Sermon Notes: Mother's Day - Hebrews 11:1-2; 12:1-2
Cultivating Faith
Big Idea: Parenting requires faith. Everyone who parents works out some kind of faith. The question is where that faith is rooted.
Specifically, being a Christian parent requires faith rooted in the person of Jesus Christ.
Parenting according to faith in Jesus shapes our decisions and helps us to cultivate the next generation to imitate our example and live by faith like we did.
Let’s unpack what we just read and see if we can make some applications.
Key words and phrases.
Faith, assurance (hypostasis – foundation, guarantee), hope/hoped, conviction (persuasion from evidence), unseen, commendation, surrounded, great cloud of witnesses, lay aside weight of sin, looking to Jesus
Lists.
Abel, Enoch, Noah, Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, Rahab, Gideon, Barak, Samson, Jepthah, David, Samuel, the Prophets.
Contrasts, comparisons.
Contrast: Hebrews 11:1 “Now” indicates a contrast between the people of the fellowship mentioned in chapter 10 who shrunk back in the face of adversity and threw away their “faith” thus testifying their “faith” was not genuine and those who preserve their walk with Jesus by exercising their genuine faith in Jesus by not giving up.
Contrast: People who didn’t give up even though they did not get to see the promise fulfilled are contrasted in our own minds with the false idea that if we believe enough, it will work out or we’ll get an easier path.
Comparison: We see a comparison between all who have genuine faith in Jesus that all of those endure hardships.
Terms of conclusion/purpose clauses.
“Therefore” in Hebrews 12:1 connects chapter 11 to chapter 12. That indicates that those who lived by faith can be imitated, and those who follow Jesus should live like them, and even more like the one they believed in, Jesus.
Not just “can” be imitated. The writer of Hebrews is calling us to imitate their faith, and to imitate the object of their faith, Jesus.
What does our text say?
Faith is actively holding on to God’s guarantee and our conviction about his guarantee based on the evidence he has provided in the good news that he will keep his people and keep his word.
The person with faith in Jesus holds on to that hope even though they can’t see the fulfillment of God’s promises at the moment and they are so convinced and hopeful that they hold on even if they never see the fulfillment.
Those who live by faith in Jesus have examples in God’s word to look at for help and most importantly, they have Jesus as the supreme example to look at. God has given these examples who show us what faith looks like in radical acts of obedience.
Those who believe run the race given to them by God with endurance knowing Jesus has been and will be faithful. They do this by laying aside every weight (tumor/impediment) and sin.
Only those who stay the course and finish the race receive the commendation of resurrected eternal life with Jesus in the eternal kingdom of heaven.
What does our text mean?
1. There is no other eternally successful way to live apart from faith rooted in Jesus.
The writer of Hebrews makes it very clear that those who have their discernment trained by constant practice and who mature by moving on from the elementary things of the faith, know that persevering faith in Jesus is the only way to live with eternity in view.
Humans can live successfully for a lifetime without trusting Jesus because they are image-bearing and intelligent creatures. They discovered Proverbs 25:2 facts that help them, but that common grace runs out at the moment they cross over by death to that intermediate state before the resurrection where we will either inherit redeemed creation in the eternal kingdom or be forever given over to hell for rejecting Creator Jesus.
Anything gained by giving up on Jesus is lost when it counts most on the last day.
Don’t give up on striving to know, understand, love, and follow Jesus.
2. I have absolutely everything to lose and nothing to gain if I give up on following Jesus.
If you’ve never wondered about whether following Jesus was a good idea, you’ve likely not tested the waters of radical obedience to God’s word. Maybe I’m just a goober.
I don’t want anyone to let that thought linger.
If I quit Jesus, I am testifying that my faith was never rooted in Jesus and that I’ve lived a life of acting before God and man, and my just reward is condemnation.
We can’t be like those in Hebrews 6 and 10 who, when faced with hardship, threw Jesus away and testified to their wrongly rooted faith.
I must make sure my hope for tomorrow is rooted in Jesus’ love for me to do me good, not easy, but good. Not safety, but good. Not success, but good. Not temporal comfort, but good.
This truth is important because, well, it’s in his word. But it is also important because it is very easy to assume faith in Jesus says nothing about parenting, so we never search out how to parent Christianly, or parenting according to God’s word and the reality of Proverbs 25:2.
Searching out how to parent and live according to all the glories of faith in Jesus is hard and requires me to change my thoughts and actions in parenting constantly.
Parenting is hard. Parenting in fellowship is harder and necessary. Parenting in according to trust in Jesus will be life’s deepest challenge.
Don’t give up leaning into Jesus and his word.
3. Living by faith in Jesus is marked by radical trust in Jesus through radical acts of obedience to God’s word.
God’s word will call the follower of Jesus to do some radical things that don’t make sense to the casual observer. They will call us to do radical things that don’t make sense to us, particularly when they don’t work like we had hoped or prayed or labored for.
I challenge you to go look through the list of saints in Hebrews 11 as the examples God provided who lived by faith, and wrestle with them.
There are some doozies in there, and some things that may challenge if you have tried to make the Bible say things it doesn’t say.
The writer of Hebrews says that those who persevere in the faith lay aside every “weight” and sin. “Weights” first meaning is “tumor” its secondary meaning can be “impediment”. So, faith requires me to shed not only sin, but also anything that is an impediment that may not be sin. That will require radical obedience that some will judge me for.
This means the life of faith begins to identify not only the obvious sins, but also the things that are not sin yet slow me down. This requires a radical faith that obeys not only the obvious things but jettisons the things other people are willing to accept in mediocrity.
We begin to see these things as we grow in maturity.
4. Faith in Jesus is marked by fellowship not isolation.
Hebrews 10:39 “We”.
Hebrews 11:2 “people of old”.
Hebrews 11:3 “By faith we”.
Hebrews 12:1-2 “...since we are surrounded by...great cloud of witnesses”, “...let us lay aside...”
Faith in Jesus is a team sport, and we need each other for part of God’s good means of grace to us to persevere in the hope of faith in Jesus.
5. Faith in Jesus requires us to constantly lay aside sin, by God’s help.
“Lay aside” is middle voice. What that means is that we actively exercise our will to lay sin aside, and as we do that, we are receiving God’s help to lay it aside. It is us working with God by the Spirit to ditch sin.
This is necessary because in our state of life before the resurrection, sin is clingy. Sin is sticky. And that sin will tempt me away from faith in Jesus worked out in radical obedience.
This work of faith can be grueling, so we look to Jesus and how he did it at the cross, and we press on.
Application.
1. Parenting is the work of healing the curse of sin at the foundational level of all of society. That’s a big task. Thus, it is a radical work of obedient faith.
The work of parenting is God’s invitation to apply the good news of the kingdom to the healing of humanity in the hard work of the redemption in human beings inside the family system.
Parenting is a full contact sport, and it requires full contact labor, and that is a life of radical obedience to labor at parenting God’s way.
Thus, we need to understand faith in Jesus.
Example: There is no explicit instructions in the Manual about how to handle a toddlers who have been up since they got home from Papaw and Mamaw’s house and it’s 1 am because Papaw and Mamaw gave them Coca-Cola and fudge rounds. Maybe call Papaw and ask him how it feels to be up at 1 am. That really happened.
2. Parenting is a call to ongoing faith in Jesus. Therefore, parenting is a call to persevere when suffering as a parent.
Faith requires suffering in whatever form the Lord determines.
Parenting will require suffering in various forms for good purposes we may never understand.
Parenting will test me.
Parenting will teach me the balance of hands on and hands off and when to apply each one and when you can no longer apply hands on work.
Parenting will teach me to apply boundaries as love for self and others, and that will come with suffering.
Parenting will reveal my sin, my past, and my relationship with my parents in all the hard and negative ways I would like to avoid, and this is part of the suffering that comes with parenting. Raising children will push all those buttons.
Parenting will not stop. Parenting will only get more complex. Thus, we need to learn to live by faith in Jesus and not quit on our role as parents. This will help us be excellent grandparents that build a legacy of faith in Jesus and growth into maturity.
3. Parenting is a call to fellowship where we have examples of faith, lessons from failure, and how to suffer well with God’s help.
This is where Radical Kids serves such as a precious and tactical means of grace to TRC.
When we rub elbows with fellow pilgrims on the hard path of raising children, we learn we are not alone, we get a break now and again, we provide a break now and again, we learn boundaries and values, and we learn some tools to help us apply the good news and manage hard things in life.
Who better to do that with than people we are in covenant fellowship with?
When we get to those crucial teen years, student ministry is a place where parents can have like-minded sold out lovers of the good news be a net of safety when our teens are learning to grow their distance from us, and a place to get help in navigating all the pitfalls that come with raising teens.
Who better to do that with than people we are in covenant fellowship with?
When we parent in fellowship we can mourn our good work that didn’t work out together, and we can celebrate our successful navigation together. We need them both.
We can learn better Christian parenting strategies if we’ll humble enough and ask questions and be open to feedback.
Me and Jennifer have learned the hard way that the atheistic evolutionary behaviorism we learned in sub-culture Christianity masquerades as Christian parenting and it not in any way connected to how the Lord treats us in the good news of the kingdom, and is not in any way connected to how the Lord Jesus designed his central nervous system to work. There is a better way.
It is so strange that God designed us to be parents at our most arrogant stage of life, and grandparents after we’ve learned a thing or two. Maybe the Lord did that so that we could learn humility young, and we could have lots of second chances later to apply what we’ve learned.
4. Parenting like this will build a lasting legacy of faith in Jesus and build up local churches to be influential for the kingdom of God.
Don’t miss out.
Do what you have to do to cut out what is not of faith in Jesus so you can invest in the things that are radical acts of obedience to Jesus and his kingdom.