Faith at the Beginning and the End

Now faith is the reality of what is hoped for, the proof of what is not seen. For by this, our ancestors were approved. By faith, we understand that the universe was created by the word of God so that what is seen was made from things that are not visible. By faith, Abel offered to God a better sacrifice than Cain did. By faith, he was approved as a righteous man because God approved his gifts. And even though he is dead, he still speaks through his faith. By faith, Enoch was taken away and so he did not experience death. He was not to be found because God took him away. For before he was taken away, he was approved as one who pleased God. Now without faith, it is impossible to please God since the one who draws near to him must believe that he exists and he rewards those who seek him. By faith, Noah, after he was warned about what was not yet seen and motivated by godly fear, built an ark to deliver his family. By faith, he condemned the world and became an heir of the righteousness that comes by faith. — Hebrews 11:1-7

This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.

We are in a series. This is week five of a sermon series called "Facing Death by Faith." We started off in the book of Deuteronomy with the death of Moses for two weeks. We're going to be in Hebrews 11 for the next several weeks. The goal of this series is simply this: I've been told it's the job of every pastor to help his congregation know how to die well. And unless the Lord returns, this is something every one of us will face. It's really important, therefore, that we are people who know how to talk about death, how to think biblically about death, who are not people who live in denial about death. And that's why we're engaging in this.

I know this is hard material. Some of you are like, "Why did I choose to visit this church this Sunday?" Sorry. You can be done in about forty minutes. You'll be fine. So you don't have to come back.

But I want to acknowledge too that this is not a theoretical topic for most of us. Most of us have lost someone. And so as I've done in other weeks, I'm going to simply light a candle as a way of remembering. There's nothing magical or special about this, but it just acknowledges that this is not theoretical. And for you this morning, you may be thinking of someone, and I want to just honor that.

Here's my theme for today: Living in the now in light of the unseen.

The Heroes of Faith

This passage has often been called the "Heroes of Faith" or the "Hall of Fame of Faith." The chapter deals with living by faith and also dying by faith. We're going to look this morning at Abel, at Enoch, at Noah, and how faith prepares us not only to live, but to die with eternity in view.

Now I want to start here. Dying is not just an event. It's not just an event that happens on one day. Happy February, you're dying all the time. It's called aging.

Aging as Death

Let's talk about aging. Aging is a story about our parts. Let's think about your teeth first. The hardest substance in the human body is the enamel on your teeth. With age, though, it begins to wear away and allows the softer and the darker tissue underneath to be exposed and show through. While that's going on, the blood supply to your gums begins to decrease, and the roots of the teeth atrophy, and the flow of saliva diminishes. The gums become inflamed. They pull away from the teeth and expose the base.

It's said that a good dentist can look at a tooth and can tell within five years how old you are. Scrupulous dental care can obviously slow that, but it can't prevent that. One of the things that happens over time is that as we age, our dental care is compounded and made more difficult by arthritis or trembling, small strokes that make it hard to brush or floss. People then develop gum problems. In the course of your lifetime, your jaw begins to lose its strength—about 40% over the course of your lifetime. The bones become more porous and weak, so people begin to prefer softer foods, which are usually higher in calories, and that makes things worse as well.

But even as our teeth get softer, other parts of us get harder. Blood vessels, joints, muscles and valves of the heart, even our lungs pick up deposits of calcium and become rigid. It's like as we're aging, your skeleton is bleeding calcium into the rest of your body. To maintain the volume of blood flow, your heart has to work harder to get the blood to your extremities. And so by age 65, almost everybody has some form of hypertension.

And as the heart muscle thickens, muscle everywhere thins. So by age 40, one begins to lose muscle mass and power. By age 80, you've lost about a quarter and a half of your muscle weight. And diet can make a difference in that, exercise can make a difference in that, but you begin losing. Your lung capacity decreases. Your bowels slow down. Your glands stop functioning. Even your brain shrinks. At age 20, your brain can barely be contained in your cranium, but in your seventies, it has shrunk almost a centimeter. And so in a head injury, your brain sort of rattles around when you're older. That's why it's so dangerous.

Now, I know that this is happy news for you this morning, alright? Aging. You're dying now. Congratulations. Happy February. Welcome to CTK. I know you're like, "Wow." But let me point out what else is going on that's not physiological. Fear. Fear increases. How many of us are afraid of growing older? That is a really, really common thought. And what are the things we fear? We fear loss of activity, we fear loss of dignity, loss of autonomy, loss of control, and of course, that's not even mentioning people we love and activities we love. Do you identify with these? Am I by myself up here this morning? Okay. Thank you.

What Do We Do With Our Fear?

What do we do with our fear? Hebrews speaks to this. Hebrews is really helpful. I want to point us back to Hebrews 11 because it tells us something about dying well. Now, you may think that's a funny way to look at this, because a lot of people memorize the first verse of chapter 11 that tells them how to live well, right?

Faith is the reality of what's hoped for, the proof of things not seen.

It's about what we're alive about. But faith for living is also faith for dying, and we need this. And faith and fear are not either or. It's not like you're a human light switch, where you have one switch which is the fear side, and one switch which is the faith side. Faith is not an on off switch that cancels out fear. It doesn't cancel out or nullify it, unfortunately. God and his word never shames humans for being afraid. Over and over, the exhortation in the Bible, "do not fear," is not a rebuke, it's an invitation. It's such a sweet part of your Bible. I want to encourage you to go back and if you just looked up all the places we're told not to fear, there are 365 of those. There's one for every day of the year.

Death is an enemy. Scripture tells us that very clearly. So what do we do with our fear? Even in this passage that's all about faith, there's no shade, no shaming for people who are afraid. Hebrews 11 doesn't show us people who weren't afraid. It shows us people who lived with fear, but died in faith and lived by faith. Faith is not an emotional anesthetic. It's a different way of seeing reality. So faith and fear can go together. They can coexist, but faith gets the final word.

We're going to look at faith under two headings this morning. Faith is and faith does. What faith is and then what faith does, how it functions in our lives.

What Faith Is

Faith doesn't, in Hebrews 11, begin with an action, it begins with a definition. Before faith does anything, here's what it is. A couple categories. It's reasoned. It's not irrational. It's personal. It's not abstract, and it's foundational. It's not supplemental.

Faith, this is my big definition, is a reasoned personal trust that becomes a foundation for this life into the next life. Reasoned personal trust.

Now reasoned. Let's talk about that. Reasoned, not irrational. Verses one through three.

Faith is the reality of what's hoped for. It's the proof of what is not seen.

That's the opposite of how people talk about faith in our culture. People think of faith as check your brains at the door. A leap of faith. It's irrational. It's a wish. It's hope against evidence. But biblical faith is not wishful thinking, and it's not irrational. It's reasoned. It's thought through. It's examined. It's weighed. It's wrestled with. It's an intellectual exercise. It's not just that, but it is that.

You think the evidence, for example, for the resurrection of Jesus is abundant and overwhelming, and it's laid out in the way you can look at the Gospel of John, where a third of the whole book is about Jesus' suffering, death, and resurrection on purpose, so you can reason your way through it. That's true.

Now a reasoned faith is reasonable because it makes sense, and it's the only thing that makes sense of what you can't see. It makes sense of what is unseen. It's not subrational. It's reasoning about it.

If there are things that are not explained by the material sciences, by naturalism or philosophy, those things are understood because Christianity makes sense of them. It explains them. It sheds light on them. Everyone lives by faith. The question is not, do you live by faith or not? Everybody lives by faith in something. The most ardent materialist believes the material world explains everything. The most ardent secularist believes that death is an end. Christianity makes sense of what is unseen. And this matters for life and death, doesn't it? This matters so much for life and death. Because reality is not limited to what we observe. If the visible world came from an invisible God, then death doesn't get to define reality. Dying by faith means my death will not make my life meaningless, because meaning was never rooted in just what can be seen. So faith is reasoned. Faith is also personal, it's not abstract.

Now we're looking at several of these people who are mentioned here, Abel, Enoch, Noah, in the first pages of your bible in Genesis. They are not philosophers. They were real people. They were real people who lived on this planet and had real lives and real encounters with the real God. The story of Cain and Abel, one of the first ones in your Bible. Both brothers offer a sacrifice to God. Abel's was a sacrificial sacrifice. Cain's was a leftover's sacrifice. God approved of Abel's sacrifice because it was made in faith. And Cain turns and is angry about this and kills his brother. It's a horrible ending of a young life.

The next story about Enoch is a bizarre story. It's a man who lived by faith and it says he walked with God and then he was taken away, he was no more because God had taken him. He doesn't see death. God kind of zaps him to heaven. I'm not sure what that looked like. But this is what's fascinating to me. Two radically different deaths, same faith. What's the point? Faith is not validated or nullified by how you die. And I really want you to hear this. One is not better than the other. The author of Hebrews isn't like, Abel was murdered, that was not so good, but Enoch, he was the real guy. No. He said this teaches us that faith doesn't make guarantees that we'd like. And this is a hard word for you this morning. Faith doesn't guarantee a peaceful death, meaningful explanation, even a sense of closure. And I've got to be really honest with you as your pastor about that. Faith rather is evidence and guarantee of a vital relationship with God. Enoch walked with God. That's what he had, and that was sufficient for him. That's what he needed. To die by faith is dying knowing and being known by God. It's being known by God.

Faith as Foundation

It leads me to this. This is why I say faith is foundational. It's not supplemental. It's not icing or gravy. It's absolutely foundational. Go to verse one. Faith is the reality of what's hoped for. The word there for reality is substance. The message by Eugene Peterson's paraphrase of this passage says this. I like how he says this:

The fundamental fact of existence is that this trust in God, this faith, is the firm foundation that makes everything in life worth living for.

It's a foundation. Let me change some metaphors. Think about the windshield on your car. The windshield on your car is really, really helpful on rainy days and in the summertime with the bugs. But if you're driving and you focus on the grime on your windshield or the dead bugs, instead of on the road, if you're not looking through your windshield at the road, but instead at the grime—maybe it's just my car—or the bugs. Right? The dead bugs, you will crash. Because the purpose of the windshield is you look through it, you don't look at it. That is how faith functions. Faith functions because we don't look at faith, we look at the object of faith. We look down the road. Faith looks beyond what's right in front of you. This is why your faith is not the big idea. It's whom you are looking at. Who is the object of your faith?

So it's not about the strength of your believing. It's not about the lack of fear in your life. It's not about this. It's about the strength of the object. It's about Jesus himself, which is why we can say faith is a reasoned personal trust that becomes a foundation for this life into the next one. It's absolutely solid for the life to come. And just like the person who's staring at the bugs who will crash, a life that doesn't look through to Christ crashes.

Faith is—and I want to invite you to this. This is a gift of God. And if you're like, I'm not sure I'm a person who has faith. I've heard about this. I know people of faith. I'm just not that kind of a person. You can ask God for this. And God gives faith to people that you may believe on him and have a life that doesn't crash into eternity. You may ask that of him.

If that's what faith is, what does faith do? That's maybe a strange thing to say. What does faith do?

Faith does. Faith acts. Faith accomplishes something. It does something for us. It changes something. We're gonna see three things here.

First: Faith Turns Death Into a Testimony

This is how faith works in Abel's life. Abel gave the sacrifice and was killed for it.

Though he died, he still speaks. — Hebrews 11:4

Did you notice that language? Though he died, he still speaks. Abel's faith outlives his breathing. His death looked like a defeat. He was killed, was murdered by his brother. But God calls it witness. God calls it witness. Isn't that remarkable?

Here's the Christian paradox. The world says your life is valuable by what you achieve. It's valuable by how much you earn. It's valuable because of what you did, the mark you left on this world. It's valuable because of what you built. This is what faith says: You are what you trust. You are what you trust, and that speaks even after you're gone.

So here's my question for you to work out this week. What story will your life tell? What story will your life tell about God?

I've been given homework out every week. I know you're loving having homework from church. This is week three of homework. On the way out, you're going to get a resource guide, and you're also going to get a homework assignment. And this one says, write your funeral. Yay. Why would I make you write your funeral message? Well, not only to save your family some time later on, but I want you to think about what story you want your life to tell about faith. What story do you want? You have some sway in what this looks like going forward. What story do I want my life to tell the world about who God is? About what really matters in this life?

See, faith turns death into witness.

Second: Faith Turns Death Into a Door

Faith also turns death into a door, not a cliff. To transition, not termination.

Faith doesn't eliminate fear. It doesn't even ease dying, not automatically. We don't all get like Enoch's fate. I mean, how many of us want it like—bam—zapped up to heaven? That would be really nice.

He was no more, he was taken away. — Hebrews 11:5

But look, this is what it says about faith.

Without faith it's impossible to please God. — Hebrews 11:6

Faith isn't one virtue among lots of virtues. It is the operating system of the soul. It's the operating system of the soul.

Look at the two beliefs that are named here: that God exists. Yet to have faith, you have to believe that God exists, that God rewards those who seek him out. That reward is not like a tangible reward. It's God himself is your reward.

Faith transforms death because it deals with our fears. It deals with our fears about going through that door. We fear death because we fear God's goodness. What if at the end I lose my health? What if at the end I lose my dignity? What if at the end I lose my autonomy? What if I lose my control? How can a good God let that happen?

Faith answers this. God is real. God is good even in dying. God is good and worth losing everything for, and you can hold on to him. He's gonna show his goodness even in your dying. Because death is not a cliff. It's a door. It's a transition. It's not an end. It's what makes dying by faith possible.

Third: Faith Builds an Unseen Future

And finally, faith builds an unseen future. We read this about Noah, the guy with the ark. He builds for an unseen future. He constructed an ark.

This is what faith does. Faith invests in a future that you're not going to be a part of. You're thinking generationally. You're thinking like we talked about last week—blessing others. Faith imagines a future good for others without you in it. It looks beyond this earthly existence, even for others.

By contrast, the poet Dylan Thomas—a very famous poem, and you probably had to read this for your high school English class, or maybe you're in high school English and you're having to read this right now. Dylan Thomas said famously:

Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Now, what is Thomas saying there? If this life is all there is, I've got to fight for every inch I get. I better fight for this life. Get stirred up. Get angry. This is all I've got. Fight for the future.

But dying by faith means you live now in light of the fact that eternity doesn't start when you die. You're already there. It's already part of your reality that I am an eternal being. I'm gonna live forever with the Lord. Your death is testimony. Transition. You build on the unseen future.

To die by faith doesn't mean you won't be afraid, and I hate to tell you this—it doesn't mean you're going to understand everything. It doesn't mean you'll feel brave at the end. It means I can trust God. I can trust a faithful God. I can trust him. He's enough now. He will be enough then. I can trust him.

The English poet John Donne—let me put a picture up of him. I think we have a picture. Nice looking guy, right?

He was a pastor and a poet, and he thought about death a lot. He wrote a lot of sonnets about death. Most famous is his poem, "Death Be Not Proud." I know I'm throwing a lot of poetry at you this morning. You can hang with it. So "Death Be Not Proud"—here's the bottom line: Hey, death, you get to say right now, don't you start, don't you be puffed up. You're going to die. You are on death row in Christ. You will soon be gone. Most famous poem by him. But he wrote a lot of other ones, and he also has this fascinating take on how fear and faith work together in death, in dying. This is sonnet 19, and I'm going to put up a text. James helped me with this—an AI version of the sonnet because you probably can't get John Donne's language on a slide. So let's put this up here. This is what he says from sonnet 19:

To torment me, opposites exist together in the same person. My inconsistency has against all nature become the one consistent thing about me. Even when I don't want to, I keep changing my commitments and my devotion. My repentance is just as moody and changeable as my sinful desires were, and just as quickly forgotten. I'm a confusing mess.

He didn't say it that way, but cold and hot, praying and silent, feeling everything, then feeling nothing. Anybody identify with John? Good guy. He's a good pastor. He knows what's going on. He says:

Yesterday, I couldn't even bring myself to look toward heaven. Today, I'm showering God with prayers and flattering words. Tomorrow, I'll be shaking with genuine terror at his judgment. My fits of devotion come and go like strange recurring fever, except this difference: with a fever, your best days are when you're not shaking. For me, my best days are the ones when I'm trembling with fear.

That's a weird idea. He's pivoting off his fear to faith. He's using his fear to get him to faith. So let me illustrate this with just one last thing. In the great state of North Carolina, here's how we climb mountains. We do not do as in some other places in the world. We don't do this. Nobody walks straight up a mountain. You've all been to plenty of state parks. You know how this goes.

You go up a mountain like this. You're going along, going up this way a little bit, and then you do the switchback. And then the switchback again, and you're going along. It's tedious, right? You kind of go, "Oh, switchback again. Here we go." And this is what you do up a mountain in North Carolina. Is this not what we do in Kackalacky, my friends? You zigzag up the mountain. And you're turning every time—not quite a 180 degrees. It's like 160 or something like that. You're turning—not quite back the way you came, just a little angle. Just enough to get you to start going up a little further. Because it's a lot easier to go up a little bit at a time than it is to go straight up a mountain.

Can you do that with your fears? We are people who are riddled with fear, and we're afraid of dying. And there's something that you can do in moments—this is what John Donne's saying—where you can turn, and you're feeling the fear rise within you, and you turn, and you can continue walking with the Lord up, and you pivot off that fear. You turn off of it. It's not the enemy. Fear is not the enemy. Death is an enemy. But fear, you can use that. You can use that to drive you back toward Jesus. You see that? That's what Donne's saying. Keep going up the zigzag. Keep doing the switchback. I know it feels tedious. It will get you home.

In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

We're going to respond to God in worship in just a minute, but let me lead us in prayer. Father, we are fearful people, and we have much to be afraid of. And not just dying, but aging rattles us. Father, we thank you that you never rebuke your people for their fear, but you always invite us to bring our fears to you and to use them to drive us back to more faith. Lord, we offer ourselves to you this morning. Lord, for some here this morning, they need the gift of faith. They've never trusted in you. Give that to them this morning. For others, we are facing hardship right now—diagnoses, losses, incremental losses that are very painful. Help us to find you on that road. We thank you for these things in Jesus' name. Amen.