HYMNS FROM "OUR OWN HYMN BOOK" 649, 653, 650. Amen. God bade Abraham journey, and he moved his camp at once. (1). He hated the very mention of religion. The things that we have, that we value, are ours today by faith. Spurgeon's Bible Commentary Hebrews 11:1-20 This is the Arc de Triomphe erected to the memory of the heroes of faith, whose names are here recorded by the apostle's inspired pen, with a brief mention of some of their most memorable actions. If you will stand firm in Christ Jesus, even in your weakness you will be made strong. God-fearing example at home is the most fruitful of religious agencies. If there is anything in religion at all, it demands a present surrender to its claims and a present obedience to its laws; but if you judge it to be a lie, say so, and we shall know where you are. God said to him, "Make an ark"; and we read in answer thereto that he prepared an ark. said the father, "he would not love you if you were not a good boy." You see, whether you grow rich or whether you grow poor, you will have these opportunities to return. Therefore, in your heart of hearts you feel that you cannot go back. But do not distress yourself, wait till some one else comes up. We desire something better. III. How long a wolf-beloved habit lingers at the door after the heart has given it a bill of divorce! The call as given by the book of inspiration ought to have over your minds a masterly power, and if your hearts were right before God the word spoken in the Scriptures by the Holy Ghost would be at once obeyed. Brethren, as believers in the Lord Jesus, we are called to two things, namely, to do and to suffer for his name's sake. Our life is quite long enough for the trial of faith. Faith is that handful of corn, the fruit whereof shall shake like Lebanon. It was blotted out when he nailed the handwriting of ordinances to his cross. Cry out to God for him. They may not be well apparently while they are going on, but they will end well at last. I may as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb, and so I will have my fling, and go into sin even as I please." I would hope there are none such here, but that those of you who have been so blessed, as to have been begotten and brought forth by pious men and women may take this into consideration--that to perish with a mother's prayers is to perish fearfully; for if a mother's prayers do not bring us to Christ, they are like drops of oil dropped into the flames of hell that will make them burn more fiercely upon the soul for ever and ever. Not now do I see, standing in the middle, a man and his wife and children, all unarmed. You dare not move in opposition to your brethren and sisters in the circle in which you move; and therefore you involve yourselves in difficulties. And there is something very solemn in the utterance of our text: "Without faith it is impossible to please God." In seeking the Lord, let us exercise our best thoughts. "Wife?" Here we are in midsummer again, and yet Felix has not found his convenient season. So then, my hearers, we must have true faith, because the old key of works is so broken by us all, that we never shall enter Paradise by it. Even if a man lives to be eighty, and has sixty years of that life spent in the exercise of faith, it is only by almighty grace that he holds out. Doubtless he was the frequent subject of sarcastic remark. He had a considerable property in flocks and herds, and probably had the ancestral dwelling house in which to reside. Such Christians as I have referred to, who are not called in early life to endure this trial, frequently have to bear its counterpart at another stage in their journey. that he would bring her now, though seventy years of age, to love the Saviour! He knew that none could save him but God; but as God bade him prepare an ark, an ark he prepared, and thus he was saved and his house. "Rahab perished not with them that believed not, when she had received the spies with peace." Ah! He did not choose another sort of wood, nor alter the shape of the vessel, nor make more stories, nor more windows, nor more doors; but he distrusted his own judgment, and leaned not to his own understanding. Not now do they gather in the great amphitheater, where sits the emperor in state, with all the proud citizens of Rome in the nearer gallery, tier on tier, and the multitude up yonder, gazing with their cruel eyes into the vast arena below. Our temptations are pretty equally distributed, I dare say, after all, and all of us might say, that we find in our avocations, from hour to hour, many opportunities to return. One thing it implies very obviously is that you thoroughly admire their example and fervently emulate their spirit. He that knows the care of a household knows how easily a parent can do serious mischief with his children by his very efforts to do them good. That which believers in past ages have accepted as truth, is not believed in many places nowadays; and so it comes to pass that one brings to us a bit of sceptical science which he has picked up from Huxley or Tyndall; another comes with a criticism that he has found in some of the modern divines, who are the devil's instruments for spreading infidelity; and a third appears with a vile blasphemy from one of the coarser assailants of religion, and each one demands an immediate answer to his quibble, or his difficulty. If that be said in truth, it is well, my brother; you bid fair to be in all things a partaker with faithful Abraham: you also shall find much blessing in the separated life. When fear is grafted upon faith, it brings forth good fruit, as in this case. We've been working through the different letters and report cards for the seven churches of Revelation and we saw that for the last two, Thyatira and Sardis, Jesus had some hard hitting warnings. It is a very perilous spot, that beginning of life, when the youth first leaves the home of piety, and finds himself where the fear of God is not in the place. Obedience which is not cheerfully rendered is not the obedience of the heart, and consequently is of little worth before God. Says one young man, in writing to me this week, "I have been praying for my fellow-clerk in the office; I have desired that he might be brought to the Saviour, but at present there is no answer to my prayers." Be assured that only by faith out of this weakness canst thou be made strong. Only that is true faith which believes everything that is revealed by the Holy Spirit, whether it be joyous or distressing. I don't want any of your thoughts." We are strangers and sojourners, as all our fathers were; dwellers in this wilderness, passing through it to reach the Canaan which is to be the land of our perpetual inheritance. Strength to do right at the head of a household must come by divine gift; and that gift will only be placed in the open hand of faith. How foolish to go on adding, sin to sin, increasing the hardness of the heart, increasing the distance between the soul and Christ, and all the while fondly dreaming of some enchanted hour in which it will be more easy to yield to the divine call, and part with sin. Where Jesus died, there you shall live. In the first place, this woman's faith was SAVING FAITH. Perhaps they were living at home before, but now they have to take a room where they can have no quiet, but where sounds of blasphemy greet them, or, in some cases, where they have to go to the workhouse, and be far away from all Christian intercourse or anything that could comfort them. "Nay, my Lord," they would reply, "do not put me off with these biding presents; feed me not upon these husks. And methinks that by what he has prepared for them he esteems them and loves them; esteeming them by what he means them to be rather than by what they appear to be. You must have a paramount faith in God, or else the will of God will not be a paramount rule to you. Faith is to say, that "mountains, when in darkness hidden, are as real as in day." If they had been, they would not have required faith in God; but being men of like passions with ourselves, they needed to trust in the Lord, and they did so. You feel that you have little to show for your faith. Still, he never does discountenance them, and he proves that he is not ashamed of them, for he calls himself their God. And lo on the morrow the troops are out, and what do they do? The will of the Lord is to be done by his servants, whether on earth or in heaven. you will care, one day, when the earth is reeling, and the world is tossing to and fro; ye will care when God shall summon you to judgment, and when he shall condemn the faithless and the unbelieving. Shall I only bear testimony to points on which I may agree with other people, and hold my tongue about the rest. may the day never come to you, you young people especially, who have lately put on the Lord Jesus Christ and professed his name, when you shall be welcomed by the world; but may you for ever forget also your own kindred and your father's house, so shall the king greatly desire your beauty, for he is your Lord, and worship you him. Men do not prepare an ark to escape from a flood unless they believe that there will be a flood. Might not a hundred difficulties and doubts be suggested to lead me to question whether God had spoken to me at all? I do think this triumph of faith over sin is not the least here recorded, but that if there be any superiority ascribable to any one of faith's exploits, this is, in some sense, the greatest of all. His cry unto the Lord is, "By thy command I stay or go. Thy sin was laid on him. Yon noble-hearted youth who, yesterday, sprang into the river, at the hazard of himself, and snatched a drowning man from death, he felt, when he stood upon the shore, what a great thing it was to save life. The obedience of a slave ranks very little higher than the obedience of a well-trained horse or dog, for it is tuned to the crack of the whip. And remember, you can only know how great a thing faith is by knowing the infinite value of the salvation of a soul. More than that, there were messages exchanged, servants were sometimes sent, and you know there was a new relation entered into--did not Rebekah come from thence? The man who waits until he shall find it more easy to bear the yoke of obedience, is like the woodman who found his faggot too heavy for his idle shoulder, and, placing, it upon the ground, gathered more wood and added to the bundle, then tried it, but finding it still an unpleasant load, repeated the experiment of heaping on more, in the vain hope that by-and-by it might be of a shape more suitable for his shoulder. It may be that certain of you are called to suffer in your minds, not because of any wrong thing in yourselves, but for the sake of others. Now, what shall be said to those who are not strangers and foreigners? It is here that your strength lies. ( Hebrews 11:1) A definition of faith. He prepared an ark. And, without doubt, her salvation was not merely of a temporal nature, not merely a deliverance of her body from the sword, but redemption of her soul from hell. A strange mystery is the simple act of faith. "They desire a better country." And, after death, what cometh? It may be now or never with you. That she was really saved in a gospel sense as well as temporally, seems to me to be proved from her reception of the spies which was an emblem of the entrance of the word into her heart, and her hanging out of the scarlet thread was an evidence of faith, not unaptly picturing faith in the blood of Jesus the Redeemer. Dare them. I. Faith is the father of holiness, and he has not the parent who loves not the child. IV. Lay hold on him, touch the hem of his garment, and ye shall be healed. Collection administered by Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. Faith is to look through that cloud, not with the eye of sight, which seeth naught, but with the eye of faith, which seeth every thing, and to say, "I trust him when I can not trace him; I tread the sea as firmly as I would the rock; I walk as securely in the tempest as in the sunshine, and lay myself to rest upon the surging billows of the ocean as contentedly as upon my bed." This is our inn, not our home. The last thing Noah earned by his faith was this, he became heir of the righteousness which is by faith; for God said of him, when he bade him come into the ark, "Thee have I seen righteous before me in this generation." This grey father of the age went on with his preaching, went on with his intercession, and, without a doubt, waited for God in his own time to justify his servant before the eyes of men. So when Christ and the world go together, you cannot tell which you are following; but, when there is a separation, and Christ goes one way, and your interest and your pleasure seem to go the other way, if you can part with the world and keep with Christ, then you are one of his. Such calls come again and again to many, but they turn a deaf ear to them; they are hearers only, and not doers of the word: and, worse still, some are of the same generation as that which Zechariah spake of when he said, "They pulled away the shoulder, and stopped their ears that they should not hear." Noah had not a careless fear, as some here have. For thou hast a sacred right to the courts of mercy. Oh! "But how?" Other sins die hard, but this is shot through the head by true repentance and faith in Jesus. Download Christ Superior To Angels Moses And Aaron A Comment On The Epistle To The Hebrews full books in PDF, epub, and Kindle. My sister, my brother, have faith in God in your hidden sorrow! Men are seldom equally skilled in the use of the two hands of doing and bearing. Obedience is the rehearsal of eternal bliss. I have broken the key of my drawers, and there are some things I must get directly." Such a sublime life recompensed a thousandfold all the sacrifice he was led to make. Might it not, even if it were divine, be suggested to me for many reasons that I was mistaken, that it was most unlikely that God should speak to a man at all, and more unlikely still that he should speak to me? When people slander and persecute you no longer, be afraid. Whatever may be the precepts of the law, or of the gospel, they are pure and holy altogether. As you have glanced over the scroll of history, or narrowly scanned the records of men's lives, the pomp of Pharaoh has not dazzled you, but the purity of Joseph has charmed you; the choice of Moses was to your taste, though it did involve leaving a court where he was flattered, for fellowship with enslaved kinsmen by whom he was suspected; and, you would rather have been with Daniel in the lions' den than with Darius on the throne of empire. A man runs a great risk When he steers himself. The Meaning of Faith 11 Now faith is the assurance[ a] of things hoped for, the conviction[ b] of things not seen. So far as I have reason to fear that my task is hopeless it becomes a heavy one. This is real faith. Then I understood why I must feel like one forsaken. Though you may think it a very ordinary thing to obey God in all things, you will find that a man had need to set his face like a flint in order to keep the right road; and the only way in which he will be able to hold on his way will be by having faith in God. Men have confessed their sins, and have not been saved. Our journey is towards the celestial city, and when the sons of earth cry to us, "What do ye buy?" Believe for yourself, because God has said it; and speak as the Lord guides you. Nothing short of this is the obedience of the inner man the obedience which the Lord desires. When God began with many of us, he found us very low down beneath the flood of evil. He even offered up his son Isaac. Whether I stand on Tabor's summit, or am hidden in the vale of Baca, the covenant standeth fast, and everlasting love abideth." The apostle Paul undertook to raise the structure, and he erected a most magnificent pillar in the chapter before us. By this shall you know whether you are Christ's or not. Oh, have you not often strong inducements, if it were not for the grace of God, to become as they are? Providence is God's business, obedience is ours. Grace has given it. Let us think of heaven, of Christ, of all the blessings of the covenant, and let us thus keep our desires wide awake. But the most of you believe the Bible to be inspired by the Spirit of God, and to be the voice of God. God does not create useless things. "Turn ye, turn ye; why will ye die, O house of Israel?" Let's read the text ( Hebrews 11:1-3 ): Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. It is well they are. Yet in order to salvation, brethren, we must be separated from this untoward generation. Now, it is always foolish in us to be led by man, for then "the blind lead the blind, and both fall into the ditch;" but for the blind to be led by God is one of the best and wisest things. Abraham was prepared for instant obedience to any command from God; his journey was appointed, and he went. Now would you have thought that such a rich plant would grow in such poor soil--that strong faith could grow in such a sinful heart as that of Rahab? You will soon become a speckled bird among them. Oh, fly to him. ", May God grant to us grace to be Daniels, even if the lions' den should threaten us. Therefore assent must go with faith: that is to say, what we know we must also agree unto, as being most certainly the verity of God. Our business, though suddenly blighted when flourishing in one place, has been, when removed amidst sad misgivings and dark uncertainties, even more flourishing in another; or if not, if trials have multiplied and poverty has succeeded wealth, yet grace has increased, and as our afflictions abounded, our consolations have much more abounded. Perhaps it is a doctrinal change; they have imbibed the orthodox faith from the pure fountain of revelation itself, unalloyed by the traditions and qualifications of men; they have cast away all the heterodox glossary of man, and have determined to believe nothing but the sovereign grace of God. Do not give a penny for that man's piety which will not spread itself. You will never be able to cut down this huge upas tree except with the axe of Christ's atoning sacrifice. I wish we all had such a fear. Oh! Promptness is one of the brightest excellencies in faith's actings. Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. More than that, if ever the child of God gets entangled, for a while he is uneasy in it. III. Has the world ever satisfied you? If thou dost trust in thy works, then thy works are anti-christ, and Christ and anti-christ can never go together. So, then, you cannot go back, because you cannot accomplish the end for which you went forward till you die. A city is a place of social joy. These opportunities to return are meant to try your faith, and they are sent to you to prove that you are a volunteer soldier. And one reason seems to me to be because he does not judge them by what they are, but by what he has prepared for them. He that has faith has renounced his own righteousness. [ d] Read full chapter Footnotes Dark is my path; I cannot see my Lord; I cannot enjoy his presence; sometimes I am like one that is banished from him; but I desire his blessing, I desire his presence; and, though to desire may be but a little thing, let me say a good desire is more than nature ever grew: grace has given it. "Yea," says faith, "I did encounter this abomination of iniquity; I delivered this woman from the loathsome chambers of vice, the wily snares of enchantment, and the fearful penalty of transgression; yea, I brought her off saved and rescued, gave her purity of heart, and renewed in her the beauty of holiness; and now her name shall be recorded in the roll of my triumphs as a woman full of sin, yet saved by faith.". It is not so. Although he may not reach the heights of ambition, nor stand upon the giddy crags of presumption, yet he shall know superior joys. Hence faith is the essential point of holiness. I pause for your reply. Many are called to suffer much in daily life. The king will send his armies against that wicked city and destroy it, and if you are citizens of it you will lose all you have--you will lose your souls, you will lose yourselves. That is the inquiry of most people, and within proper bounds it is not a wrong question. A sense of great obligation, an apprehension of the fitness of obedience, and spiritual renewal of heart, work an obedience which becomes essential to the sanctified soul. This shall be our last removal, to dwell for ever with him we love, to dwell in the bosom of God. It is better to have the faith that obeys than the faith which moves mountains. This woman's faith was A SYMPATHISING FAITH. What grand life ever was easy? Shall I help you to answer that question? Do you long to be of some use? We have to close with two or three words about what was THE RESULT OF ABRAHAM'S ACTION. And is not that word true, I would make one more application of my text, which is capable of being used in a thousand directions. We are not our own, we are bought with a price. At times he has to feel that it were better for him to fight with beasts at Ephesus than to bear the taunts, and threats, and slanders of ungodly kinsfolk. It seems in the text that God looks to what he has prepared for these poor people--"he hath prepared for them a city." Hebrews 11:7 . As gold is to the inferior metals, such is our trust in God to all our other trusts. You may be diligent in secret prayer, and, perhaps, the devil may have seemed asleep till you began to pray, and when you were most fervent, then will he also become most rampant. Trust his wounded side to smite through the heart of your evil desires. Christians must swim against the stream. 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