Wednesday, November 5, 2008

Hebrews 11

IDEA: God works with originals and not with copies.

PURPOSE: To help listeners see that while all these people in Hebrews 11 are examples of faith, they are not examples of how God might work in our lives.

It bothered me at camp when Alex said to me, "Do you think that if you and I believe hard enough, we can get the river to part so we can get to the other side?"

As ridiculous as that seems, we sometimes think that God will do for us exactly what he did for the people in the Bible in very different circumstances.

I. The outcomes of faith in the people of Hebrews 11 were not all the same.

All of them lived their lives in different situations with different needs, and God met those different needs in different ways.

Even in a general sense they didn't all have the same kinds of outcomes.

Sometimes these people of faith had immediate positive outcomes: Enoch, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Rahab, Gideon, Barak, Samuel, David sometimes, etc.

Some had delayed outcomes: Abraham, Jacob, David sometimes, etc.

Still others had very negative outcomes: Abel, Moses sometimes, Samson, Jephthah, David sometimes, many of the prophets and people in the intertestamental period.

II. God makes originals and not copies.

While we can see God at work in the lives of the people of faith, and we can rejoice, we cannot expect that God will do exactly the same thing in us.

George Mueller has often been copied with very bad results.