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Tuesday, December 11, 2018

What is Faith {Hebrews 10-11}



Tuesday, December 11, 2018



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 I personally did not grow up moving from home to home or city to city.  I grew up in one house and moved out when I went to college.  However, my mother did not grow up with the same comforts.  She moved around a lot and struggled going on vacations and living out of a suitcase.  She longed for “home”. 

Abraham came to be known as the Hebrew.  Hebrew means “stranger” or “alien”, and from the perspective of the people who lived in the land of Canaan, Abraham and Sarah, were somewhat the misfits.  They didn’t really belong.  They were strangers.

But this couple understood that everything that this world had to offer was temporary at its best.  Their ultimate citizenship wasn’t here on earth.  They were living for an eternal home and that was what made them willing to live as strangers, as aliens, to not fit into this world and this world system because they had an eternal home for which they were headed.

If we really pay attention to Abraham’s life, it’s a lot like our own.  We have a series of surrenders over the course of our lives.  We surrender because we believe in God.  We believe in His promises.  Each time we come to a point of surrender, we build an altar.  We acknowledge God for who He is, we believe in His promises, and we know that to receive His promises we have to surrender what is keeping us from moving forward.  We leave it there for God to consume.  

I don’t know about you, but the transition into having adult children has not been easy.  At times, they still want and behave like young children.  At other times, I want them to still be young and ‘under my control’.  The advice I give them is from years of experience.  I share my failures and what made me successful in hopes that they will have less failures.  But over and over I hear God telling me to leave them with Him.  It just doesn’t make sense to give up all I have hoped for.  But I have seen it – God has blessed me more than once when I’ve truly surrendered, and left things on the altar, He opens another door.  I know I have to recognize that all those other altars of sacrifice and surrender and faith, each one of those were preparing me for these moments.  And as each child graduated from high school, I had to face the same altar – each time I surrender, I confirm that God is worthy of my trust and He is preparing me to trust Him with bigger surrenders that may occur further down the road.

“Altars speak of sacrifice, of devotion, of surrender of being consumed.  They speak of life that is wholly given up to the One for whom the altar is built.”  Nancy Demoss Wolgemuth

I used to go to our chapel during my lunch hours and pray.  I would visually lay down on the altar in the front of the chapel what I was struggling with letting go of.  It was comforting to know that God would take it in His hands and use it for His glory.

So when you think about it, faith is really the biography of God through my life.  A.W. Tozer says, “Faith is less about what you say you believe and more about how you behave on a consistent basis despite your circumstances.”

So don’t be surprised if God asks you to give up secure surroundings in order to carry out His will.  And as I heard on a program last week, “we need to stamp eternity on our eyeballs.”

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