Hebrews 11:6 And without faith it is impossible to please God, because anyone who comes to him must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who earnestly seek him.
A
young man spent his summer vacations on the beach building beautiful
sandcastles. He spent untold hours building castles and intricate cities.
Sadly, one year the joy in his creations became endangered by some bullies that
thought it might be fun to tear down everything the young man built.
So,
what could he do? Well, he decided to alter his building methods. First, he
made the same kinds of castles and cities. However, now he placed a new
foundation underneath them: cinder blocks, rocks, and chunks of concrete. When
his tormentors appeared, he disappeared, and eventually, they found their
entertainment elsewhere. This story's moral is that if you lay the proper
foundation, our enemy will break his toes kicking at us.
The
foundation of our relationship with Christ Jesus is Faith. Without faith, our
foundation will be too shallow, and we will eventually begin to lean off-center
and eventually fall over. We serve the God of grace (1 Peter 5:10-11); it is
His nature to give and reward those who serve him. In His sovereignty, He will
graciously provide for those who follow Him. God is faithful in rewarding those
who seek Him.
God
and Humanity have complementary natures, which gives them the capacity for
fellowship on a highly personal foundation. Therefore, we can walk with God in
connection with Him (1 John 1:6-7). We, as human beings, are finite and must
yield to the infinite one, God Himself. Cain killed Able; however, Enoch never
did experience death, God took him. Our God has a unique plan for every one of
us.
The
day's verse tells us that it would be impossible to please God with anything
short of faith. However, nowhere in this verse or the entire Bible instructs us
that we might have to do some work to get on God's good side. In fact, the
Bible goes in the opposite direction; by faith, we are saved and not by any
good works we might attribute to ourselves (Ephesians 2:8-10).
When
God called Noah to build the Ark, no one on earth had ever seen rain, so the
idea of a flood was foreign to all people. Noah built a gigantic boat in the
middle of the desert that had never experienced rain. This action on Noah's
part is the epitome of faith that we all should take as an example. Faith is
the foundational issue in the Bible as a whole. When God called Abraham to
leave the land of his ancestors and go to a land that he had never seen before,
Abraham did not hesitate; he followed God's direction on faith. There are
stories after stories based on Faith in God throughout the Bible.
God is calling us to a land that we have never seen, a land where God will restore the paradisial state He created for Adam and Eve. So, we have this solid promise from God, in and through Christ Jesus, that can only be ours through faith in the one that sacrificed His life on an Old Rugged Cross.
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