on the subject of faith. Now, that doesn't seem to be an unusual subject for a pastor to be preaching on from the pulpit, faith. But we'll use for our text the faith passage of scripture, one of them at least, a very well-known one, and that's the 11th chapter of the book of Hebrews. So take your Bibles, please, and turn to Hebrews chapter 11. We'll read the first six verses. Now faith is a substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen, for by it the elders obtained 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 of things which do appear. By faith Abel offered unto God a more excellent sacrifice, than Cain did, by which he obtained witness that he was righteous, God testifying of his gifts. 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 God. For he that cometh to God must believe that he is, and that he is a rewarder of them that diligently seek him. Now let's pray. Our dear Heavenly Father, we come to you this morning thanking you for this time, this happy time of our gathering together in the name of Jesus Christ in this little Baptist church and having your word open before us. I pray, Father, that each one who has journeyed here, ventured into this place this morning, will leave different from the way that he came in, and that your word might be impressed upon the minds and the psyche of each one here. I ask that for those of your people who are gathered here who named Christ as their Savior and Lord, that you will enrich them for being here and enliven them and encourage them and strengthen them and ground them more firmly in this faith which you have delivered to us. For those who are here unsaved, I ask, Father, that you would impress upon their minds and upon their souls, the great urgency of the hour, and the great need for redemption. For without Jesus Christ, there is no hope. And so I pray, Lord, that you would reveal Christ to them in a very, very personal way, and convict them of their sins, and bend their wills to you. And I pray these things for your glory, and your honor, and for our edification. In Christ's name, amen. Those who believe that the Bible is God's word have no difficulty accepting its statements as evidence to the veracity of the things that it's talking about. But those who will not accept the Bible as God's word oftentimes find themselves faced with great difficulty in believing much of the thing, many of the things which are contained in it. I want to talk to you this morning for a few moments about evidence and empirical evidence and things like that. But first, I'm going to give you the treat that I've been giving you for the past several Sundays. I'm going to read you some Webster definitions from 1827, or 28, from the Webster's Dictionary of the English Language, 1827. Faith. I'm reading only two of a long list of definition that he put under faith. The first definition of faith comes under the category that he called theology. He says, faith in theology is the ascent of the mind or understanding to the truthfulness of what God has revealed. Simple belief of the scriptures, of the being and perfections of God, and of the existence, character, and doctrines of Christ, founded upon the testimony of the sacred writer, is called historical or speculative faith. A faith that is little distinguished from belief of the existence and achievements of Alexander and Caesar. Do you understand what that definition was? Simply stated, theology in and of itself is not faith. It's a system that defines what faith might be. It's a belief system. But believing the historical record as defined in the word of God or in secular historical writings is not faith any more so than faith in the belief that Caesar existed and what he did, or that Alexander existed and what he did. That's one definition of faith, a belief system. Now, I will read the next definition, which is, and I believe that's an accurate definition, by the way, and we do have a belief system. Obviously, we do. We have a set of doctrine that we believe. We follow a rule of theology very closely. We tend to wish to be as pure as we can in terms of our major theology, that is, all that pertains to God and to Jesus Christ. And so we have a belief system. But a belief system standing by itself is really of no value at all, because it is inconsequential. It doesn't touch anyone. It doesn't affect anyone. So we had a second category defining faith. First was theological, or theology. The second is evangelical. This is Webster, a public. I'm amazed at how much our country has changed. It's in a dictionary that was extant in all institutions of public and private education in the United States of America in 1827. And this is another definition of faith found in Webster's dictionary at that time. Justifying or saving faith is the ascent of the mind to the truth of divine revelation on the authority of God's testimony accompanied with a cordial ascent of the will or approbation of the heart. an entire trust or confidence in God's character and declarations, and in the character and doctrines of Christ, with an unreserved surrender of the will to his guidance and dependence on his merits for salvation. In other words, that firm belief in God's testimony and of the truth of the gospel, which influences the will and leads to an entire reliance on Christ for salvation. That was in Webster's dictionary, too. Now that's the kind of faith that we're going to be talking about this morning. Let me start off by saying that our faith, which is a combination of the theological definition as well as the evangelical definition, is entirely defensible on any grounds except spurious grounds, of course. that one with the intellect and the time to develop the defensive arguments against those who would attack it could raise an adequate defense against those who would attempt to undermine this faith. However, those of us who embrace the evangelical faith by definition that I just read here, meaning one who has received Jesus Christ as Savior and is trusting him, dependent upon him, and serving him as Lord, does not need external empirical evidence that what he believes is correct. And I'll tell you why he doesn't need it. Because he has the word of God, the Bible, which is in and of itself a compendium of evidences which are designed to reinforce the belief system that you and I possess. Now pay attention, because I don't want to lose you. I think I'm going to lose some of you here if you don't pay really close attention. The statement that I just made is that we do not need external historical evidence to prove what we believe to be true. We don't. We do not need external historical evidence to prove that Jesus Christ lived on this earth and that he died on a cross at Calvary, nor do we need external historical evidence to prove or disprove, for that matter, how this creation came into being. We need none of those things because we have substantial empirical evidence found in the word of God. I probably should define empirical for you so that you'll at least know what it is that we're talking about. People in the scientific community rely heavily upon empirical evidence. In fact, they will argue all the time. Unless it is demonstrated and proven by empirical scientific evidence, they won't believe it, which I find to be interesting. for several reasons, and I'll tell you about in a moment. But empirical means known only by experience, derived only from experiment, and used and applied without science. That's what empirical means. It means something which is learned through experimentation or experience. We are experimental Christians, for example, meaning that we live our lives experiencing the claims of Christ, experiencing them as an integral part of our very being. So we have empirical evidence. as to the person of Jesus Christ and the purpose of Jesus Christ, because we have it in our mind that had to be excised. They didn't know at the time that they had the diagnosis whether it was malignant or not, nor were they absolutely certain it was even operable. And so Janie asked Helen to have her church pray for her, which we did. And you heard the announcement this morning. And this woman, the tumor is not malignant. It was benign, and it was excised. It was removed. Well, now, to me, that's experimental evidence to the veracity and truthfulness of the scriptures of the person and being of Jesus Christ. To someone who doesn't believe as we do, they would take an entirely different view. They would say, there was no evidence that that tumor was malignant in the first place. And therefore, it was easily operable, and she was in no danger from the beginning. But the point is that based upon the experience, because that's what empirical evidence comes from, from the experiment or experimental living, the experience of being a Christian, I can tell you from my own experiences over a number of years that what happened to Janie, to Helen's friend, has happened many, many times over, oftentimes, when God's people prayed for other folks. I believe that God heals. I truly believe that God heals. In this particular case, God healed her by the surgeon's knife and skill. He healed her, nonetheless. So what began as a frightening experience, the end result was OK. It was good. But I'll go even further than that. The most profound empirical evidence to demonstrate the truthfulness of the word of God and of our beliefs is the evidence of the soul. Now I'll explain that if I can. We read in our opening verse that faith is the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things not seen. Substance, of course, is a word in the Greek language which translates best in English as that which is underlying or substantial. There are two kinds of substances, actually three, I suppose, as we use the word in English today. There is the heavy, massive substance that might be used in a foot or a foundation to support a building. There's a substance of an argument, which you can't see, but you can experience because there is something of major consequence to produce the argument. Or there is lack of substance in some cases. But anyway, the point is, and subsubstances are gaseous. So substance can mean different things at different times. But in the application of the word here in our text, substance of things hoped for, that means simply that there is an underpinning of all the hopes and aspirations of God's people who depend on the promises of God's word. I want to repeat that. There is a solid rock underpinning foundation. to buoy up and substantiate all the hopes of God's people who are depending on all the promises of God's word. It also says it's the evidence of unseen things. And I want just to take a couple of moments just to quote a couple other verses of scripture, which are going to apply to what we're talking about. The Lord Jesus Christ said to Thomas when Thomas finally confronted him after his resurrection, and Thomas, you may remember, had told his fellows that he wouldn't believe that Jesus Christ had been raised from the dead unless he saw him and touched the print of the nails in his hand and the wound in his side. You remember that? And the Lord Jesus Christ appeared to him, and he said to Thomas, here I am. Touch my side. Touch my hands. Feel me to make sure that you know that it is I And he said to him, the Lord Jesus Christ then said to them, and be not faithless, but believing. It's an important statement. And the reason why it's important is because belief and faith, while they are kissing cousins, are not identically the same. For example, excuse me a minute. Belief as an intellectual acknowledgment of the existence of something is not the same as faith in what that something may do or produce. I know a lot of people who believe in Christ. They believe in it. They will not deny that Jesus Christ was crucified in Calvary. They won't even deny his resurrection. But they deny him entrance into their lives to the degree and extent where there is no exercise of faith, but only an intellectual acknowledgment of fact. So if you're here today and you believe, well, there is a Christ, and he essentially is what Christianity defines him to be, you have an intellectual belief, but you don't have faith, because faith is the extension of belief. Faith is the experience of belief. Faith is the action of belief. When Peter And some of the other apostles were on the Sea of Galilee in a boat, and the storm waves came up and began to toss them about. You probably will remember this story. And they looked out across the storm-crested waters, and they saw the Lord Jesus Christ walking on the waters. You recall that? And they all cried out. At first, they thought it was an apparition or a ghost, and they were frightened. And our Lord called back to them. And Peter says, well, Lord, if it is you, cause me to walk out on the water to meet you. And he did. He says, come. And he came. And when Peter took a few steps outside the boat and walked across a little of the water, he suddenly began to sink. The Lord Jesus Christ reached out his hand. And he said to him, O thou of little faith, wherefore didst thou doubt? Now, see, Peter had more than belief in that particular instance. Peter was exercising belief into the action of faith. He stepped out onto the water. But once he got out there and began to look at his surroundings, the environs, the potential danger, his faith waned. And when his faith waned, he began to sink. It didn't alter the fact that he had in his mind that Jesus Christ was Lord. He didn't have any problem with that. That was there. But it wasn't there in substantial strength, at least in experimental action. to keep him afloat. He didn't have the faith to believe that he could walk on that water. He suddenly lost it. And the Lord just simply says, O thou of little faith, wherefore didst thou doubt? And then I went back to Job. And you may remember that Job was a real sufferer. He was a loser. He lost his family in one day. He lost his fortune in the same day. He lost his health a few days later. And he lost his friends, because when you lose your money and you lose your health, you lose your friends, just about in that order. You lose your money first, and your friends go. You lose your health, and sometimes your family goes. But he was in dire straits, and his two, three, Assumed friends came to visit him and they chastised him for being obviously such a sinner or he wouldn't be going through such great agony and what they would call bad luck, I suppose we'd call it today. And what they said to him was designed not to increase his faith, but to discourage him. Job simply said to them about his God. This is an amazing statement. He trusted him. Not only did he believe in his existence, he believed in his power and in his care. And here he was, a miserable, boil-infested man, deprived of comfort and wealth and family. He said to his detractors, though he slay me, yet will I love him. That's experimental faith. That's belief extended into faith. You can't explain that. I mean, you could take the most, you could take the most brilliant shrink in the world today. And he would have no, he would have no prayer of ever explaining what it was that Job was experiencing because he would approach it from a totally different viewpoint. And of course, the viewpoint of folks like that is always that. Those who live their lives on a faith that is so clear to them and has been proven so viable and reliable and powerful for 2,000 years, they nevertheless will look at them and say, well, that's OK if they want to believe that, but I don't really think that's valid. How do they know that what they believe is right? Well, why wouldn't they know that what they believe is right when everything that they believe is buoying them up and carrying them along and demonstrated in their lives that God is God and Christ is Christ and he cares for his people? Of course, they're going to believe it. They'd be fools not to. Empirical evidence. Our text says that faith is the evidence of things not seen. But there are a lot of things which are seen, which are also evidence. And it will be good evidence, valid evidence, would be in any court or trial. For example, the writer of the psalm simply said, the heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament showeth his handiwork. What his saying is, and of course, the same writer a little earlier in the psalm said, the fool has said in his heart there is no God. And what all this means is that for one to observe the creation of things about him and the order in which things have been produced and redeveloped or reproduced, to ignore the omnipotence of God's handiwork in the creation of those things, one does it his own peril and is called in the scriptures a fool. So there is evidence outside the scriptures. All I'm saying is that those who trust the word of God as the word of God really don't need that evidence. Doesn't hurt. Can't hoit. But it won't help much either. The evidence of things not seen. Things invisible. I believe what I believe because it has been proved to me way beyond any degree of satisfaction that I need to have. I know that Jesus Christ has carried me when I have failed him. I know that he did not abandon me at my worst, and I know that he sustains me when I'm at my best. He is all in all in my life, and therefore one would be hard put to raise an argument to disprove the faith which is defined in the scriptures, our belief system put into action. Beyond that, we see things that people who are not trusting Christ do not see. To us, it's evidence. To them, it's nonsense. Nevertheless, when you have the evidence and it is engraved upon your mind and upon your heart, it would be their nonsense. But then the scripture says simply of those folks, in a kind way, they're foolish. It's a foolish thing to deny the very person of God and his personal relationship to his people. But it says here, the evidence of things not seen. I like to add another spin to that, evidence of things not seen, other than the things that we live our lives by that are evident to us that others do not see. When a person is transformed from darkness to light, from death to life, when a person is born of the spirit of God and made a new creation in Christ Jesus, when his hope is heaven and he is certain of his journey in this life, will ultimately take him there, not because he will walk a good journey, but that the blood of Jesus Christ will be sufficient to cover his sins and give him a right standing before God. When that happens to folks, they see things that they never saw before. It's the same thing, but different. I guess probably I can explain it best. And I brought this hymn book up here because I just want to read one set of lines, one stanza from this hymn. We sing it off. Oftentimes we sing these things and miss the import of their meaning. This is, I believe, for God's people, evidence of things not seen previously, but now seen. Heaven above is softer blue. Earth around is sweeter green. Something lives in every hue Christless eyes have never seen. Birds with gladder songs are flow, flowers with deeper beauty shine, since I know, as now I know, I am his, and he is mine. That's evidence of things not seen before, which were there. Heaven above is softer blue, and earth around is sweeter green. Listen, folks. Jesus Christ is all-sufficient for every moment for the rest of your life. And if you do not know him, nor have him, or trust Him, or follow Him, or believe Him, then there is a big hole in your life of which you probably are not even aware. I only pray, God, that someday you will be made aware, for to live life without Christ is empty. To depart life without Him is desperate. Let's pray. Father in heaven, thank you for bringing us here and for your word. Now do such things with us as are needful and are beneficial and which will glorify the name of Jesus Christ. I pray in his name. Amen.