Dennis Tuuri

Hope you’re willing to stand on the arena’s bloody sand if required and to do so joyfully for the person and work of the Lord Jesus Christ. I hope I pray for you and for myself that we might man up, that we might be those bold, victorious, faithful men and women of old that we celebrate at this time of the year both in Hebrews 11 and also in our Reformation events, All Saints Day. They’re all reminders of all this stuff.

I wanted to talk from Hebrews 11. The actual scripture text I’m going to read is verses 1-3. Hebrews 11:1-3. Please stand for the reading of God’s word, which is always a law word and always a grace word to us. Let us hear it with ears.

Now, faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. For by it the elders obtained a good testimony. By faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God so that the things which are seen were not made of things which are visible.

Let’s pray. Father, give us ears to hear, hearts to believe your word, and thus believing your word, your covenant promises, make us strong dominion men and women. In Jesus name we ask it. Amen. Please be seated.

Once every seven years, All Saints Day falls on a Lord’s day. This is that seventh year when this happens to be the case. November 1 has been celebrated as All Saints Day since 741 AD when the chapel of all saints was dedicated.

Prior to that, beginning in 608 AD, All Saints Day was celebrated on a different day. May 13th was the day. And the reason why May 13th was chosen was that was the day that the Pantheon, you know, the pagan temple of the Greek and Roman gods, was dedicated in Rome as a Christian church. That’s interesting. That’s good imagery that God in his providence has given to us: All Saints Day, dedication of the Pantheon, now a Christian church where the saints are celebrated.

Prior to that though, All Saints Day had already been in existence. All Saints Day was first established during the time of persecution in the early church. The numbers of martyrs was large enough that they couldn’t give each saint his own day anymore. And then in the time of John Chrysostom, the martyrs were remembered on the first Sunday after Pentecost. So this has been going on a long time—celebration of All Saints Day in England and in the isles of England.

Instead of saint, it was hallowed. So all hallowed day, all hallows day. Hallow is like holy—saints. That’s what saints are: holy ones. So the word was all hallows day, and the evening before was all hallows eve, as probably most of you know. And so all hallows eve is Halloween, the evening before All Saints Day, October 31st.

In the providence of God, that was the night that Luther decided to post the thesis on the door of the church of Wittenberg. Because while some people were out making mischief and doing weird things, other people would go to church that night on all hallows eve, All Saints Day evening, the evening before, and the relics would be there. And so you’d get a bigger crowd than normal. And that was why, as I hear it, Luther decided to post his thesis on the door of the church of Wittenberg.

So that’s this connection between Halloween, Reformation Day, and All Saints Day. And the oldest thing involved here is All Saints Day. That’s what I want to talk about. That’s why I chose to talk about Hebrews 11 here.

Now, the first thing I want to do is talk about Hebrews 11 in reference to the second word—the second commandment in the Ten Commandments, which, as we have seen, is the emphasis upon the word of God as opposed to making things to replace the word of God. And we’ve talked about the emphasis upon listening and hearing as opposed to seeing.

Now, that doesn’t mean that beauty isn’t good. We talked about that last week. I was asked by somebody last week how he could make worship more beautiful. I mean, if God wants us to beautify worship, which he does, of course. He wants us to beautify the whole world, and that includes worship. And worship itself was the context in which we saw God’s commanded artwork to be done in the tabernacle and temple.

Well, remember when you think through that question: there are several components to the Lord’s day, right? I mean, there are beautiful people here. We just read about how Moses was a beautiful child. And remember last week the psalms say how beautiful, how good—same word—it is for brothers to dwell together in unity. To the extent that we increase in our community and union and communion with Christ and with each other, that is a beautification of our worship. Very real, very important.

Okay. So one way we’ll mature in beauty at Reformation Covenant in worship is to mature as a community and in commitments to one another, to know each other, praying for each other, not having grievances against one another. Get rid of the little irritations one way or the other. Get rid of them. Growth in people relationships—that’s one way.

Secondly, the physical structure is important. That’s what was going on in the tabernacle and the temple, and so it’s important to beautify the physical structure. You know, we’ve been here ten years and we just haven’t made it a priority. Other things are more important for our money. Now, maybe those are good decisions, maybe they’re bad decisions. I don’t know. We’ve done some beautification in here, but not much. It still sort of looks like the Partridge Family—the colors, I mean. Sorry, I didn’t mean to put that ugly image in your mind when you come to church every week. But you know, one way you become more beautiful in your worship is the physical setting itself should have beauty to it.

We were excited about different ways to beautify it when we first moved into this building. And well, you know, art is a difficult thing to accomplish both in terms of money, but also in terms of consensus and that sort of stuff. But you know, if we’re going to ask ourselves how can we mature in beauty, that’s one way to do it.

And then the third component is the actual liturgy itself. You know, I think speaking for myself, we probably haven’t done anything much to think about how that liturgy can be more beautiful. I don’t mean just picking different songs, but the whole flow of the liturgical sequence. It should present the truth of God’s word as we go through the sequence, and we shouldn’t have to explain it every time. We shouldn’t have to have little explanations in there. The flow of the service itself can be matured and made more beautiful. And you know, pray for your elders. This should probably be a priority for us.

So those are some ways that worship can be beautified: the physical setting, the people themselves, and then what the people are doing in this particular setting. But today, in terms of that second commandment, we go back to this emphasis upon the word as opposed to the visual image.

And of course, that’s really front and center in the first couple of verses, right? Faith is the substance of things hoped for. Boy, you know, commentators have just been all over the map on that. This is such a strange verse. I don’t know if you’ve ever kind of read what the commentators say. Don’t feel bad about that because it’s kind of tough to understand what’s being said even in terms of an understanding of the Greek words themselves.

The word translated here for substance has a lot of different meanings, a lot of different nuances in it. And it’s not easy to think through what that actually is. And it’s talking about faith in relationship to things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. That’s an odd statement: the evidence of things not seen. So it’s evidence of something that’s not seen. You know, it almost seems like there’s a paradoxical thing going on in that statement. But in any event, we can see that whatever the paradoxical nature of it is, the preeminence of hearing is clear. Faith comes by hearing, hearing by the word of God as opposed to sight, right? We can see echoes of the second commandment here and the significance of the second commandment.

Yet in verse 3, by faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God. And now the word of God comes front and center. So that the things which are seen were not made of things which are visible. Again, it seems a little strange. But understand what’s being said: the word of God is what underlies the reality of the visible. The super-reality is the word of God, okay? And it creates a real visible world. But the visible world isn’t made from things that are visible. It’s made from God who is invisible, and it’s made from his word.

So again, in terms of the second commandment, the preeminence and importance of God’s word and faith—believing that word—and that word actually establishes reality as opposed to the things that we see. This is what these verses are getting at. It’s very important to understand that, kids.

You know, this isn’t so hard to understand, right? The whole point is again that God’s word is what we trust in. We have faith in the word of God because that’s what made everything in the world. The six-day creation is important because it’s linked to the speaking of God’s word and the preeminence of God’s word over what we can see. And kids, so the important thing is that God’s word is the most important thing in your life. Your faith is in the word of God.

And actually, faith here is the substance of things hoped for. It’s the assuredness that what we hope for is there, is real, and is coming to pass. And what has Hebrews been about from the opening verses? It’s been about the supremacy of the Lord Jesus Christ and the things that are hoped for. In the context of Hebrews, this is the visible manifestations of the reign of Jesus Christ. At the center of the book, Jesus Christ is the high priest of good things to come. We’re hoping for the good things to come.

We’re like the Hebrews in a way, right? I mean, this letter is written to a little church in a metropolitan area that was basically secularized, and they get this epistle. And we live in the midst of a larger metropolitan area—the Portland area or Oregon City, wherever you’re from. And we live in cities that are largely secularized, and what we do seems pretty insignificant, unimportant. It’s not part of the big things going on in life.

But and so the tendency is just to give up. You just sort of go with the flow and give up and let sin kind of bubble up. At least stop being diligent—you know, going to church, doing what’s right every day, living the Christian life. And so the author of this book is addressing that. And what he’s drawing their attention to then is going to give them these wonderful examples of men that did this thing, that lived by faith, by faith, by faith.

And when we see those “by faith, by faith, by faith,” when men man up, when men are courageous, when men are future-oriented, when men and women are willing to be sawn in two, if that’s what God wants, for the sake of the cause of Jesus Christ, when men and women are willing to step up and to put away the foolish things of life and to attend to the things of God in everything that they’re doing in life—there’s no square inch, as Kuyper said, of this world over which Jesus Christ does not say “mine.” There’s no minute of your day over which Jesus Christ does not say “mine.”

And the way those men and women live their lives, as examples to us, are all preceded by faith—by faith, by faith, by faith. The word of God: substance of things hoped for, hope for the manifestation of the work of the Lord Jesus Christ, the high priest who is bringing good things to come. So the text drives us to the word. It drives us to faith and being related then to the word of God by which the worlds were framed.

Now, in and of itself, that’s significant. I mean, I think this means that you’ve got to do a little more than just listen to the sermon on Sunday, half listen to it, whatever you do in your particular way. You’ve got to know the Bible. And you know what? You’re not going to know it if all you do—whenever the only time you open your Bible is when I get up here. You’re going to hear little bits and pieces and things, and you’ll get the sense of the Ten Commandments, but that’ll kind of fade because you don’t read it again. You’ve got to know your Bibles.

The reformers and the mighty men of old, the martyrs, the saints that we celebrate on All Saints Day, were people that were driven by faith in a God who is there, as Francis Schaeffer says, and is not silent. He’s spoken forth the reality of things. He tells us what we’re supposed to do. We’re supposed to man up and follow him by first of all knowing his word, and secondly by being able to apply that word to the situation you’re in.

And if the situation you’re in that’s causing you trouble or grief or whatever it is isn’t being thought through in relationship to the word of God, you’re never going to get out of it. You won’t escape that, but you’ll get into something else. The scriptures, faith—you can’t man up just by, you know, sucking it up and trying to do better work if you don’t know the word of God. Faith comes by hearing, hearing by the word of God. And faith is the assurance that you know what God speaks forth is ultimate reality. It determines the visible, right?

The spoken word of God brings the light, brings the firmament, brings the trees. The reality of the flow of the six days of creation history results from the word of God. Now, that doesn’t stop. The word of God speaks and history moves and changes and transforms. We seek changes in the world around us like these mighty men of old because we know that the word of God has given us promises about the future, given us demands upon our lives, called us to do particular things, and promised us that there are rewards ahead of us. And we’re supposed to do stuff.

So we begin by recognizing the thing that we’re supposed to do in response to these people that were so wonderful and so exciting to us. The first thing we’re supposed to do is recognize that we need to know the scriptures. And we have to recognize that those scriptures are an accurate description of what the future holds. Things move in terms of the word of God.

Now, one way to see this—because this is true—here’s what one translation, this is actually from the Word Bible Commentary translation, says of verse one: “Now faith celebrates the objective reality of the blessings for which we hope.” In other words, faith celebrates the objective reality of the things that we hope for. In other words, the promises. And faith is centered upon the person and work of Jesus Christ. That’s the content of faith. That’s what Hebrews is all about. That’s what the Bible is all about.

And the implications for the word: faith celebrates that the objective reality that Jesus Christ has now been raised to the right hand of the Father rules over all things, and the world is being brought to him now.

So first of all, there is this relationship to the second commandment that drives us to an understanding of the scriptures and our Bibles. Secondly, what we find in this hall of faith—these are just comments on Hebrews 11, the first couple of verses, the emphasis on the second commandment, I think, or at least the application of it. And this is what drives all the examples.

Now, the examples are interesting the way they’re sketched out. We don’t have time to deal with all of them today. But what I do want you to recognize, and probably you already did, is that at the very heart, the middle section—and if I’ve laid this thing out right, and even if I didn’t—the greatest number of verses in terms of who’s being talked about clearly are about Abraham, Sarah, and Isaac, right? So whether I’ve got it right that they’re the center in the little structure there, or whether it’s just that all these verses are piled up about the three of them and then their kids, either way, or maybe both ways, there’s a double witness to the fact that the core example of someone who believed God’s word and acted on it in faith is Abraham.

Why? Why Abraham? That, by the way, is why we have that coloring picture of Abraham, Sarah, and Isaac right in here. Sarah is listed in here as well, and we don’t want to forget that. But why them?

Well, the New Testament over and over and over again—Abraham is not just used as an illustration of some faithful guy. No, Abraham is listed over and over again in the pages of the New Testament because God has now brought to pass the covenant that he promised to Abraham. A Messiah would eventually come. A seed would appear. All the nations of the world would be blessed in him. All the world would be changed. The world would be put to rights with the coming of the Messiah that God promises to Abraham back in the book of Genesis.

It’s the Abrahamic covenant that God has moved to fulfill the promises of with the coming of Jesus Christ. And the New Testament is in part a great celebration that the covenant that was promised and given to Abraham—for the life of the world—that covenant now has been put into effect. The promises fulfilled by God.

Frequently, some would argue, and I think correctly, that at least in some cases, maybe many cases in the New Testament, when we read about God’s righteousness or justice, we’re reading about God’s faithfulness to the promises made to this guy Abraham—the word of God being brought to fruition.

And so at the center of Hebrews 11, the great example of faith in the word of God is Abraham, Sarah, and their seed, which takes us back to Genesis 17. On your outlines, I’ve got an outline there of Genesis 17. And again, it’s big and long and oh boy, it looks confusing. No, but you know, just you can take it and read it at another time. But it does seem to have a nice little structure.

The beginning and end of this section: Abraham is 99 years old, right? It’s specifically mentioned at the beginning and end. Why? Well, it’s a little boundary marker. It tells us this is a section. At the beginning, God appears to Abraham. And just before the last mention of him being 99, God goes away. God comes down. God goes away. And in the middle of that, God speaks.

So he’s 99. God comes. Then God speaks. And then Abraham falls down. And after the middle section once more, Abraham falls down. And then there’s another speech by God. And then God goes up away, and then he’s 99 again. I mean, there’s an obvious structure going on here.

And so we have five speeches. One and five are at either end, with Abraham going down. And the middle speeches are three speeches: speeches two, three, and four. At the very middle. And it’s interesting because again in the speeches in two and four, before we get right to the very heart of the text, God is promising certain things and changing the names. He changes Abram’s name to Abraham, and he changes Sarai’s name to Sarah.

And what that represents is that Abram isn’t going to be just a daddy. He’s going to be Big Daddy. All the nations will be blessed in him. And Sarai isn’t going to be a princess. She’s going to be a queen mother. She’s going to have more power and influence too. And kings are going to come forth from her.

So the covenant promises that are picked up in the middle of Hebrews are articulated here in Genesis 17. The very heart of them is this promise to bless the nations, to change his people—Abraham and Sarah at least—their name. And so, the equal ultimacy we could say, the joint heirs of the gift of life, Abraham and Sarah, and they are going to have a child together.

And so at the center of Genesis 17 is the same thing. It’s the center of Hebrews 11 where it’s not just Abraham, it’s Abraham and Sarah. And really, it isn’t just those two. It’s their future. It’s a future that’s given to them. And that’s the heart of Genesis 17.

The middle speech is when God tells them, “This is the sign of the covenant: circumcision. And you’ve got to circumcise yourself, all the males in your household, every child that’s born.”

Now, the center is significant. God’s word says do something that isn’t comfortable, but it’s something that tells you you can’t accomplish nothing. I mean, the whole discussion is about a seed, and circumcision is given to the organ of generation. You know, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out the imagery there, right? God is saying, “Humble yourself to me. Humble yourself to my word. Believe my word and do the things that are hard.” Okay? Things that you don’t like to do, things that express your inability to effect anything.

At the heart of the Genesis narrative of Abraham and Sarah and becoming Isaac is what’s really kind of at the heart then of what Hebrews is all about. We want to man up. We want to be mighty warriors for the Lord Jesus Christ. We want to transform the world in which we live. If it takes a hundred years, it takes a hundred years. If some of us have to be sawn in two, that’s okay.

The example over and over again is that they conquer cities. They stop the mouth of lions. We’re victorious. Yes, we’re seeking an eternal city, Hebrews 11 says, but along the path, right, as we’re marching to it, there’s a thousand delights on that path. And there’s the transformation of this world from its fallen state into reflecting the beauty and glory of God. That’s what those men did. That’s what we want.

We want to be powerful. We want to be mighty. We want to change the world. All that stuff. And at the heart of it is the example to us of Abraham, Sarah, and Isaac and his kids. And at the heart of the Abraham and Sarah narrative in Genesis 17 is God telling you: be humble. Do the things in my word that are difficult for you, that you don’t want to do.

Being a Christian, growing in sanctification, isn’t just, you know, like falling off a log. What is easy for us because of our old nature is sin. Sin’s what bubbles up to the top more often than not. You can become a Christian and the Spirit’s at work in you, but it’s not like the Spirit’s going to do stuff apart from the exertion of your energy. God is working in you, right? “Work out your salvation with fear and trembling.” It takes effort.

And if you don’t put effort in obedience to the word of God, then what’s going to bubble up in your life, and what you’re going to find yourself tailing off into, are patterns of unfaithfulness, patterns of worldliness, patterns of trials and difficulties. You just sort of weave around in the world.

You young people in this church, you’ve been stalled calves. Your parents at this church—we had to go out on the range. I mean, I went to MLM school. The Bible—never heard of the Westminster Confession of Faith. Wasn’t taught, wasn’t referred to, no knowledge of it. When we found it, we were mad. Let’s go back home and, you know, do a little argument going on there because this is ridiculous. I’m not saying everything that Westminster says is right. I think most of it is though. It is a beautiful document. Forget the rightness of it even for a moment. It is a beautiful expression of faithful men and women who in the midst of difficulties in the Protestant Reformation produced the document.

So your parents, we had to search around for this stuff. We had to look high and low. The internet wasn’t so great back then. We had to read big books and find out little things by reading big books. We had to read a Gary North book this big, ninety percent of which was pitiful, but ten percent of it was absolute pure refined gold. You young people—you’ve been stalled calves. You have more advantage in that sense than we did. You’ve been taught the Westminster Confession all your life, catechism all your life. You grew up in this church, gone to the Sunday school, you know the Bible pretty good, right?

What are you going to do with it?

Faith is not hearing, believing, and then walking away and not having your life changed by those things. The scriptures say that what you have to do with that increased knowledge is you’ve got increased responsibility to change the world that we’re handing over to you.

We did some good things in this church. Oh yeah, they were small things in many ways compared to others. They were significant things. I don’t mind saying that. You know, Nehemiah said at the end of his life, “Remember us, Lord, for our work.” I say the same thing because I know that it’s not me. It wasn’t the men of this church. It wasn’t Howard. It was the spirit of God working through us and in us, and our wives—Tauashi, Debbie, Christine, Valerie, others, the apprentices. But God accomplished things through us.

We expect more from you, young people. We expect you to do better than the things we did. We expect you to look at our lives as stupid as they were in many ways and to take the stalled wonders of the Reformation faith and transformation worldview of postmillennialism and an understanding of the application of law in every area of life, and we expect you to do more than we do.

It’s highly disappointing when you don’t. I don’t mean to make you feel—I guess I do mean to make you feel bad. And sometimes if you’re not doing stuff and I know evidence—you know, faithful work sometimes goes on completely unseen by men—I understand that. If you’re doing stuff even though I don’t see it, that’s okay. I’m not trying to make you feel bad, but I am calling you today on All Saints Day to consider these saints, to consider their knowledge of the word of God.

And at the very heart of the structure of the heroes of faith given to us here is a call for humility, working hard, doing things that we don’t like to do. And if you just let nature take its course, you’re fading off the track. You’re not going to be manning up for the Christian faith of the Lord Jesus Christ.

And the heart of this structure of Abraham’s account is one that shows us that deep humility is at the base of it. Doing things in obedience to God’s word, which may seem silly, counterproductive—as circumcision would to a man who’s promised a seed—are productive in many ways. And recognizing our total inability to do the stuff that God will then have us do by the power of the Holy Spirit.

Another thing about the middle: it’s multigenerational, right? At the center of the heroes of faith stuff is Abraham and Sarah, and then Isaac is thrown in there, and then it’s Jacob, and it’s Joseph. I mean, it’s the progression of the seed.

Now, it’s interesting if you think about it. Because at the center then, we see Abram coming out from a foreign country. That’s his call. That’s his salvation. He comes out, and then he believes this promise about a seed when he’s 99 years old, and he doesn’t see it. Eventually he’ll get a child. But the text immediately goes on to show us the blessings, the truthfulness, the covenant faithfulness of God to produce a seed that’s used to change the world, right?

You understand what I’m saying? Abraham couldn’t see it. Sarah couldn’t see it. They saw one child, but we’re given it in such a way as to show us all the generations that come forth to Joseph and then eventually, of course, leading up into the coming of Messiah himself.

And so we’re given history in a little nutshell to remind us that’s the way it is in reality. Faith is the assurance that those generations will come forth from us doing the will of God, transforming the world.

So faith has this great future orientation. Christ has come to fulfill the Abrahamic promises: that all the nations of the world will be blessed. That’s the big thing that’s happening right now. We can’t see it. In fact, what we see is the opposite. We’re like the Hebrews. They had socialism. They probably were losing the free market with Caesar worship and all that stuff. So are we with our Caesar. That’s what we’ve got going on.

All these Zars, you know, Zar is Caesar. It’s the same word. That’s what we’ve got going on. We see a loss of freedom. We see a lot of problems happening. We see potentially some shifts geopolitically. We don’t know.

So we’re in a similar situation. And God wants us to have a long-term perspective: that he is indeed bringing blessings to all nations, including ultimately the nation that’ll inhabit this portion of the globe, this part of the world that God has given to us.

We are to imitate these heroes. And as I’ve been saying, with Abraham and the centrality there, we imitate these heroes by humbling ourselves, believing the word of God, and having a future orientation to what we do. Not demanding to walk by the visible, by sight, but rather walking in obedience to the word of God, by hearing, by faith. Hearing the word of God in humility—but we’re supposed to imitate these guys.

As I said, the immediate context for what happens here in Hebrews 11 is Paul has just told them in the middle section of Hebrews that Jesus Christ is the high priest of good things to come. And Hebrews 11 then begins the fifth section of the book where it talks about how we’re supposed to live with faith and endurance. That’s what he’s just kind of set them up for, and that’s what Hebrews 11 is all about: it’s a call to faith and endurance.

Just before this, in chapter 10, he says, “We’re not those who shrink back to destruction, but of those who have faith to the persevering, or the preserving rather, of the soul.” Hebrews is a call to endurance. It’s a call to man up. It’s a call to go ahead and do the things that you’re tired of doing or maybe you didn’t even ever get started doing. Hebrews says, “Persevere, do the right thing, run the race with endurance.”

And just before this, he’s quoted Habakkuk saying, “The just shall live by faith.” Which doesn’t mean particularly there—and I think probably also in Romans 1—it doesn’t mean that, you know, we have an imputed righteousness and that we’re going to live eternally and that we’re saved by faith. All that’s true. But when Habakkuk wrote that phrase, it was a prophet telling God’s people they were dead. God was killing them. He was sending them into captivity.

The prophet was announcing bad times. The Assyrians are going to come. The Babylonians are coming. Some of them are written in the context of all those disasters. And Habakkuk says: what can you do when—I’m going to use a reference here. What can you do when the president’s in charge? What can you do when the Assyrians are coming or the Babylonians are coming? Forgive me if I’ve offended anybody with the reference to our president, but let’s just say that I use an example here. Not for the man—I don’t know the man—but for the apparent representation of what’s happening in our country with the loss of freedom in terms of market decisions and transactions, with the potential desire to, whatever it is.

But what do you do? Let’s say he is as bad as people think he’s going to be. What do you do? And Habakkuk says, “My just one, Jesus Christ, will live by faith.” And those who are in him, who are united to him—my just ones, us, you and me—Hebrews says, “We’ll live by faith by believing the promises of God’s word and running with endurance the race that’s set before us.”

We will live by faith now in the present, not just at some eternal point when we go into a heavenly destination. The just will live out the life here and now by faith. And if we don’t, then we’re not the just. We’re not those who are part of the people of God. It’s that simple. Because the just shall live by faith.

We have a bright future in front of us. This text tells us. It gives us all kinds of intermediate examples. I mentioned this earlier. And then it tells us that ultimately the long-term goal—you know, the eternal transformation of this world—is what we’re headed for as well. And along the way, all kinds of victories are given to God’s people. It’s a bright future. The promise of God is that Jesus Christ is indeed the high priest of good things to come and that those good things are coming in time and history as well as at the last moment.

It gives us optimism. It gives us the ability to have the kind of endurance in our race that God wants us to have. He wants us to please him. That’s what these men did. They desired to please God.

Do you today? You man up. You commit yourselves afresh to run the race with endurance for one reason ultimately. It’s not because you owe it to him. It’s not a debt you’re paying. I suppose there’s some aspect of that. It’s not because you’re going to earn eternal favor with God. That was done through Jesus Christ.

What is it? It’s because of our love for him, our love for what he’s accomplished for us. And when we love him, when we love our heavenly Father, Jesus Christ, and the Spirit bears witness of this love that we’re his children—we love Father. We want to please Father with what we do. And God calls us to do that very thing.

The Christian’s desire in life, the reformer’s desire, the saints listed for us in Hebrews 11—their great desire was to please the one who had spoken such great promises to them and even allow them to suffer if need be, to have the glory of martyrdom if need be, for the cause of Jesus Christ. That’s what they wanted to do as believers in the word of God: to please him.

I asked you last week at the end of every day: ask yourself, well, what beauty was in that day? Did I work beautifully today? And this week I’m going to ask you: ask yourself a different question. Did I please God today? Did the Father look at me, look at what I did, and smile?

You know, he’s easily pleased but never satisfied, right? Never fully satisfied, but he’s easily pleased. You have to recognize you don’t have to do wonderful great things to please God. You do an act of faith in the power of the Holy Spirit. You just love your wife by saying something nice to her. You smile at your parents even when you think they’re not doing something right, and you make a good presentation to them of an appeal or whatever it is. You work hard for your employer, not because you want to make money, but ultimately because you love the Father who gave you work to do, and you know its effect on transforming the world.

Every one of those small daily acts of life—yes, changing the diaper—the Lord God, I believe our Father in heaven looks at those acts done not just because they’re being done, but when those acts are done out of faith, the response of belief to his word. It delights him. We please him. He smiles upon us.