Rick Sutherland opens by grounding the passage in its original context, noting that the author of Hebrews intentionally draws exclusively from Old Testament saints to make a pointed argument to Jewish Christians: faith-based obedience is not a new demand of the New Covenant, but a continuation of what God has always required and always made possible. Just as their ancestors trusted God's promises without seeing their fulfillment, so too are New Covenant believers called to walk in that same faith. The chapter, Rick argues, is not a departure from Israel's heritage — it is the fulfillment of it.

Working through Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph, Rick draws out a central theme that threads through all four stories: there is a profound difference between believing God is capable of fulfilling His promises and trusting His plan for how He will accomplish them. Abraham believed God could resurrect Isaac. Isaac spoke generational blessings he would never live to see. Jacob crossed his hands and blessed the younger son over the older, demonstrating that God's sovereign election cannot be constrained by human tradition or expectation. And Joseph, at the end of his life, gave instructions about his bones — anchoring his faith to a promise that wouldn't be fulfilled for centuries.

Rick closes with four grounding truths: faith is not confidence in our preferred outcome but in God's character and wise providence; obedience is the path we walk while we wait, not a currency that purchases the result we want; God's faithfulness is not measured by the speed of His answer; and the ultimate hope of our faith is resurrection and glory in Christ, who has overcome death. With the words of the desperate father in Mark 9:24 — "I believe; help my unbelief" — Rick invites the congregation to bring their unanswered prayers, their grief, and their uncertainty before a God who is faithful even when we cannot trace the path.

Transcript

Good morning, church family. Good morning. I think Esther and I have shared with a number of you guys in our life groups or our dinner groups, that when we moved the area, it took us a while to find Gateway. And our search for a church was interesting, discouraging at times. And as I was preparing these last couple weeks, I remembered there was a church we had gone to and it was closer to our house, so it would have been convenient. There was things we weren't crazy about, but at that point we realized maybe we weren't going to find the perfect church. And we really liked the senior pastor's teaching. They didn't have a teaching team. The senior pastor was really good speaker, but then a couple of times he was out of town and the associate pastor spoke and we were not big fans of that at all. And so every week when it would come time like, hey, where are we going to go to church this Sunday? If we didn't have something off our list, we would just default and go back to this place. And we went. What turned out to be the final Sunday. And the associate pastor was preaching from Hebrews chapter 11. And the title of his message was Be God's superhero.

And we left that message knowing more about the Marvel Universe than we did the text of Scripture. We both looked at each other and we were like, that was the last Sunday. Like, that's. And so as we work our way through Hebrews 11 with multiple lessons, we've still got a couple more ahead of us. If you don't leave after the lesson refreshed and having a new view of God's sovereignty and faithfulness, then we have not been faithful to the text, because that is what this chapter is about. That is what we are trying to squeeze and extract and apply out of it. And my prayer this morning is that God allows me to be faithful to that goal. So our passage is Hebrews 11, verses 17 through 2022. I will read that. And these are God's words.

"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 had been said, through Isaac, shall your offspring be named. But he, Abraham, considered that God would be able even to raise him from the dead, from which, figuratively speaking, he did receive him back. By faith, Isaac invoked future blessings on Jacob and Esau. By faith, Jacob, when dying, blessed each of the sons of Joseph, bowing in worship over the head of his staff. And by faith, Joseph, at the end of his life, made mention of the Exodus of the Israelites and gave directions concerning his bones." (Hebrews 11:17-22)

Father, thank you for your word, providing them and preserving them. And now by your spirit, will you give us understanding and will you give us application of specifically why you gave us these words and this focus, this meaning? And will you use it in your words today to equip us for our week ahead and to make us more like Jesus? We ask that and trust that you'll do that. And it's in Jesus name I pray. Amen.

So as we Continue in chapter 11, I want to share a couple things that stood out to me as I was studying over the last couple weeks, this text. First, as you read Hebrews chapter 11 and you think about who's mentioned, you also realize there are some significant omissions here in this chapter. I'm not talking about the apostles because there's a reason only Old Testament saints are mentioned in this text. The most common view of the Book of Hebrews, this message that was preached, is that it was preached and recorded prior to AD 70 and the destruction of the temple. And so if you accept that view, then at the time that this message was preached, this letter was written, 22 of the new Testament books had already been written. So you think about 22. The world would have known about the Acts of Christ and the apostles. But the fact that New Testament figures, the apostles, Stephen, some of the earlier Christians are not mentioned is intentional because it's the purpose of the preacher in this message about Hebrews, not to reconstruct a comprehensive history of Christianity up to that date, but rather in this lesson, he's demonstrating that faith based obedience has always been foundational in God's covenantal relationship with his people. And drawing exclusively from Old Testament characters shows that the faith required of us God's obedient servants. This is not a new demand of the New Covenant, but it's a continuation of what God has always required and has always made possible. And in making the specific point to the Jewish Christians who were the intended recipients of this message, this revisiting of their Jewish history, it serves to validate their historical experience. It affirms that the faith now being exercised in Christ under the New Covenant is the exact faith that their ancestors demonstrated and highlights specifically how that faith was lived out through their life stories. This chapter in Hebrews is declaring that the faith of the Old Testament heroes that they knew of was not a departure from their heritage, but it was the fulfillment of it in the New Covenant.

Have you ever stopped to think about some of the names missing from this chapter can you think about that off the top of your head and do some of them puzzle you? Look at this list. How about start out, we skip over Adam, Job, Joshua, Aaron, and Solomon. As I looked at that, I was like, all right, I can see why Solomon was left out, right? But what about the others, specifically Job? It's not that the others weren't people of faith. And my goodness, if you don't see faith in Job's life, but rather, God chose specific people in chapter 11. He took their stories and their purposes for a precise, divine reason.

And that brings me to the second observation that I had in this church. We work our way through books of the Bible. We teach our way all the way through. We extract the meaning, and we apply it. And if we were studying this morning Genesis or Exodus or some of the areas these stories come from, we would read the passage, extract the meaning, apply it to our lives as we try to do every week. But when we analyze these stories through Hebrews 11, it's different. We're pointed back to very familiar stories that we know from the Old Testament. But then Hebrews explicitly tells us what to focus on. And the lens that we're looking through to see the acts of faith in Hebrews 11, we're given the inspired outline. And it's crucial when we have inspiration that we follow it. And so that's what my goal is for our character studies this morning, is to look through that lens of inspiration in chapter 11, back into the stories in the Old Testament.

Imagine this. Imagine you, you got to take a vacation and you went over to Europe. You decided you were going to walk through a world famous art gallery, and you just walked through room after room of Renaissance masterpieces, and you finally stop dead in your tracks in front of this massive, priceless oil painting by Rembrandt. It's breathtaking. It's a scene with dramatic lighting, deep emotional expression, and immense historical weight. This is Rembrandt's work called the Prodigal Son. You pull out a magnifying glass and you step up until your nose is almost touching the canvas. You're completely absorbed with something there in the bottom right corner. And after minutes of studying, you step back and you look at the gallery guide and you say with absolute excitement, do you see the brushstroke right there? How that artist mixed those browns and those greens? That's the identical color I painted my deck last summer. And do you see that little knot right there? I have that exact same knot in my back porch. And this painting has to be A personal message to me from Rembrandt. And the guy just stares back at you and blinks and says, this is the prodigal son returning home. And Rembrandt spent years and years trying to capture the message of unconditional forgiveness, brokenness, and redemption. And you just spent the last 10 minutes analyzing a knot in a floorboard.

So this morning, don't look at your favorite brushstrokes in these Old Testament stories. Don't relate them to the meaning you had. We'll save that for when we study Genesis and Exodus. Right, this morning, let's look through the lens of Hebrews and see what God is calling out in these stories. First, we're going to continue in Abraham. And the section of our text this morning about Abraham comes from Genesis 22:1 through 13. I'm going to read a lot of scripture this morning. We're going to see exactly where these stories in Hebrews were extracted from the old Testament. Verse 1.

"After these things, God tested Abraham. And he said to him, abraham. Abraham answered, here I am. God said, take your son, your only son, Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains of which I shall tell you. So Abraham rose up early in the morning, saddled his donkey and took two of his young men with him and his son Isaac. And he cut the wood for the burnt offering. And he arose and he went to the place of which God had told him. And on that third day, Abraham lifted up his eyes and saw the place from afar. And Abraham said to his young men, stay here with the donkey, and I and the boy will go over there and worship and come again to you. And Abraham took the wood of the burnt offering and laid it on his Isaac, a son. And he took in his hand the fire and the knife, and both of them went up together. And Isaac said to his father, father. And he said, yes, I'm here, my son. Isaac said, behold, I see the fire and the wood. Where is the lamb for the burnt offering? And Abraham said, God will provide for himself the lamb for a burnt offering, my son. And so they went, both of them together. And when they came to the place of which God had told Abraham, Abraham built the altar there and laid the wood in the order. And he bound Isaac, his son. And he took Isaac and he laid him on the altar on top of the wood. Then Abraham reached out his hand and he took the knife to slaughter his own son. But the angel of the Lord called out to him from heaven and said, abraham, Abraham. And he answered and said, here I am. And he said, do not lay your hand on the boy or do anything to him, for now I know that you fear God, seeing that you have not withheld your son, your only son, from me. And Abraham lifted up his eyes and looked, and behold, behind him was a ram caught in a thicket by his horns. And Abraham went and took the ram and offered it as a burnt offering sacrifice instead of his own son." (Genesis 22:1-13)

So this audience, these recipients, these Jewish people, trace their lineage back to Abraham, the father of their race, and they consider him to be the patriarch of their nation. And we heard from Jay several weeks ago that Abraham started out as a pagan worshiping foreigner. He was chosen and called by God, and he became the foundation of this people. And so in this message, choosing Abraham and choosing this story serves a very strategic illustration to the recipients. Because if you trace your lineage back to an individual who lived entirely by faith and is called out for it by God, it sets a pattern and expectation for everyone who's going to follow it. And something else we learned was that Abraham was not chosen and called out in response to any merit of his own. But this was a story that needed to be contradicted, because in the early first centuries, the rabbis were teaching that Abraham had earned God's favor through obedience and good works by following where he was called, and that God had looked upon his obedience and determined him to be a righteous man based on that basis. And that narrative needed to be counteracted, and that's what's being counteracted here in this story. Abraham was righteous because he was a man of faith, but his faith was imputed to him by God. The author and the preacher here in Hebrews is establishing that Abraham lived by faith. Therefore, your patriarch lived by faith. Every Jew who follows after him must do the same. In claiming Abraham as their model.

And the central theme in our text about Abraham, I want to establish early in this lesson and apply it across all four of our examples this morning. And that's There is a difference between believing God is capable of fulfilling his promises and trusting his plan for how he will accomplish them. That's a really big difference. And two weeks ago, in his message, Jay said that faith requires us sometimes to step out into the unknown. And that's often where faith breaks down. God gives us the promise, but we insist on drawing the map of how we're going to get there. We don't want to walk into the unknown. But yet that is the very essence of Faith believing that God is able in his promises, even when we can't see the path or control the directions on how we're going to get there.

So what does genuine faith look like in real life? Our text says 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. And Jay went through all the trials, the time, the disappointment, the disobedience, the shortcut that Abraham and Sarah went through to have a child. And now God is saying, take the roadmap of my promise and kill it. Take your lineage and end it here. The author can you imagine, after all those years, the overwhelming joy of finally seeing God's promise fulfilled in Isaac, Right? God forgave our disobedience with Ishmael. The shortcut, what we tried to do in our own power and in our old age. God has given us this child and God follows that up with this command, take your son up the mountain and offer that son as a sacrifice. I can't even imagine the internal conflict that call for obedience must have had. Abraham's looking at the roadmap, looking at God and saying, you're asking me to rip the map in half and destroy it. But here's another takeaway for us this morning. Prior struggles and tests don't give you a discount or an exemption from walking in faith, right? And isn't that the call of our heart when we walk through a struggle or a test? We're like, hey, but God, I already, or you already, why am I here? Some of us have walked through maybe one long dark valley and other of us feel like we walk through valley after valley after valley. But look at Abraham's response. God. God made this call, this demand, and Abraham responded by packing up supplies, getting his son and setting out.

We see clearly how his faith unfolds in the narrative because he tells his servants, stay here with the donkey, look at your scripture. And you can go back to the Hebrew to look at this. He says, I and the boy will go up and worship and we will come back again. We will come back again. And then when you look at Hebrews, what does Hebrews tell us? Hebrews says Abraham thought he was going to sacrifice Isaac on top of that hill. He believed he would sacrifice Isaac in obedience and that God would resurrect Isaac from the dead. Can you imagine a more typology and forward looking act of obedience, of trusting God's ability and fulfilling his covenant Abraham in faith, believed that God could take an only son, receive him in sacrifice, raise him back to life, and fulfill a covenant that ultimately required the sacrificial death of, of a firstborn son. And so what Hebrews is calling us to see through this lens and this story is not merely belief in a promise or submission to a test. It's calling us to have faith that believes that God can resurrect the very thing that we surrender in obedience. The things that he's called us to sacrifice. Where we say, but God, that's my plan. That's my map. That's the way you will accomplish your promise.

Abraham's faith teaches us to trust God in the times where we cannot trace back the path between promise and fulfillment. That's the faith we're called to have. When I was studying this week, I was thinking, but yeah, but this is Abraham right? Very early on. And I started looking at the timeline of when was the law given? What is there in the law that points to the Messiah? How would Abraham know of Christ the Messiah? And isn't Abraham just passing a test that's placed in front of him? And I started looking, is there scripture that Abraham would have known about to look for this typology of a firstborn son being sacrificed to fulfill a covenant. And then I found John. In chapter eight, Jesus was engaged again with the religious debate with the leaders of his day. And in John 8:56, what does Jesus explicitly say? He says:

"Your father Abraham rejoiced to see my day" (John 8:56)

This is the incarnated Christ on earth talking. Abraham rejoiced to see my day, and he saw it in faith and he was glad.

"John Calvin noted that Jesus here is referring to the day, the day meaning his incarnation, ministry, death and resurrection, the totality of his coming, redemptive work and living centuries before Christ's earthly ministry, Abraham perceived God's plan of salvation through the Messiah and understood what was being called out in his obedience with his own son."

And this aligns with Jesus broader message that he's arguing here with the Pharisees. Abraham in faith knew of Christ and in faith believed in his coming.

Second, our scripture talks this morning about Isaac, and this text comes from several passages. The first is the blessing of Jacob in Genesis 27.

"So he came near and kissed him. And Isaac smelled the smell of his garments and blessed him and said, see, the smell of my son is as the smell of the field that the Lord has blessed. And here comes the blessing. May God give you the dew of heaven. The Fatness of the earth, and plenty of grain and wine. Let people serve you. Let nations bow down to you. You will be lord over your brothers, and may your mother sons bow down to you. Cursed be everyone who curses you, and blessed be everyone who blesses you." (Genesis 27:27-29)

And then, following a blessing over the older son, Esau, Genesis 27:39, 40.

"Then his father Isaac answered him, esau, and said to him, behold, away from the fatness of the earth shall your blessing be, and away from the dew of heaven on high. By your sword you shall live, and you will serve your brother. But then when you grow restless, you will break his yoke from off your neck." (Genesis 27:39-40)

And through our study of chapter 11, and Jay pointed this out, that chapter 11 in its lens focuses us through a view of grace. Because this story in the Old Testament is about deception and trickery and theft, and yet it's called out in Hebrews 11 as an act of faith. In verse 20 of our text, grace allows us to look past the deception, the maneuvering and the human plotting of Genesis 27 to focus instead on the ultimate outcome of these brothers and the nation that came through them. That was achieved through faith and through Hebrews. We see Isaac conferring prophetic destinies on both of his sons and their descendants, acting as a patriarch of God's divine decree. And the author's emphasis is that these blessings were active faith in God's ability. Isaac spoke them over both of his sons with confidence in God's sovereign purpose. He wasn't just doling out physical treasures that he had or wealth. He was declaring generational blessings that he himself would not live to see. Yet in declaring them, trusting that God would bring them to pass. And this mirrors a truth that we see throughout the New Testament and the New Covenant, that God's sovereign purposes will prevail despite the failings and the errors of men. And faith enables us to trust God's promise over our own failing, even when their fulfillment lies beyond our sight or even beyond our lifetime.

Third, let's look at Jacob. This comes from Genesis 47 and 48, verse 29.

"And when the time drew near that Israel, another name for Jacob, must die, he called his son Joseph. And when he saw that Joseph's sons were in front of him, he said, who are these. These boys? And Joseph said to his father, they are my sons who God has given me here in this land of Egypt. And he said, bring them close to me, please, that I may bless them. Now the eyes of Jacob were dim with his age, and he could not see. So Joseph brought them near him, and he kissed them and embraced them. And Israel said to Joseph, I never expected to see your face again. And behold, God has now let me see your offspring also. Joseph removed them from his knees, and he bowed himself with his face to the earth. And Joseph took both of his sons, Ephraim in his right hand toward his dad's left hand, and Manasseh in his left hand toward his dad's right hand. And he brought his sons near to Jacob. And Jacob stretched out his right hand and laid it on the head of Ephraim, who was the younger, and his left hand on the head of Manasseh the older, crossing his hands. And he blessed Joseph and said, the God before whom my fathers Abrahams and Isaac walked, the God who's been my shepherd all my life to this day, the angel who has redeemed me from evil. May they bless the boys, and in them let my name be carried on as well as the name of my fathers, Abraham and Isaac. And let them grow into a multitude, the midst of the earth. And how did his son react to this? Joseph, seeing that his father, laid his right hand on the head of Ephraim, it displeased him. And he took his father's hand to try to move it from Ephraim's head to Manasseh. And Joseph said to his father, not this way, my father. This one is my firstborn. My oldest. Put your right hand on his head. But Jacob refused and said, I know, my son. I know. Even in his blindness, he also the younger shall become a people, the older, he also shall be great. Nevertheless, this younger brother shall be greater than the older, and his offspring shall become a multitude of nations. So he blessed them that day, saying, by you, Israel will pronounce blessings, saying, God makes you as Ephraim and as Manasseh. And then he put Ephraim before Manasseh. Then Israel said to Joseph, behold, I am about to die, but God will be with you and will bring you again to the land of your fathers." (Genesis 48)

Hang on to that last phrase, Joseph. He will bring you again to the land of your fathers. The first detail we see highlighted in Hebrews and looking back into the Old Testament is the physical weakness of Jacob. At this point, our text notes that he was dying. And when you combine that with the details in Genesis that he was functionally blind and couldn't see, he was conferring blessings on his grandson, trusting God, knowing for a fact that he would not live to see this materialize. And in the account Joseph, following tradition, brought his sons before his grandfather and and positioned them, the firstborn, the oldest to be under Jacob's right hand and the younger under his left. But before he blessed them, despite custom, despite physical placement, Jacob crossed his hands and bestowed the primary blessing on the younger son. This is intentional. This is purposeful. Through this historical act, God is forecasting and highlighting a theological truth, and that is his blessing. And covenantal election does not depend on human tradition or natural birthright, but solely on his grace and his sovereign decree. This pattern reoccurs throughout Genesis with striking consistency, pointing to God's intention, pointing forward to the new covenant in four consecutive generations in this family. Through deception, through purpose, a younger son was chosen over the elder, Isaac over Ishmael, Jacob over Esau, Joseph over Reuben, Ephraim over Manasseh, all by different means and purposes, all in God's sovereign decree. And this repeating pattern demonstrates strictly that God operates according to divine election.

"Augustine, the early theologian, interprets this very symbolically, suggesting that the younger son receiving the primary blessing prefigured how the spiritual blessing promise to Israel would be extended to us, the church, the Gentiles, making Gentile believers the unexpected heirs of the covenantal promises."

Romans tells us that God has put a judicial hardness and blinding on his people and the covenant has flowed to the church. While that judicial blindness exists, and the core truth that we see in this is that Jacob's blessings of Joseph's sons highlights God's freedom to work beyond human expectations. Or even when we try to set the roadmap for God right, we place our sons where we want the blessing to fall. And God says, that's not how I'm going to do it. His divine plans cannot be constrained by natural inheritance, laws, cultural tradition or expectation and plans of men.

Last we see or we continue into the story of Joseph. This comes from multiple passages in Genesis and the following books, starting with Genesis 22.

"So Joseph remained in Egypt, he and his father's house, and he lived to be 110 years old. And Joseph saw Ephraim's children of the third generation. The children also of Machir, the son of Manasseh, were counted as his own children. And Joseph said to his brothers, I am about to die, but God will visit you and bring you up out of this land to the land that he swore to Abraham, to Isaac and Jacob. He's prophesying the Exodus. And then Joseph made the sons of Israel swear. He said, make me a promise. God will visit you and you will carry up my bones from Here I was brought to Egypt in captivity. When you leave, you will carry my bones away with you. So he died at 110 years of age. They embalmed him and he was put in a coffin in Egypt." (Genesis 50:22-26)

And then in Exodus 13:17:

"Pharaoh let the people go. God did not lead them out by the way of the land of the Philistines, although that was closer. God said, lest the people change their minds when they see the war and return to Egypt, God led the people around by the way of the wilderness, toward the Red Sea. And the people of Israel went up out of the land of Egypt, equipped for battle. Verse 19. When they left, Moses took the bones of Joseph with him. For Joseph had made the sons of Israel solemnly swear, saying, God will surely visit you. You shall carry up my bones with you from here." (Exodus 13:17-19)

And then in Joshua 24:29:

"After these things, Joshua, the son of Nun, the servant of the Lord, died. He also made it to 110 years old. So Israel buried him in his own inheritance at Timnath Serah, which is in the hill country of Ephraim, north of the mountain of Gosh. And Israel served the Lord all the days of Joshua, all the days of the elders who outlived Joshua and known all the work that the Lord did for Israel. And I love this part of the storytelling, God says. And as for the bones of Joseph, which the people of Israel had brought up from Egypt, they buried him at Shechem in the piece of land that Jacob, before he went to Egypt, had bought from the sons of Hamor, the father of Shechem, for a hundred pieces of money. It became an inheritance of the descendants of Joseph." (Joshua 24:29-32)

His dad had prophesied this. He prophesied this in the timeline. This is hundreds of years later, after he died. And the Israelites were still in Egypt hundreds of years, and they wandered around in the wilderness. And then in Joshua, we see that his bones were buried in the land of his father. And the preacher in Hebrews is highlighting Joseph's final instructions, telling us that he understood his story, his captivity, his time in Egypt, all were deeply rooted in faith. And at the end of his life, he spoke prophetically, saying, I see the Exodus coming. God will lead us out of here, and my bones are not going to remain here. I will reach the promised land. Even after my life. He knew that he wouldn't see the day in his lifetime. Yet he was confident that his resting place would be in the Promised Land. And by faith, the end of his life was anchored to a promise of God that would not be fulfilled for centuries. That's not how we want God's promises to operate, right? We want to hear the promise, claim the promise and pick it up tomorrow, right? Isn't that what we all want? That's not faith.

In the late 1870s, there was an engineer named John Roebling. He had a son named Washington, and the two of them set out to build a monumental suspension bridge that connected New York and Brooklyn across the East River. It was audacious. At the time, nothing like this had been attempted. It's because the river right there was plagued with fierce tidal currents, heavy commercial shipping traffic that did not want to cooperate with the construction plan. But worse, there was a deep, treacherous riverbed that was made up of shifting silt, the silt bed. And in order for them to succeed, they had to sink these massive wooden airtight boxes that were called caissons. They had to sink them deep into the silt. So they had to mine down into the silt, place these boxes, and then build on top of them. And where they had to mine down, these caves were filled with toxic gases and high pressure. And at the time, they didn't understand the disease of the bends. And so multiple. Multiple workers fell sick and died from what they called caisson disease, mining down to put these boxes. The chief engineer himself, John Roebling, got an infection and died just after the project began. So his son, in grief of losing his father, took over. And during the construction project, he was permanently crippled and left bedridden. So he rented an apartment that had a window overlooking the construction site, and through a telescope, he watched the engineers. And every day he would give instructions to his wife, and his wife would take the instructions down to the engineers and. And they persisted in this project. It took 14 long years to complete this project, with him observing from his bedside as a cripple. But in the end, on May 24, 1883, the bridge was opened. It stood firm against the wind, the currents, the weight of millions of people going back and forth. And it became a testament to a vision that refused to quit holding fast under pressure, even when the people who designed it and built it could no longer stand on their own two feet.

And this is a truth for us because there's a gap between what we believe about God and his abilities and the results that we can't see a map for and don't understand how they can be achieved. But that gap, that impossible gap, is spanned by faith. Faith is the piling and the infrastructure sunk deep into the muddy silt that allows us to span those impossible gaps. But faith doesn't construct a path by which we compel God to deliver the outcome we demand and we desire. Faith rests upon the God who has promised to accomplish his divine purposes. And obedience is how we walk with him while we wait. Obedience is how we walk when we can't see. We don't know the map or the plan. And whether his providence brings deliverance in this life or it calls us to persevere through suffering and death, obedience is the path that spans those pilings.

So this morning, let me ask you some questions. In application, let me give you a couple of truths just to apply to your life. Ask yourself, in your life or in a situation, do you know? Do you have a child who is far from God and you can't see or know the path for them to find their way to Christ? A lot of us recently have lost somebody dear. Can you see a way across the grief ahead of you in your life? Do you have a relationship that is dead or dying and you can't see a path to life in that relationship? Maybe you're in a health struggle or a challenge and you've been battling this for a long time and you don't see an end in sight. And last, in a broader sense, have you been asking God for an answer to a specific prayer for a long time to deliver you, to provide a way, and you've reached the point where you're just not sure you can hold on or for how long?

Well, four truths. First of all, faith is not confidence in our preferred outcome. The object and the hope of faith is our confidence in God, in His character, his revealed promise and his wise providence. Secondly, we're called to obey, but obedience does not purchase the outcome we're looking for. Obedience is the path that we walk while we wait and trust in God's plans and God's timing. Third, God's faithfulness is not measured by immediate deliverance. That's the scoreboard we want to apply to God. How faithful are you? How quick will you answer my prayer? But when you look at Hebrews chapter 11, there are some people whose prayers were answered immediately. And there are some people whose bones were deposited in the promised Land hundreds of years after their death. And by faith they saw the outcome. The common feature that we see in Hebrews 11 was not that all of their earthly circumstances ended favorably, but that all of them trusted in God's providence. And fourth, what we have to remember every day, the ultimate hope of our faith is resurrection and glory. God has not promised that every sorrow we encounter in this life will be reversed. He promises that death will not have the final word because we are in Christ and he has overcome death.

And this morning, I asked Carrie to let us learn a new song to close. I've been singing this song now for a couple weeks, every morning on my way to work. And I love these words from the course. The course says:

"I wasn't made to be tending a grave I was called by name Born and raised back to life again Because I was made for more and why would I make a bed in my shame When a fountain of grace is running my way and I know I am yours and I was made for more"

And loved ones. There are a number of graves that Satan wants to trap us in. The grave of doubt, the grave of shame, the grave of self control, which is an idol that leads to death. And we can find ourselves in these graves when we don't see the path ahead and our faith just doesn't let us trust God in the unknown. But this morning, as I close this in prayer, our collective prayer to our kind Father can echo some of my favorite words in all of the Bible. And that's from Mark 9. The desperate father, when he confesses:

"I believe, but help my unbelief." (Mark 9:24)

What is he saying? I know you are able, but my boy is back at home dying. How are you going to heal him? I believe. Help my unbelief. Where I don't see the path. Let's pray.

God, all of us can confess that often our faith demands immediate responses from you. Our faith demands that we control the path and the timing. Our faith is determined upon whether we can see the way you're going to accomplish what you've promised. And yet you clearly call us in chapter 11 to a different kind of faith, a faith that believes in resurrection and glory and hoping in the knowledge that you have overcome death, the knowledge that your ways are above ours and that we can trust and have faith in you, even when we are walking in the unknown. So help us as we trip and fall over our unbelief and keep our eyes focused on you, Jesus. In the name of the Christ. Amen.

Sermons

By Faith - Hebrews 11:17-22 - October 18, 2026 - Rick Sutherland