Without Faith It Is Impossible To Please Him

So this morning's sermon is about living by faith. We're not in the middle of a book of the Bible right now, and so each week I'm thinking, well, what should I preach on, or what do we need as a congregation? And I do intend to get back into a book soon, probably next week. But as I was considering this week and thinking about our life, corporately as a church, I thought living by faith would be a good topic for us to spend some time studying. And I've chosen this topic because it's an easy thing to say. We need to live by faith. Have faith. Trust God. These are things that are common to us to say. And they're common in that we know that that's what we should do. But it's an exceedingly difficult thing to actually do. To live by faith.

can only be done if you've received this gift from God. It's not something we can muster in our own strength. It's not something that sits on our shelves that we just go and take off when we think, I need a little faith. I think I'll have some of that tonight. It's the sort of thing that we can only have if God gives it to us. And so first, we ought to be praying that God would give us the gift of faith. Because to say that we ought to live by faith is to cry out to a rock for water. And unless the Lord causes water to pour forth from that rock, the people go without. And yet he did cause a rock to bring forth water to care for his people. And so we ought to seek him, asking for faith. We believe help our unbelief ought to be our prayer as we pursue him and as we seek him. And so since this doesn't come naturally to us, living by faith,

It means we need to be taught how to do it or what the scripture says about it. And so this is our topic. This is what we're going to be paying attention to this morning. Our text is Hebrews chapter 11, verses 6 and 7. Would you please stand as we read the word of the Lord? This is the word of the Lord, and it is eternally true. And without faith, it is impossible to please him. For he who comes to God must believe that he is, and that he is a rewarder of those who seek him. Noah, being warned by God about things not yet seen, in reverence prepared an ark for the salvation of his household, by which he condemned the world and became an heir of the righteousness which is according to faith. This is the word of the Lord. You may be seated. Early on as a Christian, right as I was becoming a Christian, a faithful pastor told me, I want you to do something.

searching the Bible online, as it were. He said, I want you to go online and I want you to look up all of the verses in the New Testament that have the word faith in them. And I want you to write them down and I want you to memorize all of them. Now, I don't remember how many there were and I did not memorize all of them. Now, why did he give me that assignment? Well, I was brand new in my faith and I was going through a very hard time. as a new believer. As many of us have in our lives, you have seasons, especially if you're coming to faith, where you gain eyes to see, and all of a sudden you see your life completely differently than you had before. And instead of seeing things you want and things you deserve, you start seeing things you love instead of God, that have stood in the place of, things you've pursued, thinking that they could give you what only God could give you. And so this was a circumstance in my life.

There was idolatry in my life. And so this pastor says, what I want you to do is I want you to learn to trust God. I want you to be faithful. I want you to have faith. And so you should look up these verses and you should memorize them and you should meditate on them and you should ask God to show you what faith is. And my temptation at the time was to think, that sounds wonderful and I would really like to have that. But I want something else right now. I don't want what I had taken away from me. And yet it was the Lord's will for it to be taken away. And looking back on it, it was his kindness that took it away. But this verse, Hebrews 11, verse 6, was one of the verses, one of the few that rose to the top like cream does and has stuck with me. Without faith, it's impossible to please him, for he who comes to God must believe that he is and the rewarder of those who seek him. Now, I was just coming to faith.

having not grown up in the church, not knowing the gospel, not having the opportunity to learn to live as a hypocrite, which I think many of us who grow up in the church do face. We're supposed to do the right thing and say the right thing, and then there comes a time when you have to own who you are and what you believe. I grew up without that pressure, and I don't want you to think, oh, it was much better for you. It means I had... suitcases full of sin because no one had even told me what the right thing to do was. And so now all of a sudden I'm rummaging through my past going, oh, ugh, I needed faith. And so it became clear to me that living by faith was imperative, essential, the sort of thing you can't live without. There are things that we may be able in our Christian lives and in our walk to do without for a time.

or a season, or perhaps even our own lives, but faith is not one of them. You may be able to live without a gallbladder or a pancreas or something like that, but you cannot live without a heart. Faith is like your heart. You have to have it as a Christian. It's imperative. And here, this passage teaches us that without faith, it is impossible to please God. We cannot please him without it. If we were to use, to go back into an analogy of our body, it's like our lungs. You cannot breathe without lungs. You cannot please God without faith. That's the sort of intensity or importance that's being communicated here. And pleasing God as a Christian ought to be your chief desire right at the top of the list. Not like in the top three, I mean number one. Why? Because he saved us from our sins. And we're called to love.

as we have been loved. We love because he first loved us. And so at the top of our list, though we all sin in many ways, and sometimes very serious ways, very destructive ways, very damning ways, our desire as Christians ought to be to please not our God, but our Father. Those of you who've grown up with fathers, whether they were good or whether they were bad, understand the desire to please your father and the extents to which you would go to have him smile on you. And if this is true of our earthly fathers, how much more so ought it to be true of our heavenly father who's given his own son for our sake. Pleasing him is the beating heart of Christianity. If you don't have a desire to please God, you're not a Christian. You don't have spiritual life in you. It's that big of a deal.

We have examples in Scripture of some who please God and some who don't. In Matthew 25, in the parable of the talents, the master comes and he gives talents of varying quantities to different slaves. To one he gives five, and to another he gives two, and to another he gives one. And then he goes away. And they're left with this seed, this talent to multiply, to increase, to produce a profit. for their master. And the one who's given five talents doubles it, and he has ten. And the one who's given two talents doubles it, and he has four. The one who has one talent says, I'm not going to do this work. I'm going to bury it in the ground. And when the master comes back and takes an accounting of what they did, the one who has five comes and says, look, master, I've traded and I've produced this profit. And the one with two comes and he does the same thing. And what they receive

is the joy, the pleasure of their master. Their master says this to them. Well done. Well done, good and faithful slave. You were faithful with a few things. I will put you in charge of many things, which we could put a period at the end of. But then their master says this. Enter into the joy of your master. Welcome into my joy. You've pleased me. You've pleased me. Now the one who buried the talent, didn't receive the same benediction. Instead of a good word given to him, he received a curse. And far from entering into the joy of his master, he was cast out of his presence and all that he had was taken away from him. So what did the two who multiplied the talents have? They had faith. They sought to please their master. They loved him. Knowing that they were going to come before him someday and have to give an account, a reckoning for their actions.

they said, we want to please him. And they did. On the other hand, there are times when God's people don't please him. Paul recounts such a time in 1 Corinthians chapter 10. He's speaking of the Israelites having come out of the wilderness, or out of Egypt, and wandering in the wilderness. And you remember, they come out of the, there's this great, deliverance out of Egypt after all of these plagues and Egypt is decimated and their wealth is robbed from them. They're giving it to the Israelites and saying, go, go, go, get. And then Pharaoh says, no, no, no. Our whole nation's on their backs walking away in terms of wealth and our labor and everything. Go get them back. And he sends his armies and he goes after them. And they get to the Red Sea and the Israelites are scared and they're grumbling and complaining and they're worried and The Lord makes a way on dry ground through the sea, and then their enemies are all consumed, and they get to the other side, and they sing a song, and they praise God, and you think, man, how could it get better for these people? They've just plundered the wealth of the Egyptians. They've just been delivered from slavery, and they're going out to worship God and then enter into his promised land. How could they even be tempted to curse God, to be angry, to grumble, and to complain? They go to Sinai, and they worship, and they make a golden calf, so they're not doing well.

And then they go on their way and they come to the promised land and they send a scouting party into the land to scout it out and see what the place is like. And the scouting party comes back. And what is their report? Overwhelmingly, they'll kill us if we go in there. We can't go into there. Save two men. And what was the defining feature of those two men? They had faith. They went and saw all the same stuff that the rest of the scouting party did. They saw the strength and the might and the power of the nations. And where the rest of the scouting party said, we're going to walk into our death. These men said, we can go because the Lord will go with us. But then, because of their lack of faith, the Lord says, if you don't have faith to go into the promised land, guess what? You won't.

And they wandered in the wilderness for 40 years. And during that time, what happened to all the men who didn't have faith? God cut them down. They didn't enter his promised land. They were put to death, save the two who were faithful, Joshua and Caleb. And so when Paul recounts this history to us in 1 Corinthians, it says, nevertheless, with most of them, speaking of these Israelites who were wandering in the wilderness, nevertheless, with most of them, God was not well pleased. For they were laid low in the wilderness. Now, these things happened as an example for us so that we would not crave evil things as they also craved. And so who are these people who were laid low whom God wasn't pleased with? Well, just before this passage, it says that they were all baptized in Moses as they went through the Red Sea. The nation was baptized, was marked.

not just with circumcision, which was the customary sign of the covenant at that time, but a looking forward saying, here, baptism. They were baptized as they went through the Red Sea. They were marked as God's people. And then as they were in the wilderness, what did they eat and what did they drink? The scripture tells us they ate and drank spiritual food and drank spiritual drink. But in the end, in the final analysis, as R.C. Sproul would say, God was not well pleased with them because they didn't have faith. They didn't trust him. Instead, they grumbled and they complained, thinking that they knew better than God what they needed. And it was impossible under those circumstances for them to please God. And so living by faith first is absolutely essential to us. It's as essential to us as having life, having breath, having a beating heart. It's not something that we take on or put off at our pleasure.

It's also not passive. Living by faith does not mean let go and let God. It doesn't mean I prayed about it and I'm not going to worry about it now. Certainly, pray about it and don't worry. But it's not a passive thing. Because the rest of this verse, after it says without faith it's impossible to please him, it says, for he who comes to God, which we could translate in other words as he who has faith. He who comes to God, he who has faith must believe that he, the Lord, is. And also that he is a rewarder of those who seek them. Now coming to God or seeking God are active words. They're not the sort of things, you don't come to something or seek something while you're sitting around. You come to something, you seek something by moving, by doing, by acting.

And this means bringing our lives, every bit of it, into conformity with his word. How many things in our lives do we not have faith about because we don't, we just take for granted. This is how it'll be. This is how it'll go. This is what'll happen. I don't need faith. I mean, I just know how it'll be. And as you grow older, you start to realize how little control you actually have of your own life and its particularities and the details of it. Paul says in 1 Corinthians, he says, I planted and Apollos watered, but what? God caused the growth. Which is meant to teach us that we do the things that God calls us to do, planting and watering, but the growth, the putting together of the sun and the water and the nutrients in the soil, the things that cause the growth, that is in God's hands. We can't do that part.

And so we come to God, we seek after God, we pursue God. This is what it means to live by faith. Living by faith is not something that occupies our heads so much as it consumes our lives. As we look over the landscape of our lives and we go, which areas have the grass of faith growing in them? Your marriage, your finances, your work, your children, your grandchildren. Where is the faith of grass? Where's grass growing? Where is it barren? Where don't you trust God? Where aren't you pursuing him? Where do you question that he's a rewarder of those who seek him? Where do you know better than him? We'll not be rewarded on our intellectual ability to grasp those truths of the gospel. We'll be rewarded on the basis of our faith and the fruit that it's produced in our lives.

In Acts 17, Paul was preaching and he says to the people that they ought to seek God if perhaps they might grope for him and find him, though he's not far from each one of us. Now, this is one of the other verses that I memorized when I was a brand new Christian. What does it mean to grope for something? Think of being in a room in the dark, can't see anything. You know, in your house, you may be able to walk through your house in the dark and you don't have to grope for anything. You may step on a Lego or a slip on a book or something if you have little ones, but you know where things are located. But what do you want when you go to someone else's house and stay in their guest room for the night? You want a light. Why? So you don't have to grope around in the dark and stub your toe on the chest that doesn't sit at the foot of your bed, but sits at the foot of their bed. And you start walking around and looking and searching desperately. I need the light. Where's the light? Paul says we ought to grope.

in our pursuit of God, looking for him, searching him out, finding him like we would the light switch, so that we don't stub our toes on the sins and temptations that so easily entangle us. And then, following this verse, there are many, many examples of men who lived by faith. And the first is Noah. Noah was a man who understood this verse and who demonstrated it. in his life. He sought after God. He was godly, and he listened to the Lord, and then he did what the Lord said. This is why he's given to us as an example, a good example, a positive example. Now, I ask you, as we look at verse 7, it says, by faith, being warned by God about things not yet seen, in reverence, prepared an ark, Noah did, for the salvation of his household, by which he condemned the world and became an heir of righteousness, which is according to faith. And I ask you, what informed Noah's faith. Why did he do what God told him to do? Why did he build an ark? Well, the first part is, God came and warned him. Said, I'm going to send a flood. But then, you and I, we hear things from the Lord. Read things, rather. And simply to hear the truth is not sufficient. Any more than it's sufficient to throw seed on the top of the soil and expect it to grow. Noah had to process through what the Lord said.

And could you imagine the Lord coming to you and saying, I'm going to destroy everything that is around you except you and your children and the animals that I want you to put on this boat. I'm going to kill it all and destroy it. I mean, I think we balk at things that wouldn't even register in terms of their magnitude. And we go, no way. That can't happen. That won't happen. And here Noah is being told, the judgment's coming. The flood's coming. death is coming. It says in here, after God warned him, that Noah prepared the ark in reverence. And that word is sometimes translated reverence, sometimes, and I think more times, translated fear. The King James would translate this, in holy fear, Noah prepared an ark. So what motivated Noah's living by faith? His fear of God.

He feared God, and it motivated him to live by faith. He didn't reason out in his head academically what would be wise or prudent or the best use of his resources and time. There are many wealthy men in Scripture, and I believe that Noah was one of them. Consider, if the ark down in Cincinnati, just south of it, is a fair representation of The ark Noah actually built. Consider the wealth and the resources a man had to have to be able to build something like that. How much did it cost them to build it? How long did it take them to build it? And they had scores and scores of men building it. Years. How long did it take Noah to build his ark? Best guess, 60 to 70 years. How much wealth? I have no idea. Probably all of it.

What did he need it for? The Lord was going to destroy everything that wasn't used in building this ark. The Lord didn't tell him, of all the things you have to take on that ark, money wasn't one of them. Take animals to repopulate the earth and take animals to sacrifice when we get off this boat. And take your family. Noah spent a good portion of his life, where we say 60 or 70 years, we think, man, that's like our whole lives, but Noah lived to be 950. So the task that he was set to by the Lord, if we were to make an equivalent to the average lifespan of us today, six to eight years, working at it every day, with all of your resources available to you and being used up in service of the Lord. Spend it, use it, build it. And Noah did it because he feared God. And he's given to us as an example of living by faith.

Another thing we can see about Noah is that his faith was impossible to hide. Impossible to hide. How could you hide that boat? Could you imagine explaining to anybody what in the world you were doing and why? And for so long, what a fool he would have looked like. But he feared God and he built the ark. If you were Noah, what would you have said when someone asked you, why are you cutting down every tree you can get your hand on? Why are you clear-cutting, leveling? Seemed like a good idea to me. What would Noah say? The Lord said. The Lord said. I'm doing what the Lord said. Could he have been faithful if he wouldn't have spoke as he built this boat over these decades of the coming judgment of God? I'm building a boat because he said he's going to kill us all, except for me and my family that are going to go on the boat.

I mean, what could he say except these things? This man had faith that was visible, that surely he spoke about. And so our faith, like Noah's, ought to be visible. His family's salvation, your family's salvation, hinges on, hangs on, swings on whether you live by faith or not. It's the sweetest and the most important thing you can give to your kids and those that come after you. God warned Noah. He feared God, and he lived by faith. God has warned us in many ways. And so it's incumbent on us that we live by faith as Noah did, seeking to please him. When you lack faith, one of the things that it produces in you is unbelief, right? Faith is to believe God, and so if you lack faith, then you lack belief, then you don't believe the things that God says. It only makes sense. And so you look at the warnings of Scripture, and you look at the judgments of God throughout history, and you go, no. Or maybe like Nehemiah, you go,

Not in my time. How many of us today are sitting here going, yeah, it's going to get bad in America for Christians, but not in my time, or I hope not in my time. Nehemiah was not commended for having such an attitude, and we shouldn't emulate him. When God speaks and when God warns, his people ought to listen and ought to act. We understand this with our children. When parents speak, we ought to teach our children to listen. and to act accordingly. Employees ought to listen to their employers. We ought not to disregard the ministrations of God's servants in our lives, warning us, leading us, caring for us, protecting us. But if there's no fear of God in you, you won't listen. You don't have it in you to listen. The words may be spoken, but they'll be spoken to deaf ears that say, eh, no.

no, I don't believe you, or not in my lifetime, or you're exaggerating, or as though God is somehow incapable of burning this whole place up when he wants to, or casting us into ruin. Our families are not so secure that they're insulated from the judgment of God. Our country is not so big and successful that it's insulated from the judgment of God. I think we would all be surprised at how little it would take. to bring us to our knees. And so if there's no fear of God in us, it's a very good indicator that there's no faith in us. And woe to us, may it be that we would not be outside the boat or like the virgins crying out, give me some of your oil, because the bridegroom came and they weren't prepared. Noah lived by faith. Every area of his life, every bit of his resource was submitted to his faith.

in God and his trust in God. And if God were to fail him, Noah would have had nothing. But God didn't fail him. Why don't we live by faith? We can read of Noah and we respect him and we admire him. I think at least in part because we look and we go, I couldn't do that. I don't do that. Well, God hasn't called you to build an ark, but he has called you to live by faith, to be controlled by the same things that Noah was controlled by. Noah was controlled by his faith. then we're to be controlled by our faith. And the reason living by faith is so scary, and I think many times why we refuse to do it, is because it means that we give up control. How hard is it for us to listen to and to follow the people that we live among every day that we're supposed to listen to and follow? It doesn't even matter if they're good leaders. We're ready at the drop of a hat to be like, nope, you're wrong. Trustworthy or not.

whether you're convinced that they know what they're doing, whether they have a track record of faithfulness and godliness, as soon as they say, I want you to do something that's uncomfortable, hard, difficult, sacrificial, nope, can't do that, won't do that, too much, need to think about it, we wonder, what if they're wrong? What if they mislead us? What if they sin? But in the end, isn't this just our justification for fitting Isaiah's description of us being sheep who've each turned to our own way? I can't follow them, listen to them, do what they say. They might mess up. But for sheep, their life is only safe in the pack. As soon as they go away from the pack, they have no protection of the shepherd. They have no safety of the herd. No one watching out and keeping them from the ditches and ravines and crevices and thorns that'll kill them. And we, like sheep, each have gone our own way.

because we were unwilling to go where the shepherd, our Lord, leads us. Again, what is the refrain of the book of Judges? Each man did what was right in his own eyes. Time and again, the people cast off God's rule in their life and said, we're going to do what we think is best. And they'd get in a mess, and they'd cry out to God, and he mercifully would come and raise up a judge and heal their wounds, only for the judge to die. And for them to go right back to the way they were time and again. Because they wouldn't give up control. They wouldn't submit themselves to the lordship of Jesus Christ. They wouldn't do what God called them to do. We'll hold intention in our lives. Our need for guidance. Our need for help. We'll hold it together with our unwillingness to be led. I need your help, but I won't do anything you tell me to do. Now if you went and told a doctor that, what's the doctor going to say? If I was a doctor,

And I would say as a pastor, well, come back when you're ready to listen. What else can I do? I can't help you because you won't be helped. Christians back there going, uh-huh. Abram would say the same thing as a dentist. What can you do with people who won't listen? You can't do anything for them. And the irony of our day, or maybe not irony, but the sadness of our day is the shepherd is the one who gets blamed when the people won't listen. The doctors didn't this and that. No, I bet that if you went to the doctor and you did what they told you, you'd have a better chance than if you thought you knew better than him. And so we need guidance in how to live by faith. But the provision is that we trust God and give up the control of our own lives like Noah did. We start to see this sort of unwillingness to be led.

seeping out as young children and then it carries on through our lives unless we learn to live by faith. And this with people that we interact with on a daily basis. How much more difficult is it then to submit to God whose consequences and whose judgments are often not immediate? Because of his mercy, they're not immediate. How much harder is it to trust and to follow him? You wonder if Noah ever thought in these years of building this boat. Is it really going to rain? How often have we thought that God's commands were unreasonable, too difficult, too outrageous, too onerous or burdensome, too costly? And how many of us have worn ourselves out trying to find another way? This is why Jesus says to his people in Matthew 11, Come to me, all you who are weary and heavy laden, and I'll give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me.

For I am gentle and humble in heart, and you'll find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light. We weary ourselves trying to make our own way through this life. And in the end, what will we have to show for it? Can we know what we will have to show for it? Sure. We will reap what we sow. So what are we sowing? Are we living by faith? Are we sowing the seeds of faith? Are we trusting God with the things that are beyond our control, as if there were things that aren't, do we want to please God? Do we want to hear his fatherly benediction when it's all said and done and all the things we've sown have been harvested? Well done, good and faithful slave. You've been faithful with a few things. I'll put you in charge of many things. Enter into the joy of our master. Is that what we hope to hear? Yes. The question then is, is that what we're...

preparing to hear. The slave who buried his talent was not preparing to hear that. He was preparing to hear, get out of here and give me what I gave you on your way out. And so living by faith means doing what the Lord says every day of our lives, when it's easy, when it's hard, when we're tired, and when it's costly. Paul prays for the Colossians, and we ought to pray for one another and for ourselves that we would walk in a manner worthy of the Lord. to please him in all respects, bearing fruit in every good work and increasing in the knowledge of God. This is God's calling on our lives. This is what he saved us to. We can talk a lot about what he saved us from, but we must also consider what he saved us to. He's not saved us from our sins so that we could return to them. He's not saved us from our sins so that we can be comfortable or safe or easy or popular or wealthy.

He saved us from our sins that we might be righteous and might do righteous things to offer up to him in loving response to his sending his son Jesus. And so I want us to live by faith. I want us to cultivate an expectation in our lives that living by faith requires us to do things that are sometimes very difficult and painful, costly and hard. And that God is no man's debtor. And that he rewards those who live by faith. This is the testimony of scripture, is that those who live by faith will be rewarded by their God. And you say, when? And I say, I understand your weakness. It resides in me too. And my answer is not, this is when. My answer is, when the Lord decides to repay you, you will not be disappointed. You will not be disappointed.

He's merciful and he's good and he bears us through all of our weaknesses and all of our hardships in this world, preparing us for the world to come. And he gives us his spirit to strengthen us and to guide us into all truth and to help us to live by faith, to please him and to bear good fruit. And so this is our work. Let's pray. Father, you've been very patient and kind with us, bearing with us in our weakness and in our ignorance. And in our rebelliousness and our stubbornness, Father, there's all kinds of things that keep us from living by faith. Please forgive us for the ways we've refused to live by faith. Please help us to see in our lives how to better live by faith. Help us to come to you and seek after you, trusting that you do reward those who do such things. Father, we pray that you would...

Put down fear in our hearts. Help us not to live our lives thinking that we are the sovereign, we are the almighty, the ones that control our lives and the details of them. Father, confirm in our hearts that not only are you sovereign, but you're merciful and you're kind. Even in the face of great adversity, you bring these things into our lives for your glory and for our good. Help us to see your love. and your tender care of us even as we suffer, even as we long to be with you, as we bear up under the burdens and the toils of this life. We groan as creation groans for the resurrection and for deliverance from all of our burdens. Help us even as we groan to be faithful to you, to live by faith and to bear good fruit in every season. Help us to grow in our knowledge of you.

which surpasses understanding, the knowledge is able to save us, to redeem us, and to prepare us to stand before you in glory and to dwell with you for eternity. We pray these things in Jesus' name. Amen.