The comedian, George Carlin, did a creative routine based on the word 'stuff' - that your 'stuff' is important to you. Your house is comfortable to you because it's filled with your 'stuff.' When you visit another person's house, it is not so comfortable because it has their 'stuff' in it; you think your 'stuff' is more comfortable than their 'stuff.' When you go on a vacation, you have to decide what of your 'stuff' you're now going to put in that suitcase so you have the right 'stuff' with you.
Don't Do That, My Stuff Is In There
When you get to the airport and they throw your suitcase seven feet to that belt, you say to yourself, "Don't do that. My 'stuff' is in there." Well, pretend with me that we were about to take a spiritual road trip, and you have to load in your spiritual suitcase the things that are absolutely essential to true Biblical Christianity. What would you load in your suitcase? What things would you have to have for your Christianity to be Christianity? I want to get you to consider with me this morning, bare-bones, pared down, minimalist Christianity.
Turn, if you would, in your Bibles to Hebrews 11, page 1007 in the church Bible. The last time I was in this spot in the morning, I spoke from Hebrews 11:1-3; I'm sure you all remember that, talking about, "What in the world is this thing called 'faith'?" Well, we want to continue that discussion. I will read for you beginning with verse 4 of Hebrews 11: By faith Abel offered to God a more acceptable sacrifice than Cain, through which he was commended as righteous, God commending him by accepting his gifts.
And through his faith, though he died, he still speaks. By faith, Enoch was taken up so that he should not see death, and he was not found, because God had taken him. Now before he was taken he was commended as having pleased God. 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. By faith Noah, being warned by God concerning events as yet unseen, in reverent fear constructed an ark for the saving of his household.
By this he condemned the world and became an heir of the righteousness that comes by faith. (ESV) Look at the first phrase there of verse 6, "And without faith it is impossible to please him." Central to active living Christianity is faith, a life of faith. But what is that life of faith about? Perhaps it would be helpful for us to begin with a little bit of cultural analysis. Philosophers for generations have given themselves to predicting again and again the death of religion, the demise of faith.
If you watch television or listen to the news or read the newspaper or news magazines, you are told again and again that faith is dying, that religion is on the way out, that there are more and more functional atheists in Western culture. That thought is marked by best-selling books, The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins; God is Not Great, what a horrible title, by Christopher Hitchens. But there's a man who has given his life to research these things, Rodney Stark. And he has recently published a book called What Americans Really Believe.
And Stark reports a Gallup Poll done way back in 1947 that asked the question about belief in God. And only 4% of the people polled said that they were atheists. That means 96% of those people retain some kind of belief in God. Baylor University did a poll in 2007, and that percentage of atheists had bloomed all the way to 4% - the exact percentage some 60 years before. That means that 96% of the people around us retain some kind of belief in the divine, some kind of belief in God. Now you ought to be asking, "Where are those people?"
You would think, if that were true, that buildings like this would be the most used and the most populated buildings in the culture. You would think that many of the societal problems that we have would not exist. And so, these kinds of cultural realities drive us to ask the question, "Okay, what does it actually mean to believe in God?" Notice what it says here, "Without faith it is impossible to please him, (next phrase) for whoever would draw near to God must believe that he exists." What does it mean to believe in the existence of God?
Is it enough to believe in that general, nebulous thing called 'God'? Well, this is where it's very encouraging and very helpful that Scripture interprets Scripture. And so I would like you to take your Bibles again and turn with me to Acts 17; that's page 926 in your Bibles. This passage, historical passage that we're going to look at, wonderfully unpacks what it actually means to believe in the existence of God. Verse 22, Paul is in Athens; he's waiting to make a connection with others on a missionary journey.
Paul in the Areopagus
"So Paul, standing in the midst of the Areopagus, said: 'Men of Athens, I perceive that in every way you are very religious. For as I passed along and observed the objects of your worship, I found also an altar with this inscription, 'To the unknown God.' What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you. The God who made the world and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in temples made by man, nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives all mankind life and breath and everything.
And he made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place, that they should seek God, and perhaps feel their way toward him and find him. Yet is actually not far from each one of us, for "'In him we live and move and have our being'; as even some of your poets have said, "'For we are indeed his offspring.' Being then God's offspring, we ought not to think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of man.
The times of ignorance God overlooked, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent, because he has fixed a day on which he will judge the world in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed; and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead." (Acts 17:22-31, ESV) Paul was not at all content with the general, nebulous religiosity, god orientation, if you would, of the people of the culture of Athens. This culture was very much like our culture, populated by people who had some kind of general belief in God.
Paul says, "No, no, no! This God has revealed Himself; and in order to actually believe in God, there are three essential things about God that you must believe in." Now I want you to get the model here. These three doctrines of God, because they are doctrines of God, also define your identity; and when you get that, you begin to understand the nature of the content of true faith. Look at verse 24, "The God who made the world and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in temples made by man."
Verse 26, "And he made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth." You must first, in order to be exercising true Biblical faith, believe in God as Creator. You could argue that the most foundational doctrine of all is the doctrine of creation. Perhaps the most, four most important words in all of Scripture are the first four words of the Bible, "In the beginning God;" because if God created the world, everything in life immediately changes. Because if God created this world, by the very nature of that act, this world is His.
This world belongs to Him. This world is His possession for His using. You and I live in a perseveringly, comprehensively, Godward world. This is my Father's world. There's nothing that exists, wherever it exists, whenever it exists, that does not belong to God. Every aspect, every dimension, every situation, every location is the result of His creative glory, belongs to Him! But that's not even enough to say. You must say, "If God is the Creator, then I am His creature." That means you were born belonging to another.
Your life has never belonged to you. Your mentality, your emotionality, your personality, your gifts do not belong to you. All of those were created by Another; they are His possession for His using. Listen: bad, terrible, sad things happen when we begin to take life as our own. Husbands and wives, your marriage won't work if you think that marriage belongs to you because you'll take that marriage, and you'll do in it what you think will bring you the happiness that is your will. You have two people doing that, you have a marriage you don't want to be in.
Parents, those children don't belong to you. They're not your little indentured servants for your particular happiness. They belong to the Lord. They were never your possession. They will never be your possession. You are agents of the Creator. Your job doesn't belong to you. It wasn't just given so you can attain the kind of lifestyle that has always been your dream. Come on, you know that lifestyle - you have a house in mind; you have a car in mind; you have vacations in mind; you have a wardrobe in mind.
Everything Belongs to the Lord
Your employment belongs to the Lord for His purpose. Everything in your life belongs to Him; and when you take those things as belonging to you, when you forget the Creator and you forget that you're a creature, life becomes dark and sad and broken. I am, and everything I am, is the possession of the One who created it for His will, for His glory, for His purpose. Human life is fundamentally Godward. Brothers and sisters, hear me say that when you lose sight of that, you don't just lose your spirituality, you lose your humanity.
That's why inhumane things happen in Western culture, because we lose the protection of our identity when we forget that God is Creator, and we take life as our own, and we do inhumane things to one another as a result. We use people; we hurt people; we neglect people; we're unmerciful to people, because we think it's all about us. But Paul doesn't stop there. Let me read again: The God who made the world and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in temples made by man. (Verse 24)
(Verse 26) And he made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place, that they should seek God, and perhaps feel their way toward him and find him. Yet he is actually not far from each one of us. Not only must you believe in God as Creator, you must believe in Him as Sovereign. Your world is a world, not run by fate or chance, it's not like a clock that was wound up and is ticking its way as designed.
The world is ruled personally and specifically by God. Now, this passage gets very specific. It says that God determines the exact place where you will live and the exact length of your days. God is not somehow just generally sovereign over the general events of this general world. No, He is intimately, personally ruling the very details of your life. Your job is not to write your story; your story is being written by another. Think about this: we like to think that we're in charge of our lives. We like to think that we have more control than we actually have.
Imagine what it would take to rule all the circumstances and all the events, all the locations and all the situations, to get all of us in this room just this one time this morning. My mind is melting right now. I mean, think of the endless stream of details that were ruled over to get you to this place just this one day. Now think about the life of every human being who has ever lived, wherever they have lived that's under the rulership of the Lord Almighty. To Him be the glory! Wow! My life is ruled by the Lord, and the goal of life is not to devise a plan for your life.
The goal of your life is not to try to craft sovereignty over your situations and relationships and locations. The goal of life is to live obediently and to rest in the sovereign will of the Lord of lords and King of kings and to know with deep rest in your heart, His will will be done. That's why true Biblical faith is the only solution to fear, because true Biblical faith is the only place where rest can ever be found. It's found in the careful, wise, holy, gracious, loving, wise sovereignty of the Lord of lords and King of kings.
But Paul continues. There's a third thing that defines God and defines me. God is Creator; that means I'm his creature. God is Sovereign; that means I'm not! And God is Savior. Paul's discussion of the nature of God leads to a call to repentance and leads to a discussion of the resurrection because the Lord is not only Creator; the Lord is not only Sovereign; the Lord is the Redeemer. And the minute those words 'Redeemer' come out of your mouth, you have to immediately confess the fact that you are a person in need of redemption.
There is a grand pervasive human dilemma; it's sin! I would like to think and you would like to think that you say the things you do and you act the way you do because of the people that are around you. An angry husband will point to his wife; a bitter wife will point to her husband; rebellious children will point to their parents; angry neighbors will point to their neighbors; dissatisfied workers will point to their boss; people irritated in traffic will point to the car in front of them. Now what the Bible says is that my greatest problem exists inside of me, not outside of me.
My Personal Judas Called Sin
And there's never a day in my life where I'm not betrayed by my own personal Judas that I carry around inside of me called 'sin.' Everyone in this room is a person in need of personal, practical, daily redemption. You need forgiveness. You need deliverance. And you cannot talk about God as Redeemer without acknowledging, "We are not okay!" We need the grace of His forgiveness. We need the power of His deliverance because inside of us is something we can't independently solve, we can't independently lick; we need rescue!
Now all of that comes together, you will know, in these little moments of life where faith or faithlessness demonstrates itself. This week, I lost a very important file. I would like to say that it was a moment of deep faith for me. But I didn't like the fact that, first of all, I was confronted by the fact that life doesn't belong to me. If life belonged to me, no file in my life would ever be lost. Everything in my life would be at ready reach because that makes me happy. But life doesn't belong to me.
The loss of the file confronted my lack of sovereignty. It's humbling to confess how little in life you actually have control of. I can't even control the existence of one file; that's pretty humbling. And the loss of that exposed my sin because I was immediately filled with self-oriented, "I'm in the center of my universe" anger. I don't particularly care if anybody else loses a file, but I must not lose a file for I am 'me.' Now that leads us to what is said next in Hebrews 11. Turn back to Hebrews 11, in case you've forgotten, that's page 1007 in your church Bibles.
You see, what we're confronted with immediately is that intellectual faith is not enough. Notice what he says, "For whoever would draw near to God must believe that he exists (verse 6) and that he rewards those who seek him." Seek is an active term, and so faith must never be an intellectual thing; it must never be just academic or mental. I want to say this very strongly: we must sturdily reject any system that sees theology as an end in itself. We must reject any system that sees Biblical literacy as an end in itself.
The study of Scripture and the study of theology must always be a means to an end. True Biblical faith is not something you just do with your mind; it must engage your mind, of course, but true Biblical faith is lived. What is faith? Here it is: it's a radical new way of living propelled by a deep, consistent, and persevering belief in the existence of God and the reliability of His promises. I believe that God exists, and so I live in a new way because I live in light of His Creatorship; I live in light of His Sovereignty; I live acknowledging His redemption - and that changes my living in every dimension of my life.
I don't seek my will in my marriage; I seek Him in my marriage. I seek Him at my university. I seek Him in my job. My life becomes a 'seeking Him' paradigm. Now to help us understand what that looks like, the writer of Hebrews gives us three wonderful illustrations: Abel, Enoch, and Noah. Abel connects, for us, the relationship between faith and worship. When I begin to acknowledge the glory of God's creatorship, the glory of His sovereignty, the glory of redemption in Christ Jesus, the natural response of my heart is worship.
And not only do I want to worship Him, but I want to worship Him in a way that's acceptable to Him. And I begin to realize that worship is not just something I do one day a week; that my life is actually meant to be a hymn of worship; worship becomes what I do. And I long somehow, someway, that the way I live would offer, by the content of that living, the kind of worship that is actually due this God of glory that I've rooted my life in. You can't have true Biblical faith without a life that is propelled by worship.
Then there is Enoch, a man who was commendable to God because he lived God's way, a righteous life. And so Enoch connects, for us, the relationship between faith and obedience. Because if I am living now embracing God as Creator, God as Sovereign, God as Savior, I no longer want to set my agenda; I no longer want to make my law for the purposes of my kingdom; I'm now praying, "Your kingdom come, your will be done right here, right now, on earth as it is in heaven," and I give myself to a practical life of personal obedience.
Zeal for Obedience
My question is not just what will make me happy in this moment; my question is how may I approach this moment in obedience that will please my Lord? True Biblical faith always results in zeal for obedience. And then there's Noah. You know this man well, called to build a huge boat on the basis of what God said was going to happen. In case you don't remember, that construction project took 120 years. And he remained faithful even though he was mocked and derided by the surrounding culture. Noah connects for us faith and endurance.
You see, your life will never have endurance if your life is running on the tracks of your fickle impermanent desires where you wake up every morning, and you test your emotions, and you go wherever your emotions and desires lead you; that never leads to endurance. Some of us lead a sad chronicle of quitting, again and again and again, of making promises that we soon break, of deciding to do things that three days later bore us. But listen, when your life is rooted in an acknowledgment of His creation and your attachment to Him as Creator, when your life rests on His sovereign will, when your life embraces that call to repentance and that rest in His forgiveness--then your life will have continuance and perseverance because your life is now no longer dictated by fickle desire or by reading the tea leaves of circumstances; your life is rooted in the existence of a God who does not change, and there's constancy, and reliability, and perseverance to the way that you live because your life is now anchored by the existence of God, by the nature of who He is and by His call to you.
I will say this to you for sure. A faithful husband is a faithful husband not first because he loves his wife, but first because he loves his God. A faithful worker is a faithful worker not because he has a great boss, but because he has a glorious God. A faithful neighbor is a faithful neighbor, not just because he has the sense to live near nice neighbors, because he gets his fulfillment not from his neighbors, but from his Lord. Now here's what Biblical faith is. It's a life that's shaped, rooted, and controlled by a deep belief in God as Creator and me as His creation; God as Sovereign and me living, resting in His control; God as Savior and me as a sinner that results in a functional life of worship, obedience, and endurance.
Now, what that means is although we live in what is still a religious culture with people who would say that they believe in God, what is being exercised out there and maybe even in here is not true Biblical faith. It is religiosity. It is some form of spirituality. It is some kind of God-awareness, but it doesn't result in a life of worship, and a life of obedience, and a life of endurance because it doesn't have the specificity of saying, "God is Creator, God is Sovereign, and God is Savior, and my life is rooted in Him."
Now, I have to say this. You won't get that faith in the classroom. I love the classroom; I was a seminary professor for twenty years. You won't get that faith just by a sermon. I love to preach; it's the high privilege and honor of my life. Please hear me say this, "You will only ever get this faith at the foot of the cross of Jesus Christ because deep inside of each of us, brothers and sisters, is the inescapable DNA of faithlessness." And even though some of you have walked with God for many years, there are moments where you still default to faithlessness.
Perhaps there are some of you who are here this morning, and you would say, "Paul, I don't think I've ever exercised this kind of faith." I understand why--because but by the grace of God, I would share your heart; because faith requires rescue. "For by grace you are saved through faith; it is not the result of what you have done; it is the gift of God, which means that no one can boast." If you've never exercised this faith, I would say, "Reach out to the one who holds that gift in His hands and say to Him, 'I long to live this sturdy enduring life of faith, and I have found I can't; please help me.'"
If you're a believer and you know that your life is really a picture of fickle faith, that bouncing back and forth between faith and faithfulness, you too reach out this morning to the One who suffered and died and rose again so that your faith would be sturdy. And say to Him, "Oh, Father, I have a problem. I want to be a person of faith, but so often my responses are faithless. Oh, please this morning, rescue me one more time by Your grace." He is Creator; He is Sovereign; He is Savior! He has the power to answer that prayer.
Let's pray: Lord, how humbled we are when we consider the nature of true Biblical faith, and how much we are moved to cry out to You. Oh, Lord, gift us, we would pray by Your grace, that our lives may be hymns of worship, that our joy would be to obey You, and that no matter what is going on around us, we would endure. Hear us we pray Oh, Creator; Oh, Sovereign; Oh, Savior. In Jesus's name, Amen.
