. And so, we’re going to be looking at Abraham.
If you’re in one of the discussion groups and you are using the DVD, maybe you’ve already seen the DVD, and so you’ve already seen the teaching that was done on Abraham. And so, this will hopefully reinforce that, maybe give you another kind of look at the life of Abraham and so forth. But when you think about the matter of perfecting faith, we’re thinking about how our faith grows. And really our faith grows in an imperfect way, I guess you might say. It has these swings, these faith swings we might call it, where there are these faith highs and faith lows.
And if you’ve been a person of faith for a while, you’ve probably experienced this, right? You feel like, yeah, I finally am figuring this faith thing out. And then that’ll put you into a low right there anyway, you know. You got some pride going on, but whatever it is. And so you understand that the faith is something that just— it seems like it’s a challenge.
It’s just a part of life. Sometimes we’re bumping heaven and other times we’re in the pit of despair, you know. Is things gonna work out? How are things gonna go? And so our faith seems to be low.
So we could say in some ways that the life of faith is like a San Francisco Giants baseball season. All right, now I don’t know if you’re a Giants fan, but if you are a Giants fan, you’re going to identify with this, okay? Because, uh, the baseball season thing is just about ready to get going. You know that the teams are all at spring training right now, so the Giants are over in Scottsdale, and they just started actually playing their spring training games on Friday. So they played one Friday, they played one Saturday, they play one today.
They’re going to play 33 games during this spring training time. Actually, they won their game on Friday and they won their game on Saturday, which means they have a perfect record right now. You know, they’re like 1,000%. This is fantastic. And if you’re a Giants fan, this is a, you know, a moment to celebrate and, you know, go out and have something special.
But whatever it is, you know, you’re going to do But you know as a Giants fan that the chances of them going through spring training through 33 games and not losing a game, the chances of them not losing a game would be about what? Like zilch, okay? It’s not gonna happen. They’re gonna lose some games because that’s just baseball. And then when they get into the baseball season starting on April 2nd, they’re gonna start into their 162-game season, okay?
162 games. And guess what? They’re gonna probably lose some games during this season. I went back and I looked and I never found the perfect record of 162 wins. Okay, if you’re gonna be a Giants fan, you’re gonna have highs and lows emotionally if you’re following the team.
It’s just part of it. Last year there were 75 dips. Okay, 75 dips and You know, 87 moments of, whoo, this is really good, we’re going in the right direction, but there were 75 losses in the year before. It’s— you can go back and you can check the record, but nonetheless, people continue to support the San Francisco Giants. You know, I was just told after the first service, somebody who works with the Giants, he said, you know, there have been 32,000 people already that purchased season tickets for the Giants this year.
32,000. He said, you know how many are in the stadium? 42,000. So now you wonder why you can’t get a ticket very easy, you know, 32,000. And he said, and these are all people basically that are buying tickets because they want to see their Giants— what?
Yeah, we want to see our Giants win. I mean, that’s the point, is we’re not buying tickets to see, yeah, let’s have a miserable season and, you know, this is going to turn out to be a bad deal and No, the hope is, is that it’s gonna be a great season, they’ll win the pennant, they’ll win the World Series, all the rest of that. The point of all of this is just to say this, that if you’re a baseball fan, you better get used to highs and lows because wins and losses are a part of baseball. It just goes with the game. Guess what?
If you’re a person of faith, highs and lows are a part of the life of faith. And I think it’s really important before we finish this series that we just address that from a realistic perspective, that we be realistic. And I’m gonna just give you a couple thoughts this morning. One of them is just simply that we need to be realistic about this faith journey because this faith journey is going to be filled with faith highs and it’s also going to be filled with faith lows. Now you may not think that if you look at Hebrews chapter 11, and I’d like to start at Hebrews chapter 11, so if you have your Bibles, or the message note sheets this morning, flip over to Hebrews chapter 11.
And I say you may not think that because when we read this passage that’s found in Hebrews 11 and we hear about all these people of faith, it just seems like they’re always on the win column, you know, that things are great in their life of faith. And we could, if that’s all we see, we could think miserable things about our life of faith. But I want you to just see kind of a bigger view of faith. And so we’re just going to take a brief look here at the life of Abraham and get a picture of this man who was called the father of faith, okay? The father of faith.
This man who grew strong in faith. This man who had great faith. We want to understand what was his faith journey like and how can that connect with our faith journeys to give us encouragement and hope in a world that seems to oftentimes put us in the lost column when it comes to faith. So Hebrews 11, I want you just to notice the 4 by faiths that are found here in this chapter regarding Abraham, beginning in verse 8. By faith, Abraham, when called to go to a place he would later receive as his inheritance, obeyed and went, even though he did not know where he was going.
Verse 9, by faith, there’s a second by faith, he made his home in the Promised Land like a stranger in a foreign land. He lived in tents, as did Isaac and Jacob, who were heirs with him of the same promise, for he was looking forward to the city with foundations, whose architect and builder is God. Verse 11, by faith, there’s a third one, Abraham, even though he was past age and Sarah herself was barren, was enabled to become a father because he considered him faithful who had made the promise. And so from this very one man, and he as good as dead, talking about Abraham, came descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky, and as countless as the sand on the seashore. Then there’s a little interlude if you’re following along in your Bible, but jump on down to verse 17 where it picks up Abraham’s story again, and it says, by faith Abraham, when God tested him, offered Isaac as a sacrifice.
He who had received the promises was about to sacrifice his one and only son, even though God had said to him, It is through Isaac that your offspring will be reckoned. Abraham reasoned that God could raise the dead, and figuratively speaking, he did receive Isaac back from death. Now, what you have there, if you take some time and just look at this account that’s found in Hebrews chapter 11 about Abraham, is essentially what we have are 4 faith highs, right? 4 faith fantastic moments in the life of Abraham. And you might, if you’re following along in your message notes or in your Bible, you might circle or underline 4 words here, okay?
The first word is called in verse 8. When Abraham was called, when God called Abraham to leave his home in Ur, a place that he had lived for 75 years, when he was called by God to go out to a place that God wasn’t telling him where it was going to be, all he said to him was, Abraham, I’m gonna do something through you. I’m gonna give you a land. God made a promise to take Abraham to the Promised Land. And secondly, through you, all the nations are going to be blessed.
Through your seed, through your descendants, all the nations are going to be blessed. After God made those promises to Abraham, the last part of Genesis chapter 11 and the first part of Genesis chapter 12, Abraham, when called by faith, as it says here, In verse 8, by faith he left his home and he traveled for 1,000 miles. He stopped off at Haran, which is about 600 miles away. He then went another 400 miles to Canaan, but he followed God by faith. Now, if you were Abraham and you put your house up for sale at this moment in time and your neighbor came over and said to you, I see you’re moving, where are you moving?
Your answer if you were Abraham would be what? I don’t know. That would be your answer. I don’t know. And if your neighbor said to you, why are you moving?
Your answer would be, because God told me to move. Now, if you have neighbors like I have neighbors, at this point they would have probably said, good, we’ll get you out of the neighborhood, you know, kind of thing. But at this point, he had no idea. All he knew is that God was calling him to leave. And it says, you notice in verse 9, that he lived, and you might underline or circle that word, that he lived in tents, okay?
So when he gets to the Promised Land, he’s gonna spend time living in temporary housing as aliens and strangers in a foreign land as he’s awaiting, you notice what it says there, as he’s awaiting, verse 9, as he’s awaiting this heavenly city that God is building. So all he has is the promise that there’s gonna be a better city that he’s going to live in someday, But for now and until then, he’s going to live in temporary housing. That could be a moment of faith for anybody, right? And then thirdly, you might underline or circle the word father in verse 11. When he fathered Isaac, he fathered Isaac at a time where he was as good as dead.
You saw that in the passage, that he and Sarah were too old to have children, okay? They were too old to have children, but they believed God’s promise and God gave them a son and his name was Isaac. But then, verse 17, he offered, and you might underline or circle the word offered in verse 17. There was a time where God came to Abraham and he told Abraham to take his son, his only son Isaac, chapter 22 of Genesis, verse 2, and he said, this son that you love, and I want you to go to Moriah and I want you to sacrifice him as a burnt offering in one of the mountains that’s there, a mountain that I’m gonna tell you about, God said to Abraham. And when God told him to do that, he obeyed.
He immediately followed God’s lead and prepared everything for the sacrifice. But if you know the story, you know that God stopped him. He stopped him and he provided a lamb. And in a sense, figuratively speaking, Isaac was raised from the dead in that he was no longer gonna be that sacrifice unto death. But Abraham believed God would figure the whole thing out, that God would raise the dead, that God would do whatever was necessary in order to fulfill his plan of having descendants through this kid.
And by the way, this kid, he was 25 years old at this time. Josephus says that he was 25. We see again the pictures, like I said, with regard in this series to Daniel, And Daniel, you know, in the lion’s den, we get the picture of that little kid. No, he was about— Daniel was about 80 years old. And sometimes we see this little picture of, you know, Abraham sacrificing his son Isaac, who’s this kid.
Well, he’s not a kid. He’s about 25 years old. But nonetheless, in these 4 ways, Abraham demonstrated amazing faith. So if we were to graph, you know, if we were to put a graph together and we were to say, wow, what went on in the life of Abraham, it would be like, you know, an angular line that’s just getting better and better, moving toward heaven, and it’s just one faith high after another from age 75 on when he was called to leave Ur until he fathered Isaac at 100 until he, 25 years later, offered Isaac as a sacrifice. 50 years of amazing faith.
Now that would be great, wouldn’t it, if God looked at our lives and he saw us as people that basically God’s saying, hey, go, I want you to go, I want you to leave where you are right now, and willingly we just go even if we don’t know? Where he’s taking us, and we would be willing to live in a tent. You know, if God, you want me, okay, fine. That’s kind of— some of you, you understand that one right now. It’s like when you came to Silicon Valley, you knew, I’m gonna never be able to buy a house.
I’m always gonna be living in somebody else’s house, renting or leasing from somebody else. But you did it because you believed God wanted you here. And so you’re trusting him. Or it could be that he’s asking you to do the unthinkable, that he’s going to do the unthinkable through you. I mean, it just doesn’t make sense.
I mean, come on, you know, when you get this age, you can’t have kids. Or maybe he’s asking you to do something that just causes you to have all kinds of questions, like, God, listen, I thought that You were going to bless the world through my descendant, and you said that that was Isaac, and this just doesn’t make any sense. But you trust him anyway.
It would be great to live like that, wouldn’t it? Where we just trust him and we follow his lead. We go where it is he wants us to go. We do what it is that he wants us to do. That would be great, wouldn’t it?
I was at a pastor’s conference on Thursday, South Bay Pastors Network. We had 4 hours together. It was just a gathering of pastors to be encouraged and have lunch together and, you know, kind of hang out together and talk, do the pastor stuff, all the rest of that sort of thing. It was fun. There were a few guys that came up to me, a few of the pastors, and said, hey Dave, how are things going at Bridges?
And they’ve known the history of Bridges and they’ve known that, you know, we’re a church that has had some rough times in the past. And so they were wondering, you know, how are things going right now? And I said, you know, this is a really good season of ministry. I mean, it really is. It’s fantastic what God’s doing in the life of the church right now.
And you guys know this if you’ve been a part of the church. This is a wonderful time. And, and I think this 40 Days of Faith has been a wonderful time for us as a church. I truly do. I just What God’s been doing in this time is, it’s been great.
So I shared that with the guys. I said, you know, there just are so many good things that are happening in the life of the church, and I think some of them are connected to this 40-day Focus on Faith that we’re in right now. And I told them a little bit about that. And then as I was reflecting back on that, I went back to almost a year ago where I was sitting in a conference and Rick Warren was saying, you know, we do these focus studies. Throughout the year, a couple times a year at our church, and I just, he said, you know, you really oughta think about doing something like that.
And I couldn’t get that off my mind, so I came back and I started fishing around and I found this Daring Faith study and thought, well, maybe that could be helpful. So we as pastors talked about, would it be good for us as a church to spend some time just focused on faith, and we all agreed as pastors, yeah, that would be good, and so we presented it to the elders and the elders said, yeah, that would be good, We talked to the staff about it, and they got supportive of it, and the life group leaders got supportive, and then you, and then you got supportive, even to the degree where, as we said, you know, don’t just come to the messages, but really get into this thing and really be a part of this and get the workbook and do the questions and, you know, talk to people about this, and 300, almost 350 of you picked up the workbooks and This has really been a good time, and really what that has been is it’s been a demonstration of faith. Okay, if God wants to do this, then let’s go down the road and let’s embrace what it is that he has for us, and let’s just see what he’s going to do. I would call that a faith high. Now, wouldn’t it be great if, you know, we all live out the remainder of this ministry, whatever that is, if we live the whole thing out and then there’s never a dip.
Wouldn’t that be great? But the fact of the matter is, that’s pretty unrealistic, isn’t it? I mean, if we’re gonna be realistic about faith, there are going to be moments where we’re struggling with faith, maybe even right now. Moments where we don’t respond to God the way that he wants us to. In other words, there are gonna be moments like the moments that are described in Abraham’s journey found from Genesis chapter 12 all the way through Genesis chapter 22.
And I want you to see this because Abraham not only had some highs, but he also had some faith lows. And you have to go to Genesis to see the rest of the story ’cause the rest of the story isn’t told in Genesis chapter— excuse me, in Hebrews chapter 11, the rest of the story is told. In the book of Genesis. The lows began really right away, because after Abraham was called, he went to Haran. And you know what?
Haran was a detour. As you read the account, you get the sense that Haran wasn’t a place that God wanted Abraham to stay long, but he ended up staying long enough that his father died there. So, it was basically a place that they kind of shoved into their schedule instead of God. I’d call that a faith low. And then as you follow the story and they get into the Promised Land, you know that there was a famine in the land, and as you read about Israel, you’ll often find that when there’s a famine, they go to Egypt.
So they went to Egypt, and they were gonna look for some food, but when they got down there, they had a conversation with the Pharaoh, And do you remember what Abraham told his wife to do? You remember? He told his wife to do what? To lie. You remember that?
That was not exactly a high-faith moment. We’d call that a low-faith moment where fear, fear overcame their faith. And then you may remember that his nephew Lot had some cattle, he had some herdsmen, And Lot’s herdsmen and Abraham’s herdsmen, even though they were family, could not get along, and there ended up being a rift in their relationship, and they parted company and had to go live somewhere else because they could no longer live together. And then you may remember also in Genesis chapter 16 where Abraham and Sarah are waiting on God to fulfill his promise. It’s been 10 years.
God had made the promise to them that they were gonna have children. It’s been 10 years, they haven’t had children, so what did they do? Do you remember this? They decided to help God out by offering Hagar, the maidservant, to Abraham so that she could get pregnant and ultimately they could have the children, or a child, that would help God out with his promise. I would not call that a high-faith moment, would you?
I would call that, are you kidding me? What were you guys thinking there? And then you may also remember that in Genesis chapter 17, when God sent some messengers to Abraham to say to him, listen, I know you’re old, but you’re still gonna have children, that he and Sarah got a good laugh out of that one. That was not a high-faith moment. And then you may remember in Genesis chapter 20 how they ended up moving to the Negev where again Abraham lied.
Not this time Sarah who he told to lie, this time he lied about Sarah and said, she’s my sister. She’s not my wife, she’s my sister. That created all kinds of problems. And then you may remember in Genesis chapter 21 where Abraham dumped, where Abraham dumped Hagar and Ishmael. That after they did have the son Isaac, there was a rift in the family, and so Abraham just dumped him to the point where it looked like that Ishmael was going to die of starvation had God not intervened.
So, God intervened in order to take care of Hagar and Ishmael. In other words, that was not another great faith moment in the life of Abraham. In other words, as Paul Harvey used to say, the rest of the story, if you were to graph it, it didn’t look too good, the rest of Abraham’s story, because there were several moments in the life of Abraham where the guy is, you know, going in the wrong direction. Instead of trusting God, he’s coming up with his own plan. Instead of waiting on God’s timing, he’s coming up with his own timing.
Instead of believing that God would intervene in ways that would be appropriate to how God works, he trusted his own ways. You know, this reminded me of a conversation that I had a week or so ago with my son Brent. Brent does documentary films. As a living, and he got a contract recently with a Christian, somebody, a professing faith person. And so Brent thought, okay, well, we’ll give this a shot, see how this goes.
I gotta tell you right up front that it hasn’t always worked out well for Brent to work with other Christians. This always drives me nuts when I hear this kind of story. And so he got into this, you know, contract with this guy, put 60 hours of work into preparing this video, trying to get to a place where the guy could be agreeable about something and actually even come up with a script, okay? Just a script. I mean, after 60 hours, you should be able to have some kind of an agreement on a script, and he could not even get that from the guy.
So ultimately Brent said to him, listen, this is not gonna work. And he knew that the guy was gonna push back on him, which he did. In fact, the guy said, well, listen, I’m gonna quote him now. The guy said to Brent, well, God told me that you’re the one that’s supposed to do the job. Have you ever heard a Christian say this?
God told me you’re the one that’s supposed to do the job. Okay, Brent, he said, I decided not to, you know, talk to him about his theology at that point or correct his theology or anything like that. So we didn’t, we didn’t go down that road. But you know the perfect answer? It would have been, if God told you that I’m the one to do the job, then let me do the job, right?
I mean, the reason that you came to our film company is because you’ve seen our work and you believe we could do the job, so let us do the job.
Well, in essence, what we see in this downward graph with Abraham is somebody who’s trying to take over for God. And when you connect it to the good moments in his life, This is what the journey of faith was like for Abraham. Now that’s realistic. And if you’re only reading Hebrews chapter 11, you’re going to miss part of the story. That’s Abraham’s faith journey.
And for a lot of us, when we look at that this morning, That’s hopeful because that’s our faith journey. It’s not this angular line that’s just perfect. It has its ups and it, it has its downs. It’s just part of the experience that we’ve had with the Lord. Now, what does the Lord want from us in this journey?
Well, I think we need to be realistic, but I think also we need to be responsive. We need to be responsive. When God called Abraham, he expected Abraham to respond, and he did. When God said to Abraham, you’re going to live in tents, he was responsive to that. They lived in tents.
When God said, you’re going to father a son, he was ultimately responsive to that. When God said, Abraham, I want you to to sacrifice your son, I want you to offer your son on an altar. He was even responsive to that. And really, for anybody who’s a person of faith, that’s what the Lord wants for us. He wants us to be responsive.
And I think if there’s been one thing that’s been helpful for me that would come to the top in this whole series, it would be the difference between being responsive and being a person who takes the initiative. There was a study that we did a few weeks ago, and it had to do with initiative in the life of a Christian and the place of initiative. But I still remember that the study that we did, when you looked at the study closely, it was all reflecting a responsive life of faith. But the word initiative was used to title the study, and so I said to my group, I said, I don’t really like using the word initiative. Here, because I think that what the Lord is looking for us is responsiveness.
He wants us to be responsive to what it is that he’s calling us to do. Isn’t that true? That’s the point. Faith is responsive enough that it trusts God. It trusts him completely and therefore responds to his will.
Then fine, then go ahead, don’t wait, then take the initiative and get going. But the initiative doesn’t come before God so that what we’re basically doing is saying, come on, God, catch up, catch up, okay? Catch up. So I think for some people, they think faith is stepping out in faith without God’s calling. That’s not the point of this.
The point of this is to follow. The point of this is to be pulled by God. And the moments where there was this dip in Abraham’s faith, where the moments instead of following God’s lead, He was leading God in the opposite direction or a different direction, right? And so often it can be that way for us. You know, it’s fascinating, after Genesis chapter 11, you get into chapter 12 and there’s some summary verses, but you get this one statement made in Hebrews chapter 12 and verse 2 where it says, let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and the perfecter of our faith.
What is he saying? He’s saying faith needs to be something that is manifested in our life from start to finish. Because Jesus, if you got a connection to Jesus, if you’re in a relationship with Jesus, Jesus is the author of faith. He’s the one that gives us the faith to believe. He’s the author of faith, he starts the faith, And he is the finisher of the faith.
He’s the perfecter. It says it there. He’s the perfecter of faith. But we’ve got to keep our eyes on him. And really, Abraham was at his best when he was fixed on God.
He wasn’t thinking about, oh, this isn’t gonna work out. He was focused entirely on God. In fact, you get this statement. Listen, this is amazing. Genesis chapter 15.
You get this statement. Genesis chapter 15, verses 5 and 6. It says, God took him, he took him outside and said, look up at the heavens and count the stars, if indeed you can count them. In other words, this is going to be true of your descendants. You’re not going to be able to count them.
There are going to be so many descendants through you, Abraham. Old— you old man. There are going to be so many descendants through you. And then he said to him, so shall your offspring be. And then you get this statement: Abraham believed the Lord and he credited it to him as righteousness.
That last part there, Abraham believed the Lord and God credited it to him as righteousness, that is a statement that’s repeated in James chapter 2. It’s also a statement that’s repeated in Romans chapter 4. And essentially what it is used to teach in those chapters is that faith is something that saved Abraham just like faith is something that saves us. It’s not our works. It’s faith in the author and the perfecter of our faith, Jesus Christ, so that if we’re saved, we’re saved by Jesus Christ.
But when we believe, and this is the wonderful thing, our faith is credited as righteousness, as righteousness. Now this is fantastic because what God then does with our sin account is he looks at our sin account and he forgives it. It’s actually accounting terminology. God credits, God credits to our account righteousness so that when he sees our account, he no longer sees a lack of faith, a lack of faith, a lack of faith, a lack of faith. Or sin debt, sin debt, sin debt, sin debt.
That’s all been forgiven. God wrote— has written on our account righteousness because of faith in Jesus Christ, the one who gives faith and the one who perfects our faith. Well, at that moment, Abraham’s account was credited as righteousness. And when was that moment? Well, here it is.
When did it happen? It happened in Genesis chapter 15 and verse 6. And when in this scheme of Abraham’s journey does Genesis chapter 15, verse 6 happen? It happened on this downward trend when there was this rift between he and Lot and the herdsmen, and then, and then it happened right before they decided to come up with a plan to help God out. But at the moment that he believed, Genesis chapter 15, verse 6, God looked at his account and he said, he’s forgiven.
Which tells me why God didn’t hang out the rest of Abraham’s dirty laundry in Hebrews chapter 11.
It was no longer part of the deal.
And boy, when you see this, this changes the whole understanding of the faith journey because yes, There are gonna be lows.
We just can’t get this thing perfect, can we? We can’t get the faith thing perfect. It’s not gonna happen that way. It’s so important as we finish out this series that we realize that we’re not gonna get it perfect. Now that’s not an excuse to say, well, I’m gonna give up.
No, it’s just part of the journey.
But nonetheless, when we place our faith in Jesus Christ, God credits to our account the same righteousness. He sees us as forgiven in him. Now, how does that change the journey for you this morning?
Well, maybe I shouldn’t beat myself up as often as I do.
Maybe I need to embrace God’s grace in a different way than I ever have embraced his grace.
Maybe I shouldn’t give up on this faith journey. Maybe I should keep walking, because the author and perfecter of faith isn’t yet done with what it is that he wants to do in me.
I had a conversation last week between services with one of our members, and we were talking about how good this time of faith has been for us. And I talked a little bit with him again about that whole matter of responsive faith and how that’s been a high moment for me, is just coming to understand that in a new way. Oh, I just want to respond to what it is God’s doing with faith. And so we were talking about that, and he said, you know, That reminds me of a message that I heard some years ago preached by Jonathan Howe, Ada Howe’s husband. Some of you know Ada.
Jonathan is now in heaven. But he said, you know, I still remember him saying this, without God man can’t, without man God won’t.
Well, there it is.
You see, God is the author and he is the perfecter of faith, and this is not gonna happen without him and a relationship with him, but he’s not gonna do it without us. He asks us to be people of faith, follow his leadings, his promptings. We obey him, we repent when we fail him. So the whole point today is just simply this: faith is perfected through the highs and the lows of life. And hopefully then through those highs and those lows of this Christian walk of faith, God gets us to the place where he wants us, where he wants us to be.
We wanna be where God wants us to be, don’t we? Absolutely. And God changes us into the people that he wants us to become. And that’s a part of the highs and the lows. And so wherever you are in your faith this morning, this is an opportunity to, you know, I’m checking out of the journey.
No, this is an opportunity to join in the journey, to enjoy. This is part of the journey, just like it’s part of a baseball season. Hey, yeah, there are gonna be some highs and there are gonna be some lows, but we understand that. And there are gonna be some highs and there are gonna be some lows, and we understand that. But we’re gonna keep our eyes fixed on Jesus, who is the author and the perfecter of faith, and trust him to change us into the people he wants us to become.
Amen. Let’s pray. Lord, thanks for helping us in this series, and thanks for again what we’re learning even this morning about this life of faith. And we hope and pray that this message will be something that could help us daily. As we seek like Abraham to walk in faith, and we recognize that as he’s been called the father of faith, he didn’t have perfect faith.
None of us will until we get to heaven. But we ask that your perfect work would continue in us and change us into people of greater faith. And we thank you that Jesus is the one that can start that kind of faith in us. And that when we receive him, our account of debt before you is completely forgiven, and life begins different than it ever had been before. And Lord, we pray that for everyone.
We pray that for everyone who’s here, people that we come in contact with, that they would become people of faith who connect with you through your Son, Jesus Christ. In fact, if you’re here today and you’ve never received the gift of life, That’s really what you want to do most, is to make the most important decision in life and receive Jesus as your personal Savior. And you could do that just in the quietness of your heart and just invite God to change your life. Tell him that you want to connect with him through his Son Jesus. And if you need to talk to somebody about that, talk to one of us even before you leave this morning or just simply talk to God about it.
If this is brand new for you, just say to him, Lord, I don’t know about this. He’ll hear that prayer. But would you help me? If a person of faith is what I need to become, would you help me? He’ll hear that prayer.
Or maybe you’re right now at the place where you’re ready to become a person of faith, and if you are, the Bible says if you’ll confess with your mouth Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you’ll be saved. And this faith journey will begin in the biggest way possible, in a personal connection to God through Jesus Christ. So we pray that if that’s where you are, you would receive that gift even now. So Lord, thank you as we go from here. May we live out a life of faith in ways that honor and please you.
And we thank you that you’re gonna be there with us every step of the way. It’s in Jesus’ name we pray, amen.
