The Just Shall Live by Faith — Mike Morrow

Faith Begins and Continues in Christ

Be turning with me this afternoon to the book of Hebrews chapter 11. While you're turning there, I want to read to you from Colossians chapter 2, and verse number 6, where the Bible says,. As you therefore received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk ye in Him.

And then verse 7 says, Rooted and built up in Him, and established in the faith, as ye have been taught, abounding therein with thanksgiving. As you received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk ye in Him. You received Him by faith.

Chapter number 11 of Hebrews says, Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. For by it the elders received a good report. Through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the Word of God, so that things which are seen were not made by things which do appear.

By faith Abel offered unto God a more excellent sacrifice than Cain, by which he obtained witness that he was righteous, God testifying of his gifts or his sacrifice. And by it he, being dead, yet speaketh.

By faith Enoch was translated that he should not see death, and was not found, because God had translated him. For before his translation he had this testimony, that he pleased God. But without faith it is impossible to please him, for he that cometh to God must believe that he is, and that he is a rewarder of them that diligently seek him.

By faith Noah, being warned of God of things not seen as yet, moved with fear, prepared an ark to the saving of his house, by the which he condemned the world, and became the heir of the righteousness, which is by faith.

Father, we bow in Your presence again today to thank You for the Word of God. We thank You, Lord, that it is our food, it is our life. We thank You for the Spirit of God that inspired this book. We thank You for the Spirit of God who now illuminates the Word of God to our hearts.

And I pray, Lord, You'd do that this afternoon. I want to thank You for these men. I want to thank You, Lord, for what my eyes have seen, what I've heard. Thank You, Lord, for my own heart being refreshed by the fellowship.

Lord, I bless You today for this church, for their pastors, and Lord, for those in leadership, and for those who are in fellowship. Lord, I just bless You and praise You. Raise up more, Lord. Lord, help us in this hour.

You know my weakness. Lord, You know my inabilities, and so I pray, oh God, that Your name would be glorified in spite of me. And Your truth, dear Lord, would come out regardless of what I say. Lord, I pray Your truth would reign supreme in this place today.

But if it please You, Lord, help me to speak the truth. Help me to say things in a way that's easily understood, and Lord, in a way that glorifies Christ, I pray. Thank You again for the cross. Thank You, Lord, for the blood that was shed for us.

Lord, I bless You and thank You for salvation today. Thank You for the companionship of the Holy Spirit. Oh God, thank You that we can call You Abba, our Father. Lord, we praise You today and thank You in Jesus' name.

Amen. As you receive Christ Jesus, the Lord so walk in Him. The Bible says that we received Him by faith. Scripture tells us that we're saved by grace through faith. And neither the grace nor the faith is of ourselves, but it's the gift of God.

God in mercy, if you're saved today, reached down and saved you, and He by grace gave you faith to believe the Gospel. If you're saved today, God by grace gave you faith to believe the Gospel. Last night I gave my testimony, and I did that on purpose because I wanted to kind of preface what we're going to be talking about in these days, if God continues to lead me in the way I feel like He is.

I don't think most of us today really understand how faith operates in the life of a Christian. We believe we were saved by faith. I gave you my testimony last night and I told you that for the first time in my life on that Thursday evening at about ten minutes till seven, for the first time in my life I genuinely believed that Jesus Christ had died on the cross for my sins, and that if I would call upon Him, He would forgive me of my sins, and change my life and save me forever.

Out of faith I did call upon Him, and in response to His own Word and His own promise, He did save me. So my life as a Christian began in faith. And if you're saved here today, your life began in faith.

Your Christian life began in faith. You exercised faith. I've listened to a lot of testimonies and I have to tell you, I believe certain things about testimonies. If I offend somebody, you're just offended, I'm sorry.

I'm not sorry that you're offended, I'm sorry that you have to be offended. But you hear me today, you don't go to bed one night lost and wake up saved. You don't grow into salvation. It's not a gradual thing.

God saves sinners. He saves people who understand that they're lost, and they exercise faith in Jesus Christ. Now I understand that there are different experiences, and I'm not trying to say everyone has to have the same experience that I've had.

But there are some elements to salvation that are the same. Lostness is one of them. Human depravity and the recognition of human depravity, whether you know that word or not, is one of them. And the need of a Savior, that's being lost.

And coming to Christ in faith as the Savior and the Lord of your life, is the other one. You have all kinds of stuff in between there, and all kinds of phenomenon that happen, and you felt this, and you saw that, and all the rest of that stuff.

But there's at least two things that are essential. You have to come to the end of yourself, and you have to come to Christ. And that's faith. That's faith. So how do you live the Christian life after that?

Legalism and the Works-Based Christian Life

Most of us are taught that after you're saved, then you've got a set of rules that you need to live by. Get up the next morning after you're saved, and you've got to have a prayer time. You've got to read your Bible.

How many Christians are reading their Bible because they're supposed to? Not because they're wanting to get something from God, but because they're supposed to. How many Christians are praying because they are obligated to pray?

The Bible says pray without ceasing, so I guess I better pray some. And I want to be a good Christian, and I want to be a spiritual person. And then when you head down in that direction, and I have to tell you, my background is in fundamental Baptist background.

And brother, one of the first messages I heard after the Lord saved me was, you know, you Christians sitting out here that have been saved, you need to get right with God. And then we were constantly told we needed to get right with God.

And so we were constantly getting right with God, not knowing that it was the blood of Jesus Christ that eternally made us right with God. It was through the blood of Christ that we have fellowship with God.

So a lot of people are brought into Christianity. The Lord saves them. And then immediately because of false teaching, they're brought into a works kind of mindset. We fall into this legalism. And it doesn't matter whether it's an outward legalism or an inward legalism.

You know, the guys I ran around with as a young Christian, very impressionable Christian, they were extremely legalistic. Men didn't wear Bermuda shorts, for instance. It was a saying back in those days for girls.

If a girl had a slit in her dress, slits are for sluts. Isn't that terrible? I'm admitting those kinds of things are terrible, but that's the kind of Christianity that I was birthed into. And I was genuinely saved.

They were right about conviction and they were right about the blood of Christ. But then immediately cast into this legalistic type of Christianity. Well, I began to pray and I began to seek to grow in the Lord.

And as I did that, I testified last night how the Lord saved me, how the Lord gave me my wife. All of that was by faith. I had come to the end of myself about a wife, and then the Lord gave me a wife.

As you receive Christ Jesus, the Lord so walk ye in Him. So as we learn to come to the end of ourselves in our Christian life, in our life, in our efforts, in our ability, and constantly live on the cusp of not I, but Christ.

It's Christ that lives in me. It's Christ living His life in me. As you learn that, you are actually learning what the Bible means when it says, the just shall live by faith. That's where life is. You see, life is not in legalism.

And life is not in licentiousness. You've got a whole crowd of folks over here on one side who are saying, well, I'm saved by grace and therefore I can live any way I want to. I can live in sin if I want to because I'm saved by grace.

I mean, God put my name down in the book of life. I'm forever saved. Hallelujah. Once saved, always saved. And I believe in once saved, always saved. But I always say it like this. Once saved. Saved. Really saved.

Always saved. We've got a lot of people who say they're saved who've never been saved. We've got a whole lot of people who say that they're children of God who've never come to Christ. That's another issue.

The point I'm trying to get across today is, the just shall live by their faith. You've got one crowd over here who says they're saved by grace and they live any way they want to. I believe the Bible teaches they're lost.

I believe that's what the Scripture says. You know a false prophet by the fruits he bears. You know a Christian by the fruits he bears. You know whether a man's real or not by his love for Christ and by the life that he lives.

You've got people on the other side, as I said, that are very legalistic. It's immediately, you have to get right with God and stay right with God and you do these things in order to stay right with God.

Well, I've got news for you. There is one performance that God accepted and that was the work of His Son in His life and in His death on Calvary's cross. And even now in His intercession for His children.

And my life has to be lived by faith in that. So now listen to me. He gives us here a definition of what faith is. What does it mean to live by faith? And I've read the commentaries. They say this is not a definition, but I'm going to say it is.

Faith as the Reality of Things Not Yet Seen

Listen to what He says. If I say to you a shirt is, and then I tell you what a shirt is, I've given you a definition of a shirt. Faith is, listen now, in the original language it actually starts off with the is.

Is faith, this is really what faith is. It is the reality of things that are hoped for. If you're reading a modern translation, it may translate it better than the King James. But what He's saying is faith is the title deed, the reality of things that we have confident assurance over.

If I buy something on the internet, and I get the receipt, and I print out the receipt, I've got a title deed to it. It's the title deed of something that I have confidence I'm going to get in the mail.

That's faith. If I own a piece of property and I have the deed to that piece of property, I may never have seen that property yet, but I'm the owner of that property. It is a reality in my life. He says that's what faith is.

Listen now, the presence of faith in your life is that. Now listen to what the object of that is. He says, faith is the title deed, the substance, the reality of things that we're confident we'll have.

Confident things. It is the evidence, the convincing of things not yet seen. We are convinced of things that are not yet seen. And then He's going to explain how faith works. Look at the next two verses.

He said, for by it the elders obtained a good report. And we're going to read about some of those elders down through here later on. But He just makes the general statement, this is how the elders lived their lives and pleased God.

This is how the Old Testament saints walked with God and pleased God. It was by faith. And they saw something far off that they had not possessed yet, but they believed God for it, and they lived as if it was theirs because it was theirs.

That's what faith is. And then He says in verse 3, through faith we understand. Wait a minute, let me stop there. We say, if I could understand something, then I'll believe it. God says, no, you believe something and then you understand it.

By faith we understand that the worlds were created. Listen to what He says. They were framed, the ages were framed, by the Word of God, God's speech, so that the things which are seen were not made of things which do appear.

Now we know that's true. You go back to Genesis, God said, let there be light. God spoke the world into existence from His Word. Out of nothing God spoke things into existence. And the world you see around you right now is made of things that are not seen.

By the way, it's just in the 21st century that we've really come to understand that the world is made by things you can't see. They've looked at the atom, and then they've gotten down below the atom and they've looked at the protons and the electrons.

And they've gotten down below the electrons and protons and they've looked at the quarks and the neutrinos and all the rest of that stuff. And they've gotten to the place where they can isolate something, but the problem is, it's moving so quickly they can never see it.

And the only way they can say it is, it was there. Because it's moved so quickly they can't see it. And so actually, the world, the things that you can see, is literally made from things that can't be seen.

Isn't that amazing? And now some people say, well, now I believe it. You don't have faith. You know, that's not faith. Faith is, God said this. That settled this. God said it. The worlds were framed. The ages were made by the Word of God.

That's how faith works. Now you're going to see that more practically here in just a minute. I really want you to get it. Listen to what he says now. He says, "...By faith Abel offered unto God a more excellent sacrifice than Cain, by which he obtained witness that he was righteous, God testifying of his gifts, and by it he being dead yet speaketh.".

So Abel brings a sacrifice to God out of his flock. How did he know to do that? I think the way he knew to do that is that, this has to be speculation somewhat, but his parents had been clothed with the skins of animals that had died because of their sins.

I think Adam knew much more about the Gospel than we could believe he knew. And when Abel comes to God, he realizes there is something about the innocent dying in the place of the guilty. And he brings his sacrifices to God.

Of course, Cain is over here laboring. He is so proud of that 30 pound watermelon. And he gets the biggest one and the best one. And that 20 pound squash that he's grown. And that ear of corn that's three feet long.

And he brings all of this that he has sweated over and toiled over. And he lays them before God and he says, See God what I have done. And God does not smile upon his sacrifice. And guess what? God says Abel is righteous.

Cain is unrighteous. And Abel dies. And the unrighteous seed persecutes the righteous. And the righteous dies. Why did Abel die? Abel died because he exercised faith. By faith he brought that sacrifice.

He had an insight into the will of God. And in doing the will of God by offering the innocent animal, he comes before God. And because he does that and God accepts him, Cain murders him. Cain who is of his father the devil.

Faith in Enoch, Noah, and God's Purposes

By faith Enoch was translated that he should not see death. Wait a minute. Here's another man who comes along who has this testimony that he pleased God and God doesn't allow him to die. He's taken out.

He's translated. He's brought out of this world. Faith works both ways. When we get down into the latter part of Hebrews chapter number 11, you're going to find some that got delivered from the sword and some that gave up to the sword.

Some who wandered this world in terrible situations. And others who were victorious. Some who were fed to the lions and died. And some who shut the mouths of lions by faith. And both of them by faith.

You see the problem with us is we don't understand that faith is not something we grab hold of and manipulate and use for ourselves. It's something that God works in us for His purpose to do His will in us.

That's what faith is about. And so Enoch escapes. Now listen. He says, Now here it's going to get really important. And I'm not going to preach a long time this morning or this afternoon, but I want to say to you it's about to get really important in your life.

Listen to what he says. By faith, Noah being warned of God, of things not seen as yet. Wait a minute. Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen yet. Noah, if you go back to chapter 6 of Genesis and read his history, you find that Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord.

And because he found grace in the eyes of the Lord, he was a perfect man and an upright man. He lived for the Lord in a terrible generation. In a time when everybody else, God said the whole earth, every imagination was wicked constantly, continuously.

It was a wicked, wicked place. And yet Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord. And God said something to Noah. And Noah heard God and believed God and obeyed God. And there was results that came from that.

Now hear me. That is the life of faith. The faith life is a living relationship with the living God who deals with your life in your circumstances according to the principles and the teachings of His Word so that He guides you day by day through all kinds of situations in your life.

I told you about meeting my wife because I wanted you to understand. I was a young man who had absolutely no experience. I was naive. I didn't know so many things just about living life. And yet God in His mercy arranged things so that I would find the very woman that He wanted me to have.

That 20 years later down the road would preserve my life and preserve my ministry and set me free. He arranged that. But how did that start? A conviction in my heart that was biblical. If God wants me to have a wife, He can give me a wife.

Here's the biblical truth. We receive everything we need from the Lord in this life. We don't need anything else from anybody else except from the Lord. The Lord gives us everything we need. He's our source.

As a child of God, you're born out of this world into this spiritual world. And God is your supplier. Jesus Christ is your shepherd. That's what David meant in the 23rd Psalm when he said, the Lord's my shepherd.

He leads me in green pastures. And then think about everything He said God supplied in His life. God is your supply. And there I am, a young naive young fellow, and I just believe the Bible. I believe God has a woman for me.

And so I seek His face and I wait before Him until He does exactly what He promised He would do. Here is Noah. He's walking with God. The Bible says Noah walked with God. It's like Enoch walked with God.

Enoch got taken out. Noah got given a job. The Lord said, I want you to build a boat. Why would I build a boat, Lord? It's going to rain. What is rain? Water is going to fall from the heavens and the fountains of the great deep are going to break up and I'm going to destroy this generation of people.

I'm going to destroy the whole earth. Now listen to what it says. Listen again. He says, without faith it's impossible to please God. The next verse, verse 7. By faith, Noah, he heard from God, being warned of God, of things not seen as yet.

Hadn't rained yet. Moved with fear. He moved. How? Out of obedience to God. He moved with fear and prepared an ark to the saving of his house. And by the way, the rest of us too, to the saving of all the rest of humanity so that the human race didn't perish from off the face of the earth.

So Noah hears from God. He is moved with fear. He obeys God by preparing the ark and he saves his house by which he condemned in building the ark, he condemned the world and became heir of the righteousness which is by faith.

Hearing and Obeying God's Word

Now hear me. That's repeated over and over and over again in this chapter on faith. My question to you is, what issue in your life are you hearing from God about? We're a pretty complacent bunch if we don't have any needs that we need to hear from God about.

I'm not talking about something mystical here. I'm talking about something practical. I'm not talking about something weird. I'm talking about if you're saved, you know what it means to be in fellowship with the Lord.

And if you're in fellowship with the Lord, it's not always just hallelujah. I'm learning prayer is not always me talking. It's a two-way. It's a conversation. And the Lord deals with us, again, according to His Word, according to the Scriptures.

His Word is filled with promises. And His Word is filled with encouragements. But listen to me. The Word becomes alive in us. You remember Jesus' rebuke to Satan? Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God.

There's a little Greek word, rhema. It's the spoken Word of God. Same word when Paul says, faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the Word of God. The Word of God. I'm saying to you, and I want to say this with all of my heart this afternoon, don't allow yourself to be deceived by dead orthodoxy.

By believing that because you believe certain doctrines, you're alright. Or because you prayed a prayer that you're alright. I know you know better than that. But listen to me. The life of the Christian is to be lived by faith.

I'm here this week by faith. I'm not here because I feel like I'm strong and I could come out here and just wall around in the pasture and fight through barbed wire fence and go shoot guns. Five years ago, I might have felt that way.

I'm weak. I heard somebody say motel last night and I said, thank you Jesus. I honestly believe God provided that for me. If you don't understand that there are things that you are trying to deal with right now in your life that God has an opinion on, God has a will about.

And our business is not to run around and try to automatically, mechanically do certain things. Our business is to find out what is the will of God in this situation. Now, we have an advantage over Noah and Enoch in that we do have the canonized Word of God.

We have the Bible. And as I warned you last night, I'll probably warn you this way every time I speak this way because I know a lady who got a hold of this truth that God can lead you and God can speak to your heart.

And so, my goodness, she justifies everything she does by God told her. God told her this, God told her that, God told her the other, and God told her several things that's not in the Bible. And I told her that it wasn't God telling her that.

That I genuinely questioned her understanding of those things. Hear me very closely. We have a standard and what is not specifically spoken of in the Bible is spoken of in principles. There are principles that cover whatever is in your life.

And so our business is to find out what does God say about this thing? What does the Lord want about this thing? I had a lady in our church who began to pray for her dad. She sought the Lord diligently for her dad's salvation.

Her dad was just a pagan. He had never been to church. Just a rough old man. Never been to church at all. Didn't care about church. And God began to deal with her heart. She read over in I Timothy where the Bible says God would have all men to be saved come to a knowledge of the truth.

Boy, it came alive in her heart. That means my dad. You can sit down and double exegete that Scripture to death if you want to. But God brought that alive in her heart. She said that means my dad. And to make a long story short, in about a year the Lord saved him.

She continued to pray in faith. Oh God, that means my dad. That means my dad. That means my dad. The Word of God came alive to her. I'm saying to you, don't for anything allow yourself to be sucked into this intellectualized, mechanical kind of Christianity that is so popular today among young people.

Doctrinal Knowledge and Experiential Faith

We hear the doctrines of grace. Well, I love the doctrines of grace. I remember as a brand new Christian in that Arminian atmosphere that I was in, I always had the question, why did God save me out of that youth group that was so worldly?

Why didn't He save my friends like He saved me? I finally came to the conclusion that that was His business, not my business. But as I grew and as I understand the Scriptures and began to believe the doctrines of grace, it's a great blessing to my life.

Great truths about election and all of those things. I love those truths. But you hear me, those truths themselves will not save you. Salvation is an encounter with the living God. And hear me now. The Christian life is that same encounter.

Don't stop encountering Christ. Don't stop doing that. You can go down a religious, we call them over in the Carolinas, a little religious pig trail. Just off the main trail. Running off after some new doctrine or some new idea.

And boy, I tell you, it's really puffing up, isn't it? It makes you feel intellectual when you discuss sublapsarianism, doesn't it? It really makes you feel good, doesn't it? Especially if you can say that and somebody looks at you and says, I don't know what he's talking about.

It really makes you feel good, doesn't it? It's not worth a hoot. I'll tell you what's worth something. Being warned of God, that He obeyed the Lord and He saved His family by doing it. That's what's worth something.

Are you where you are because God's led you to where you are? Or are you supposed to be somewhere else? You see, I realize this afternoon that I'm talking to somebody that might end up in Iraq or in the hands of ISIS.

I understand that. And I will tell you something, it would be better to be in the hands of ISIS in the will of God. Filled with the Spirit of God. Than it would be to be in the greatest hospital surrounded by the greatest doctors on earth out of the will of God.

So how do you do that? By faith. As you received Christ Jesus the Lord so walk ye in Him. Built up and rooted in the faith. Built up in Him. You see, that Colossians passage doesn't say just built up in the Word.

It says built up in Him. Again, it's a relationship. It's Him. So, Noah, being warned of God, things not seen as yet, moved with fear. Prepared an ark for the saving of his house by the which he condemned the world and became heir of the righteousness which is by faith.

Abraham's Obedience to an Unknown Destination

By faith, Abraham. The writer seems to be bringing out some very important people in the life of Israel. Remember, he's writing to the Hebrews. The so-called Christian Hebrews. And he's reminding them of their heritage.

And he says, by faith, Abraham, when he was called to go out into a place which he should after receive for an inheritance, obeyed. Alright, you've got the elements again. Abraham heard God. God spoke to Abraham.

What did He say? He said, Abraham, I want you to go with me. I'm going to take you to a place you don't know of. Abraham said, where are we going? God said, just come on. Can you imagine how it must have felt to Sarah when Abraham walks into her tent and looks at her and says, honey, pack up, we're leaving.

And she says, we're leaving, but all our family's here. And he says, yeah, but we're leaving. God says go. She says, but where are we going? He says, I don't know, but we're going. I don't know? Well, we're going with God.

And God's going to lead us. I remember when I was a young man, I pastored for four years in Lowell, North Carolina. I could see the little mountain where I was raised from where I was pastoring the church within three, four miles of my mom and dad's house.

And I remember when God began to deal with my heart to go to school and began to deal with my heart to go to school in Mississippi, which was 600 miles, 500 miles away from where I was. And I felt like Abraham.

I felt like I'm going someplace. I'd never even been to Mississippi except for going to a camp meeting in North Mississippi. But as far as knowing anything about the place, I knew nothing about the place.

But my wife and I packed up our goods and we put them in a U-Haul or whatever it was and we went to Mississippi. I stayed there for 18 years. The Lord taught me some awesome things while I was in Mississippi.

And it was God's will for me to be in Mississippi. Now, you say, Brother Mike, why do you bring that up? Because when I left North Carolina, I didn't know exactly how things were going to be. People thought I was crazy.

My mom and dad couldn't understand. How is it that you could just get up and just go somewhere like that? I mean, there's schools here, Mike. You don't have to go to Mississippi to go to college. There's Gardner-Webb.

There's this school. There's that school. There's the other school. No, God wants me to go to Mississippi. And so we went to Mississippi. Spent 18 years there in the will of God. We came to Kentucky. I spent six years in a church getting ready to go to the church I'm in now.

That may sound odd to you, but I did. And I've been where I am now 15 years. But listen, God's ways are not our ways. It's not us to question where God leads and what God says, except to verify by the Word of God.

And when that's done, and we know we're following the Lord, strike out, brethren. Abraham obeyed God. He went to a place he should have to receive to an inheritance. And he went out, listen to this, not knowing whether he went.

By faith he sojourned in the land of promise. You know what that means? It means he stayed there. The only way he could stay in the land of promise was by faith. And the Scripture says he was in a strange country.

He was dwelling in tents with Isaac and Jacob, the heirs with him of the same promise. Here's the promise he had. God said, I'm going to take you to a city. And then He took him to Israel. He took him to a wilderness almost.

It's a beautiful land. I've been there. But listen. Listen to what it says. He went to a place. He looked for a city which had foundations whose builder and maker is God. When he left Ur of Chaldees, he was looking for a city.

He was looking for a permanent residence. And what he found was a place for his trailer. He found a place to park his U-Haul for a while. And then for a little while somewhere else. And then a little while somewhere else.

And we're going to find out later that all of these who followed in faith did exactly the same thing. Looking for the fulfillment of the promises of God. Through faith also, Sarah received strength to conceive seed and was delivered of a child when she was past age.

I guess she was. Ninety years old is pretty well past childbearing age, wasn't she? Now hear this. She judged him faithful who had promised. You remember the story? Abraham's outside his tent. There's some guys who come walking up.

One of them happens to be God. And he tells Abraham, this time next year, Sarah will have a child. Sarah's, what, 89 years old there? And she laughs. That's why they named the child Isaac by the way. It means laughter.

And she laughs. But somewhere in there, she believes God. And she says in her heart, if God said it, that settles it. It's so. And when she said it's so and settled it in her heart that God had already settled it.