Sermon Notes

August 24, 2025

In The Shadow Of Giants: A Faith that Fights

Hebrews 11:1-40

Last week, we began the fight against our giants, and we saw that we must attack our giants at their foundation, which was based on the supernatural. We make sure that we are filled with the Spirit by being a blood-bought, born-again follower of Jesus who has not quenched nor grieved the Holy Spirit in our lives, but are following daily in obedience in the fight against our giants. However, in our battle, the foundation of the giant is not the only foundation that we must be concerned about. We need to be concerned with ours as well. Any athlete will tell you that your stance is going to be the key to finding success on the playing field, and the same goes for those who are on the spiritual battlefield — we must have a firm foundation. Our foundation is the only perfectly solid foundation that someone can have because our foundation as a Christian is in Jesus Christ and His resurrection. When we stand on the firm foundation of Christ and His Gospel, we fight in the power and boldness of the Holy Spirit, and we will always see victory in our lives over our giants who cast large shadows. The problem is that we can quench the Spirit's work in our lives, like we saw last week, but we have another problem as well. We can also fall off our foundation. Both are extremely detrimental in our fight, and we can’t afford to have this happen and still be looking for victory. Remember, Jesus never fails, so our foundation will never fail, but we can find ourselves sliding off that foundation when we try to fight for our humanity. We must make sure we are tethered securely to our firm foundation, and the thing that is going to hold us fast to our foundation is our faith.

When we all take a moment and look back upon our lives, we will remember things that we experienced, and with them, can bring pleasant memories. Maybe it’s the sound of someone’s voice you remember calling you home when you were playing outside in your childhood. Maybe it’s the smell of a campfire that brings back memories of beloved family camping trips. It could be the feeling of the summer sun on your face that reminds you of a vacation that you hold dear. Maybe it’s the sight of snow that brings you back to a winter car ride that you are still praising God about because you made it home, or perhaps it’s the taste of a favorite meal that brings back memories of Sunday afternoons growing up. No matter the memory, they all were experienced through our five senses. These senses are what God gave us to experience and understand the reality of the world around us. Faith plays the same role, but not in the physical world. It's what we use to understand and experience the reality of the spiritual, and it’s what holds us fast to the firm foundation that we have in Jesus. So this morning, I want to look at Hebrews 11 to define and demonstrate the kind of faith that will hold us fast to our firm foundation as we battle the giants in our lives.

Faith Defined - Hebrews 11:1

1 Faith shows the reality of what we hope for; it is the evidence of things we cannot see.

The author jumps right in, defining faith in the life of a believer in Jesus Christ. This is a very important distinction because the world’s definition of faith and a Biblical understanding of faith are incongruent. The world loves to distort the true meaning of faith and has done so for millennia. It has taken many forms over the years, but one of the most prevalent that we see in our present culture comes from a movement that was popularized some 20 years ago with a best-selling novel called “The Secret”. I’m not sure if you remember this book, but it was riding the wave of popularity as it was featured in Oprah's book club. The book espoused the pseudoscientific belief and called others to embrace the “Law of Attraction”, “The New Thought Movement,” and “Manifestation”. This false faith ideology is broken down into three parts. Ask for what you want and be as clear as possible and speak it into the universe. Believe that the universe is already sending it your way. Receive it by acting and feeling that you have already been given it by the universe. The funny thing about this new age idea is that you replace the word “universe” with “God,” and you have a heresy that has permeated many churches, especially those in Africa and America. You might have heard it referred to as “Name it and Claim it” or “The Prosperity Gospel,” and either of those is nothing more than the lies of Satan repackaged to look like the true Gospel of Jesus Christ. True Biblical faith, the type of faith that all Christians are called to have and hold fast to, is not an “I hope so” feeling, but rather it’s exactly what the writer here in Hebrews defines it as. To understand its definition, I think we can focus on two words here in this first verse.

The first word we need to look at is REALITY. This word in the Greek gives us a wonderful picture of support or foundation, much like the foundation we talked about that we need to fight our giants. It’s been said that doubt says, “There is no way that can happen,” and faith says, “I can’t wait to see how God does this.” The difference between these responses is the certainty of a particular reality, and like we said before, faith is how we experience the supernatural. The promises that are in the future, in a place we have never experienced, it’s faith that knows that these promises are not just a wishful thought, but a reality because of the resurrection of Jesus Christ. It’s faith that holds us tight to Jesus during battle, so that we will not be shaken even when our giants are yelling at us and trying to exchange the truth of God with their lies.

The second word I want us to focus on is the word EVIDENCE. Many people assume that to be a Christian, you must have blind faith, but this couldn’t be further from the truth. Believing in something by blind faith makes the object of your faith nothing more than a superstition. I’ve even heard some well-meaning Christians tell others who are looking for answers about God and Scripture that “you just have to believe”, but remember, just because you don’t have the answer, doesn’t mean there is not an answer. Let me encourage you if you are struggling with intellectual doubt, continue to dig, continue to question, continue to ask, or come and talk to one of the Pastors. I, for one, LOVE answering questions about our faith because the more questions you ask, the more answers you find, and the more you realize Jesus’ statement in John 14:6 is the truth. When you find truth, you always find Jesus, and when you do, you realize what a firm foundation we have for our faith because of Jesus. Peter penned 1 Peter 3:15 and commanded us to have an answer for anyone who has a question about the hope that is inside of us. He wrote this because he knew people would have questions, and we need to know why we believe what we believe as we mature in our faith. In Peter’s command to be ready to answer when someone asks about the hope that is within you, he is commanding us to be ready with evidence of our faith in Jesus. This comes in many forms. It can be manuscript evidence, archaeological evidence, prophetic evidence, or statistical evidence. That list goes on and on. There is an entire branch of Christian study devoted to the defense of the faith and it is called Apologetics (Apologetics being a Greek word derived from the Greek word Apologia that we translate as “answer” in 1 Peter 3:15). So through these two words we see that faith as an assurance that is grounded in reality because of evidence and not wishful thinking. It’s not just a definitional concept of faith that is going to help us have the faith that will hold us in the battle. If we are going to grow in our faith, we are going to have to walk with ones who have walked in faith. You probably wouldn’t want to have your heart operated on by a doctor who has only read about the surgery in books. You want someone who has walked that path before. This is the reason that the writer of Hebrews continues the rest of this chapter by looking at the faith of men and women in history and will show us that faith is not just a belief. It's something that permeates all aspects of our lives, and we need to understand what this looks like in the real world, and that’s exactly what the writer of Hebrews provides for us.

Faith Demonstrated - Hebrews 11:2-40

Over the next 39 verses, we are told about faithful followers after faithful followers who conquered giants in their lives and how their faith in God worked during those battles. There are over 20 different heroes of the faith that are mentioned here (We don’t know the actual number because the writer includes the line “and all the prophets”). In the interest of time, I want to just look at 6 of them or groups of them to see how faith should play out.

Abel - Faith in Worship

The story of Abel and his brother Cain is the first account of the brokenness of humanity after the fall that is recorded in Scripture. However, the author here does not focus on the tragedy that is played out in the brothers' relationship, but rather, he focuses on his faith. Between the words recorded here as well as the original account recorded in Genesis 4, we see that God had revealed the ways that Adam and his family were to worship God. Abel had faith and worshiped God the way God wants to be worshiped. Able brought the best of what he had to God. He brought the first of what he had to God. He didn’t do it out of obligation but did it as an act of worship to give God what he is due because of who He is. Abel didn’t, but we are told he gave “some” of his crops to God. Yes, Abel was religious, but he was not acting in worship as a righteous act. The same must happen with us. We must worship in faith. We respond to God because we KNOW He is who He says He is, and when we take Him at His Word, we will respond to Him by giving Him our best and our first, whether it is our money, our time, or our energy. When you have true faith in God, you will respond properly in worship.

Enoch - Faith in our daily lives

Enoch must be one of the most interesting characters in the Book of Genesis. He is mentioned just briefly in Chapter 5 of Genesis during a genealogical rundown of the family of Adam. We are told that he walked closely with God, and one day God just took him home. In the account here in Hebrews, we are given one of the most powerful verses in Hebrews 11, “Before he was taken up, he was known as a person who pleased God. And it is impossible to please God without faith.” If you want to please God with your life, then it’s going to have to be a life in which you walk in faith daily with God. Now we can’t see what that looks like from just the few verses about Enoch in the Bible, but as we look at the entirety of Scripture, we can see this starts with a desire to please God. We must seek Him in everything. We must pray, asking God to mold our will to His. It's focusing on His Word as we see how we can live it out in obedience. It's through worship, and it’s through proclaiming it to others. This is how we walk by faith daily, just like Enoch.

Abraham, Issac, Jacob, Joseph - Faith waits

A summary of the faith of these patriarchs is not going to be sufficient to understand the totality of what the author here in Hebrews is talking about, so I will focus on one small part that can help us in our battles. There were 4 generations of men whose faith was seen in their waiting. They didn’t know where they were going. They only knew what they left behind, and they knew what God had promised for the future. Instead of going back, they pressed on, not receiving what God had promised instantly, but KNOWING it would happen, and pressed on. They knew what we needed to understand. God is calling for our obedience in all things and will work it all out in His timing. We must keep fighting in obedience, knowing that God will work it all out in the end, just like He promised. Remember Abraham and Issac? Abraham promised that God would provide a lamb for the offering, and while God temporarily stepped into that situation and provided a lamb for the time being, it took 2,000 years for God to ultimately send the Lamb that defeated the giant of sin once and for all. Remember to serve while you wait. Be obedient while you wait and walk with God in faith as you wait upon the Lord. Never forget that His timing is always perfect, and there are many times in life when we will feel like we don’t know where we are going, and that is OK. God just wants us to trust Him, take that first step of obedience, and wait for Him to tell us where the second step should lead.

Noah - A Faith that works

James 2:20 - Faith without works is dead. There is probably no other more famous verse about faith in Scripture. It means that true Biblical faith will always spur you to action. Moses showed this perfectly in his life. He had God’s Word. That Word spurred him to action in building an ark. It was by faith that he ignored all the comments because it had never rained before, and it was by faith that his family was saved as well. We need to understand that when God speaks, it’s not just for our information, it’s for our transformation — our transformation into someone who is more like Jesus every day. If your faith is not spurring you to work, then your faith is dead and is not saving faith.

Moses - A Faith that Focuses

For Mother's Day, we spoke about the investment that Moses’ Mom made in his life to ensure that he was brought up in the Lord. This is attributed to Moses' faith. It was faith in God that caused him not to focus on the pleasures of this world, but to choose the things of God, no matter the consequences. It was faith that caused him to make the right decisions and have the right values. It was faith that kept his focus off his giant, and instead of being afraid, His faith caused him to focus on God, and he knew when he was supposed to move. It was his faith that caused Moses to be moved and tell others how they could be spared by being covered by the blood of the lamb. It was by faith that Moses walked into the Red Sea and did not try to walk around or float over it, because Moses knew God was going to take care of the giant, and he wasn’t concerned about how. He just walked in obedience, focused on the One whom he served.

Joshua & Rahab - Faith brings victory

Jericho was impossible to conquer from a worldly viewpoint, especially with the absurd instructions that God gave, but Joshua had faith and followed in obedience, and the walls came tumbling down, even though it didn’t make sense. Rahab had faith in God and was saved by grace, and despite who she was before she met God, she was included in the bloodline of the Savior of the world — Jesus. When we have faith and we follow that in obedient action, we will see victory. The writer of Hebrews reminds us that sometimes victory is not what we think it should look like. Many heroes of the faith suffered and died. We are reminded that through Jesus, the best is yet to come, and that is the hope we hold on to no matter where we find ourselves in this world.

As I was writing this sermon, I paused to attend a homecoming celebration of a true man of God. As I was reflecting upon the life of this saint, they played an old hymn over the slideshow. It was the song, “When We All Get to Heaven”. Now I listened closely to the words of that song, “When we all get to heaven, what a day of rejoicing that will be, when we all see Jesus, we will sing and shout the victory!”. Those words are very true, but I couldn’t help but think about them, considering the sermon that God had me preparing. Through faith, true Biblical faith, we don’t have to wait to see Jesus to shout the victory. We can shout it now because we have evidence in the reality that awaits all of those who have made Jesus the Lord of their lives. Death has been conquered once and for all, and we have been cleansed and set free from the bondage of sin. We have a victory right now that we can shout about! We must have a faith that is Biblical if we are going to fight our giants. It's not a superstition, nor is it an intellectual pursuit. It is a total response to what God has revealed in His Word. It's a reality that we can experience each and every day, but only when we have faith in Jesus!

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Sermon Notes

In The Shadow Of Giants: A Faith that Fights

Hebrews 11:1-40

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