The Heart of the Hero

The following message was preached at Hillcrest Baptist Church on 24 July 2016.

©Nathan S. Kidder

Background of Hebrews

This morning I have been given the privilege of opening the Scriptures with you to meditate together on the “Heroes of the Faith” series that finds its roots in Hebrews 11.  If you will turn in your Bibles to that chapter, we want to zero in on verses 13-16.  So we are together in Hebrews 11:13-16.

There are a few things that we’re after in this passage.

First, I want to know about the book of Hebrews.  Some background information will serve us well.  The author of Hebrews is likely the Apostle Paul or potentially Apollos, a 1^st Century Alexandrian Jewish Christian who we meet in Ephesus around the year 52 AD and in Corinth around the year 55 AD.  Since he was from Egypt, we might have an African author in the Bible!  Regardless of the author’s identity – and the book is inconclusive in identifying him – we find that he is deeply concerned by a spiritual movement of Jews who were abandoning Christianity and reverting back to Judaism.  Evidence suggests that the book was written sometime between 65 AD and 70 AD, but almost certainly before the latter date and the destruction of the Jerusalem temple by the Romans.  Jewish Christians in the decades following the death and resurrection of Christ had faced severe persecution from their fellow Jews.  They had been ostracized from the community, pushed to the margins of society, attacked verbally for following a murdered radical.  But this persecution had never been a bloody one.  But then, in 60 AD, the Roman Emperor Nero began a full-scale assault on Christianity, labeling the followers of a crucified criminal as radicals, rebels, and anti-Roman.  It would be one of the most brutal periods of persecution the church has ever known.

There were various reasons why Christianity was misunderstood and it followers were viewed as a threat to Roman rule.  But perhaps the most powerful reason is spelled out in the Apostle Paul’s letter to the Romans.  Chapter 10:9 says, “If you confess with your mouth ‘Jesus is Lord,’ and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved” (NASB).  The confession “Jesus is Lord” stood in powerful opposition to the Roman practice of Emperor Worship, by which loyal citizens were to declare “Caesar is Lord.”  Christians were quickly viewed as politically subversive and a growing threat to the unity of the Empire. 

They refused to bow down to the idols of the surrounding culture. 

The time is coming when we will be required to bow down to the idols of our culture.  They might be idols of money, sexuality, rights, youth, and technology.  But we must be very careful here that we resist institutional idols while still loving various individuals.  Standing up for our faith does not give us license to hate or revile people of other beliefs or persuasions.  Thus, again we must insist on standing up to the institutional forms of idolatry while still graciously loving those so enslaved by them.

I mention all those things for one simple reason.  These Jews were abandoning Christianity and reverting back to Judaism, in some cases, to save their own lives.  In other cases, they were rejecting Christ because it had become extremely uncomfortable to follow him.  They no longer received welcome in the Jewish sector and they clearly did not belong to Rome.  They were strangers everywhere.  And they wanted a sense of belonging; they wanted to avoid the persecution that Christians were facing.  They were attempting to jump out of the flames, as it were, because the heat was becoming too intense.

Some of us might say, “Well, we would have made the same decision.  After all, Judaism and Christianity are essentially the same thing, right?  We find the roots of our faith in ancient Judaism and a common ancestry in our Father Abraham.”  But the essential difference between Judaism and Christianity is the coming of the Messiah.  In Judaism, the faithful are still waiting for the Davidic King to come and reign in Jerusalem.  In Christianity, the Davidic King has come and reigns in the hearts of those who enthrone him.  Furthermore, Jesus said, “Whoever denies me before men, I also will deny before my Father who is in heaven” (Matthew 10:33, ESV).  So the difference is crucial.  Eternity hangs in the balance.  Everything rides on this one issue.  So the author of Hebrews is insistent, as powerful in his persuasion as possible, that these Jews not abandon the faith, but persevere despite various afflictions.  And his main argument centers on the supremacy of Christ (over Moses, the angels, the Law at Mount Sinai, the mysterious Melchizedek, the Israelite priesthood under Aaron, the sacrificial system, emphasizing that the New Covenant over which Jesus presides as infinitely superior to the Old Covenant).  So Hebrews is a 45-minute-long sermon that calls for the perseverance of the saints on the ground of the supremacy of Jesus Christ.

Second, I want to know about faith.  What is it?  How do we get it?  How do we use it?  The author exalts the supremacy of Christ throughout the book as the foundation for holding fast in the faith.  Faith is how one perseveres.  Faith is how one overcomes the world.  Faith is the means by which we honor Christ, recognizing him as the author and perfecter of our faith, in standing firm – not denying him in the midst of fiery persecution.  Faith is the mechanism by which we deny the pleasures of the world, embrace suffering for the sake of Christ, look ahead to the promised reward, and endure until the end.  In Hebrews 11, we find the repeated emphasis, “By faith… Abraham; By faith… Jacob; By faith… Moses; By faith, By faith, By faith.”  The author’s repetition clues us in… he is supremely interested in faith, more so than the individuals he mentions.

This is similar to my intent this morning.  I am less interested in the individuals of the faith and more interested in the faith of each individual (your faith; my faith).  It is infinitely important because we are told “without faith it is impossible to please God” (11:6).  By faith we please God; we are commended by God; we are accepted.  And if we cannot please God, we are eternally banished from his presence.  So the issue of faith is a matter of eternal LIFE & DEATH.

And finally, I want to focus on the two words in this passage that help us understand faith: “seek” and “desire.”  We are primarily after the inward, invisible aspects of faith this morning and not primarily the outward and visible signs of faith.  We are looking into the heart of the faithful saint of every generation and not at the outworking of faith among particular individuals.

As a side note, let me say that I agree whole-heartedly with the title of this sermon series, “The Heroes of the Faith.”  There are biblical role-models that help us with motivational and inspirational examples of mountain-moving faith.  But there is an inherent danger in labeling these men and women “heroes.”  We are tempted to separate out some exceptional believers and elevate them unnecessarily.  Then we label all other believers as “ordinary” and imply that we will never attain to that “extra-ordinary” faith of these biblical heroes.  We whisper in the recesses of our hearts “that kind of faith is for them, but I will never be like Abraham or Moses.  They were heroic and I am just ordinary.”

This mindset results in one of two possible reactions.  First, we look at the example of these “heroes” and we want to be like them; we want to be great.  So we start to work and work and work.  We feel that if we did enough, we could be like them.  In the process of working this hard, we forget that the struggle of the Christian life is to rest!  We are to rest in the promises of God, rest in the provision of God, and rest in the all-sufficiency of God’s grace.  We are reminded that the Ten Commandments are not essentially a “to-do” list for the people of God.  Our relationship with God is not defined by our performance.  For at the very heart of the Ten Commandments is the Sabbath command. 

Exodus 20:8-11 says this: “Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy.  Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath of the Lord your God; in it you shall not do any work, you or your son or your daughter…” your servants or your work animals, or foreigners who are staying with you (NASB).

And the purpose of the command is explicit in the introduction.  God says, “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery” (Ex. 20:2, NASB).  The essence of the Sabbath command is to commemorate by a weekly reminder that God is not a “slave-master” deity who demands the performance of his people and then begrudgingly grants them a part of his glory.  No.  He is the God who stoops to conquer.  Islam says you must follow the Five Pillars in this life and your performance will be weighed by Allah at the end of your life.  You must strive upward.  Hinduism says that you must work to do good in this life, that you might be reincarnated in a higher form in the next life.  This cycle repeats itself again and again until followers reach nirvana.  Again, we are to climb upward toward glory.  The “Noble Eightfold Path” of Buddhism is similar, in that we are to reshape our thoughts and behaviors in order to escape the corrupted physical world and attain spiritual liberation.  Human effort is the ultimate means to spiritual freedom.  In all these religions, our striving determines our ultimate fate.

Men and women must struggle to scale the utmost heights, climbing, ascending, scrambling up the impossible incline of personal merit.

But Christianity is the only religion in which the transcendent deity comes down!  God says, “I have seen your afflictions, I have heard your cries, and I have come down to rescue you.”  The Nicene Creed, speaking of Christ, affirms, “For us and for our salvation, he came down from heaven.” 

The other reaction to the heroes of the faith would be the opposite extreme.  One response says we must “work, work, work” to be saintly.  The other says, “There’s no point in trying.”  We accept that we will never be heroic; we will never be like Abraham, Moses, or those gone before us.  And the apathy stemming from this mindset is equally dangerous.  We come to care little for personal holiness.  We pay little attention to devout obedience.

In the end, we must avoid both extremes and find ourselves somewhere in the middle.  So what’s our solution?  The answer is found in defining faith.

Defining Faith

We said above that we had three main goals for this sermon.  First, we wanted to understand the overall structure of the book of Hebrews.  We had handled that issue pretty extensively.

But second, we had also wanted to know more about faith.  There are innumerable passages in the Bible about faith, including Hebrews 11.  But I want to go outside the immediate context briefly to establish an essential point.  Many of you will be able to quote Ephesians 2:8-9 by heart.  If you’ve been in the AWANA program, you undoubtedly recognize these verses as comprising one of the foundational passages for understanding salvation.

It says, “For by grace (feminine singular noun) you have been saved through faith (feminine singular noun); and that (neuter singular pronoun) not of yourselves, it is the gift of God” (NASB).

And the question that so often came to my mind is this: What is the gift of God?  Which one is the gift, grace or faith?  Some people are out there saying that grace is the gift of God and faith is your part.  Have you heard them preaching this way?  Grace is God’s part; faith is your part.  God has blessed you with every blessing in Christ (that’s grace).  And you must access those blessings through faith.  You access wealth through faith.  You access healing through faith.  You access health, wealth, prosperity, happiness; you access your best life now by faith.  Does that sound familiar?  I want you to know this morning that this kind of teaching is heresy.  It is not biblical and it is dangerously erroneous.  The Greek nouns “grace” and “faith” are both feminine singular nouns, whereas the descriptive pronoun “this” is neuter.  The Greek language is very consistent in using feminine nouns with feminine pronouns and likewise, masculine nouns with masculine pronouns.

Therefore, the word “this” (or, in some translations, “that”) cannot describe either grace or faith, but must describe them both.  It describes the process by which we are saved (grace through faith), acknowledging both as the gift of God.  In fact, this is a common Greek construction used throughout the Bible.  Where we see the neuter pronoun, we find that it refers to the process.  Now… what does that mean?  It means that faith is a gift of God.  Grace is God’s part; and faith is God’s part.  God grants each believer a gift of faith, awakening his dead heart to respond to the gospel.  Without the gift of God, no one is born again; no one responds to the good news; no one finds Christ compelling, glorious, or the greatest treasure of the human heart.  No one.  Every believer receives the gift of faith.  It is not that we conjure it up from within us.  Do you see what this does?  There are no ordinary Christians.  Everyone is given the gift of faith.  Abraham was given faith.  Moses was given faith.  You and I are given the gift of faith.

We now return to Hebrews 11 with a better understanding of faith.  

Hebrews continues to develop a biblical definition of faith built on the foundational understanding that Ephesians presents.  The writer tells us that faith is the “assurance” (Greek word is literally, “substance”) of things hoped for.  Do you see that in Hebrews 11:1?  Faith is the substance of things hoped for.  There is a certainty, a substantial belief, that something real awaits us.  This is primarily directed toward future realities, by which I mean the inheritance of the saints, the resurrection and glorification of the believer, the return of Christ, and the everlasting life of those who submit to him.  We hope for these future things… and the writer of Hebrews says that faith is the substance of that hope.  It gives us certainty, assurance, and bold conviction that what we have believed is real.

The immediate context informs our understanding here by way of an illustration.  1^st Century Christians were being imprisoned for their faith (in some instances, this was the best-case scenario).  Other Christians were then forced to make a risky decision.  On the one hand, they could stay quiet and relatively anonymous.  The result would be that their Christian brothers and sisters in jail might die from lack of food or other provisions.  You see, there was no care for prisoners in those days.  You were left in deplorable conditions without food or water or proper sanitation.  You were dependent upon your family members to feed you and keep you alive while you served your sentence.  So this was the first option.  Stay quiet and let them die.

The second option would have been to step out, identify with your Christian brothers and sisters in jail, and take care of them.  But what happened to your home while you were away visiting those prisoners?  Your home was looted and your property was seized.  So the second option was to take care of prisoners, thus identifying yourself as a believer, and risk the plundering of your property.  You would risk losing everything.  Who would make that kind of decision?  And Hebrews 10:34 tells us, “For you showed sympathy to the prisoners and accepted joyfully the seizure of your property, knowing that you have for yourselves a better possession and a lasting one” (NASB).  What does that mean?  They were happy to have their homes plundered because they were certain of something better.  They had a substantial assurance that their hope was grounded in reality.  In other words, they had hope.  And the substance of their hope was the reality of heaven.  You see, if heaven is real, then the possessions of this world are fleeting, and the better possession is the lasting one, the heavenly one.  If we have homes in glory-land that outshine the sun, then we need not hold tightly to the sheetrock and shingles that we presently call home.

So faith is a gift of God to every believer.  It is also the assurance that heaven is real.  There is substance to hope.  There is a reality beyond the scope of our vision that only the heart of faith perceives.

And next, Hebrews 11:1 tells us that faith is the “conviction (Greek word is literally, “evidence”) of things not seen” (NASB).  This is a further expansion of what we’ve just been talking about.  There is something real beyond what our eyes can see.  But it is not all confined to the future.  There are spiritual realities all around us that the eyes of faith can see.  Faith provides the evidence of forgiveness of sin, the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, the intercessory role of Christ as mediator between God and man, the access we have to God through prayer.  We cannot see these present realities.  But do you have faith?  If so, you have all the evidence you need that these things are real. 

So once again… faith is a gift of God to every believer.  It is the assurance (or substance) that all things heavenly are real.  And it is the evidence that God’s present work in the lives of believers is also real.  We cannot see what we hope for, but we know it is substantial.  We cannot see what is invisible, but we have been given evidence of it through faith.

Exposition of Hebrews 11:13-16

¹³These all died in faith, not having received the things promised, but having seen them and greeted them from afar, and having acknowledged that they were strangers and exiles on the earth.  ¹⁴For people who speak thus make it clear that they are seeking a homeland.  ¹⁵If they had been thinking of that land from which they had gone out, they would have had opportunity to return.  ¹⁶But as it is, they desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared for them a city (ESV).

The first thing that I want us to notice this morning is that we are looking into the heart of the faithful.  These are men and women being identified in Hebrews as those who have lived and died in faith.  In the immediate context, we have several examples of the faithful acts that they performed.  But let us not miss this subtle, yet supremely important, fact.  The outward actions were merely a reflection of an inward conviction.

The second thing is that they endured.  They did not pass in and out of a lifestyle of faith.  No.  They lived and died in faith.  And this is the purpose of the writer of Hebrews: that the believers of the middle 1^st Century would endure, would remain faithful in Christ until the end.  We will be told that the way to endure is to fix our eyes on those who have walked faithfully in the past.  And of course, chapters 11 &12 pivot on that very axis, moving from the secondary and tertiary examples of faith to the primary example… through the secondary and tertiary heroes of the faith to the primary hero (I would dare say here… the ONLY hero of the faith; the only one who lived in perfect submission to God the Father and in complete dependence upon the Holy Spirit).   The writer of Hebrews would have us endure because Christ, our faithful High Priest, endured until the end.

The third point that emerges from the text is the phrase “these all died in faith.”  We recognize that this refers to the saints that have just been introduced to the original hearers of the Hebrews sermon, such as Abel, Enoch, and Noah… but primarily Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.  The author tells us that they “died in faith.”  I would not have us overlook such an important point, for there are actually two kinds of death.  The Bible speaks powerfully about those who die in faith as those who have actually passed over from death to life (see John 5).  For this group, death is merely a transition from life to life (physical life to spiritual life).  But there are those who die apart from faith and are lost forever.  There is also a transition, but a horrifying one: from physical death to spiritual death.  Some will be eternally joyous in the presence of God (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) forever.  And some will be eternally haunted in the fierce self-imprisonment of the soul apart from God forever.

The fourth observation from the Hebrews passage is that they died in faith without receiving the promises.  According to the author, what it means to die in faith is to die without receiving the promises.  He wants to tell us that the promises of God are mostly for the future (for the Kingdom) and only some of them are for now.  The promises of God are not mainly for this world.  For sure, there are some that we experience now… but the vast majority of the promises are for the coming Kingdom.  These men and women continued to believe in God, who promised innumerable descendants, a blessed Land of their own, a royal lineage, and even the complete cosmic renewal that meant the reversal of the curses of Genesis 3 after the Fall of Man in the Garden of Eden.  I think Abraham is chief character in view here… and you heard a great sermon on Abraham a couple of weeks ago, if I’m not mistaken.

So I only need to remind you that, at the end of Sarah’s life, after she had died, Abraham had to haggle over the price of a small field in the land that had promised to him as an eternal inheritance.  He was charged three times what the land was worth (it was extortion, because the tribal leaders could see the wealth of Abraham in terms of flocks and servants).  So the man who owned the land was cheated.  Check out Genesis 23 for the details, but that’s the point of the narrative.  And our astute author of Hebrews picks up on this.  Abraham died without inheriting Canaan, with only two sons (the older of which had been exiled to the desert), no royal offspring, and the desperate plight of sin’s continual presence.  Nothing of what had been promised to him was delivered… except Isaac.  And Abraham had to wait 25 years for the one legitimate son (he was 75 when God promised… and 100 years old when the boy was born).

But notice that the text says they did not receive the THINGS promised.  Do you see that there?  That’s really important.  This says something to us about the character of these Old Testament saints.  They were not interested in getting God’s gifts more than they were in getting God.  They were faithful unto death, but had not received God’s gifts.  We are tempted so often to be like this, aren’t we?  We think about the Kingdom and we say, though never so brazenly and openly as this: “God, we don’t care about you, just give us your stuff.”  But we do say it.  We say, “The best part about heaven will be seeing your loved ones again.”  WRONG.  We say, “You can live your best life now, inheriting all the gifts of God while only paying lip service to the Giver.”  WRONG.  We treat God like a heavenly butler and prayer like the intercom system.  We ring and say, “Hey, it’s getting a little too hot down here (police are dying, terrorism is flourishing, chaos is reigning)… it’s getting a little too hot down here, could you turn up the AC a little bit.”  And then we go back to watching TV.  Like the prodigal son of Luke 18, we want our inheritance now.  And like the older brother, we want the Father’s riches so we can be happy with our friends.  Jesus confronts both brothers as essentially saying to the Father, “We don’t care about you, just give us your stuff and let us live our own lives.”

But these saints in Hebrews 11 were not interested in getting the Father’s stuff.  How do I know?  This part is implicit in the text of Hebrews 11 and yet it is not difficult to see.  Refer back to 11:6, which says, “And without faith it is impossible to please him, for whoever would draw near to God must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him” (NASB).  This verse says that the faith that pleases God believes two things: (1) God exists, and (2) God rewards those who seek him…WHO SEEK HIM.  Him.  When we see that faithful saints have died without receiving the promises of God, we think that God did not reward them.  But the nuance in the text is highlighted in the way we just read it.  The reward is God himself.  He rewards, not primarily with blessings and gifts and promises (though, to be sure, he rewards with these things too)… but with himself.  So these men and women died without receiving the promises of God, but they certainly received God himself.  This is the definition of dying in faith… to receive God.  Heaven is heaven because God is there… not our deceased relatives.  Eternity will be either blessed or damned on the basis of God’s presence… and not on any other factor.  Every other blessing flows from the presence of God; so we seek him first, just as the faithful before us have done.

The fifth point provides a picture of faith.  It sees the promises from afar and welcomes them from a distance.  It looks toward the promised life to come and recognizes the Kingdom as home.  It stands on the surface of earth and gazes homeward into realms of glory.  Faith says to our hearts that we belong there… not here.  What also surfaces from the passage is the connection between the end of verse 13 and the content of verse 14.  So let’s look at those verses briefly.  The main point the author wants us to see is that all who live by faith – all who seek God and welcome the blessings of the Kingdom from afar – are exiles in this world.  We are strangers, aliens, migrants, vagrants… we do not belong.  What it means to live by faith (or to walk by faith) is to live with such a substantial view of the Kingdom that our lives are lived as if we were already there.  We get a picture of this in the Old Testament.  Remember Daniel and the story of the lion’s den?  The whole conflict centered on whether or not Daniel would bow down to the idols of his surrounding culture.  The Babylonian king had decreed that all should bow when they heard the music playing, upon penalty of death.  But Daniel lived in Babylon as if he were still in Jerusalem.  He lived in the midst of darkness still belonging to the kingdom of light.

And out of these verses comes one of our two key words this morning: seeking.  Seeking.  Faith seeks.  It is not passive.  It is not content with a vision of this world.  It sees the world to which the soul belongs, if only from a distance, and continues to seek it out.  We see Christ in a new way and we fall in love with what is out there – that distant treasure in heaven.  My sight has been altered so dramatically that my “wants” change… my values change.  Simple test of your faith – how content are you in this world?  What is the level of your “belonging” in this world?  How can we become less comfortable?  We want to live as though we’re not at home here because we have had a shift in values.  On this point, I cannot give a picture of what it might mean to live according to the values of the Kingdom because it will look different for each of you.  The temptation would be to say that wealth makes us ungodly… that we need to be poor in order to live within Kingdom values.  But that’s simply not Biblical.  There are wonderful believers who are wealthy and so generous toward God and his work.  The issue is the heart… and only the Spirit of God can do heart surgery.  So I will pray for each of you… and you can pray for me, that he will do whatever surgery we need without any resistance.

The sixth point that we observe from the text highlights the reason behind their refusal to go home.  They could have retreated to their comfortable surroundings and home culture, but they did not.  They had a chance to go back, but they didn’t.  Now remember, the author is trying to persuade the Jewish community not to revert to empty forms of worship.  They were not to return to Judaism; they were not to go back.  And he uses the example of the Patriarchs who did not return, who did not go back, either.  Why not?  The answer brings us to our second key word: Desire.  Notice, “They desire a better country… a heavenly one.”  Remember that we are looking into the heart here.  The heart of the hero seeks the far-off country and the promises reserved for the future.  And as it seeks, it desires one over the other.  It falls in love with the coming Kingdom to such an extent that it desires the Kingdom more than anything this world has to offer.  Faith desires.  It is not simply a decision we made when we trusted Christ.  Faith changes the way we feel; it changes the nature of our desiring and adjusts the objects of our desires.  The old hymn goes like this: “Once earthly joy I craved, sought peace and rest.  Now thee alone I seek, give what is best.”  This is the idea.  Simple test of your faith – how do you react to the state of affairs here in the crumbling American Empire?

I have met numerous people who are just seething below the surface because our country is being given to immigrants, being taken over by terrorists, and overrun by godlessness.  We are ticked.  But guess what – we are not from here.  We are not actually Americans.  Citizens of the kingdom have been tasked with taking the Gospel to every corner of the world.  How are we doing with that?  It’s time for a gut-check… all of us.  We’ve had trouble meeting the lost where they live.  So God is bringing the lost to our neighborhoods… pretty soon people of every tongue and tribe and nation will be standing at our doorsteps.  We’ve been given the blessing of making relationships with the global community without even needing a passport.

Instead of loving these desperately lost people, we’re hopping mad that they would request halal beef in McDonald’s burgers, demand the removal of the Ten Commandments from government buildings, petition for the words “under God” to be omitted or replaced in the pledge of allegiance.  We’re caught in the 1^st Century mindset of the Zealots (like Simon, the disciple of Christ, or the Maccabean revolutionaries before him) that we need to fight to bring about the kingdom of God on earth.  But we must acknowledge that America is not God’s country.  According to NT theology, Israel is not even God’s country either.  Our God is not an ethnic or tribal deity.  He is the God of the universe and his kingdom exists in the lives of those who bow in submission to King Jesus and enthrone him as Lord of their hearts.  Our reaction to the crumbling American empire will likely show us the desires of our hearts.  Do we prefer the comforts of the familiar, comfortable, visible surroundings, or the promises that can only be welcomed from afar?

Genuine faith does not stop at a one-time decision to follow Christ.  It continues throughout our whole lives as seeking the one to whom we belong and desiring him above all else.  That’s it.  That’s the message we need to hear this morning.  A new life emerges from the shadows of the former self that has different vision and radically altered values.  These values are so radical from our former worldly values that it seems we’ve been made into a new person entirely.  We’ve been given new citizenship… we’ve been transformed from within… we’ve been born again.  Therefore,…

We are citizens of heaven stranded on the earth.

We are sons and daughters of Zion, living as exiles in Babylon.

We are people of the light, walking in the midst of encroaching darkness.

We are aliens and strangers on the earth, looking for the city of the living God.

We do not belong in Jamestown.

We are not American citizens.

We belong to the kingdom of God.  Therefore, let us reject the pleasures and treasures of this world and seek, by faith, the kingdom of our Heavenly Father, desiring him above all else.

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The amazing statement that sums up this passage says that God is not ashamed to be called their God.  Now imagine this: the God who created the world and everything in it, the God who called forth the universe from formlessness, the God from whom all beings derive their existence and thus, the God to whom all beings necessarily and rightfully belong… this God becomes our God.  He belongs to us.  And he is not ashamed to belong to us.  There are two reasons for this… one is highlighted by the word “therefore” and the other by the word “for.”  There is one reason that precedes the verse and one that follows.  The one that follows says that God is not ashamed to be our God because he has made a city for us.  And the one that comes before says that God is not ashamed to be our God because we desire that city.  He has made us a city and we desire that city.  Now, we pause to reflect on what makes God unashamed to be called our God.  Is it that we must enact some huge and monumental undertaking?  Is it that we must be holy enough for him to notice and be proud?  It is simply that we must desire him.  That’s it.  For in desiring God, we glorify him above all else that we could desire.

So the closing question this morning is this: What is sitting on the throne of your heart that you desire more than God?  Maybe you can discern this by the way you use your time, what you think about most often, how you spend your money, what you prioritize in the bringing up of your children.  Faith means to desire God above all else.   

The Heart of the Hero

The following message was preached at Hillcrest Baptist Church on 24 July 2016.

 

Background of Hebrews

This morning I have been given the privilege of opening the Scriptures with you to meditate together on the “Heroes of the Faith” series that finds its roots in Hebrews 11.  If you will turn in your Bibles to that chapter, we want to zero in on verses 13-16.  So we are together in Hebrews 11:13-16.

There are a few things that we’re after in this passage.

First, I want to know about the book of Hebrews.  Some background information will serve us well.  The author of Hebrews is likely the Apostle Paul or potentially Apollos, a 1^st Century Alexandrian Jewish Christian (from Egypt, and so we might have an African author in the Bible!) who we meet in Ephesus around the year 52 AD and in Corinth around the year 55 AD.  Regardless of the author’s identity – and the book is inconclusive in identifying him – we find that he is deeply concerned by a movement of Jews whereby they are abandoning Christianity and reverting back to Judaism.  Evidence suggests that the book was written sometime between 65 AD and 70 AD, but almost certainly before the latter date and the destruction of the Jerusalem temple by the Romans.  Jewish Christians in the decades following the death and resurrection of Christ had faced severe persecution from their unconverted countrymen.  They had been ostracized from the community, pushed to the margins of society, attacked verbally for following a murdered radical.  But this persecution had never been a bloody one until, in 60 AD, the Roman Emperor Nero began a full-scale assault on Christianity, labeling the followers of a crucified criminal as radicals, rebels, and anti-Roman.

There were various reasons why Christianity was misunderstood and it followers were viewed as a threat to Roman rule.  But perhaps the most powerful reason is spelled out in the Apostle Paul’s letter to the Romans.  Chapter 10:9 says, “If you confess with your mouth ‘Jesus is Lord,’ and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved” (NASB).  The confession “Jesus is Lord” stood in powerful opposition to the Roman practice of Emperor Worship, by which loyal citizens were to declare “Caesar is Lord.”  Christians were quickly viewed as politically subversive and a growing threat to the unity of the Empire.  They refused to bow down to the idols of the surrounding culture.  The time is coming when we will be required to bow down to the idols of our culture.  They might be idols of money, sexuality, rights, youth, and technology.  But we must be very careful here that we resist institutional idols while still loving various individuals.  Standing up for our faith does not give us license to hate or revile people of other beliefs or persuasions.  Thus, again we must insist on standing up to the institutional forms of idolatry while still graciously loving those so enslaved by them.

I mention all those things for one simple reason.  These Jews were abandoning Christianity and reverting back to Judaism, in some cases, to save their own lives.  In other cases, they were rejecting Christ because it had become extremely uncomfortable to follow him.  They no longer received welcome in the Jewish sector and they clearly did not belong to Rome.  They were strangers everywhere.  And they wanted a sense of belonging; they wanted to avoid the persecution that Christians were facing.  They were attempting to jump out of the flames, as it were, because the heat was becoming too intense. 

Some of us might say, “Well, we would have made the same decision.  After all, Judaism and Christianity are essentially the same thing, right?  We find the roots of our faith in ancient Judaism and a common ancestry in our Father Abraham.”  But the essential difference between Judaism and Christianity is the coming of the Messiah.  In Judaism, the faithful are still waiting for the Davidic King to come and reign in Jerusalem.  In Christianity, the Davidic King has come and reigns in the hearts of those who enthrone him.  Furthermore, Jesus said, “Whoever denies me before men, I also will deny before my Father who is in heaven” (Matthew 10:33, ESV).  So the difference is crucial.  Eternity hangs in the balance.  Everything rides on this one issue.  So the author of Hebrews is insistent, as powerful in his persuasion as possible, that these Jews not abandon the faith, but persevere despite various afflictions.  And his main argument centers on the supremacy of Christ (over Moses, the angels, the Law at Mount Sinai, the mysterious Melchizedek, the Israelite priesthood under Aaron, the sacrificial system, emphasizing that the New Covenant over which Jesus presides as infinitely superior to the Old Covenant).  So Hebrews is a 45-minute-long sermon that calls for the perseverance of the saints on the ground of the supremacy of Jesus Christ.

Second, I want to know about faith.  What is it?  How do we get it?  How do we use it?  The author exalts the supremacy of Christ throughout the book as the foundation for holding fast in the faith.  Faith is how one perseveres.  Faith is how one overcomes the world.  Faith is the means by which we honor Christ, recognizing him as the author and perfecter of our faith, in standing firm – not denying him in the midst of fiery persecution.  Faith is the mechanism by which we deny the pleasures of the world, embrace suffering for the sake of Christ, look ahead to the promised reward, and endure until the end.  In Hebrews 11, we find the repeated emphasis, “By faith… Abraham; By faith… Jacob; By faith… Moses; By faith, By faith, By faith.”  The author’s repetition clues us in… he is supremely interested in faith, more so than the individuals he mentions.

This is similar to my intent this morning.  I am less interested in the individuals of the faith and more interested in the faith of each individual (your faith; my faith).  It is infinitely important because we are told “without faith it is impossible to please God” (11:6).  By faith we please God; we are commended by God; we are accepted.  And if we cannot please God, we are eternally banished from his presence.  So the issue of faith is a matter of eternal LIFE & DEATH.

And finally, I want to focus on the two words in this passage that help us understand faith: “seek” and “desire.”  We are primarily after the inward, invisible aspects of faith this morning and not primarily the outward and visible signs of faith.  We are looking into the heart of the faithful saint of every generation and not at the outworking of faith among particular individuals.

As a side note, let me say that I agree whole-heartedly with the title of this sermon series, “The Heroes of the Faith.”  There are biblical role-models that help us with motivational and inspirational examples of mountain-moving faith.  But there is an inherent danger in labeling these men and women “heroes.”  We are tempted to separate out some exceptional believers and elevate them unnecessarily.  Then we label all other believers as “ordinary” and imply that we will never attain to that “extra-ordinary” faith of these biblical heroes.  We whisper in the recesses of our hearts “that kind of faith is for them, but I will never be like Abraham or Moses.  They were heroic and I am just ordinary.”

This mindset results in one of two possible reactions.  First, we look at the example of these “heroes” and we want to be like them; we want to be great.  So we start to work and work and work.  We feel that if we did enough, we could be like them.  In the process of working this hard, we forget that the struggle of the Christian life is to rest!  We are to rest in the promises of God, rest in the provision of God, and rest in the all-sufficiency of God’s grace.  We are reminded that the Ten Commandments are not essentially a “to-do” list for the people of God.  Our relationship with God is not defined by our performance.  For at the very heart of the Ten Commandments is the Sabbath command. 

Exodus 20:8-11 says this: “Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy.  Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath of the Lord your God; in it you shall not do any work, you or your son or your daughter…” your servants or your work animals, or foreigners who are staying with you (NASB).

And the purpose of the command is explicit in the introduction.  God says, “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery” (Ex. 20:2, NASB).  The essence of the Sabbath command is to commemorate by a weekly reminder that God is not a “slave-master” deity who demands the performance of his people and then begrudgingly grants them a part of his glory.  No.  He is the God who stoops to conquer.  Islam says you must follow the Five Pillars in this life and your performance will be weighed by Allah at the end of your life.  You must strive upward.  Hinduism says that you must work to do good in this life, that you might be reincarnated in a higher form in the next life.  This cycle repeats itself again and again until followers reach nirvana.  Again, we are to climb upward toward glory.  The “Noble Eightfold Path” of Buddhism is similar, in that we are to reshape our thoughts and behaviors in order to escape the corrupted physical world and attain spiritual liberation.  Human effort is the ultimate means to spiritual freedom.  In all these religions, our striving determines our ultimate fate.

Men and women must struggle to scale the utmost heights, climbing, ascending, scrambling up the impossible incline of personal merit.

But Christianity is the only religion in which the transcendent deity comes down!  God says, “I have seen your afflictions, I have heard your cries, and I have come down to rescue you.”  The Nicene Creed, speaking of Christ, affirms, “For us and for our salvation, he came down from heaven.” 

The other reaction to the heroes of the faith would be the opposite extreme.  One response says we must “work, work, work” to be saintly.  The other says, “There’s no point in trying.”  We accept that we will never be heroic; we will never be like Abraham, Moses, or those gone before us.  And the apathy stemming from this mindset is equally dangerous.  We come to care little for personal holiness.  We pay little attention to devout obedience.

In the end, we must avoid both extremes and find ourselves somewhere in the middle.  So what’s our solution?  The answer is found in defining faith.

Defining Faith

We said above that we had three main goals for this sermon.  First, we wanted to understand the overall structure of the book of Hebrews.  We had handled that issue pretty extensively.

But second, we had also wanted to know more about faith.  There are innumerable passages in the Bible about faith, including Hebrews 11.  But I want to go outside the immediate context briefly to establish an essential point.  Many of you will be able to quote Ephesians 2:8-9 by heart.  If you’ve been in the AWANA program, you undoubtedly recognize these verses as comprising one of the foundational passages for understanding salvation.

It says, “For by grace (feminine singular noun) you have been saved through faith (feminine singular noun); and that (neuter singular pronoun) not of yourselves, it is the gift of God” (NASB).

And the question that so often came to my mind is this: What is the gift of God?  Which one is the gift, grace or faith?  Some people are out there saying that grace is the gift of God and faith is your part.  Have you heard them preaching this way?  Grace is God’s part; faith is your part.  God has blessed you with every blessing in Christ (that’s grace).  And you must access those blessings through faith.  You access wealth through faith.  You access healing through faith.  You access health, wealth, prosperity, happiness; you access your best life now by faith.  Does that sound familiar?  I want you to know this morning that this kind of teaching is heresy.  It is not biblical and it is dangerously erroneous.  The Greek nouns “grace” and “faith” are both feminine singular nouns, whereas the descriptive pronoun “this” is neuter.  The Greek language is very consistent in using feminine nouns with feminine pronouns and likewise, masculine nouns with masculine pronouns.

Therefore, the word “this” (or, in some translations, “that”) cannot describe either grace or faith, but must describe them both.  It describes the process by which we are saved (grace through faith), acknowledging both as the gift of God.  In fact, this is a common Greek construction used throughout the Bible.  Where we see the neuter pronoun, we find that it refers to the process.  Now… what does that mean?  It means that faith is a gift of God.  Grace is God’s part; and faith is God’s part.  God grants each believer a gift of faith, awakening his dead heart to respond to the gospel.  Without the gift of God, no one is born again; no one responds to the good news; no one finds Christ compelling, glorious, or the greatest treasure of the human heart.  No one.  Every believer receives the gift of faith.  It is not that we conjure it up from within us.  Do you see what this does?  There are no ordinary Christians.  Everyone is given the gift of faith.  Abraham was given faith.  Moses was given faith.  You and I are given the gift of faith.

We now return to Hebrews 11 with a better understanding of faith. 

Hebrews continues to develop a biblical definition of faith built on the foundational understanding that Ephesians presents.  The writer tells us that faith is the “assurance” (Greek word is literally, “substance”) of things hoped for.  Do you see that in Hebrews 11:1?  Faith is the substance of things hoped for.  There is a certainty, a substantial belief, that something real awaits us.  This is primarily directed toward future realities, by which I mean the inheritance of the saints, the resurrection and glorification of the believer, the return of Christ, and the everlasting life of those who submit to him.  We hope for these future things… and the writer of Hebrews says that faith is the substance of that hope.  It gives us certainty, assurance, and bold conviction that what we have believed is real.

The immediate context informs our understanding here by way of an illustration.  1^st Century Christians were being imprisoned for their faith (in some instances, this was the best-case scenario).  Other Christians were then forced to make a risky decision.  On the one hand, they could stay quiet and relatively anonymous.  The result would be that their Christian brothers and sisters in jail might die from lack of food or other provisions.  You see, there was no care for prisoners in those days.  You were left in deplorable conditions without food or water or proper sanitation.  You were dependent upon your family members to feed you and keep you alive while you served your sentence.  So this was the first option.  Stay quiet and let them die.

The second option would have been to step out, identify with your Christian brothers and sisters in jail, and take care of them.  But what happened to your home while you were away visiting those prisoners?  Your home was looted and your property was seized.  So the second option was to take care of prisoners, thus identifying yourself as a believer, and risk the plundering of your property.  You would risk losing everything.  Who would make that kind of decision?  And Hebrews 10:34 tells us, “For you showed sympathy to the prisoners and accepted joyfully the seizure of your property, knowing that you have for yourselves a better possession and a lasting one” (NASB).  What does that mean?  They were happy to have their homes plundered because they were certain of something better.  They had a substantial assurance that their hope was grounded in reality.  In other words, they had hope.  And the substance of their hope was the reality of heaven.  You see, if heaven is real, then the possessions of this world are fleeting, and the better possession is the lasting one, the heavenly one.  If we have homes in glory-land that outshine the sun, then we need not hold tightly to the sheetrock and shingles that we presently call home.

So faith is a gift of God to every believer.  It is also the assurance that heaven is real.  There is substance to hope.  There is a reality beyond the scope of our vision that only the heart of faith perceives.

And next, Hebrews 11:1 tells us that faith is the “conviction (Greek word is literally, “evidence”) of things not seen” (NASB).  This is a further expansion of what we’ve just been talking about.  There is something real beyond what our eyes can see.  But it is not all confined to the future.  There are spiritual realities all around us that the eyes of faith can see.  Faith provides the evidence of forgiveness of sin, the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, the intercessory role of Christ as mediator between God and man, the access we have to God through prayer.  We cannot see these present realities.  But do you have faith?  If so, you have all the evidence you need that these things are real. 

So once again… faith is a gift of God to every believer.  It is the assurance (or substance) that all things heavenly are real.  And it is the evidence that God’s present work in the lives of believers is also real.  We cannot see what we hope for, but we know it is substantial.  We cannot see what is invisible, but we have been given evidence of it through faith.

Exposition of Hebrews 11:13-16

¹³These all died in faith, not having received the things promised, but having seen them and greeted them from afar, and having acknowledged that they were strangers and exiles on the earth.  ¹⁴For people who speak thus make it clear that they are seeking a homeland.  ¹⁵If they had been thinking of that land from which they had gone out, they would have had opportunity to return.  ¹⁶But as it is, they desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared for them a city (ESV).

The first thing that I want us to notice this morning is that we are looking into the heart of the faithful.  These are men and women being identified in Hebrews as those who have lived and died in faith.  In the immediate context, we have several examples of the faithful acts that they performed.  But let us not miss this subtle, yet supremely important, fact.  The outward actions were merely a reflection of an inward conviction.

The second thing is that they endured.  They did not pass in and out of a lifestyle of faith.  No.  They lived and died in faith.  And this is the purpose of the writer of Hebrews: that the believers of the middle 1^st Century would endure, would remain faithful in Christ until the end.  We will be told that the way to endure is to fix our eyes on those who have walked faithfully in the past.  And of course, chapters 11 &12 pivot on that very axis, moving from the secondary and tertiary examples of faith to the primary example… through the secondary and tertiary heroes of the faith to the primary hero (I would dare say here… the ONLY hero of the faith; the only one who lived in perfect submission to God the Father and in complete dependence upon the Holy Spirit).   The writer of Hebrews would have us endure because Christ, our faithful High Priest, endured until the end.

The third point that emerges from the text is the phrase “these all died in faith.”  We recognize that this refers to the saints that have just been introduced to the original hearers of the Hebrews sermon, such as Abel, Enoch, and Noah… but primarily Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.  The author tells us that they “died in faith.”  I would not have us overlook such an important point, for there are actually two kinds of death.  The Bible speaks powerfully about those who die in faith as those who have actually passed over from death to life (see John 5).  For this group, death is merely a transition from life to life (physical life to spiritual life).  But there are those who die apart from faith and are lost forever.  There is also a transition, but a horrifying one: from physical death to spiritual death.  Some will be eternally joyous in the presence of God (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) forever.  And some will be eternally haunted in the fierce self-imprisonment of the soul apart from God forever.

The fourth observation from the Hebrews passage is that they died in faith without receiving the promises.  According to the author, what it means to die in faith is to die without receiving the promises.  He wants to tell us that the promises of God are mostly for the future (for the Kingdom) and only some of them are for now.  The promises of God are not mainly for this world.  For sure, there are some that we experience now… but the vast majority of the promises are for the coming Kingdom.  These men and women continued to believe in God, who promised innumerable descendants, a blessed Land of their own, a royal lineage, and even the complete cosmic renewal that meant the reversal of the curses of Genesis 3 after the Fall of Man in the Garden of Eden.  I think Abraham is chief character in view here… and you heard a great sermon on Abraham a couple of weeks ago, if I’m not mistaken.  So I only need to remind you that, at the end of Sarah’s life, after she had died, Abraham had to haggle over the price of a small field in the land that had promised to him as an eternal inheritance.  He was charged three times what the land was worth (it was extortion, because the tribal leaders could see the wealth of Abraham in terms of flocks and servants).  So the man who owned the land was cheated.  Check out Genesis 23 for the details, but that’s the point of the narrative.  And our astute author of Hebrews picks up on this.  Abraham died without inheriting Canaan, with only two sons (the older of which had been exiled to the desert), no royal offspring, and the desperate plight of sin’s continual presence.  Nothing of what had been promised to him was delivered… except Isaac.  And Abraham had to wait 25 years for the one legitimate son (he was 75 when God promised… and 100 years old when the boy was born).

But notice that the text says they did not receive the THINGS promised.  Do you see that there?  That’s really important.  This says something to us about the character of these Old Testament saints.  They were not interested in getting God’s gifts more than they were in getting God.  They were faithful unto death, but had not received God’s gifts.  We are tempted so often to be like this, aren’t we?  We think about the Kingdom and we say, though never so brazenly and openly as this: “God, we don’t care about you, just give us your stuff.”  But we do say it.  We say, “The best part about heaven will be seeing your loved ones again.”  WRONG.  We say, “You can live your best life now, inheriting all the gifts of God while only paying lip service to the Giver.”  WRONG.  We treat God like a heavenly butler and prayer like the intercom system.  We ring and say, “Hey, it’s getting a little too hot down here (police are dying, terrorism is flourishing, chaos is reigning)… it’s getting a little too hot down here, could you turn up the AC a little bit.”  And then we go back to watching TV.  Like the prodigal son of Luke 18, we want our inheritance now.  And like the older brother, we want the Father’s riches so we can be happy with our friends.  Jesus confronts both brothers as essentially saying to the Father, “We don’t care about you, just give us your stuff and let us live our own lives.”

But these saints in Hebrews 11 were not interested in getting the Father’s stuff.  How do I know?  This part is implicit in the text of Hebrews 11 and yet it is not difficult to see.  Refer back to 11:6, which says, “And without faith it is impossible to please him, for whoever would draw near to God must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him” (NASB).  This verse says that the faith that pleases God believes two things: (1) God exists, and (2) God rewards those who seek him…WHO SEEK HIM.  Him.  When we see that faithful saints have died without receiving the promises of God, we think that God did not reward them.  But the nuance in the text is highlighted in the way we just read it.  The reward is God himself.  He rewards, not primarily with blessings and gifts and promises (though, to be sure, he rewards with these things too)… but with himself.  So these men and women died without receiving the promises of God, but they certainly received God himself.  This is the definition of dying in faith… to receive God.  Heaven is heaven because God is there… not our deceased relatives.  Eternity will be either blessed or damned on the basis of God’s presence… and not on any other factor.  Every other blessing flows from the presence of God; so we seek him first, just as the faithful before us have done.

The fifth point provides a picture of faith.  It sees the promises from afar and welcomes them from a distance.  It looks toward the promised life to come and recognizes the Kingdom as home.  It stands on the surface of earth and gazes homeward into realms of glory.  Faith says to our hearts that we belong there… not here.  What also surfaces from the passage is the connection between the end of verse 13 and the content of verse 14.  So let’s look at those verses briefly.  The main point the author wants us to see is that all who live by faith – all who seek God and welcome the blessings of the Kingdom from afar – are exiles in this world.  We are strangers, aliens, migrants, vagrants… we do not belong.  What it means to live by faith (or to walk by faith) is to live with such a substantial view of the Kingdom that our lives are lived as if we were already there.  We get a picture of this in the Old Testament.  Remember Daniel and the story of the lion’s den?  The whole conflict centered on whether or not Daniel would bow down to the idols of his surrounding culture.  The Babylonian king had decreed that all should bow when they heard the music playing, upon penalty of death.  But Daniel lived in Babylon as if he were still in Jerusalem.  He lived in the midst of darkness still belonging to the kingdom of light.

And out of these verses comes one of our two key words this morning: seeking.  Seeking.  Faith seeks.  It is not passive.  It is not content with a vision of this world.  It sees the world to which the soul belongs, if only from a distance, and continues to seek it out.  We see Christ in a new way and we fall in love with what is out there – that distant treasure in heaven.  My sight has been altered so dramatically that my “wants” change… my values change.  Simple test of your faith – how content are you in this world?  What is the level of your “belonging” in this world?  How can we become less comfortable?  We want to live as though we’re not at home here because we have had a shift in values.  On this point, I cannot give a picture of what it might mean to live according to the values of the Kingdom because it will look different for each of you.  The temptation would be to say that wealth makes us ungodly… that we need to be poor in order to live within Kingdom values.  But that’s simply not Biblical.  There are wonderful believers who are wealthy and so generous toward God and his work.  The issue is the heart… and only the Spirit of God can do heart surgery.  So I will pray for each of you… and you can pray for me, that he will do whatever surgery we need without any resistance.

The sixth point that we observe from the text highlights the reason behind their refusal to go home.  They could have retreated to their comfortable surroundings and home culture, but they did not.  They had a chance to go back, but they didn’t.  Now remember, the author is trying to persuade the Jewish community not to revert to empty forms of worship.  They were not to return to Judaism; they were not to go back.  And he uses the example of the Patriarchs who did not return, who did not go back, either.  Why not?  The answer brings us to our second key word: Desire.  Notice, “They desire a better country… a heavenly one.”  Remember that we are looking into the heart here.  The heart of the hero seeks the far-off country and the promises reserved for the future.  And as it seeks, it desires one over the other.  It falls in love with the coming Kingdom to such an extent that it desires the Kingdom more than anything this world has to offer.  Faith desires.  It is not simply a decision we made when we trusted Christ.  Faith changes the way we feel; it changes the nature of our desiring and adjusts the objects of our desires.  The old hymn goes like this: “Once earthly joy I craved, sought peace and rest.  Now thee alone I seek, give what is best.”  This is the idea.  Simple test of your faith – how do you react to the state of affairs here in the crumbling American Empire?

I have met numerous people who are just seething below the surface because our country is being given to immigrants, being taken over by terrorists, and overrun by godlessness.  We are ticked.  But guess what – we are not from here.  We are not actually Americans.  Citizens of the kingdom have been tasked with taking the Gospel to every corner of the world.  How are we doing with that?  It’s time for a gut-check… all of us.  We’ve had trouble meeting the lost where they live.  So God is bringing the lost to our neighborhoods… pretty soon people of every tongue and tribe and nation will be standing at our doorsteps.  We’ve been given the blessing of making relationships with the global community without even needing a passport.

Instead of loving these desperately lost people, we’re hopping mad that they would request halal beef in McDonald’s burgers, demand the removal of the Ten Commandments from government buildings, petition for the words “under God” to be omitted or replaced in the pledge of allegiance.  We’re caught in the 1^st Century mindset of the Zealots (like Simon, the disciple of Christ, or the Maccabean revolutionaries before him) that we need to fight to bring about the kingdom of God on earth.  But we must acknowledge that America is not God’s country.  According to NT theology, Israel is not even God’s country either.  Our God is not an ethnic or tribal deity.  He is the God of the universe and his kingdom exists in the lives of those who bow in submission to King Jesus and enthrone him as Lord of their hearts.  Our reaction to the crumbling American empire will likely show us the desires of our hearts.  Do we prefer the comforts of the familiar, comfortable, visible surroundings, or the promises that can only be welcomed from afar? 

Genuine faith does not stop at a one-time decision to follow Christ.  It continues throughout our whole lives as seeking the one to whom we belong and desiring him above all else.  That’s it.  That’s the message we need to hear this morning.  A new life emerges from the shadows of the former self that has different vision and radically altered values.  These values are so radical from our former worldly values that it seems we’ve been made into a new person entirely.  We’ve been given new citizenship… we’ve been transformed from within… we’ve been born again.  Therefore,…

We are citizens of heaven stranded on the earth.

We are sons and daughters of Zion, living as exiles in Babylon.

We are people of the light, walking in the midst of encroaching darkness.

We are aliens and strangers on the earth, looking for the city of the living God.

We do not belong in Jamestown.

We are not American citizens.

We belong to the kingdom of God.  Therefore, let us reject the pleasures and treasures of this world and seek, by faith, the kingdom of our Heavenly Father, desiring him above all else.

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The amazing statement that sums up this passage says that God is not ashamed to be called their God.  Now imagine this: the God who created the world and everything in it, the God who called forth the universe from formlessness, the God from whom all beings derive their existence and thus, the God to whom all beings necessarily and rightfully belong… this God becomes our God.  He belongs to us.  And he is not ashamed to belong to us.  There are two reasons for this… one is highlighted by the word “therefore” and the other by the word “for.”  There is one reason that precedes the verse and one that follows.  The one that follows says that God is not ashamed to be our God because he has made a city for us.  And the one that comes before says that God is not ashamed to be our God because we desire that city.  He has made us a city and we desire that city.  Now, we pause to reflect on what makes God unashamed to be called our God.  Is it that we must enact some huge and monumental undertaking?  Is it that we must be holy enough for him to notice and be proud?  It is simply that we must desire him.  That’s it.  For in desiring God, we glorify him above all else that we could desire.

So the closing question this morning is this: What is sitting on the throne of your heart that you desire more than God?  Maybe you can discern this by the way you use your time, what you think about most often, how you spend your money, what you prioritize in the brining up of your children.  Faith means to desire God above all else.