“A Solid Foundation” Hebrews 11:1-10, 13
All Saints Church - Bill Berger
“Faith is to believe what we so not see, and the reward of this faith is to see what we believe.” -Augustine
Biggest thing we can do is to believe what Jesus said and actually live it out. Need faith in order to deal with the difficulties of life. Faith is rational, personal, foundational, and grace-full.
Faith does take thinking. Cf v.6: conviction - validate through evidence. Cf v.3: to understand. IS a thinking faith. If the seeing world is all there is, there is no way to judge what is right and wrong. We will be unsure of moral knowledge. But the world cannot be all there is, something is giving us a new sense of reality and it takes thinking to get there. Faith is more than reasoning, but it is definitely not less.
Most think of faith as a lack of questioning. But the look at the heroes of faith shows something different. Moves past the rational pursuit to become real and personal. Being called personally. This is where tension arises: we can give intellectual, but where the important interaction is is when we make it our own, when we seek.
The move from a rational beleif to a personal encounter with God. You are now seeing things as you have never seen them before. Why? Because there is much more to this world than we can see.
Has your faith moved from the rational to the personal?
Abraham: Why? God: I’ll tell you later. This world has no foundation, nothing we can stand on. Things break down. We need another foundation that will not fail us because everything here will. We will lose the things of this world we build as foundations (we often even value safety over Jesus). That is building our lives on sand. The foundation is who is Jesus and what does it mean to follow him?
The Gospel should be keeping us from being superior (we are broken and cannot fix ourselvs) nor inferior. Fortunately, the Gospel is also Grece-full. Cf John 8: Abraham would have rejoiced to see my (Christ’s) day. Christ says if I don’t live up to my word, I will pay the price; also, if you don’t live up to your word, I will still pay the price. He is not calling us to do anything he hasn’t already done. When we obey, our lives will be turned around.
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