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Welcome to day three of our look together at Hebrews chapter 11. We're looking
at verses 17 to 22 today, and we're continuing to look at Abraham, the father of
our faith, four great actions of faith in his life that you and I can learn
from. Yesterday, the fact, number one, that he looked at the known instead of
the unknown, that God encourages my faith to look at the God I know instead of
the unknown future.

The fact that he looked at the future instead of the present. He built upon the
eternal city, not the temporary tents that he lived in. And then the fact that
he looked at the promise instead of the problems.

He looked at God's promise in Isaac, and it took him a journey to get there just
like you and I. Then there's a fourth thing that you and I can learn from
Abraham, and that is he looked at his confidence instead of his confusion.
Listen to what happened in verses 17 to 19.

By faith Abraham, when God tested him, offered Isaac as a sacrifice. He who had
received the promises was about to sacrifice his one and only son, even though
God had said to him, "It is through Isaac that your offspring will be reckoned.
" Abraham reasoned that God could raise the dead, and figuratively speaking, he
did receive Isaac back from death.

I want you to notice the pattern in Abraham's life. First there's this
tremendous success. After 25 years, Isaac comes into his life, into Sarah's
life.

But then after the success comes the sacrifice. God's ultimate goal in your
life, my life, it's not the success, but the sacrifice that always follows.
Let's talk about this for a while.

First let's talk about Abraham. He was building altars. He was making sacrifices
to God all the time.

But this time God asked Abraham to bring his son. He asked him to take the
greatest blessing in his life, the blessing upon which all future blessings were
to be based, and to be willing to sacrifice that blessing. Now God knew that he
would never ask Abraham to kill a child.

But Abraham didn't know that. He lived in a world where many people sacrificed
children. Not our kind of world, the world he lived in, many people sacrificed
children.

So God tested him. And Abraham was so sure of God's promise at this point, he
thought, if God lets me go through it, he's going to resurrect him. He's going
to do something miraculous, because I trust God's promise.

Now why did God put Abraham through this, to teach us this truth? God gives you
successes so that you can then make sacrifices. That's the truth.

God gives you successes so that you can then make sacrifices. Now there's a huge
part of me that does not like that truth. We think I get successes so then I can
coast.

I get successes so I can bask in those successes. God did not put you on this
earth to bask. He has things for you to do.

He has ways for you to make a difference in this world. So first the successes,
and then the sacrifices. Even in the smaller things of life, you successfully
finish school, not so that you can put a diploma up on the wall and sit in the
glory of that diploma for the rest of your life.

You finish school so that you've learned some kind of work, some kind of skills.
You can go and make a difference by sacrificially working every day. God blesses
you with material wealth.

Why? Just so you can bask in that material wealth? No.

So that you can give to help others. You're blessed to be a blessing. God
blesses you as you raise kids.

Why? So that they'll live at home for the rest of their lives and tell you what
great parents you are? So that they'll leave you one day and go out and make a
difference in the world.

And there's a sacrifice in that. Sacrifices that follow success, it takes great
faith because they don't make sense to us. That's where the confusion comes in.

Abraham must have been so confused. Why would God wait 25 years to send a
promised son and then ask Abraham to sacrifice that son? When God asks you to
make a sacrifice, he's not trying to take the success away from you.

That's what you and I need to realize. When God asks you to make that sacrifice,
he's wanting to turn that success into something that will last forever. He's
wanting to take that success and turn it into something that will last forever.

It's just following the example of Jesus. Ephesians 5, 2, "Live a life filled
with love for others. " Following the example of Jesus who loved you and gave
himself as a sacrifice to take away your sins.

This sacrifice for us gives us life today. And so God gives you some money.
Gives you an abundance of money.

You have enough to take care of your family's needs, make sure you're fed and
sheltered even more. What do you do with the rest? When you take that and you
sacrifice it for ministry's sake, for God's sake, you've made a sacrifice out of
that success.

You've turned it into something. Well the Bible talks about people welcoming you
into heaven because of the material sacrifices that you have made. You've turned
it into something that will last forever.

Now Abraham, what a great life of faith. Right after Abraham, quickly in verses
20 to 22, we read the stories of Isaac and Jacob and Joseph. Let me read those
verses and then let me share with you some encouraging things about these three
men's lives.

Verse 20, "By faith, Isaac blessed Jacob and Esau in regard to their future. By
faith, Jacob, when he was dying, blessed each of Joseph's sons and worshiped as
he leaned on the top of his staff. By faith, Joseph, when his end was near,
spoke about the exodus of the Israelites from Egypt and gave instructions about
his bones.

" What I love about these verses is they remind you and I that you can be a
person of faith. We've just looked at Abraham for a couple of days. And many of
us, we look at Abraham and we think, "I know he's the father of my faith, but I
just don't see that happening to me.

I am not an Abraham. I don't know how he waited 25 years, even with struggles. I
couldn't have done it.

I don't know how he was willing to sacrifice his son. I couldn't have done it. "
Let me tell you about a couple of guys, three of them you'd never expect to find
in this list of faith, yet they are.

Two of them you wouldn't expect. A third whose greatest faith statement in these
verses is not what you expect. First you have Isaac.

That's a pretty unexpected addition to this list of faith. The most spectacular
thing about Isaac's life was his birth. He came along after 25 years.

After that, in one sense, it was all downhill when you read the book of Genesis.
Genesis 26 is the only chapter that's entirely about him and you see, he didn't
do much in that chapter at all. He's sort of the wallflower of the book of
Genesis.

He was a very shy man. He looked for a wife until he was age 40 and he only
married Rebecca at that age because his parents pushed him into it. People today
would look at a guy like this and call him a failure, a man who did not take
advantage of the opportunities that life offered him.

You're Abraham's son after all. But God commends him for his faith in the way
that he blessed Jacob and he blessed Esau. Now if you know that story from the
Old Testament, even that didn't go very well, but God didn't see the fact that
he struggled in that blessing.

He saw instead the fact that he was willing to bless and he ends up commending
the faith of this man who not many people noticed. You can be a person of faith.
And then you have Jacob, just as unexpected in addition, but for a different
reason.

He didn't fade into the background. He was always pushing, always pushing. He
seemed to spend much of his life cheating or conniving someone out of something.

He gained birthrights and inheritance and wives and herds and land just by
scheming to get them all. He always seemed to have a scheme and those schemes
often got him in trouble. But God sees the end of the story of Jacob's life,
that he ended as a man of faith, a man of worship.

Worshiped as he leaned on the top of his staff, as he couldn't make it around on
his own strength, he was still a man of worship. Here is a man who struggled
with himself, who struggled with life as he reached for the top, yet he's a
great man of faith. He's listed in this great list of faith.

Faithful people don't get everything right the first time. In fact, they don't
have things go right sometimes ever in their life. These are the people, the
people of faith, who are willing to keep on trusting the fourth and fifth and
tenth and eleventh and twelfth times, even though you struggle.

Jacob a man of faith, Isaac a man of faith, and then Joseph, a great man of
faith. Now, Joseph is one of the greatest success stories of the entire Bible.
You might remember he becomes the second leading ruler of all of Egypt.

He changed the world economy of his time. So the Bible had a lot of opportunity
here in Hebrews 11, the writer to talk about this man of faith, his actions of
faith that he took when he was in prison, his actions of faith that he took when
he had dreams and trusted God. But instead it says he had faith when he spoke
about the Exodus, when he talked about the fact that the people of Israel would
someday be set free from that land.

Towards the end of his life, after he had all these victories, all these
wonderful successes, at the very end, he says, God has a promise still in the
future. And take my bones and carry them with you when you go from this land. I
want to be buried in the promised land.

You never know what your greatest act of faith might be. You never know when it
might come. You might think your greatest activities have already been done in
life.

You never know what your greatest word of faith might be. For Joseph, it came at
the very end, according to Hebrews 11, when he looked forward to what God was
going to do. Keep being the person who looks forward to what God's going to do.

Now what I love about these last three in regard to what we just looked at with
Abraham is they remind us, they remind us that you and I can be people of faith.
People of faith struggle. People of faith are not perfect, but people of faith
live a life of faith.

So let's pray together. Our Father, we pray. We pray for the faith of these men
that we've read about today.

Give us the faith of a Joseph, to have faith to the end of life, to realize that
looking forward to what you're going to do is one of the greatest acts of faith,
to have the faith of a Jacob, that even though we might have struggled in life,
been prideful in life, we can still worship you at the end of our life, to have
the faith of an Isaac that recognizes that even though I may feel like others
don't notice me, you do. You do notice me, and I can act in faith today, to have
the faith of an Abraham, to have the faith to take the successes that you've
given into my life and to make a sacrifice of those successes knowing that in
that sacrifice, you're going to do something eternal. Give me, give me faith,
Jesus, today to act on your word.

I need your strength to do this. I pray for it. In Jesus' name, amen.

Tomorrow we're going to look at the faith of a man named Moses.