When my kids were in high school they ran track. If you are unfamiliar with how track meets work, they can be awfully confusing to watch. Several events take place simultaneously. My favorite–and the only one I somewhat understood–was the relay race. I loved watching the handing off of the baton.
In 1996 Atlanta had the privilege of hosting the Summer Olympics. Donovan Bailey, a runner from Canada, won the 100-meter race and took home the gold with a blazing time of 9.84 seconds. But, ironically, his was not the fastest 100 meters run that year; it was not even close. There were actually several runners who each ran 100 meters much quicker than Bailey. They were the runners who ran their 100 meters in the 4×100 relays. (4 runners each running 100 meters.) These runners ran faster because they were handed their batons while they were in full sprint.
One of the prayers of Grace is to hand off the spiritual baton to the next generation with a spiritual lead. I’m excited to open the Word with you this week, the first week our schools are back in session. We will be praying for our schools and our students. We will see how to hand off this race to the next generation in the lead.
Podcast: Download (Duration: 37:39 — 25.9MB)
Downloads
Notes Transcript Video Audio iTunesGrace Fellowship Church
Buddy Hoffman
August 11, 2013
Let’s Hand Them a Lead!
Hebrews 11-12
Good morning. If you’re here this morning and you don’t have a Bible with you, slip up your hand. We want to put a Bible in your hand. It may take them a moment or so. Some of you carry your Bibles on your iPhones or other sort of phones. I haven’t quite gotten used to that. I do know you can, on your phone, switch over to a game if it gets boring and nobody much really knows. So you can go like, “Uh, this is not working for me today,” and Words with Friends or whatever is the thing.
When you get that Bible, open it up to Hebrews 11 and Hebrews 12. I’m really, really excited about this series we’re going to launch in just a few weeks out of the book of Philippians. I’m sure some of you have done studies out of Philippians before. We haven’t done one here in a long, long time, but I really believe if we take seriously what the book of Philippians says, we can experience real joy.
One of the things I find among a lot of people who are believers is they live lives of quiet desperation. They’re not running around saying, “I’m miserable! I’m miserable! I’m miserable!” but if you start digging down to how they view life, it’s not really a joyful approach to life. They’re miserable.
Now let’s be realistic about something. If we want people to come into the kingdom, then we’re going to have to learn to experience joy ourselves. I read a book a number of years ago. It was called The God of All Comfort. Has anybody ever read that book? It’s a great book. The very first paragraph is worth the whole book. It reads like this, that a lot of people about their Christianity are like people with a really bad headache. They would really like to get rid of the headache but they don’t want to cut off their head. They’re not ready to jettison the entire thing, but they really just carry it like it’s a problem.
If you have that Bible, open it up there to Hebrews 11. Look at verse 1, and then we’re going to just read the first few verses of chapter 11. Then we’re going to read down into chapter 12. “Faith is the confidence that what we hope for will actually happen…” Now that’s a pretty powerful statement. “Faith is the confidence that what we hope for will actually happen; it gives us assurance about things we cannot see. Through their faith, the people in days of old earned a good reputation.” (Hebrews 11:1-2) Then it starts going through here in this chronological order.
It’s been so long ago in some of your minds that you might not remember the basic One Story series. This is what happens here, and it takes us through Abel and Enoch and Abraham and Sarah. It’s story upon story upon story that build upon the faith of one generation after the next generation.
When you see that phrase in verse 1, “Faith is…” and then it defines faith, as far as I know, this is the only place in Scripture that actually defines and says, “This is what faith is.” There are other places in the Bible that are definitive about other things. Like if I said to you, “What is love?” what chapter would you think of? First Corinthians 13.
When I was a kid, my mom and dad (and we weren’t above this either when our kids were small) would bribe me to memorize Scripture. Did any of you do that with your kids? You just bribe them. Sometimes people say, “Well, you shouldn’t bribe,” but a real bribe is to try to get somebody to do something wrong. I just see it as an external motivation. As a teenager, one of the first chapters I ever memorized was 1 Corinthians 13, because I didn’t want to live my life not knowing and being able to see what love really was.
If you say, “What is prayer?” what passage would you think of? I’ll give you a hint. It’s Matthew, and it’s 5, and it’s the Lord’s Prayer. He tells the disciples, “Pray like this. Our Father, which art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done.” He gives them this pattern of prayer. You have these definitions, these examples of what major building blocks of the kingdom living is all about. But as we all know very well, there’s a difference in the definition of something and the demonstration of something.
Does anybody like ice cream? I like ice cream anytime, all the time. I was curious when I was thinking about this. I looked up the definition of ice cream in several dictionaries. It sounds terrible. It goes something like, “A sugary substance with [this amount of] cream…” and it just gives this chemical analysis of ice cream.
If I were to say to you, “Let’s go over and have some ice cream,” and you said, “Well, what is ice cream?” If I were to open a dictionary and give you a definition of ice cream, you might go, “Hmm, maybe not.” But if you drive over to Bruster’s… My favorite ice cream at Bruster’s is the mint chocolate chip. Does anybody else like the mint chocolate chip? Man, that is really good. They’ll let you have those little taste testers. If I say, “Taste this.” You wouldn’t think about the definition at all, because the demonstration is so much better than the definition.
What you find in Hebrews 11, it defines faith, but then it goes through and gives us a whole host of people who demonstrated the faith. What does faith really, really look like? It looks like Abraham when he’s over in Ur of the Chaldees and he has a pretty good life, and he lives in the cradle of civilization, and God says to him, “I want you to leave here.”
I think sometimes we think of people like Abraham as some kind of primitive people and a primitive culture who lived in caves or just lean-tos and stuff. If you ever have a chance, go through the British Museum and look at the art pieces they have dug up in the Ur of the Chaldees. They are as good as anything you would find in art galleries today. They had libraries. It was a very advanced civilization.
God says, “Okay, here’s what I want you to do. I want you to leave the most advanced civilization, where you really are somebody, and I want you to go where you don’t even know where it is. I want you to go nowhere, and I want you to be nobody.” Have you ever had one of those situations where God just tells you, “I’m going to take you down a road, and you don’t know that road. All you know is you have to follow me”? Do you know what? That’s faith.
That’s where you just step out and you don’t really know everything God is going to tell you to do. When Jody and I graduated college, I’d prayed about this a lot, and Jody had prayed about this a lot. It seemed kind of crazy, even looking back on it, but God had laid on my heart through a number of circumstances to go plant a church in Boise, Idaho.
I started telling my friends we were going to go start a church in Boise, and they would say, “Who do you know in Boise?” and I would say, “Nobody.” “Have you raised support to go start a church in Boise?” and I would say, “No.” They said, “Well, what are you going to do?” This was before GPS. I said, “I’m going to get a map. I’m going to figure out how to get to Boise on the map, and then we’re going to drive to Boise and we’re going to believe God has prepared some people who he wants to plant this church with us.”
They would look at me like I had just landed from Mars. They said, “You don’t know anybody. You don’t know a church there. You don’t have any money. You’re just going to drive out there. This doesn’t sound like faith. This sounds like you’re crazy.” And we did. We just drove out to Boise.
We got there in June, and it was the longest day of the year. It doesn’t get dark out there till late because it’s way west, and I thought we were entering The Twilight Zone. We went up over this ridge, and we looked down over the city, and I said, “God, I believe you have some people here you want us to minister to and link up with to reach this city.”
We checked into the cheapest motel in town because we didn’t have much money. Then we went to a breakfast buffet all, you could eat. I said to Jody, “Eat a lot because we don’t really have a lot of money. Eat a lot.” Then we got back in the car and we started driving around. We drove around town, which at that time Boise wasn’t very large, so it didn’t take long. You could drive from one end of time to the other in like about eight minutes.
We drove through town a couple of times, and we drove up onto the edge of the city. There was an old building there that looked like maybe at some time it’d been a church. We pulled into the place, and we pulled around back of the building, and a couple was pulling weeds out from around the door. I rolled the window down and I said, “Is this a church?” and the man looked up at me and he said, “No, but we wish it was.”
I said, “Really?” He said, “Yeah, we’ve been praying for three years that God would send somebody here to be a pastor and lead us.” I’m thinking, “Hey, God has a plan.” I didn’t know if that was the place. I didn’t know if that was the person. Have you ever gone fishing and you get a pretty good bite? I’m thinking, “Okay, well, this is a pretty good bite.”
We passed out a few flyers, and within two weeks we’d found about five families that had been praying for years that God would send somebody to plant this church. Now let me tell you something. Faith is when you really hear from God and you step out on that. I’m not advocating that as a way of building churches, by the way.
Chapter 12. I want you to look at this. He goes through this whole list of people who demonstrate faith. Boy, these are stories after stories after faith-building stories after faith-building stories. I have to tell you that when you read through these stories, they’re not all like you would wish they would turn out.
Like when you read the story of David and he kills the giant, you go, “Yes! That’s the way faith is supposed to turn out.” You read the story of Moses and you read the story of Abraham and you read where Moses extends his rod across the Red Sea and it opens up, and you say, “Yes! That’s what happens when we really step out on faith.”
But it’s worth your time to look down to verse 35 and notice what it says there. “Women received their loved ones back again from death.” (Hebrews 11:35) Now whether you believe that or not, I’m here to testify that does happen. I won’t go into that, but I have been into that valley. But look at this. “But others were tortured, refusing to turn from God in order to be set free. They placed their hope in a better life after the resurrection. Some were jeered at, and their backs were cut open with whips. Others were chained in prisons. Some died by stoning, some were sawed in half…” (Hebrews 11:35-37)
Now I’m going to tell you something. That’s not what we like to hear. You say, “Well, how did your faith story go?” “Well, I got cut in half.” Or… “Well, you stepped out on faith and you did the right thing. How’d that go?” “Well, they cut my head off,” or, “They beat me till my back broke open.”
Look at chapter 12. “Therefore, since we are surrounded…” Now I want you to think what that means, because that could mean a lot more than it just sounds. “Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a huge crowd of witnesses to the life of faith…”
Now there is disagreement on this issue among theologians, but there is a considerable amount of people who read this and take it just for what it says, that those who have gone before us are witnessing the life we’re living today. They are witnesses of the faith life we are running. He says because we’re running this faith life and because we’re surrounded by these witnesses, “…let us strip off every weight that slows us down, especially the sin that so easily trips us up.” (Hebrews 12:1)
Now notice what it says here. This is important. “And let us run with endurance the race God has set before us. We do this by keeping our eyes on Jesus, the champion who initiates and perfects our faith. Because of the joy awaiting him, he endured the cross, disregarding its shame. Now he is seated in the place of honor beside God’s throne.” (Hebrews 12:1-2) That’s amazing. What he’s describing here is an interesting proposal.
Look at verse 39 of chapter 11. “All these people…” Who? Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Sarah, Joseph, Moses. “All these people earned a good reputation because of their faith, yet none of them received all that God had promised. For God had something better in mind for us, so that they would not reach perfection without us.” (Hebrews 11:39-40)
Do you know what he’s describing here? He’s describing a relay race. He says they didn’t receive their full reward because their full reward couldn’t be given because there was still more of the race yet to be run.
Our kids ran track in high school. Did any of your kids run track in high school? Have any of you been to a track event? They’re sort of confusing. It’s not like baseball or football where you can just follow one thing. Like you have people running around in circles. You have people throwing heavy shot puts. You have people throwing spears.
You have people running down a track with a big pole in their hand trying to launch over some kind of another pole. And then you have people running down the track on the other side without any pole trying to just jump over another pole. You have people who are running and then they’re trying to jump as far as they can. You have people who are running and jumping, but they get to touch down three times before.
I remember the first track and field competition I went to. Jody ran some track in high school. I never did. I’d never attended one. I’d seen them on TV as I briefly passed by to something I could understand. I was sitting up there with Jody, and I said, “What’s going on here? There are people running long races and there are people running short races and then there are people running races together. I can’t really follow it.”
But when your kids are involved, you’ll work at it. I would sit up there and I would say, “Okay, what’s happening now?” One of our kids ran the 4×4 relay. Do any of you watch 4×4 relay? I became fascinated with the 4×4 relay. I have my own little baton. This particular baton came from a Chick-fil-A. Any Chick-fil-A people here? I was asked to come do the prayer at a Chick-fil-A opening of a store, and they came out and they did this whole presentation. It was like getting inaugurated for president. They start telling this story about Truett.
They come out and some young person is in charge of this Chick-fil-A, and they start telling about how many sandwiches Truett made before he perfected the chicken sandwich and how many contests he entered and failed. They go through this whole big story. They have these values.
Then they say, “So on behalf of Truett Cathy and the tradition of Chick-fil-A, we are handing you off this baton, and it is your responsibility to carry on those values.” By the time was over, I was ready to sing, “God Bless America.” I was thinking, “Man, I went into the wrong business. I want to make chicken. Whoever believed chicken was this important? Good heavens!”
Now when you look at this Hebrews 11, what it’s describing is the reality that we as people of faith have this responsibility to hand off this faith to the next generation. We as parents have to ask ourselves that question…How are we doing? Because if you watch a 4×4, one thing is almost always certain. If you drop the baton, you’ve lost the race. You’ve lost the race. It’s in that passing of that baton.
Are most of us old enough to remember the ’96 Olympics? Where were they? Atlanta! I still like that. It’s Atlanta! There was a runner that year who became the fastest runner ever to run the 100 meters. Does anybody remember his name? Yes, Donovan Bailey. He was a Canadian. We had a Canadian staying with us, and it really hurt me. I did not think the Canadians were fast at anything except on ice, but Donovan Bailey was fast. He broke the world record.
But do you know that his record (It was 9.84) in the 100 meters that year wasn’t the fastest 100 meters that was run that year? It wasn’t even the second fastest. It wasn’t even the third fastest. It wasn’t even the fourth fastest. Do you know what the fastest 100 meter runs that were made that year? It wasn’t in the singular 100 meters; it was in the 4×4’s, because what happened is people received that baton running at full speed. They moved forward and they were ready.
Now do you know what our responsibility is? Not our responsibility; our immense privilege. It’s to hand that baton to the next generation so they don’t have to start from a dead start. Some of you came to faith, and you didn’t even come from a dead start; you came like from way behind the starting line. You weren’t raised in Christian homes. You were raised in environments that they fought and the fruit of the Spirit wasn’t manifest. When you got that baton, you ran as hard as you could, but you were always pulling something that was pulling at you.
Some of you were blessed because when you came to faith, you had a mother and a father and Sunday school teachers and all kinds of people who poured into you, and when you received that baton of faith, you were already in full stride. That’s a blessing. I understand this personally because I come from that kind of family.
I was talking to Mike Williams, because a number of years ago, Mike and I rode back over to Mississippi and Starkville. Mike’s grandfather was a Methodist pastor. Now listen to this. In 1922, he went to the Methodist assembly there and said, “We can no longer live lives that are not integrated and our churches have to integrate. We cannot treat people differently just because they’re of a different color. If they are brothers in Jesus, we have to worship together.”
Do you know what he received as a result of that? I guarantee you it wasn’t applause. It was death threats, churches that said, “We don’t want you to be pastor anymore.” I remember Mike reading his granddad’s obituary. They talked about how Mike’s dad was the man who stepped into the gap and changed the churches in Starkville. Now that’s not an easy job, but Mike was handed a baton that changed the trajectory of his life.
Next week, we’re starting back our LUG. We’re starting back our KidzLife. We have all kinds of programs downstairs. It’s the heart of this church that we hand the next generation a lead. Some of you were handed that baton behind. You can change it for some other kid. Let’s pray.
Father, thank you so much. Thank you for your grace. Thank you for how good you are to us. Thank you for the amazing blessing you are. We look at the faith we have seen demonstrated, and we look at this passage that invites us in to own that faith, and then we look to the champion of our faith, who is Jesus Christ, the finisher of that faith, and we keep our eyes on Jesus.
People will always let us down, but Lord, you never will. So this morning we pray. There are those here this morning who really just need to come and make commitments to you about their families or their kids or ask forgiveness for what has happened in their lives and the impediments they’ve placed before others, or ask the Lord to give them the ability to give their children their lead.
We want to pray together. We want to receive Communion together. There are some folks over here on my right who will pray with you. If you’re looking for somebody to pray with you this morning, if you have never come into the kingdom, why don’t you just do it today? It’s better in than it is out, I promise you.
In your name we pray.