What is Faith? (Hebrews 11:1-2)
This sermon was preached on June 22nd, 2025.
11 Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see. 2 This is what the ancients were commended for.
I remember the first time I went to a UNC basketball game. I was overwhelmed. Going to the Smith center. I went to the museum beforehand and it was all this memorabilia from all across history. One of my favorite things was a framed letter that Coach K from Duke had sent to Michael Jordan when he was trying to recruit him and MJ picked UNC.
We go in. There’s the court. The powder blue seats. The pep band is playing. There’s the team and Coach Williams and Rameses the mascot and all of it. There were sights and sounds and smells. It was immersive and memorable.
Then I remember the next time I went to the park to shoot baskets by myself. Just me. I had some earbuds in to listen to a podcast and though I was playing basketball—the same sport, but not the same thing. One was some of the greatest players in the world, with 18k people in attendance and countless others on television worldwide. The other wast just me on a playground.
This summer we’re looking at one chapter of the Book of Hebrews, and I bring up UNC basketball because Hebrews is written to a bunch of people who grew up in the impressiveness of Jewish worship at the temple in Jerusalem who are now looking around at their very unimpressive christian community and wondering if they’ve made a mistake.
Imagine it. You’ve grown up going to the temple in Jerusalem for the religious festivals. Hundreds of thousands of people descending on this one city for a time of worship and, frankly, fun. When you go to the temple, there’s sacrifices and food and priests dressed in these elaborate vestments and singing by massive, professional choirs.
But now that you’ve placed your faith in Jesus, you no longer participate in the sacrifices—you believe that all those things pointed forward to Jesus and to keep participating in them would mean rejecting that Jesus is the fulfillment. And now your religious life looks a whole lot less…impressive. Now worship is going to someone’s house, or maybe even going to a catacomb—literally worshipping in an underground cemetery.
There aren’t elaborate sacrifices. There are no priests dressed in robes. There are no huge crowds. There’s a few dozen people singing probably a-capella, reading from the OT and letters from apostles. You pray, you hear someone speak. You eat a meal.
It’s nowhere near as impressive outwardly. You’re starting to wonder if all this talk about Jesus being the fulfillment of all of it was overblown. Shouldn’t the fulfillment be even more grand? How can what you’re experiencing be the fulfillment of the grand stories you hear in the OT and the grand experience of worship in Jerusalem?
The Book of Hebrews is written to call people to see the glory and supremacy of Jesus. To take their eyes off of the things that seem so impressive to us to show us how they are actually meant to point us to not buildings or things but people and the community that is created around the gospel.
This summer we’re going to be looking at one chapter of the book of Hebrews, a chapter that is usually called “the Faith Hall of Fame.” It walks through all these big figures from the Old Testament, folks like Noah, Abraham, Moses.
But the point is not to list a bunch of people so that we’ll be impressed with them. We aren’t supposed to read this chapter and think “oh man, Abraham was a super man.” “Moses, if only I could be as strong as him.” No. In fact, the people are listed to make the point that they were not the epitome of God’s working, high above us. It’s not the Tarheels basketball and me at the playground. No, it’s fundamentally the same team. Their faith is the same power and quality as ours and that all of the impressive things we see in their actions are all an anticipation of what we have now with one another and a pointing forward to the ultimate plan of God in the renewal of all things.
We know that by what these first two verses tell us: what faith is, and how it is their faith, not their works, that these figures from the OT were commended. It’s their faith in God that makes them notable—them being swept up into what God is doing. And the same is true of us.
What Is Faith?
We may mean a lot of different things when we say the word “faith,” but what does Scripture mean when it talks about faith? Hebrews 11.1 gives us the closest thing that we have to a dictionary definition to faith. “Faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see.”
Confidence and Assurance. But not just confidence and assurance in a generic sense. Confidence and assurance, if it isn’t grounded in something or someone that is worth being confident in and assured of, is just blind guessing and foolishness.
No, faith is confidence and assurance in a person. Faith is a relational term that describes what is like for us to live in relationship with God until we are at home with him and all things are made new. To rest on God’s love for us as something we do not need to try and earn. To receive Jesus Christ as our Savior and Lord, who gives to us all the benefits of his redemption. Resting and receiving. Confidence and assurance.
That’s faith. Receiving from him who we are and turning to him to live a life before him—not in fear of condemnation, but in a way that we walk in the smiles of God toward us and turn our face toward him in obedience.
As we look through Hebrews 11, it mentions a number of the biggest figures of the Old Testament. And their lives were very different from one another—different times and different places. They were very different people. But the notable thing that unites all these very different people to one another, and unite all of them to us, is faith. Trust and dependence in God and his purposes. And this is a remarkable thing, because as the passage tells us, this is what these huge figures were commended for.
They were commended for their faith. Commended for looking outside of themselves for strength, for salvation, for their identity, for their purpose. It’s like saying that we commend someone for paying their bills with someone else’s money. It’s like saying that the remarkable thing about a person is how much they depend on someone else to take care of them.
That wars against everything we think about when we think about what is worth commending. We get honors and medals for great achievements. We give trophies and championship belts to winners and champions. We look down on and even mock people who have to depend on others or who we think get good things they didn’t deserve or work for.
Yet Scripture is telling us that when we think through these figures from OT history, we shouldn’t be impressed that they are heroes who had some special strength in themselves. No, they are remarkable because they placed their faith and trust in God. The thing that sustained them, the thing that infused their lives with meaning and power is their trust and dependence on God.
If we read the OT or Scripture and come away thinking these are just supposed to be examples to be followed—heroes—we will miss the point entirely. These are not men and women who were especially holy who had a closer connection to God than any of us. We don’t look back to them as the epitome of experience with God. We honor them as people like us, in need for God’s grace. We don’t honor them as heroes, but as brothers and sisters.
This trains us on how to read and interact with Scripture. When we read these stories of the OT: David and Goliath, or Daniel in the lion’s den, or Sampson, Abraham, Moses—all of it—we are seeing how these figures and their faith in God’s sufficiency points us to also trust and depend on God. They were all pointing forward to Jesus—we can look back on the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus and how he is enough.
I’ve read a lot of theological books and one of my favorites and probably the one I recommend to others the most is a children’s bible. The Jesus Storybook Bible. And the reason why I recommend it isn’t the illustrations or anything like that. It’s because it gets this point so right.
In fact, it may be worth me quoting the introductory chapter of that book:
“Now, some people think the Bible is a book of rules, telling you what you should and shouldn’t do. The Bible certainly does have some rules in it. They show you how life works best. But the Bible isn’t mainly about you and what you should be doing. It’s about God and what he has done.
Other people think the Bible is a book of heroes, showing you people you should copy. The Bible does have some heroes in it, but (as you’ll soon find out) most of the people in the Bible aren’t heroes at all. They make some big mistakes (sometimes on purpose), they get afraid and run away. At times, they’re downright mean.
No, the Bible isn’t a book of rules, or a book of heroes. The Bible is most of all a story. It’s an adventure story about a young Hero who comes from a far country to win back his lost treasure. It’s a love story about a brave Prince who leaves his palace, his throne – everything – to rescue the ones he loves. It’s like the most wonderful of fairy tales that has come true in real life!
It takes the whole Bible to tell this story. And at the center of the story, there is a baby. Every story in the Bible whispers his name. He is like the missing piece in the puzzle – the piece that makes all the other pieces fit together, and suddenly you can see a beautiful picture.”
This is how we read the Scriptures. This is also how we think of our lives: they are meant to be geared toward Jesus. To find their ultimate purpose in the glory of God and our delight and joy in him.
Look around, we’re ordinary people in an ordinary place, in an ordinary town. I’m a guy talking, we sang some songs, and we’re about to have the Lord’s Supper with ordinary bread and ordinary wine. Nothing impressive by the looks of things.
The point is that the things aren’t the point. This place, the stuff we do. We could be in the most broken down building in the world. We could have the worst bread and wine you’ve ever tasted. The music could be off-key and the person reading Scripture stumbling over every word.
The point isn’t the place or the stuff. The point is the people, and the Spirit of God. Jesus called himself the true temple, the place where God is most clearly displayed. And the NT also tells us that we are the Temple of God—inhabited by his Spirit, the place where God dwells with us together.
Meaning we aren’t at a loss because our place isn’t impressive and because we aren’t impressive—and also meaning we shouldn’t be overly impressed with places or people. Now, there’s something to be said for beauty, and some places are more beautiful than others. There’s something to be said for honoring people for goodness.
But in the end, it does not matter where we are and it does not matter if the collection of our church is just a bunch of folks who have messed up far more often than not. The point is Jesus. And we may be very different from one another—as different as the OT figures that are listed here in Hebrews 11. But the tie that binds us together is faith. Confidence and assurance of God at work. The power of the Christian community is that we can be brought together with people whose lives are completely different than ours, but we are bound together by the love of God.
So this summer, as we look through the stories of all these people that are listed in Hebrews 11, may we have the eyes of faith that traces the work of God through all of it, and have our eyes fixed not on them, but on Jesus, our victorious Lord.