Noah: The Obedience of Faith, Part 1

Most people, even most Christians, want God to walk with them.

That's backwards. God wants us to walk with Him. Dr. Tony Evans talks about the connection between real faith and obedience. To walk by faith involves completing what God tells you to do. Celebrating 40 years of faithfulness, this is The Alternative with Dr. Tony Evans, author, speaker, senior pastor of Oak Cliff Bible Fellowship in Dallas, Texas, and president of The Urban Alternative. When God tells us to do something we would have done anyway, it's pretty easy to obey. But what about when the Lord's instructions are a little bit out there or take us beyond our comfort zone? That's what Dr. Evans talks about today as he takes a look at the life of Noah.

Let's join him. Back in the old school for you old school folks here. In the 80s, one of the more popular hairstyles was the jerry curl. Curled your hair in these tight little curlers in order to get those tight little curls, which is why so many of us don't have hair today because they got burned up with the jerry curl. If you were one of those who got a jerry curl, you always kept nearby curl activator because the jerry curl would dry out.

It would dry out on you. First of all, there is no more curl. So you would spray on the activator, massage it in to get your curl back. The activator would take and connect with the hair where the perm had been placed in it in order to relight it, moisturize it, and bring it to life again.

The activator gave you your curl back. Many of us have a dried up faith. It's dried up.

We go through the motions. We talk about believing in God, but the curl is gone. We're not seeing the luster of our faith.

We're not seeing the moisture of our faith. It's dormant. It's laying there. It's not robust. It's not alive. It's not vibrant.

That's because it's missing the activator. James puts it this way. Faith without works is dead. He says in James chapter 2 verse 14, he talks about a useless faith.

He talks about a faith that's not working. It's not active. It's dry. It's sterile. It's not producing anything. There's no life to it.

And he says it's because it's missing the activator. Faith is activated by your works of obedience. You activate your faith by your works of obedience. If you're having faith and being disobedient, your faith dries up, and your curl is gone, and the luster and the moisture is not alive. It is the work of obedience that ignites the reality of faith so that you see the invisible enter into the visible, which is what faith does. It grabs the invisible and brings it into the visible, for faith is a substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen, Hebrews 11 verse 1 says. This is why so many Christians are not seeing God operate in their lives, because they have a dried-up curl that is a useless, dead faith.

They may be saved and on their way to heaven, but they never see heaven join them on earth, because God can't get them to the work of obedience. Now remember, faith is not founded on how you feel. You can feel no faith and be full of faith. You can feel like you're full of faith and have no faith, because faith is measured by foot traffic. It's measured by life, not lips, walk, not talk.

It's measured by what you do. The Bible calls it walking by faith. It's movement. If there is no movement, you can shout, you can clap, you can scream, you can holler, you can flip a pew, and you have no faith. Because if the feet are not moving in the work of obedience to which God has commanded you, there is no faith and the curl stays dry. The faith is not activated.

It doesn't come alive, and so the invisible is not seen indivisible. One of the great Old Testament illustrations is Noah. One verse is given to him in Hebrews chapter 11, verse 7, and here's what it says. By faith, Noah, being warned of God about things not yet seen, in reverence prepared an ark for the salvation of his household, by which he condemned the world and became an heir of the righteousness which is according to faith. We're introduced to Noah as the illustration of faith at work. Now, this event occurs in Genesis chapter 6. Remember, this is an Old Testament figure given to New Testament Christians to teach us how to live by faith. We're told something about Noah in Genesis 6, verse 9.

These are the records of the generations of Noah. Noah was a righteous man, blameless in his time. Noah walked with God. We're saying Noah was a righteous man. He lived to please God.

He was a blameless man. He had integrity with people, and the reason he could be righteous and the reason he could be blameless had to do with his walk. He walked with God. Let's review from Enoch, because we were told Enoch walked with God. Most people, even most Christians, want God to walk with them.

That's backwards. God wants us to walk with Him, because if God is going this way and we're going that way, there's no way you can walk together. So to walk with someone is to be in proximity to them, be on the same page with them, and be in alignment to them. If you're not walking with God, if you're merely visiting God on Sunday, but this is not how you roll, you're not carrying out your everyday activities in light of God, you're not bringing Him to bear on your business, you're not bringing Him to bear on your finances, you're not bringing Him to bear on your marriage, you're not bringing Him to bear on your parenting, you're not bringing Him to bear on your career, He's good for Sunday, God.

You got me an hour and a half, an hour and 45 minutes on Sunday, then I want you to walk with me for the rest of the week. That's the wrong song, that's backwards, Christian soldiers. He says, Noah walked with God. He was on the same page that God was on. And trust me, when you walk with God, He's walking with you. Noah walked with God, and we're told that he was a man of righteousness, blamelessness, and spiritual integrity and character.

He wasn't perfect. That shows up later on in his life and in his story. Walking with God is called pleasing God. Pleasing God means to make God smile, to make God happy. Nothing pleases God more than to see somebody walking by faith, making their decisions based on their relationship with God, bringing God to bear on all their decision-making. Now God becomes real to you.

But here's what's interesting. It is the context in which he walked with God, because the first eight verses of Genesis chapter 6 lets you know what the world around him was like when he was walking with God. It says in Genesis chapter 6 verse 1, it came about that men began to multiply on the face of the earth, and daughters were born to them, that the sons of God saw that the daughters of men were beautiful. They took wives for themselves, whomever they chose. Then the Lord said, My spirit shall not always strive with man forever, because he also is flesh.

Nevertheless, his days shall be 120 years. The Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterwards when the sons of God came into the daughters of men, they bore themselves children. Those were the mighty men who were of old, men of renown. Then the Lord saw that the wickedness of men was great on the earth, and that every intent of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. The Lord was sorry that he had made man on the earth and was grieved in his heart. The Lord said, I will blot out man from whom I have created from the face of the land, from the man to the animals, to the creeping things, and to the birds of the sky, for I am sorry that I have made them. Noah was walking with God when nobody else was. Noah was the exception to the rule.

He was marching out of step with the culture because he was marching to a different drumbeat. It says the whole world had become wicked. What was some of the wickedness? Well, if you were to read the Scriptures, you would find there was immorality, violence, lewdness, vulgarity, profanity, lying, killing, blasphemy, and then it hit the bottom, demon possession. The sons of God cohabited with the daughters of men.

Sons of God are called angels in Scripture. So the fallen angels who are sexless infiltrated evil men who had relationships with women producing a demonized population. So when you tell your kid you ain't nothing but a demon, you might be telling the truth. This was a demonized population that is a population who had been so infiltrated with evil that every thought they had was against God. You see, our world doesn't believe that today.

Let me inform you of something. The reason why your walk with God is gonna be a lot tougher today than maybe in your yesteryear or what your grandmother faced is we're dealing with a demonized environment. It's not just the evil. It's the evil infiltrating mankind so that demonic activity dominates the environment. And you know when it's dominating environment because people are not only doing evil, they're coming up with new ways to proliferate it.

He says every thought was evil. When Dr. Evans comes back in a moment, he'll explain why some people have a hard time obeying God while for others it seems perfectly natural. First I want to tell you about our special offer that includes Tony's current series, Heroes of the Faith, as well as his brand new book, Kingdom Heroes. Both of these powerful resources take a look at very ordinary people who became some of the most familiar characters in the Bible simply by their obedient faith in God, believing what he said and staking their lives on the fact that he tells the truth. They're perfect for your personal study or to share with your church or Bible study group. In fact, if you request these resources today, we'll even include the companion Bible study workbook as an added bonus. You can get this Kingdom Heroes package, including all 13 messages from the two-volume Heroes of the Faith CD and MP3 series, as our gift in appreciation for your contribution toward Tony's ministry. Just visit us at TonyEvans.org to make your online donation and resource request.

It's very easy to do. You'll see a link right on the home page to this special package. Again, that's TonyEvans.org. Or call us any time of the day or night at 1-800-800-3222. Let one of our resource team members help you.

That's 1-800-800-3222. Dr. Evans will be back with more of today's lesson right after this. We were at the Garden Tomb, and we had communion, and we talked about the resurrection. Dr. Tony Evans recalls what happened when he led a group of first-timers on a trip to the Holy Land. People began to weep as they understood afresh the crucifixion, and that's one of the things that I think comes out of going there is a fresh encounter, so that things have gotten dull or stale.

It has a way of injecting new life and new reality into your experience. Now you can have that experience yourself, thanks to Tony's new movie coming out this November, Journey with Jesus. What I'm hoping is that through this experience and with that movie, I will be there with you, and you will be there with me. Journey with Jesus, November 15th, 16th, and 17th, in a theater near you. I look forward to the fellowship we're gonna have together through the film.

For locations, showtimes, and more, visit TonyEvans.org. I won't go too deep into this. We don't have time today, but you need to understand how demons work. Demons work because they need a vehicle through which to express themselves, because they're spirit beings. They're angels, fallen angels.

So they need a vehicle. That's why when Jesus cast the demons out of the insane man, they asked, could we go into the pigs? Because they were unclean, and so give us a place to reside. We need a house to express ourselves through. When you have trash staying up in your house for an extended period of time, you have ipso facto invited roaches and ants into your premises.

You don't have to give a formal written invitation. If the trash lingers, they will assume they've been invited to a party, because ants and roaches gravitate to trash. Demons gravitate to sin. So when they see sin proliferating, they assume they've been invited to that party. So when sin becomes dominant in my life, or your life, or our lives, the demons say, hey, they've invited us over there into that environment. So they go where the garbage is, and that's why sins then wind up becoming addictions. So now the problem is not only the sin that brought about the addiction, the reason why it's so hard for addicted people to get over the sin is they not only have to try to deal with the sin, but the demonic amplification of the sin, because the demons have gone into a garbage environment and made themselves at home there. That's why it is an addiction, because it has been demonically infiltrated. That's why when people try to deal with the sin without dealing with the demons, they wind up right back at it, because the spiritual was unaddressed in whatever the addiction happened to express itself to be.

That's why the world calls it addictions. The Bible calls it a spiritual stronghold, the spiritual stronghold of pornography, the spiritual stronghold of gambling, the spiritual stronghold of whatever it happened to be, drunkenness, because there has been a grip by the demonic world. He says the demonic world had gripped the culture. But here's Noah, who was a righteous man, a blameless man, who walked with God, meaning he's the odd man out.

He's the weirdo. He's the crazy man, because he wasn't conforming to the culture, be not conformed to this world. He wasn't agreeing just because everybody else was going there. He wasn't doing it just because everybody else was doing it. His goal was not to be popular with the world in which he lived, because the world in which he lived was not popular with God.

He saw himself as pleasing God, not pleasing the culture. If you go in water and you go deep enough, you're gonna get lockjaw. You won't even be able to open up your mouth, because the deeper you go, the more pressure you feel. If a boat goes down in the water too far, the pressure of the water will collapse the boat.

Too much pressure. That is, except if you're a submarine. If you're a submarine, you can get to the bottom of the ocean, because the inside in a sub is pressurized. So it can go down, way down, and way deep in spite of the pressure, because when they pressurize a submarine, there is more pressure on the inside than the pressure coming at it from the outside, which is able to allow it to sustain itself in the pit of the darkness of the depth of the ocean.

But if you go real deep and there's no pressure on the inside, the pressure on the outside is gonna flatten you like a pancake. The reason why so many Christians are collapsing is there's not enough pressure of walking with God on the inside to override the pressure coming at them from the outside. And so we collapse. There used to be a time when we grew up when the Christian worldview dominated, so even if you weren't a Christian, you respected the Christian worldview. That is the pre-Christian era. We live in the post-Christian era, and now Christianity has become persecuted all around the world. We're now in a post-Christian environment where that value system, that ethic, is no longer accepted as the respected norm, and the more serious you are with your walk with God, the more odd you will look like.

Not because you're trying to be weird, not because you're trying to be different, it's that you just are different. Noah was pressured, but because he was a righteous man who walked with God, he was able to sustain himself in the pressure. Noah—watch this— walked so close to God that he was the only one God was talking to. Hebrews 11 saying, being warned of God, God said, Hey Noah, Noah, come here.

Since we're hanging out together, I'm gonna destroy the world. See, the reason some of us don't hear from God is we're too far. God wants to speak to you, but he wants to speak to you because you're walking with him.

You're hanging out together, you're in close proximity, so he speaks to the mind and bring thoughts that you didn't think, bring perspective you didn't have, bring an orientation you weren't about, because you're close enough that you can hear his voice speaking to you. And woe to the Christian who spends their Christian life never having heard the voice of God, never having God speak to your thoughts and bring ideas to your mind or create circumstances to guide you, being you knew it was God bringing that about, because we were asking him to walk with us while we were not walking with him. God says, Noah, verse 11 of Genesis 6, Now the earth was corrupt in the sight of God, and the earth was filled with violence. God looked on the earth, and behold, it was corrupt, for all flesh had corrupted their way on the earth. Then God said to Noah, The end of all flesh has come, for the earth is filled with violence because of them, and behold, I am about to destroy them with the earth. Make for yourself an ark of gopher wood. You got to be kidding me.

You got to be kidding me. God talks to him, I'm going to destroy the world, and I want you to make a boat. Hebrews 11, 7 says that Noah built an ark when he hadn't seen anything, meaning he'd never seen a flood.

It hadn't rained up to this point, because the earth was warded from underneath. So God is warning him about something he's never seen. He lives a hundred miles away from an ocean. What in the world do you build a boat a hundred miles from the water you got to put the boat on? When God is close enough to you to speak to you, and what he tells you is weird, makes absolutely no sense—I mean, get ready to do something big—the weirder God gets in leading you, the bigger the thing is he's involved with.

He's going to destroy the whole world. He tells Noah, build a boat on dry land, even though you've never seen rain, you don't know what a flood is, and trust me, we do some of what God tells us to do. To walk by faith involves completing what God tells you to do. The work he's called you to, the obedience he's demanded of you, but remember that obedience is coming because you're walking with him. If you're not walking with him and told to obey him, obedience becomes an irritation. If you're walking with him, obedience becomes a natural outgrowth. They may hate obeying God because they haven't been walking with God. The folks who love obeying God are the folks who are walking with God. So you need to walk to appreciate the obedience, even when the obedience doesn't make sense. Walking with the Lord, as Dr. Evans described, actually begins with a step of faith, and he's here now to tell us more about that.

Dr. Evans? If you want to know for certain that you're on your way to heaven when you die, then I invite you right now to go to Jesus Christ and let Him know that you believe He died for you, that you believe He arose for you, and that you want to put your trust in Him alone for the forgiveness of your sins and the gift of eternal life. If you really want to go to heaven, He'll give you a free ticket there, but you must go to Him for it and believe Him to give it to you. If you do that, you'll be saved right now.

Get answers to your questions about becoming what the Bible calls a new creation through Christ. Visit tonyevans.org today and follow the link that says Jesus. Tony will explain it to you personally, and you'll find some free resources to help you get that new walk started right. While you're there, be sure and check out the featured resource package I mentioned earlier, Tony's brand-new book and Bible study, Kingdom Heroes, and the 13-part Heroes of the Faith audio collection. Don't forget we'll send you this entire resource package as our gift when you make a contribution to support Tony's ministry here on this station and around the world. We rely on the generous support of listeners like you to carry on this important work. Visit tonyevans.org to make your request today, or give us a call at 1-800-800-3222, where members of our resource team are available around the clock to help you.

That's 1-800-800-3222. As we've been learning, when God gives us our marching orders, the idea is to start marching. Tomorrow, Dr. Evans will tell us more about what we often do instead and why busyness is no substitute for obedience. I hope you'll be with us. The alternative with Dr. Tony Evans is brought to you by The Urban Alternative, celebrating 40 years of faithfulness thanks to the generous contributions of listeners like you.