Faith is not a power which you possess to create your own future. Faith is a God-given ability to trust the future that God has promised you. Welcome to Grace to You with the Bible teaching of John MacArthur. I'm your host, Phil Johnson. The great Puritan Matthew Henry said this about saving faith, and I'll paraphrase a bit.
Henry said, "It is cheap and easy religion to believe the principles of Christianity and to imagine that that belief is enough to bring you to heaven." So the question is, how do you know your faith is saving faith? What exactly do you have to believe? John MacArthur starts answering those questions today on Grace to You as he begins a study titled "A Faith That Pleases God." It's all about helping you know whether your faith is the kind that God desires. But before we begin this study on what God-pleasing faith looks like, it's important first to identify the kind of faith that doesn't please God. We asked John about that some years ago.
Here's what he said: "Well, I guess." Yes, the most extreme illustration of the faith that doesn't please God would be the words of James, who said, "The devils believe." Wow, the devils believe. Yeah, I don't know if you've ever thought about it, but Satan and the demons have an accurate theology. Yeah, they know who God is. They know who Christ is. They know the gospel.
They know that Jesus died and rose again. They know that God is sovereign over the world. They they know that God has pre written history, they know that the Bible is true. They know that every word of the Bible is true. But they don't follow that.
They are inveterately, permanently, everlastingly wicked. They have no interest in what is righteous or what is true.
So they believe, and all they can do is tremble in fear. And we saw some of that, didn't we? With the demons that Jesus confronted during his time on Earth. There are people who have that kind of demon faith. They believe, but they never do anything about it.
They show up in the final judgment, as described in Matthew seven, and they say, "Lord, Lord, you know we did this in your name, and we did that in your name, and we cast out demons in your name, and we proclaimed you as Lord." And Jesus says to them, "Depart from me, you workers of iniquity. I never knew you." What a shock! There are warnings all through the Scripture about this kind of false faith. It's the tares that grow along with the wheat in the parables of Matthew 13, and and our Lord says, don't you try to separate them because you can't tell the difference because you don't know the heart.
Someday God's going to send His angels and they'll do the separation. False faith is is everywhere. True faith has to be clearly defined and understood.
So, here goes the series. Titled a faith that pleases God, we could call it a faith that saves, and we're going to be looking at that in Hebrews chapter eleven. Exciting days, looking at a faith that pleases God. Yes, friend. This study will help you understand the difference between a simple knowledge of what God is like, and genuine life-saving and life-giving faith in Him.
So here is John MacArthur to kick off his study of faith that pleases God. I want you to turn in your Bible to Hebrews chapter 11, and as we look through this chapter. I want us to not get caught up in a lot of difficult details. I think this is a chapter that is is going to be foundational for us. What it presents to us is the power of faith, the power of faith, the excellency of faith, and I think that needs some clarification in the climate in which we exist today, because there is a faith movement within the framework, large framework of.
Of evangelical Christianity, it is part of the charismatic movement. It's called the faith movement, and these people talk about the power of faith. They talk about the power of faith a lot, but when they're talking about the power of faith, they are creating a faith that doesn't exist. They are taking an impotent faith and trying to empower it. When people in the faith movement talk about the power of faith, they are talking about faith as if it were a personal power that we possess to create our own future, a personal power that we possess to create our own reality, to change the world, to literally define and manufacture our own future.
When they talk about the power of faith, they mean that we can use our faith as a power to write our own future history. We can literally believe things into being. We have the power of faith that can create a healing. We have the power of faith that can bring about a salvation. We have the power of faith that can.
Change how people treat us. We have a the power of faith that can change our economic situation. It can take us from poverty to wealth. It can take us from having little to having much, from being deprived to being prosperous, from being a failure to being successful, from being a nobody to being a somebody. From having only ambitions and hopes and dreams to experiencing fulfillment, the the notion that exists in this faith movement, as it's called, and they have largely tried to commandeer the concept of faith, is that faith is a power that you possess to create your own future.
Nothing could be further from the truth. That is a lie. It is a deception. Faith is not a power which you possess to create your own future. Faith is a God-given ability to trust the future that God has promised you.
Huge difference, huge difference. I don't want to write my own future. Do you? I really don't want to be responsible for laying out my future. I don't want to be responsible for determining what my future is going to be.
I am more than happy to leave that in the hands of one who loves me perfectly and who has ordained for me a future that is purposeful, fulfilling, satisfying, God glorifying, and eternally blessed. We're talking about faith, not the false kind of faith that supposedly can create your own future, but the true kind of faith that can produce in you confident trust in the future that God has promised you. That future is laid out in Scripture.
So when we talk about faith, we're talking about trusting in what God has said. Not trusting that you can create something as yet unsaid, a future unwritten, unspoken, unrevealed, but rather to believe in that promise which is laid out in Scripture, in all its glory, in all its detail, that has been given to every true believer. In fact, from a human viewpoint, all the heroes of faith that are recorded in the eleventh chapter—and there are many of them, as we will see when we go through the chapter—if from the human perspective they had perhaps the option, they might have written their story differently. Differently, because all their stories are filled with difficulties. Certainly, Abraham's was.
Certainly, Moses was.
Well, we can start where the chapter starts with the first by faith, Abel. You wouldn't say that if Abel had a choice to write his future, he would have written that he would be murdered by his brother.
Now, these are these are people who died. These are people who struggled. These are people whose lives were marked with. Horrendous suffering, and it crescendos toward the end of the chapter.
So, from the human perspective, if they somehow had the power to write their own future, they perhaps would have written it differently than God wrote it. But the kind of faith we're talking about—the faith that God gives a believer—is the faith to trust the future that God has written. Because inherent in what God has written for us is His promise of ultimate blessing and eternal joy.
Now, the readers of this book needed to understand about faith; they needed to understand it desperately. Obviously, the bulk of those who would read this epistle, written to Hebrews, were believers. This was written; we don't know by whom. Can't be certain of that, but it was written by one of the apostles or an associate of the apostles to a community of Jews who had come to faith in Christ. They understood faith.
They understood that they needed now to continue to live by faith. And that faith would be placed in the gospel, in the person who is at the heart of the gospel, namely the Lord Jesus Christ. This would be a new kind of life for the Jews. As I said, these are Hebrew believers, and really, for the first time in their life, through the gospel and salvation, they have come to understand that their relationship with God is not dependent on works, but it's dependent on faith. That's new, and it needs to be reinforced, and that's part and parcel of why this eleventh chapter is here, so that they don't grow to borrow Paul's words, weary in well doing.
That they hold on to a life of faith by looking at the models and the examples of all these people in the past who lived by faith and received their glorious reward. But it's more than just a chapter designed to encourage believers to continue to walk by faith. You will remember that through the first ten chapters, the writer has been laboring to make one major point, and it is this: that the new covenant is superior to the old covenant. Right? That Christ is superior to everything else.
Jesus and His sacrifice is superior, completely superior to the sacrifices and the animals in the old system. He is a better sacrifice, who made a better offering. Jesus is better than angels. The writer tells us in these chapters, he is better than the prophets. He is better than Moses, better than Aaron, better than Joshua.
He is a better priest than all other priests, and he is from a better priesthood, a superior priesthood. He is the mediator of a better covenant, and he is a better sacrifice. The message of the first ten chapters is: Put your faith in Jesus Christ. He is in every sense superior.
Now this reinforces for the believers who are receiving this letter the superiority of Christ to which they have already asserted their will by the power of God. They already know that they have trusted in that reality. But at periodic points through the opening ten chapters, familiar to anyone who studies the Book of Hebrews, there are warnings. There are at least four of them by the time you get to this chapter, and this chapter constitutes, if you will, another warning. These warnings are given to non-Christian Jews who are attending this fellowship.
They're sitting on the fringe, if you will. They're apparently intellectually convinced of the gospel. They they understand the the truth of the gospel in their minds. They understand the power of the proof of that truth by the miracles and signs and wonders which were wrought by Christ.
So we could say they're intellectually convinced. They are hanging on the fringes of this. Fellowship of Christian Jews, but they never really have come all the way to Christ, and there are these periodic warnings not to fall back. Not to go back into Judaism. There's one in one of them in chapter two.
There are more in chapter three and four. Another in chapter six. Another in chapter ten. Don't go on sinning willfully after you have the knowledge of the truth, says chapter ten, or you will bring upon yourself a far more severe eternal judgment.
So the warning is. Come all the way to the new covenant. Come all the way to Christ. Come all the way to faith. This is a big change.
Big change because we know that the Judaism that existed in the time of our Lord and thus in the time of the New Testament was a system of salvation by what? By works. By merit. The Jew attempted to earn salvation. This is all the Jews knew.
This is what they had been told. This is what they had been taught. This had been ingrained into them from generations by their parents and their religious leaders. And a simple study of the four Gospels reveals the fact that the Judaism of the first century was not the supernatural system given by God, whereby the sinner knew that he couldn't keep the law of God and thus was penitent and prayed to God like David did in. Psalm 51, pleading for mercy and grace by faith in a God who was willing to forgive, and thus received salvation as a gift of grace, not earned by works.
The system had long forgotten that salvation was by grace. That Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord. That Abraham believed, and it was accounted to him for righteousness. And they had created a religious cult built on ethics, built on morality, built on religious ceremonies. Salvation came to those who observed all those ethical standards, all those moral aughts, and all those ceremonies.
It was necessary then to teach these people the reality of salvation by. Faith. They had a lot of other things that they could look at in terms of New Testament literature to be taught that Jesus said that. Salvation was by faith; that was clear, and not by works. The apostle Paul made it abundantly clear: Ephesians two, eight, nine.
For by grace are ye saved through faith. Romans chapter three, chapter four, and all the way through indicates that salvation comes by faith alone. Scripture is replete with that emphasis. But the Jews are having a hard time being deprogrammed. Can we put it that way?
They're having a hard time being deprogrammed, so you're going to have to show them something other than the New Testament. They would like to be able to accept. This reality of salvation by faith rather than by works, coming from Christ, coming from the apostles, coming from Paul, coming from the New Testament writers. But isn't it possible that there could be some other illustrations of salvation by faith from the Old Testament? This might get them across that barrier that seems to be so formidable for them, and that is why the eleventh chapter of Hebrews is written.
It is written because it. Is a necessity to prove to the Jews who are intellectually convinced that Jesus is the Messiah that salvation is by faith, and that people not only after Jesus but even before Jesus were saved by faith, by faith.
So, in verse thirty-eight of chapter ten, the writer of Hebrews states the key. My righteous one shall live by faith. My righteous one shall live by faith. That is a direct quote from Habakkuk chapter two, verse four. The just or the righteous one will live by faith.
And Habakkuk is an old covenant prophet, and you can't shrink back from that. If he shrinks back, my soul has no pleasure in him," says the prophet, verse thirty-nine. But we are not of those who shrink back. We we don't shrink back from this salvation by faith in Christ. To shrink back is to end up in destruction.
But of those who have faith. To the persevering of the soul, the plea all the way along in these warning sections is: Don't come all the way to Christ, sit on the edge, and then reject salvation by faith and fall back into your old works righteousness system. If you fall back, God has no pleasure in that, and you will fall back into eternal destruction. Come all the way to faith in Christ for the eternal preserving of your soul.
Now, how is he going to get this case across? How is he going to penetrate their sort of Old Testament thinking? The answer in chapter eleven by giving us a list of Old Testament saints whose lives were marked by faith. The true people of God through all the ages have become the true people of God by faith. Chapter eleven is loaded with illustrations.
Just looking at verse four by faith, Abel; at verse five by faith, Enoch; at verse seven by faith, Noah; verse eight by faith, Abraham; and again in verse seventeen by faith, Abraham. And in verse twenty, by faith Isaac. In verse twenty-one, by faith Jacob. Verse twenty-two, by faith Joseph. Twenty-three, by faith Moses.
And again in verse twenty-four, going down further, verse thirty-one, by faith Rahab. And then in verse thirty-two, there's Gideon, Barak, Samson, Jezebel, David, Samuel, the prophets, who by faith did all these amazing things. Verse thirty nine sums it up. All these, having gained approval through their faith, did not receive what was promised, because God had provided something better for us. That apart from us, they would not be made perfect.
They didn't receive what was promised. They trusted that it would come as it had been promised, and that's exactly what I said is the definition of faith you want to work with. Faith is confident trust in the future God has promised. Faith is not some kind of power by which you create your future. It is the power of God given to you to trust in the promises God has made in Scripture.
These people hadn't received the promise, and they trusted in the promise, and thus they lived by faith. It's a great, great. Monumental, powerful, powerful lesson.
Now we're just going to kind of look at the opening three verses, and then we'll we'll do some character studies over the next Sunday evenings. But let's just consider a few things. First is the nature of faith, and this is good because the writer gives us a sort of starting point, a kind of basic definition. It's not really a formal definition of. Of faith, rather than a rather, it is a description of faith, kind of the basic elements or features that describe faith, and it's very very simple.
Look at verse one: faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.
So the first thing we learn about faith is that it is trusting in what isn't visible. It is trusting in what isn't received. It is trusting in what isn't experienced. It is trusting in something not yet manifest. Faith, belief—that's a noun.
The Greek word pistis. It is a noun. It means belief, trust, confidence, faith. And I love the fact that he uses a noun because it emphasizes the settled reality of this. It is a commodity that is possessed.
Certainly, believing can be a verb, but we're talking here not about some act of faith, but we're talking about the reality of a settled faith. It exists as a commodity. It is a gift of God. Ephesians two eight says, "Not of works; it comes from God." And when God gives this commodity of faith, it is the assurance of things hoped for. That's what it means to live by faith.
It doesn't mean that. That we see something we want and bring it into existence. It means that we put our confidence in something not seen, convictions of things not seen.
Some of your translations will say faith is the substance of things not seen. That's a great translation. I love that translation. Faith is the substance of things not seen. Substance is a word that has substance, doesn't it?
It does. It's a word that you can take to the bank. It's a word that you can sort of cash in on. It's a word that basically can be legitimately translated substance, essence. That gives it reality.
Faith is substantial confidence in the reality of something. Not realized. Faith gives present substance to something that is future. As this chapter will show us, when it unfolds in Old Testament times, there were well all the saints, men and women, who had nothing but the promises of God, nothing but the promises of God to rest on, nothing but the promises of God to hope for. No visible evidence that Messianic promise would come true.
No visible evidence that Kingdom promise would come true. Yet the promises were so real, and the revelation of those promises in Scripture so reliable that people built their entire hope on them. All the Old Testament promises related to the future. That's what it says at the end, at the end of the chapter. Those people who exercised this faith exercised faith in what was promised that they did not receive.
What would that be? Eternal life, heaven, everlasting bliss, reward, joy, reunion, which is promised in the Old Testament of the saints in the presence of God, the very presence of God, the very likeness of God. I will. David says, "I look for the day when I will awake in Thy likeness." The glories of eternal bliss—they didn't see any of it here. They never even saw the ultimate sacrifice.
They—they never knew who the Messiah was. They were people of faith, but their faith was anchored in a reliable revelation from a God who cannot lie, and so their faith gave substance to the future hope.
Now we're on this side of the cross, but folks, we understand this, don't we? None of you has seen heaven, and you don't know anyone who's been there and back except the Lord Himself. And yet, you have basically put your entire eternal destiny. On the foundation, on the fact that the Scripture is reliable, and what God has promised, you can trust. Right, and what that has done is created substance in the present tense for a future promise.
You're listening to Grace to You, the Bible teaching ministry of John MacArthur. Today we began John's study on the nature of saving faith, called "A Faith That Pleases God." Keep in mind, you can download all nine messages from this study free of charge from our website, gty.org, an ideal resource to help you examine your own faith, or maybe to send to someone you. Discipling to pick up the study of faith that pleases God. Get in touch today. Again, a faith that pleases God is available free of charge in MP3 and transcript format at gty.org.
That's our website, and while you're there at gty.org, be sure to check out all the free study tools available to you. We have thousands of free resources on issues like the substance of faith, God's design for the family. The life of Christ, and much more. You can read blog articles, follow along with the MacArthur Daily Bible Reading Plan, and download any of John's more than thirty six hundred sermons. Again, all of those resources and more are free at gty.
dot org. And make sure you let us know how John's teaching has encouraged you. Remember to include this station's call letters when you email us at letters at gty dot org, or you can send your letter to Grace to You, Post Office Box four thousand, Panorama City, California nine one four one two. And now for the entire Grace to You staff, I'm Phil Johnson. Thanks for starting your week with us, and be back tomorrow as John MacArthur looks again at the nature of saving faith.
We'll continue his study called "A Faith That Pleases God" with another thirty minutes of unleashing God's truth, one verse at a time, on Grace to You.
