ROOTED: Heroically in the Word of God-Part 1

Part 1

Takehome point: Live heroically by faith in God’s Word today because you have heaven forever.

(reading time: 3 minutes)

Someone recently asked me, “do you ever feel God? Do you ever just know he’s there?” How would you have answered this sincere and curious man?

Hebrews 11, the heroes of faith chapter in God’s Word, gives us the best way to answer this question. You can be a hero in the way these ancients were heroes. Your faith can be rooted heroically in the Word of God.

"Now, here’s what faith is...” The author to the Hebrews writes in 11:1, “Faith is the reality of the things hoped for. Proof of the things we do not see.” (My translation from working with the Greek).

But what is the reality?

The reality looks bleak! I’m dying, I’m sick, I’m immersed in workplace, family and political drama. So when you say, "put your faith in the reality", what are you saying? Here’s what God’s ancient people saw as the reality, with the eyes of faith...

Psalm 87, “God has founded his city on the holy mountain. The Lord loves the gates of Zion more than all the other dwellings of Jacob. Glorious things are said of you, city of God.”

They saw a reality so otherworldly in comparison to their tents and simple houses and grueling lives.

The author to the Hebrews goes on about the reality and the proof that we hope for and don’t see with our human eyes, but our God-given eyes of faith. “For in this, the older ones were well spoken of…”

You who are older, more experienced, so many of your grandchildren think of you in this way, despite your blunderings, for the same reason. Whether they believe it and see it yet or not, they see your faith rooted heroically in the Word of God.

They see you pausing to ponder the city of God. They hear you speak of hard lessons you’ve learned throughout your life, the times when you cried, “God have mercy on me, a sinner.” They admire and wonder when you don’t talk about it as if you’ve arrived or you’ve figured it all out, but that God forgave you and is teaching you a better way to do life with him as you venture towards your true, heavenly home. They see you pray to him who is not seen, but who is real. They feel welcomed by you to talk about anything at all, even the struggles they’re not sharing with their parents at this moment. “For in this, the older ones were well spoken of!”

Please don’t be skeptical of the younger generations as if they don’t want to learn from you! Maybe not all do, but some do. If you welcome them at your gate, you are open to them, you get into their world and their shoes, you will find they are starving for something real, something to put their faith in that is better than what we see all around us every day.

This reality that we hope for and this proof that we don’t see was here at one time.

The reality we hope for was here!

It was what Adam and Eve experienced every day until their sin blinded them to God. The author to the Hebrews writes, “By faith we understand that the world was put in order by the word of God. For what is now seen came not from what is visible.” God had a vision for his creation. A blueprint. Could one of us or even a group of us have come up with the plans he did? I mean who of us would have tilted the globe just so on its axis so that the sun would hit different parts of the globe more directly at different times of the year? So we’d get to experience the harvest of sweetcorn right now and the cooler days ahead. So we’d get to pick our cucumbers and make pickles. And pick our tomatoes and make them into salsa.

How can our inner being not cry out in worship with the sons of Korah in Psalm 33,

”By the word of Yahweh were the heavens made, and all their host by the breath of his mouth...For he spoke, and it came to be; he commanded, and it stood forth.”

God took this all a step further and recorded the life stories of real people, like Abraham and Sarah, to show us what it looks like to have our faith rooted heroically in the Word of God. Here's where you'll go in Part 2. Jump to Part 2 https://aaronschulz.blogspot.com/2019/09/rooted-heroically-in-word-of-god-part-2.html