Impossible Without Faith

Today on Summit Life with J.D.

Greer. We will never please God. We will never go all the way with Him. And what I mean by that is believe everything He reveals. Live truly as His disciple. Be involved meaningfully in His mission. We will never do that until we are convinced that God is and that He is the rewarder of those who diligently seek Him. Welcome to Summit Life with Pastor J.D.

Greer. As always, I'm your host, Molly Vitovich. You know, it's really not hard to be a cultural Christian today in America. Going to church periodically, enrolling your kids in a Juana, Sunday school teacher, or most of all, posting something on social media.

But none of these things really requires much faith. Today, Pastor J.D. will be talking about the real difference between mere belief and a true saving faith. Now, if you've missed any of the messages in this study called Christ is Better, be sure to catch up right away at jdgreer.com.

But right now, let's join Pastor J.D. for this message he titled Impossible Without Faith. We are in the middle of a series now through the book of Hebrews called Christ is Better. And this chapter, chapter 11, is all about faith. Here is a confession that you won't often hear from a pastor, okay?

You ready for this? In many ways, it takes very little faith for me to follow Jesus. It takes very little faith for me in many ways to follow Jesus. Denying God would be much more costly for my family than following Him is.

I mean, in a lot of ways, right? I mean, imagine if I came home this afternoon and told my wife, hey, I don't believe in God anymore. I mean, that would be devastating for our family. It would be devastating for my job, right? I mean, that's like the first job performance box to check. You know, is a Christian?

Check. You know, if that's not part of my life, then I'm not getting paid. Plus, I have enough cash flow that I'm not usually worried about where my next meal is coming from. You know, I'm not like, kids, let's come together, let's pray, because if God doesn't come through this afternoon, we're not going to be able to eat tonight. So all that to say, it's really easy for me to walk with God and do Christian things without any faith.

But that can only take you so far. Because if you are a thinking person, then eventually you get confronted by something in the Bible that's really hard to believe. Sometimes I'll be in a discussion with somebody who's not a Christian, and they'll be challenging me on what I believe, and they'll say, like, surely you don't actually believe this. And I'll have this little kind of soul gut check, and I'll be like, do I actually believe that?

Just because the Bible says it. Or I will sense that God is asking me to do something that really puts things on the line. To make a financial sacrifice, or give up a right or privilege. Or to put myself or my family in some kind of danger or deprivation, and I've got to do that in order to obey. And I will have this kind of moment again where I'm like, do I actually believe these things? This week, past week, I was with a bunch of missionaries, and I always love hearing their stories about how God directed them to do what they do.

And so, like, that's my question. Tell me your story. You hardly ever hear somebody say, oh, I just love to travel, and I didn't really like my family, so I wanted to live in a strange place and learn a whole new culture and a new language, preferably a place without electricity where they riot in the streets every other day.

That was my thing, so that's why I'm over here on the other side of the world. That never happened. I never get that answer.

Usually it is simply, well, we were convinced this is what God wanted us to do. One of the couples I had the conversation with this past week was the mom and the dad of one of our staff members here, and they told me about, you know, being at the top of their game, and they had a real estate business, and they'd made tons of money, and they were, you know, had the dream house that they wanted to build, and they finally built it, and it was everything they hoped it would be, and they were taking the vacations they wanted to take. And he said, I'd even started on my toy collection that I hear that you get into in your 50s.

You got to start collecting, you know, something that's really expensive in a lot of them. And he's like, I'd started two or three of those collections. He's like, I'm looking around, and I got everything.

And he says, my wife and I are sitting in our living room one night, look across, you know, the room at each other, and we're like, that's it? This is it? This is what our lives were about? This?

Achieving all this stuff? We've hit every box that we wanted to go for? That's it? He said, about that time, we're learning about the mission of God in the world and what eternity's like, and he said, we just, we said, this can't, this can't be all of it. He said, we, so we put it all up, we sold every bit of it.

We gave almost all of it away. He said, then we came, and now we live here on the other side of the world, taking Jesus to people. Now, you know, let's be honest, that takes a different kind of faith commitment than most of us in this room are used to living with.

They forsook what was real, what was tangible for what was invisible. I don't mean this to be overly rude or overly blunt, but I am convinced that many of us squeak out a Christian life without ever really being confronted with the hard questions of faith. Taking your kids to church or participating in the Christian subculture that you grew up in and are most comfortable with is not a bold risk of faith. For many of you, it's just the path of least resistance.

And I'm sorry if that sounds rude, but it's just the truth. But the writer of Hebrews makes it clear, listen very carefully, verse six, without faith, it is, what's that word church? Impossible to please him, for whoever would draw near to God must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who give up everything to follow him. So you can only go so far without faith. Keep in mind what's going on here in Hebrews. The writer, if you recall, is admonishing a group of people for whom following Jesus has gotten very difficult. People are being persecuted for their faith, and that included many of their friends. And some of their friends have fallen away from the faith, and people are telling them, you're crazy.

They got a lot of unanswered questions. They're like, well, God, why, how come you're not doing this? And God, if you were real, how come this didn't happen?

Or where were you when this happened to me? I don't understand this. Many of the people that the writer is addressing are starting to lag behind in the faith. And so the writer tells them that there is no way, no way they're going to make it if they don't honestly and truly believe that God exists and that following him is worth it. We live in a world without a lot of persecution for our faith.

At least it's been that way, you know, for the most part. But for the most part, people don't bother us in our walk with Jesus, and so it's fairly easy for us to go through the motions of the Christian life without ever really considering the questions of faith. But we will never please God.

We will never go all the way with him. And what I mean by that is believe everything he reveals. Live truly as his disciple. Be involved meaningfully in his mission. We will never do that until we are convinced that God is and that he is the rewarder of those who diligently seek him.

So here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to walk you through the last half of Hebrews 11. You're going to see several specific examples of what it looks like to have faith, and then we're going to use those to discuss what exactly faith is and where faith comes from. Verse 17 is where we will begin. Verse 17, by faith Abraham, when he was tested, offered up Isaac, and he who had received the promises was in the act of offering up his only son, of whom it was said, through Isaac shall your offspring be named. He considered that God was able even to raise him from the dead, if that's what it took. God had told Abraham to sacrifice his son.

Now this was more than just a sacrifice of something that he loved, as significant as that was. As I've told you before, in those days your sons were your hope for the future. The society they lived in was agrarian, so the more sons you had, the more workers you had to work the land and attend the herds.

The more income you could generate for your family. Plus, this was an age before social security and 401ks and retirement homes. So your children were your safety net. The more children you had, the more likely you were to be taken care of in old age. By the way, this is still my philosophy as a parent. That's why I have four children. I only need one of them to get rich, and Veronica and I will be fine.

All right, but in those days it was everything because you didn't have a bank account. Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann says this, childlessness in any ancient text or narrative is the effective metaphor for hopelessness. For without children, there was no foreseeable future for yourself, for your family, or for your people.

Abraham and Sarah have one child. He was a miracle baby they'd had in their 90s, and God is asking them to give him up. He is asking them to give up all that they look to for life, for joy, and for security, to put their earthly hopes and dreams on the line and walk away from all of it. That took faith, and they did it. They said, God, our futures are in your hand, our hope, our security, our joy.

We trust you with all of it. Verse 21, by faith Jacob, when dying, blessed each of the sons of Joseph, who is his son, bowing in worship over the head of his staff. By faith Joseph, at the end of his life, made mention of the exodus of the Israelites and gave directions concerning his bones. Here you got two stories of people who died in a state where it didn't look like God was anywhere close to fulfilling his promises. You see, God had told Abraham and his descendants, you know, Jacob was his grandson, Joseph was his great-grandson, God had told Abraham and his descendants they would be a great nation, they would have their own land, they would be a blessing on the earth. Yet when Jacob, Abraham's grandson, dies, his family is in Egypt because they've had to flee the promised land due to a famine. Things are going the wrong direction, right? I mean, you can feel good about it if it's going the right direction, but it's going the wrong direction.

Rather than looking like they're being made into a great nation that blesses the earth, they're guests in somebody else's nation living off of handouts. But when Jacob dies, he leans on his staff and he repeats the promise to his son and he asks to be buried back in the promised land. When Joseph, his son, dies, the whole family's still in Egypt.

He does the same thing. He says, when our family returns to the land that God gave us, dig up my bones and take them back because that is the place God promised to us and God will keep his word. I know this is not the end of the story. What does your faith look like right now? We'll return to our teaching here on Summit Life in just a moment.

But before we do, I wanted to quickly share a little bit about our new resource this month. The book of Hebrews takes us on a journey that compares and contrasts Jesus to key historical people and events from the Bible. Through these comparisons, we see how he is greater than anything that has come before.

He is the hope for a new creation and is our perfect sacrifice. This is why we named our newest Bible study, Christ is Better. It is a 10-session workbook that includes some helpful insights and deeper reflection questions meant to give you greater understanding and deepen your faith in Christ. Our goal is always for everyone within our listening audience to put Jesus first in their lives. So do this study with a friend or a small group and grow in faith together.

Give us a call at 866-335-5220 or go online to jdgrier.com and reserve your copy today. Now let's get back to today's message with Pastor J. D. Greer. Verse 24. By faith Moses, when he was grown up, refused to be called the son of Pharaoh's daughter, choosing rather to be mistreated with the people of God than to enjoy the fleeting pleasures of sin. He considered the reproach of Christ's greater wealth than all the treasures of Egypt, for he was looking to the reward. By faith he left Egypt, not being afraid of the anger of the king because he endured of seeing him who is, what's that next word church? Very important, invisible.

Think about how crazy this is. I mean Moses has as his possession all the privilege, all the position you could ever have hoped for. He's got one of the highest positions in the world's mightiest empires, yet he walked away from all of it.

He traded the invisible for the invisible because he believed it. Verse 28. By faith he kept the Passover and sprinkled the blood so that the destroyer of the firstborn might not touch them. Here you got the children of Israel believing what God says about how he is going to save, even though nothing like that had ever happened before.

I mean imagine trying to explain this to your Egyptian neighbors. You're like hey you know you really ought to kill one of your sheep and paint the blood on top of the door and why is that? Because the death angel's coming tonight. Oh the death angel's coming tonight.

Yes we will get right on that. I mean can you imagine how humiliating this was? Verse 29. By faith the people cross the Red Sea on the dry land but the Egyptians when they attempted to do the same were drowned. Here you got the children of Israel trusting that God's going to provide for them in an impossible situation. They've been doing what God said.

He led them to the brink of the Red Sea. So they're standing there by the Red Sea and while they're standing there they get word that the entire Egyptian army is coming up behind them to destroy them. And they're like uh God we got a problem what do we do? God's like go forward. They're like but God there's an ocean there.

An ocean. We don't just go through it. He's like yeah just start walking.

Just point your face there and go. And they do it. And as they're walking suddenly the sea opens up in front of them and they walk right through it and closes behind them. Verse 30. By faith the walls of Jericho fall down after they've been encircled for seven days.

This one always gets me. They go up against an enemy. All right they're the new guys in the land. They're looking to impress. And they're like all right God what's the strategy? What's the strategy for defeating this enemy? God gets them all together huddles them up and says all right we're going to run the old circle and shout on them.

They're like the what? Yeah yeah you're going to line everybody up and you're going to walk around Jericho. Nobody's going to say a word. You're just going to stare. And on the last day you're going to do it seven times and then you're going to shout and I'm going to bring the walls down.

They're like uh what excuse what? No fighting. No battering rams.

No flanking maneuvers. God says nope. Just walk around the wall and at the appropriate time you give a shout of faith and I'll fight for you. Seven days of social awkwardness followed by one shout of faith.

And they do it. And God gives them the city. So let's stop there and I want you to learn three very important things about faith.

Number one. Faith is a response to God's revelation. Faith is a response to God's revelation. Notice verse six that the definition of faith is relatively simple. Faith believes that God exists and it believes that obeying him is worth it. That he's a rewarder of those who diligently seek him. Faith is simple on one level.

You believe that God really exists and you believe that following him is worth it. Now people look at that phrase that he exists and they say well that's the problem. How do you know that he exists? We can't see him. We can't touch him.

We can't talk to him. It almost seems like the writer of Hebrews is saying you just make something blind leap into the dark. You say well I just believe that God exists with no evidence just because just because I choose to believe and my grandma told me and I thought she was a good lady so I'm gonna do what she did. That's not what he's saying though. Believing that he exists means that you believe that God is as God has revealed himself. That's what that phrase means in context.

Let me do something that is for some of you gonna feel like I'm about to shove your head underwater and hold it for about five or six minutes but for maybe a couple of your neighbors this is going to be helpful so give me a few minutes at just the time you think you are literally going to drown I'll let you back up I promise but hang with me because I think this is important. Listen, the Bible never sets out to prove God philosophically. There's no book in the Bible called the five arguments for God. It just points to the places that God is speaking and says do you recognize that as the voice of God? You hear it for example in creation. Psalm 19 says the heavens declare the glory of God and the earth proclaims his handiwork. Their voice goes throughout all the earth.

Their words are heard in every language in the world. There is no place on earth that this voice is not heard. You see most people look around at creation and they the explanation that nothing times nobody equals everything is just not that compelling. Francis Crick who was one of the most famous atheists in the scientific community, he died recently.

In 2004 he wrote a book called the Astonishing Hypothesis. Listen to his words, listen, you, your joys, your sorrows, your memories, your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, the love you feel for another human are in fact no more than the behavior, the impersonal behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. You are in the end nothing but a pack of neurons. Everything is chemistry.

Really? Is that romantically satisfying to you? Is that what you girls want to receive on a card? The love I feel for you baby is just a random assortment of chemicals that I inherited. My desire to be with you is really just the desire of those chemicals to propagate their own genetic distinctive in our species. Will you be my valentine?

Really? I'm guessing that's not gonna make it on a Hallmark card anytime soon. You just know there's something more to human experience than chemicals and firing neurons. You sense it in the gratitude you feel in your happiest moments.

C.S. Lewis said that atheists have the profound problem of feeling grateful in their happiest moments and not knowing who to thank. You hear his voice in the Bible. You hear his voice in the person of Jesus and you say that's him, that's him, that's my creator, that's my father.

There he is. You hear his voice and you just recognize that these are the voice of God. Theologians call that the sensus divinitus and it works like your other senses. You're like whoa, whoa, whoa, don't I need to be able to prove logically that there's a God?

Well think about your other senses. If I asked you to prove with watertight logic that I was actually standing here and you were actually listening to me and your senses were not playing tricks on you and this was not all some illusion or a dream, you probably couldn't do it. In fact, I know you couldn't do it because philosophers concluded a long time ago that we can't prove the existence of anything outside of our own minds. You don't assume the world around you exists because you can prove it by logical inference.

Your senses sense me and you believe that your senses were telling you the truth. Philosophers call that a basic belief or think about how you know that certain things are wrong like murder or genocide or child abuse. I mean imagine you met a Nazi who was trying to explain to you why Hitler's actions in World War II were not that bad. They started laying out, you know, arguments from evolution and history and the greater good and blah, blah, blah. You're not even listening to their arguments, right? Because before you hear their reasoning, you already know they're wrong. You know they're wrong not because you know they're wrong. Because of reasoning, you know they're wrong on the basis of instinct. Many of our moral conclusions can be backed up by logic, but their basis is usually instinct. That is not to say that there are not good philosophical reasons to believe in God.

There are. And there are good evidential reasons to believe in Jesus. The prophecies, the resurrection, all those kinds of things. But those things merely back up our sensus divinatus, our sense of the mind. You say, aha, what about those people who don't believe? If this really was a basic belief, everybody would have it.

That's not true. According to the book of Romans, one of the results of our sinfulness was that our hearts were darkened. And so our ability to perceive God got all messed up. The book of Romans says that the inability to perceive God is a kind of spiritual sickness. It's being spiritually dead. Just like the person who really struggles with the fact that the matrix is true probably has some issues, or the person who thinks that child abuse may be okay has a morally dysfunctional heart, the person that is unable to perceive God in the world has a spiritual dysfunction in their heart, the Bible says. By the way, church, that's why we spend so much time in prayer for people. Because you can't heal somebody's heart through logical argumentation. The Bible says we need regeneration.

God might use our arguments in the process, but only his spirit restores our sanity. The way I've described it to you before is like this. Imagine you've got a guy standing on top of a 30-story building and he thinks he's a bird and he can fly. So you go up behind this guy. You're like, hey, man, don't jump. You can't fly.

You're not a bird. He thinks he's a bird. Every single time, what's he going to do? He's going to leap out.

He's going to die. Now, if you had the ability, like say you had a needle of some kind, like a serum, and you could poke it in his back and restore his sanity to him. And then you ask him the same question, same evidence.

Every single time, he backs off that ledge and comes down with you because his sanity has been restored. The difference is not in the question. The difference is not in the evidence.

The difference is in the condition of the heart. The Bible teaches see that when God's spirit begins to work in somebody, they can look at the same set of evidence. And whereas before they were like, I don't see how there's a God, they suddenly look at that same evidence and say, how could you not see God there?

Because he's everywhere. The greatest act of mercy that God can give to you is to open your eyes to himself. So faith is a response to the revelation that God has given.

It takes God at his word and believes that he is as he reveals himself to be. Now I know some of you say, yeah, but I just have such a hard time believing all these hard questions. Like if there really is a God who loves me, why did this happen to me? I don't understand some of the moral codes of the Bible. Why is there a hell?

I feel you. Listen, I really do. One of these days when I have more courage, I'm going to write a book called the pastor with more questions than his parishioners. That's right where these people in Hebrews are by the way, too.

You know what the writer of Hebrews says to them? I don't have all the answers, but what I can put in front of you is Jesus. And I can put up there Jesus. And I can say that while we don't have all the answers, what we have is him. And we can trust what we can understand on the basis of who we know him to be.

What about you? Can you follow Jesus knowing that he might not give you all the answers right away? That's a question we each have to wrestle with. It might not always be easy, but trust me, Jesus is worth it. You're listening to Summit Life, the Bible teaching ministry of Pastor J.D.

Greer. We're in a study of Hebrews called Christ is Better. And if you'd like to hear the previous messages, you can find them online at jdgreer.com. It's our pleasure to give you access to these and other Bible study resources. And today we'd like to get a very encouraging resource into your hands. It's a new 10 part Bible study based on our current teaching series. The main message of the book of Hebrews is don't give up. It was written to a group of people whose faith in Jesus was lagging.

Many of us still struggle with the same problem, and we find it harder and harder to walk with God, especially through life's most difficult moments. To help us as we seek to deepen our faith in God, the Christ is Better Bible study drives home that Jesus is worthy of our trust and devotion. We'll be glad to send you this brand new study to thank you for your financial support. When you give a gift to Summit Life, you make it possible for us to deliver this daily Bible teaching to your radio station. So give today and join our mission to bring the gospel into center focus. Donate by calling 866-335-5220, or you can always request it when you give online at jdgreer.com. I'm Molly Vidovitch inviting you to join us tomorrow as we learn that there's no such thing as half-hearted faith. Be sure to listen to Wednesday to Summit Life with J.D. Greer. Today's program was produced and sponsored by J.D. Greer Ministries.