Building on the Foundation of Faith: Isaiah 1: 11-20; Heb. 11:1-3, 8-16
As a kid, I absolutely loved building things. I had a couple of sets of building blocks—one smaller, solid, and made of wood. And another set that looked like red and blue bricks made of a sturdy cardboard. I would spend a long time building up what looked like houses and buildings all with one singular purpose in mind: to tear it down and destroy it in a matter of seconds like a crazed child-Godzilla. Let’s be honest—as a kid, what’s the fun of building such things if you can’t smash and strew them everywhere?
Life is sometimes like that for us as well. We have built, inch by inch, block by block what we think is something great—a crowning achievement—and then some problem, circumstance, or our own personal struggles cause the whole thing to collapse. A friend once told me, “Life is not building one giant, lifelong structure until you die. Life is about building, tearing down, re-creating, and building something new, and in all that we build, God’s holy presence is with us as the master designer and architect.”
Hebrews 11 is a chapter that offers us a solid foundation of faith in God, then tells us how we ought to build from there. What the examples tell us, and what we must keep in mind is that what we build in faith ought to be able to withstand pressure, regardless of overcoming, thriving, or anything else, what we build together with Christ must be able to withstand troubles which comes at us.
Hebrews 11 gives us the well-known discussion of faith. This is not a definition, for faith can encompass so much more including trust, wisdom, love, redemption, and so on. Here, we get more of a partial explanation of faith placed in the context of the examples throughout Hebrews 11. First, faith bridges that gap of our hope and reality. Faith makes real for us things we cannot see. Then we are given the examples. We hope for a design to the universe around us, and faith makes real for us that God is the architect. Abraham hoped for a promised land, a lasting inheritance. His faith in God led him to the reality of this hope. And yet Abraham and his family still arrived to a place where they had to withstand and survive in tents and as foreigners and strangers in a new land.
Abraham and Sarah hoped that God would honor the promises made to them. Their faith bridged the gap and brought them Isaac from whom an entire nation would be birthed. Then we are told they never saw the reality of what was promised in these many generations. When God said their generations would number the stars in the sky or the sand on the ground, they simply believed. Though they died before it all happened, they died in faith believing in what God had promised. Their ability to withstand and survive in faith and hope led to the reality of God’s promises for the next generations. It reminds me of the farmer who planted hundreds of seeds for trees. Though he would never see the trees he planted, his planting was for the next generation, and the generation after that, and so on.
Faith builds on today to look forward to tomorrow. Christ’s work of love and redemption was not just for those in his immediate circle. His sacrifice echoed down the centuries and for eternity bringing a way of love, mercy, and redemption. That didn’t stop with the generation he lived in—his mission of hope and grace continues to work in this world even today.
We read in the Old Testament the harsh words of God’s condemnation on this very same people centuries later for whom Abraham and Sarah and Isaac worked, sacrificed, and held the faith and hope. Sometimes all of what we build will come tumbling down. The people to whom Isaiah prophesied had clearly destroyed the bond and relationship they had with God. They acted the holy rituals, but the foundation of what God called them to had crumbled.
Through Isaiah, God recalls them to the work of protecting innocents, seeking justice, helping the oppressed, and attending to the cause of widows and orphans, for in God’s community, the least of these or the most vulnerable are meant to be protected. Accountability, honesty, and tough encouragement are fine, but allowing others to suffer will rot the foundation God has given.
Yet even though the foundation had crumbled and the people no longer had the same relationship to God, to one another, or to those they felt responsibility for, God, the master architect and designer, still provided a way for them to rebuild—to shore up the foundation and to grow in faith once again. The same is true for us. Where we allow the power of Christ’s grace and love to work in and through us, we can rebuild those broken places, we can fill the cracks in our foundation, and we can find this place of wholeness and peace in life.
When I began college, things crumbled a bit. I had been a straight-A student in high school. Now I was pulling a solid C- in chemistry, Spanish was going no bueno, and economics might as well have been Charlie Brown’s teacher going, “Wah-wah-wah-WAH.” In a moment of wisdom, my uncle said, “Will, it’s not about thriving, it’s about surviving. Just focus on surviving.” At first that seems a bit harsh. Is thriving in life really no longer an expectation in adulthood? Is all of life from 19 through the bitter end a battle to survive? But if you think more on it, perhaps it’s better to look at it this way: sometimes we survive today so that we can thrive tomorrow, and the day after, and the day after that.
Sometimes we cannot see the direction or the way out of the collapsed ruin around us, but faith is the proof of what we cannot see now. Sometimes we find life has been knocked down like a child-size Godzilla tearing through a bunch of well-built toy blocks. But our belief in Christ’s grace, love, and mercy gives us the hope that tomorrow will be a place of thriving even as we have to survive today.
And our faith to build with Christ working in us is what bridges that gap from hope to reality. My friends, we may never see the endpoint of what we begin building today. But just like Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, Jacob, and all the great leaders of faith, what we build in faith today makes the hope of the next generation reality. So let us begin building on the solid foundation of our faith in Christ.
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