God is Not Ashamed To Be Called Their God

So, in preparing to preach this Sunday, I found myself wrestling with whether or not I should step away from 1 Timothy for a week to talk about thankfulness. And if you've been here for a while, you know that this is often a trouble that I have. I actually don't like special sermons. They're probably the hardest sermons for me to preach. And you might think, oh, well, a topical sermon is, you can just say anything you want, and that's the difficulty. What are you supposed to say? When you could say anything you want, it's actually nice to know what I'm preaching about next week because I can read the text and see what's coming next and say, here we go, that's what we're going to be studying. It's like a meal plan at home. You look on the thing and it says, Tuesday we're having chicken nuggets. And you say, I like chicken nuggets. And I get to have them on Tuesday. That's how it is for me with preaching. I like to know what's coming. And so when I come to topics where I go, okay, well I'm supposed to talk about this, it's very difficult to me. I know it might seem strange.

But I always feel quite a bit of tension within myself about these sorts of things. And part of the reason is that on the one hand, there's an opportunity, right? Thanksgiving is coming. We're all kind of thinking about giving thanks and being with family and those sorts of things. And so there's an opportunity for us as Christians to set aside some time to say, okay, well, what about thankfulness? What's the Bible have to say about that? How should we think about it? How should we behave? There's an opportunity. On the other hand, A sermon on thankfulness runs a very high risk of being trite or pro forma. What are you supposed to preach about the Sunday before Thanksgiving? Well, thankfulness. So how do I preach a sermon that doesn't just have you going from the beginning to the end? Yeah, I should be more thankful. I'll try harder.

You know, that's not helpful. If that's what comes out of the sermon, then what have we done? What have we accomplished? I don't want to do that. And that's sort of the tension that I feel, is I don't want it to just be this, well, it's just what you do. I want it to be vital. I want it to matter. I want our hearts to be engaged by it. And so I often struggle with, do I take the opportunity or do I not? And so I wrestled with it for a while, and I decided that I didn't want to miss a real opportunity, and so that I would...

do my best and try to address the issue of thankfulness this morning. And so if you had to assess this issue in yourself, am I thankful the way I ought to be, the way I think I should be, that sort of assessment, I suspect that most of us would say we're quite deficient, not thankful as we should be. Lots of room to grow. And I'm afraid that our solution has amounted to, well, I know I should be more thankful, and I'll try to be, at least for a while. I'll put on a smile. I'll be nice. And that's what it means for me to put effort into being thankful. And yet, inevitably, within a few days or maybe weeks, you're going to be right back where you started, except that you'll be more convinced that growing in thankfulness isn't worth the effort. And this is sort of the cycle that we go on if we think thankfulness is just something we're supposed to do, something we're supposed to be. In other words, we grow more hardened each year against growing in this area if we're not careful. We have to be on guard against it.

I grant that it's not easy to grow in thankfulness. And it's also a topic or an issue that almost no one around you will hold against you if you replace true thankfulness with snarkiness. Everyone will go along and joke with your discontentment and your bitterness and your grumbling and complaining. No one's going to say, aren't you thankful for anything? They'll say, yeah, yeah, it is hard and miserable. And yet the fact remains that Christians ought to be thankful people. So where does thankfulness come from? That's sort of the question before us this morning. And I think our unspoken understanding of thankfulness is that it's the result of abundance. It's the result of having enough. And that that's why we're not thankful as we ought to be is because we don't have what we need or what we want. And that we would be thankful when we have what we want or what we need. But it doesn't work that way, at least not in a lasting way. I grant that it's true. When you get something you want, something you need, there is a season or a time of thankfulness, a time of joy. You say yes, and you have gratitude in you.

But that's not the kind of thankfulness we're talking about. That sort of thankfulness comes naturally, and it also has a shelf life, and it's a pretty short one. And then it's gone. But that's not Christian thankfulness. Because that sort of thankfulness comes and goes, and it's a natural response to what goes on around you. It makes the person, it makes you and me, passive in the whole thing. Well, I'm thankful if good things happen, and I'm perfectly okay to not be thankful when I don't get the good things. And so instead of thankfulness being the result of abundance, Abundance tends to produce entitlement and greed. Those are the lasting things that stick around with abundance. Thankfulness for a short time, and then once that cloud has blown on down, what's left isn't, yeah, that is mine, and I do deserve that, and that is for me, and I want some more of it. That's what ends up being left, and that's what I want to try to address this morning, is that sort of entitlement, that sort of greed. Where does that come from, and how do we replace that with Christian thankfulness?

It's also worth noting, you might think, well, I object to your thing about abundance. I actually don't have the things I need. I actually don't have the things that I want. I actually do have real needs. And I'll grant that you have real needs. I have real needs too. And yet, the poorest one among us does have everything they need. We have more than enough. And so when we think of abundance, we shouldn't think in terms of, I need more than I have now. We ought to look at our current circumstances and say, This is abundance. I have what I need. And you might say, well, but other people have more. And I say, I grant that other people have more. But their life is not yours to live. Your life is yours to live. And if you pursue thankfulness in terms of looking around and thinking, I'll be thankful when I have what they have, you'll never find thankfulness. You'll never find it. And so we have to stand from the very beginning as a testimony or witness against ourselves.

disciplining our own hearts and desires, saying, I do have what I need. Do I want other things? Sure, certainly. But I do have what I need right now. And if we don't start there, then thankfulness just becomes, I know I should be more thankful and I'm going to try harder to be more thankful. But it's a fool's errand because we won't actually grow in thankfulness. unless we're thankful for what we already have. Thankfulness is not something that's available to us in the future when something changes. It's something that we can be and ought to be right now as Christian people. And so if abundance is not what leads to thankfulness, material possessions having enough of the things we want, it would be helpful for us to know what does produce real thankfulness, real Christian thankfulness. And my hope this morning is that by the end of our time, we'll have a better understanding of thankfulness.

and a better game plan than we did when we arrived this morning about how to cultivate it in our own hearts and lives. Our text this morning is Hebrews chapter 11, verses 13 through 16. Would you please stand for the reading of God's word? This is the word of the Lord, and it is eternally true. It says, All these died in faith without receiving the promises, but having seen them, and having welcomed them from a distance, and having confessed that they were strangers and exiles on the earth. This is the word of the Lord. You may be seated now. Now this may seem like a strange text to you. The word thankfulness or gratitude, it doesn't even show up in there. It talks about death and being a stranger in an exile. It talks about heaven, sort of. It talks about God not being ashamed. And you think, what's this have to do with thankfulness? Well, what I want to do is I want to take a part of this scripture that I think, for those of you who read it, it's in the middle of a chapter that's all about life.

It's called the Hall of Faith or the Chapter of Faith. And so Hebrews 11 just goes through all of these men and women and all the things that they did by faith. And this text is sort of an interjection in the middle of that. Previously, in the preceding 12 verses, they've already talked about Abel, Enoch, Noah, Abraham, and Sarah. And if you were to continue on after these verses, it picks back up with Abraham and then it goes on down. and down through more and more people. And at the end of it, he says, I would run out of time if I talked to you about all the people who've lived by faith, all the people who've gone before, and all the things they've endured by faith. They just go on and on. Well, the purpose of this passage, of this chapter of Scripture, is meant to stir us up. It's meant to be an encouragement to us. It's meant to strengthen us. Because often you feel alone. You feel like, well, no one else has been through what I've been through, and it's very difficult. It's very hard for me. And the temptation, if we're honest about it, is you feel like God's abandoned you. You feel like he doesn't care to provide for you.

He doesn't care to look after you, but is happy to just see you consumed in whatever it is that you're involved in. And so this chapter of Scripture is meant to come to us and say, no, that's not the case. There will be suffering, there will be hardships, there will be discontinuity between your life and the life to come, but that won't last forever. And so I want to talk about Noah a little bit, just preceding this in verse 7. It says, And I want to talk about Noah a little bit. And we're going to come to thankfulness toward the end. But I want you to consider Noah for a little while. I want you, always when we read Scripture, I want you to think of putting yourself in there. If I was in that situation, if I was that person, if that happened to me, what would I have thought?

What would I have done? What would I have wanted? What would I have been afraid of? What would it have meant for me to trust God? When we read scripture, we're not just reading a fictional story about something that never happened. We're reading about real men and real women with real souls who really worked out their faith in the Lord. Same thing that you and I have to do. And so when we read about Noah, we have to say, what was it like to be Noah? We know a couple of things about Noah's, the environment Noah lived in. We know that it was a very miserable time to live or an exceedingly wicked time to live. Just before God tells Noah to build an ark, it says that he looked out on the heart of man and he'd seen that their desires were only evil continually and that God was sorry that he had made them. Now could you imagine living in a time when God said, I'm sorry that I've made creation because of what it's come to.

That would be awful, wouldn't it? I mean, this is not your best life now. This is not one glory on top of another. This is a tough time to live. Exceeding wickedness, out in the open, not hidden. And you live in the midst of it. This is Noah. And then the Lord comes to him and warns him. Says, I'm going to destroy the earth, but you're going to build an ark. And you and your household are going to be saved by it. What would you have thought? If you were tasked with that kind of work, what would the realities have been in your heart? To have the Lord God tell you, I'm going to destroy this place and everything in it, except for you and your family. That would be terrible, terrible news. Terrible news. It would also be wonderful news. Terrible because you realize the impending judgment, the far-reaching destruction that's coming. It would have been an awful thing to hear.

Everything you know, everything you're familiar with, all of these people, save your children and their spouses. They're going to be destroyed. It's all going to be gone. Everything that you have except them is going to be gone. It's going to be destroyed. That would have been awful news to get. And yet there would have been a silver lining, if you will, where you're told you're not going to be a part of that destruction. So there would have been this tension, this angst, this difficulty inside of Noah, knowing that there's this destruction coming and that he's going to be saved from it, but he has work to do.

And the work he has to do is to build the ark. I've never been to the replica down near Cincinnati. How many of you guys have been there? Any of you? You've been there. Is it big, Levi? I've heard it's massive. Could you imagine building that? How long do you think it would take to build something like that? Days, weeks, months, or years? If your life depended on it, you might work pretty hard, huh? Yeah, that's right. If I had to, my life depended on it. Well, if you read in scripture, And it doesn't say, and it took Noah this long to build. But you can gather from Scripture that it took somewhere between 50 to 70 years to build. A long, long time. Is there anyone here who's 70 years old? Marian, you're over 70. So it could have been built in Marian's lifetime, but none of the rest of us. So you work for 70 years with the knowledge that destruction is coming.

And every board you nail on brings it that much closer. What in the world would it have been like to be Noah? To get up every day and to nail together the world's condemnation. To fasten together the destruction of all creation. This is his work for 50 to 70 years before it comes. How do you think Noah saw the world around him during that time? What would you think if you were in his shoes and you had been tasked with this work, knowing that this judgment was coming? You'd been warned. What would you have thought of the world? It would have been quite different than what we think of the world now, from our situation. And so Noah is one of the people that our passage describes as having died in faith, not receiving the promises. So Noah spent his life, 500 years when he was commissioned to build the ark.

500 years when his first child was born, and 600 years old when the floods came. So you presume his kids were old enough to have grown up and gotten married because they had wives. And so, eh, 70 years. And then the ark was built, and then the flood came, and the destruction was unleashed. And Noah is described as having died in faith without receiving the promise. And in one sense, you could say Noah did receive the promise. of deliverance, of salvation, of mercy, of God's kindness, because he was in the ark. And so in that sense, he received a type of the promise. But this passage tells us he didn't receive the promise. He did everything he did. He lived his whole life without receiving what was promised to him. And so we learn that the ark was just a foreshadowing, a preview of the promise that was still coming. Another way of saying it is Noah...

pursued something that he wanted his whole life and he did not get it. So do you have things in your life that you don't have that you want? How is your thankfulness tied to that? Consider Noah. He lived his whole life never receiving what he wanted, never receiving the promise. And so you have to think for a minute, was Noah a thankful type of man? Would you have been a thankful type of person if you had been in Noah's shoes? And you might think, well, No, he didn't get what he wanted. And I say, well, are you sure he wasn't thankful? Wouldn't you be thankful for being on the inside instead of the outside of the ark? I'd be thankful. I'd be thankful that my wife and children were with me. So what did Noah have to do? Well, he had to build an ark. He had to let go of everything he had in this world and take hold of the promise that was to come. That's what he had to do. That's what he did.

And so our passage tells us that those who say such things, those who do such things, make it clear that they're seeking a country of his own. And so Noah, receiving this knowledge that this whole world is going to be destroyed, he says at some point, somewhere in him, he says, that's okay. This place isn't my home. It's okay if this place gets destroyed. I can't prevent it anyway. But it's okay if it gets destroyed. Because this isn't my house. This isn't where I belong. This is not where I'm going to spend eternity. And so Noah went without the comforts of the world. And the scripture teaches us that this is proof of his faith. He knew this wasn't his home. And here's the important part. He didn't want it to be. He didn't want to have all of his expectations and all of his joys and all of his good things now. He was willing to wait for them, even until death.

This next verse here where it says, And if they had been thinking of that country to which they went out, they would have had opportunity to return. This is a reference to Abraham. We didn't talk about Abraham. But you remember that Abraham was called out by God. He was in Haran, and the Lord said to him, Come out to a land that I'll show you. It doesn't say where it is. It doesn't say what it will be like. It says, I'll multiply you. I'll make you great. Come on out. So Abraham packs up his wife and all of his belongings, and away they go. And then it says that he and his sons, Isaac and Jacob, it says they all lived in tents.

Now what does it mean that they all lived in tents except that they didn't have a home? They were travelers for generations. Never did they get to sit down and have a place to call their own. Always on the move, always with difficulty, always with hardship. And this passage says if they had wanted to go home, they could have. If they had wanted to go back, they would have had opportunity to do so. Do you remember when the Israelites left Egypt? And they got out into the wilderness. And they got hungry. What did they say? Send us back. We want to go back to Egypt. They wanted to go back. But Abraham here is given to us as an example of those who didn't want to go back. Who were willing to go out into the wilderness. Who were willing to endure the hardship to take hold of the promises that were to be theirs in time. And so what's true of Abraham is true of us as well. If we want...

to return to our former way of life and the comforts that we have now or that we have before we were Christians, or if we're still in the struggle of saying, I want both. I want the promises and I want the good things now. We will not be thankful people. We can't be thankful people because we're living in the tension and we're not committed to where our home is. I remember having a conversation with a friend one time, I don't know, a few years ago, and we were talking about death. And he said, he said something to the effect of, well, do you want to die? And I said, well, what kind of question is that? No, I don't, in the sense that I don't want to leave my wife and I don't want to leave my kids and I don't want to be away from the people and the things that I love here. But there is a sense in which I agree with what Paul says in Philippians, which is to live is Christ and to die is gain. And as for me, I don't know which to choose. I don't know which I would prefer. Because wrapped up in that question is,

and receiving the promises and having your joy made complete. And I don't know which I prefer. That's what Paul says. And there are times in my life where I say, I don't know which I prefer. And that's not to say I don't love my wife or children, I don't love you, or that I don't care to be here. But it is to say that we ought to all, as Christians, have a desire in our hearts to be done with this struggle and this burden and this trial. That is life, this side of life. of death. We ought to want it to be over at some point. Now that sentiment, that idea, can only be true of a Christian. What happens to someone who's not a Christian when they die? Do they get promises? Do they get good things? No. They get the opposite of that. They get judgment and they get wrath. They truly have nothing to look forward to. And it follows that they should not want to die. Because the best that they'll ever have it is before death. But the best that a Christian will ever have it is after death.

And so there ought to be a continual growing desire in our hearts to leave this world behind, just like it would have been for Noah. Could you have built an ark if you loved this world? You couldn't have built an ark if you loved this world. He couldn't have done it. In building the ark, God said to him, in effect, there are promises for you that are better. And there's joy that surpasses whatever you have in this world. Build an ark and leave it behind. And Noah built an ark. So are you like Noah? Well, you might think, well, I'm not like Noah. And I say, well, was Noah a perfect man? No. The first thing Noah did when he got off the ark after the flood was he planted a vineyard. That's the first thing the scripture records for us. The second thing is that he got drunk. He was not a perfect man. Abram and Sarah, were they perfect? No, they sure weren't. Abraham tried to sell his wife off as his sister twice. All of these people who are given to us are given to us as sinners.

They all sinned in many ways, and this is the case with you and me as well. And yet all of these people were given to us as examples of people who sought a better country, a heavenly one, who didn't see this world and everything that it has to offer as what they desired most. They were willing to go without. And so then the section ends and says, therefore God's not ashamed to be called their God, for he's prepared a city for them. And so what this means to us is that we have a God who's holy and who's righteous and who's just, and we're sinful.

And yet he delights and looks forward to and has no shame in us being his children as we seek him and as we're thankful for the, we seek the promises that he's given to us to take hold of at some point in the future. Noah's failures and Noah's sins didn't prevent him from being loved of God. God wasn't ashamed of him because of it. And it is true that we ought to seek to repent of our sins and we ought to seek to turn away from them and to give God more glory. And yet it ought to be a comfort to us that if we want to be with God, if you find in your heart a desire to be with God, to dwell with him, it should comfort you to know that God's not ashamed of you. But he's prepared a place for you. And he'll welcome you to it in his time. I think Noah's a good example to us of thankfulness. Because one thing that I'm convinced was true of Noah is that Noah did not love this world, given the news that he had heard.

How could he love this world when he knew it was going to all be destroyed? And soon. And if he had to invest and give his life for something, it wasn't going to be this world. Because he understood what it was going to come to. That the flood was going to destroy it. And in our scripture lesson this morning in 2 Peter chapter 3, What did Peter say about the flood? He says, well, the first time God destroyed the world with the flood, but now he's restrained the water and all the wickedness and everything that's going on in the world is reserved for fire, for judgment. And so in a sense, you can say, we have the same knowledge that Noah does. We know that this world and all of the things in it are going to come to an end and we're not going to take them with us. And so we ought not to desire them the way we do. Thankfulness doesn't come from abundance. It doesn't come from you having things.

that this world has to offer. Thankfulness comes from seeking a better country and knowing that God will welcome you into it. And so as you think about being thankful, the only thing that's sure in your life, the only thing that you can trust won't change, won't go away, is God's faithfulness and his mercy and kindness to you. That's the only thing that won't change. The circumstances of your life, there's no promises about those. The circumstances of your finances, of your house, of your health, of your marriage, of your children, of our country, none of that's guaranteed. In fact, all of those things change. And if you put your hope in them, you love this world too much, and they won't satisfy you. You might be thinking, well, but can't I like those things? Can't I enjoy those things? Didn't God give us those things to enjoy? And I say, yes, but not to supplant. You're seeking after a better place, a better home. If you ever get something and you think, well, this one's nice, but I want the better one. Okay.

We'll do that. When you get something in this world that's nice, say, well, this is nice, but I want a better one, a heavenly one, and then pursue that. Those who are worldly and who love the things of this world will never have true thankfulness. They'll have the sort of thankfulness I described at the beginning that comes and then goes away, but never true thankfulness because they're on the roller coaster of saying, I've got to have, I've got to have, have what? Have what? Have security? Our confidence and our security and our stability and our protection is from the Lord. Nothing you can have in this world, nothing you can do in this world is going to give you the sort of security that only God can provide. And yet all of us are tempted to go looking for it in every other place. If I just had this job, if I just had this money, if I just had this health, if I just had this baby, if I just had this whatever, whatever it is, it will not make you happy. It will not give you true thankfulness. I want us to be thankful people.

It was a hard sermon for me to preach because this is not something I'm good at. Sometimes you look at scripture and you go, well, I can see that I've grown some in this area. This is not an area where Dave's real good. But I also know that it's not an area that many of you are very good either. And so we ought to commit together to seek a better country. And in pursuit of that better country, build a kingdom like Noah built an ark. He gave his life to it. He endured all of the hardships and all of the... mockery and all of the pain of knowing what was coming and all of the hope of knowing what was coming. And he's an example to us of a man who's got his eyes fixed on the right thing. And so when things don't go your way, when you don't get what you want, or you get what you want and then it gets taken away, I want you to remember that that's not where your joy comes from. That's not where a Christian's satisfaction or contentment is rooted. In this world, you'll have trouble. Things will come and things will go.

Sin will happen. It's a reality of this world in you and around you. But in the world to come, that's not the case. So let go of the world and all the things that it has to offer you. Don't put your hope in them. Put your hope in God. Trust God. Without qualification and without, well, I will if or I will when. No, now. Right now. You say, but it's hard. And I say, it's not going to get any easier. Don't believe that lie. That's like running on a treadmill. You never make any progress. Trust God now. When Jesus' disciples were worried about him leaving, they said, what are we going to do? What are we going to do? We don't want you to go. And he says, it's better for you that I go. Because if I go, I'll prepare a place for you. And then I'll come. I'll return and I'll receive you into my glory, into my presence. And the sweetest part of all of it is at the end, he says, if these things were not so, I would have told you. And so we can trust that those things are so, that those things are true, that God has gone.

and sent his son into this world to save us, and that he's gone back to his heaven to prepare a place for us, this better country, this heavenly one, that Noah was looking for. This is going to be the root of thankfulness in your life. This is where it will come from. It won't come from anywhere else. Your thankfulness will come from God's provision of his son for you. And you might think, well, that's really theoretical, and that doesn't really help me. And I think, well, ain't nothing else going to help you. You can spend the rest of your life trying to find something else you think will help better, but you will come up empty. The problem is not that it's not valuable to you. The problem is that it's not valuable to you. And so it ought to be valuable to you. The promises that these men lived and died for, they've received now. And those same promises are for you. And you'll receive them if you persevere in faith.

And so you ought to be thankful for those promises and behave now as though they're yours already in full. This is where thankfulness will come from. This is where joy will come from. This will allow you to see the good that God's doing in the midst of difficulty in your life. In this world, we'll have trouble. We'll have hardships. We'll have things not go as we'd like them to. But it will not always be that way. You say, what about my marriage? It's a mess. And I say, well, we can work at that. And we should. But are you thankful? You say, oh, I can't be. And I say, well, then you won't be. But you're missing out. And I don't want you to miss out. I want you to value the kindness of God in sending his son to this world to die for you. So that all of your sins could be washed away so that you could be on the inside of the ark instead of the outside. Thankfulness comes from being on the inside. All the things that you long for and lust after and worry about and everything, those are on the outside of the ark. You don't want to be found with those things.

When the time comes, that's a bad place to be. Let's pray.