Text:\u00a0 Hebrews 11:1-2; Hebrews 11:8-16<\/p>\n
I remember sitting in her living room.\u00a0 She told me she attended some Miracle Temple in Chicago.\u00a0 Then she asked me:\u00a0 Do you believe in miracles? <\/i>\u00a0I said yes and then I quickly added:\u00a0 and you know what is the greatest miracle of all, the fact that you and I can say with a believing heart, I believe, I trust in Jesus Christ, my Lord and Savior.<\/p>\n
Do you realize what a great miracle that is dear friends?\u00a0 That you and I can sing and yes believe:\u00a0 Jesus loves me this I know.\u201d\u00a0 Jesus loves me this I know, not because I always feel it inside.\u00a0 I sometimes feel just the opposite.\u00a0 Jesus loves me this I know, not because I always see his love in my life.\u00a0 Sometimes life seems to say just the opposite.\u00a0 Jesus loves me this I know, for the Bible tells me so.<\/i>\u00a0 God tells me so in his Word and by a miracle, yes by a miracle, I believe it.\u00a0 I trust that it\u2019s true.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s what faith is all about.\u00a0 It\u2019s not seeing is believing.\u00a0 It\u2019s just the opposite.\u00a0 It\u2019s being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see<\/span>.<\/p>\n Today we look at one such life of faith, the life of Abraham.\u00a0 And here notice:<\/p>\n FAITH LOOKS PAST WHAT WE SEE AND EXPERIENCE \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Abraham lived by his extended family in the city of Ur, what would be Iraq today.\u00a0 How the Lord came to him we do not know, yet we do know he spoke to Abraham.\u00a0 Leave your country, your people and your father\u2019s household and go to the land I will show you <\/span>(Gen 12:1) Then the Lord promised: I will make you a great nation.\u00a0 I will make your name great\u2026All peoples\u2026 will be blessed through you.<\/p>\n What a wonderful promise, but what a call.\u00a0 What a test of faith!\u00a0 For what faced Abraham?\u00a0 What did he see?\u00a0 Ur wasn\u2019t the greatest place to live but it was home and there lived his family.\u00a0 And now God says to leave.\u00a0 He says to go somewhere he\u2019s never been.\u00a0 And then I imagine the questions:\u00a0 Why are you leaving?\u00a0 It doesn\u2019t make sense.\u00a0 God couldn\u2019t want you to leave your family.<\/i><\/p>\n Yet he left.\u00a0 He left with no road map or GPS.\u00a0 He obeyed God\u2019s call.\u00a0 Why?\u00a0 How?\u00a0 By faith.\u00a0 By faith, Abraham when called to go to a place he would later receive as an inheritance, obeyed and went, even though he did not know where he was going<\/span>.<\/p>\n Then think about the land, the promised land of Canaan.\u00a0 God promised it would be his inheritance.\u00a0 His family would possess it, own it.\u00a0 But what did he see?\u00a0 Yes, he was richly blessed with flocks and herds and many servants.\u00a0 But the land was something different.\u00a0 There he lived as a stranger, a foreigner.\u00a0 He moved from place to place, living in tents, not ever having a home, not ever possessing the land.\u00a0 In fact, the only land he ever owned was a small burial plot for his wife, Sarah.<\/p>\n Yet he did not go back to his own country.\u00a0 He did not give up on God\u2019s promise even as he said farewell to this life.\u00a0 And why?\u00a0 How?\u00a0 By faith.\u00a0 By faith he made his home there.\u00a0 For faith looks past what we see and experience when God promises his blessings<\/b>.<\/p>\n But now think of the most important promise.\u00a0 Offspring.\u00a0 Many of them, a great nation.\u00a0 Offspring, one special descendant through whom all nations would be blessed.\u00a0 In other words, a Savior for a dying world of sinners.<\/p>\n Yet what did Abraham see?\u00a0 He saw his own tired old body past the age of making his wife pregnant.\u00a0 He saw a barren wife who had never bore him a child.\u00a0 And then the years went past, twenty four of them since God\u2019s promise to bless him.\u00a0 The years went by and still no son, no offspring.<\/p>\n Yet Abraham did not give up.\u00a0 Yes, he struggled with doubts at times.\u00a0 But he did not give up.\u00a0 By faith he looked past what he saw and experienced.\u00a0 By faith he clung to God\u2019s promises.\u00a0 And by faith he was enabled to become a father<\/span>.<\/p>\n But even with that son, faith still was necessary.\u00a0 For one son was a far cry from a great nation, the millions that would one day come out of Egypt to possess the land of Canaan.\u00a0 And this one son, Isaac, was not that one special descendant.\u00a0 It would still be many generations before he would be born in a stable in Bethlehem.<\/p>\n Yet by faith, we\u2019re told Abraham greeted these things from afar.\u00a0 To his dying day, he believed in God\u2019s promised blessing.\u00a0 And why?\u00a0 How?\u00a0 By faith.\u00a0 For faith looks past what we see and experience when God promises blessing.<\/p>\n So what blessing has God promised you?\u00a0 He hasn\u2019t promised to bless your family with a homeland and make you a great nation. .\u00a0 Yet he has promised to be with you wherever you go.\u00a0 He has promised that he has plans for you, plans to prosper you and not to harm you.\u00a0 He has promised to be your ever present help in time of trouble. To make all things work out for your good.\u00a0 But what do we sometimes see?\u00a0 It might seem that God is like you and me who can forget or go back on the promises we make.\u00a0 But faith knows.\u00a0 Faith trusts in what it cannot see.\u00a0 Faith looks past what we see and experience and clings to God\u2019s promises.<\/p>\n And here is the most important one.\u00a0 Through faith in Jesus and what he has done, we sinners are forgiven and adopted into God\u2019s family.\u00a0 In Christ, you are a child of God.\u00a0 But again, like Abraham, what do we see?\u00a0 Abraham lived long before Christ.\u00a0 We live long after Jesus walked on this earth.\u00a0 Like Abraham, we haven\u2019t seen Jesus.\u00a0 We haven\u2019t seen his miracles.\u00a0 We haven\u2019t seen him after he rose back to life.\u00a0 So what do we see?\u00a0 We don\u2019t see anything do we?\u00a0 We don\u2019t see Jesus and our lives with him can seem not much different than before.\u00a0 Same problems.\u00a0 Same troubles.<\/p>\n Yet, by a miracle of God, we believe.\u00a0 By faith, we go on.\u00a0 And with that faith we look past what might seem to be.\u00a0 We look past it all to God\u2019s Word where we see God\u2019s own Son die for us, where we see him rising in glory on Easter morning.\u00a0 For there by faith we see and know his promises are sure.<\/p>\n But faith wouldn\u2019t be worth much if it just spoke to our lives here and now.\u00a0 This life is a brief moment in time when compared to eternity.\u00a0 Yet God in Christ has given us so much more.\u00a0 A hope not just for tomorrow, and then no more, but a hope forever.<\/p>\n Yet again, what we see does not match up.\u00a0 But that\u2019s where faith comes in.\u00a0 For faith looks past what we see and experience when God points us to our eternal home<\/b>.<\/p>\n Abraham looked forward to living in another land, another city.\u00a0 And not the city of Jerusalem, not the land of Israel.\u00a0 Rather as the Bible says, the city with foundations whose architect and builder is God,<\/span> the promised land of heaven.\u00a0 God had given him this hope which is also ours.\u00a0 For God promises that one day we will live in that eternal city where there will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain.\u00a0 We will live the blessed presence of Jesus who loves us and gave his life for us.<\/p>\n And yet what did Abraham see.\u00a0 What we also see.\u00a0 He saw death, not life.\u00a0 He saw a grave which he purchased to bury the body of his life long companion Sarah.\u00a0 He saw a grave which he knew would one day swallow him as well.<\/p>\n Yet by faith in the coming Savior, Abraham could look past what he saw with his eyes.\u00a0 He could look past the tears, past the sadness, as we can.\u00a0 He could look past that grave to what God had for him on the other side.\u00a0 So he could live his life.\u00a0 By faith he could live his life not as a man with time running out, not as a person moving ever closer to a dreadful dead end.\u00a0 No, by faith he could look\u00a0 past what he saw.\u00a0 He could live his life as we can, someone just passing through, and always on the way: to that sweet and blessed country, the home of God\u2019s elect , that sweet and blessed country that eager hearts expect.<\/span><\/p>\n Some years ago I was talking to a pastor who shared with me a very sad situation.\u00a0 He described a woman in his congregation who had seen her children grow up to lead terrible lives of sin.\u00a0 They broke her heart.\u00a0 Her husband was gone.\u00a0 And now her health was failing.\u00a0 So she cried.\u00a0 She wondered.\u00a0 She was numb with sadness.<\/p>\n Do you know what that pastor told her?\u00a0 How blessed you are<\/i>.\u00a0 Huh?\u00a0 How blessed you are he told her and then he explained.\u00a0 He told her that God wasn\u2019t punishing her.\u00a0 Instead he was teaching her something so important for us, his people.\u00a0 What faith is all about\u2026 We learned it as children.\u00a0 So simple, yet so profound, Jesus loves me this I know<\/span>, for the Bible tells me so<\/i>.\u00a0 Amen.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Text:\u00a0 Hebrews 11:1-2; Hebrews 11:8-16 I remember sitting in her living room.\u00a0 She told me she attended some Miracle Temple in Chicago.\u00a0 Then she asked me:\u00a0 Do you believe in miracles? \u00a0I said yes and then I quickly added:\u00a0 and you know what is the greatest miracle of all, the fact that you and I can say with a believing […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-463","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sermon"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.livingwordpetaluma.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/463","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.livingwordpetaluma.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.livingwordpetaluma.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.livingwordpetaluma.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.livingwordpetaluma.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=463"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/www.livingwordpetaluma.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/463\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":468,"href":"http:\/\/www.livingwordpetaluma.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/463\/revisions\/468"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.livingwordpetaluma.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=463"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.livingwordpetaluma.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=463"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.livingwordpetaluma.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=463"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n<\/b>I.\u00a0 When God promises his blessings
\nII.\u00a0 When God points us to our eternal home<\/p>\n