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if you take your Bible, we're gonna be in the Book of Hebrews today in the New Testament. Not the Psalms. It's a special day. So we have a special text. We're gonna be any Hebrews. Chapter 11, Hebrews 11.

There are 40 verses in Hebrew. Hebrews 11. Is it possible for a pastor to preach 40 verses in 20 minutes? Yes. Pardon? Yes. Will this pastor cover 40 verses and No, no, we will not. So you're so pragmatic.

Good to have you in God's house. Fun day. It's been great to have Darren here all weekend on. I'm glad that you are here. How many? This is the first time you've been in this sanctuary. This is your first Sunday.

Wow. Amazing, isn't it? It's, like, totally different. So it's good. It's good to be in here on to have you here. This is this morning. So let's go to God in prayer. As we look at the scriptures, Father, we give you praise for who you are.

Thank you for the facility that you have orchestrated, uh, in and through the work and the gifts of the many. And we pray that this building might be a great testimony to the power of the Gospel of Christ.

Challenges with the scriptures today invigorate our faith, create on opportunity for us toe think even bigger things for you as we study what faith is about in Jesus name. Amen. When you think about this great day being the 45th year of the church, also being the dedication of our new building, how this all come about, How did it happen? Theologically, you could say, uh, his base form God providentially worked behind the scenes for 45 years exactly what he did.

Proverbs tells us a lot about God's providence and his plans. Proverbs, Chapter 16, Verse nine says this about God's Providence says that man's heart plans his way, but you notice the contrast. But the Lord directs his steps, so you have a free will to make choices.

But behind the scenes, God's guiding you to get you to where he thinks that you need to be to do the things he wanted to dio problems 1921 says something. Similarly, it says there are many plans in a man's heart.

Nevertheless, the words council that will stand So God has his plan for your life on his has his plan for our church. So when you think about just what has happened here in the 45 years of our church, it is a testimony to the great providence of God working to bring this to fruition.

We've had a lot of great leaders over the years. People of great faith, great leaders of faith. You met Jack Elwood. Jack was the pastor before me. There was actually an interim between myself and Jack.

Mark Green was the interim Paster way back in 1975. It was, uh, Mike WinZip on then Paul Hanson and John Dorsch, then Jack Elwood, Mark Green and then Marty. It's interesting all those years, great leaders giving great, great vision that what the church could be on, they can't cast the vision that was amazing.

So they broke away from denomination that was drifting away from sound doctrine. There was 83 people in 1975 in July when they founded the church, and they wanted to build a church on sound doctrine Bible teaching, prayer, love of the gospel on Boy.

Did they do it? And they cast a huge vision for the church and now you're realizing the vision of these people. But they had great faith is what I want to focus on. And the kind of faith that they had and that we've had is the church is kind of faith that we need to take us forward.

I call a high definition faith. How many have a high definition television at home? Yeah, and it's bigger than 50 inches. Yeah, the bigger the better, right? Yeah. Do you Do you like it? You do? Yeah.

I mean, isn't it amazing? Because when Liz and I first moved here, we had two giant Sony televisions, like massive memory when they were massive and it took two people to pick them up. When we bought these TV's back in the day, I thought they were just They were They were.

It was in high definition, but it was the bomb of a television. I loved those televisions, but they were so massive. And one day we got a note that a truck was coming and going to deliver something to our house back in 08 of November when we moved here.

So one day a truck came, the guy offloaded This large box. Like what is that? And there was ah, letter from her Dennis that she had worked for for 19 years. And basically he said, uh to thank you for working in running my office for me.

All these years, I bought you a high definition television. They're just some things, you know you receive, right? Bring that in the house. This is amazing s So we got all plugged up. Talk to some people here.

A church. Like, what do I do with this thing? Got all hooked up, and, uh, once we turned it on, do you think I kept the old Sony? I donated it. I donated that television because once you saw the new picture in the old picture, there was no comparison between the high definition.

Now, I don't know where you shop. I've told you over the years. I love to shop. I do. I love to shop. Uh, in fact, I asked my wife to go shopping sometimes, and she's like, Why? I'm like, because I love to shop when we go to Costco.

Whenever you go into a Costco, you go to the main door. Show him your card. Usually, what's to the right of you. What? Televisions never look that direction, because what happens when you look that direction? You realize that the visual ability of that particular TV is far superior to probably what you have at home, right? This leads to this end of coveting the next thing you know, you want to spend $2500 on a new television.

So why? Because we love high definition. So let's take about high definition for a moment, how wonderful it is when you get it and just apply it to faith. Because if somebody has blurry faith on their kind of wishy washy and their faith, you don't really wanna emulate that.

That doesn't excite you. But when you're around somebody that's great faith in God, that's like, have a high definition faith. You wanna get near that person. You want to know that person because that faith excites you.

And I would say that's the kind of faith our leaders have had over the years. It's just catchy, catchy faith. We want to study that kind of faith because we're a church of great faith and what is great faith like? And so since there's 40 verses and you've already told me it's impossible to cover 40 verses in one sermon.

We're only gonna cover a few verses. We're gonna take some snapshots from this Hall of Faith chapter of the Bible Hebrews 11 and look at three different things. It says about faith, because this is the faith of our fathers.

This is the faith that we have, and it's the faith that we want as we go forward. So what is high definition? Awesome faith, like number one. High definition faith is rational. It's not irrational. It's rational.

So I told you before I'm a Christian because I'm a thinking person. Not because I walk in the church. I checked my brain, and I hope against hope that it's true. No, no, no. I'm a thinking person. I'm very analytical.

I wanna look at the evidence and then consider this evidence. Is it true that there is a God? Is it true that he has spoken? Is it true? That is his word, etcetera. I'm gonna verify those things and and then come to a conclusion about faith based on evidence.

What does it say in Hebrews? 11 that faith has consists of. Here's what it does now. Faith is the substance of things hoped for. It is the what the evidence, the evidence of things not saying for by it.

The elders obtained a good testimony. Verse three says. By faith, we understand that the world's the cosmos as we know it on all of its complexities in order were framed by the word of God so that the things which are seeing were not made by the things which are visible.

So you DNA chain in all of its complexities enzymes, amino acids, molecules, whatever. Everything that is in our cosmos was made according to the Scriptures, by the very word of God. So when there was nothing, God spoke as it says in Genesis one, and it became talk about power.

And this is what he says. Our faith tells us that we have evidence for this. So when you look at science science doesn't they say they have some evidences that prove where we came from, how we got here, but they're evidences are vacuous when you look at them because the scriptures say faith is the substance of things hoped for the word a substance hypothesis in Greek, I took six years of Greek going through school because all my friends always told me there's so much lost in the translation.

You cannot trust the New Testament. How am I going to refute that? How would you refute that? Learn Greek. So I took six years agree. Because I wanted to read. Is anything lost between the those writings that the Scriptures come from and the New Testament? I guess what I found out.

After six years of higher education, nothing was lost in the translation. Plus, I learned that these words are very interesting when it says that faith is the substance of things. The Greek word for substance is the word for title deed in the Greek culture title deed.

So do you have a mortgage right now? Yeah. Are you ever gonna pay that thing off? Hmm. Is it possible to pay your house off in the northern D C environment? Well, yeah, but it's not easy. So when I first came here and from California and 08 I'm thinking I'm coming from California homes.

They're worth a lot of money. I'm coming with cash. No problem. It's a problem because I couldn't afford my five bedroom, three bath house here with RV parking. I'm like, you've got to be kidding me. Eso in the interest rates back then were 6.

5. What a deal. Then I refined over the years to 4.75 Now I'm refined presently to two point 25 It's unbelievable. What's my goal? Pay my house off and I advertised that. I think I could do it in about eight years, So I'm excited.

And so once I pay it off, what are they going to give me? Title deed to my house, right? That's what happens when you pay your house. If you get the title deed to your house, it's the substance. So it's the sure thing, so that when you've got that title deed in your house, you can say This is mine.

I paid that thing off, he says. When it when it comes to your faith, your faith is Ah hope, But it's a hope based in fax, like the title deed of the fact that there is a God, he says that we as Christians, we understand that the evidence that there is a God because he says we understand the evidence that God has given to us that he exists.

Science? What does science say? Well, it has all kinds of metaphysical problems that it cannot surmount. I'll give you some of them. Uh, some of the problems that science house are questions like this.

Why is there something rather than nothing? Why? I mean, if this all came about by a big bang, I mean, how that happen? Why did it create order and complexity? How to complexity Just come from chaos? How did the rational come from the irrational? How could specify.

Specify complex systems that are inter related to each other that need each other ever come about in a Siris of changes over millennia, Millennium, and there's no way it could happen. So when we think about science that has many limitations, a lot of it it's faith because they weren't there.

But the scriptures say, Well, no, they're God made this happen and we have a problem with cause effect because behind every chair is a chair maker behind the chair maker, someone who made the chair maker.

Someone made that person we live in chain, chain of cause and effect, and we all know cause and effect cannot go in reverse to infinity there because there has to be something you hang it on because there's no such thing.

A self causation Jerry didn't cause itself podium didn't cause itself. There must be something bigger than cause effect outside of time and space That's eternal. That made things. That's God, he says.

We have evidence. Well, what's the evidence? We went through this several weeks ago when we went to one of the songs that give you all the evidence is for the fact there is a divine being. But when you look at this building, there's tons of evidence.

This is a divine being by just looking at the building as they built this building and all of the stages, the 1200 dump trucks that drove by my window with all that beeping noise. Who invented that is of the devil, that beep, beep beep that drove me crazy for a whole year? All those trucks, uh, but they dug a huge pit over here for the for the basement and all that they did.

But what I found most interesting was when they got down to the wiring of the building because behind the stage here is a room where a lot of the wires terminated for all the sanctuary. And we're talking hundreds and hundreds of wires.

There was one guy that I only ever saw in there. He would sit in there for hours, put in all those wires where they went, and I would go by and talk to him and he wouldn't talk to me. Probably good, right, Because you don't want, like turning on the stage lights and a toilet flushes or something.

I mean, what I'm saying, e This guy was like, organized. He's following all those lines, Put them where they go. And then they put three circuit boxes outside my office, big ones with hundreds of wire speeding in there.

And I'm like, What in the world? But we walk around. Go. All of this design tells me there's a what? There's a designer. Only a fool would look at all that go. It just happened. Now all the intricacy, all that design tells me there's a designer behind it.

So we have lots of evidence is in the world that we live in just in the building. The building tells us there must be a god because the premise is true. Behind the design is a designer behind. A really complex design is a really complex designer.

So how much more intricate is the human eye than electrical system? Much more. How much more intricate is your brain, etcetera? So there's much evidence that points us to God. We're a church that believes in a living God, and we believe he is there on.

We don't just hope against hope that he's there. We look at the evidence that he has given to us and we serve and worship him. That kind of faith is what our fathers have had. That's the kind of faith that your pastors and your staff has had here.

That's why we've accomplished what we accomplished for God because we have had faith grounded in the evidence is that there is a God who is, and we serve him Number two high definition faith. What is it like? It gives up.

It goes out from wherever you were, and it gains big time in the In the final analysis, it gives up things that you love. Abraham. We'll look at him in verse eight. See, I'm skipping verses so we could do this by faith.

Abraham obeyed when he was called to go out to a place which he would receive is an inheritance. Andi went out not knowing where he was going. By faith, he dwelt in the land of promise, as in a foreign country, dwelling in the tents with Isaac and Jacob.

The errors of the same promise for he waited for the city, which has foundations whose builder and maker is God. Abraham. He was a Chaldean. He lived in your of the Valdez, which was located alongside the Euphrates River, which was just a few miles north of the of the apex of the Persian Gulf with the Tigers and the Euphrates converged down there.

He's called by God. We don't know how God called him. We don't know if you saw I had a dream, had a vision, got a direct word from God. We don't know, but God comes to this man in his seventies and tells him I got something for you to do.

If you're retired right now and you think God's done with you, I think again she got typically uses people later in life. You kind of, say, Abraham in the seventies and says, I wanna I wanna make a new nation out of you.

I want you to leave the comfort of your And I wanted you to travel 150 miles north to Hiran on. I want to spend some time there and I will eventually tell you where you're going. Well, we know from Genesis.

Chapter 12, verses 6 to 7. His dad dies in Iran. Terra, his father and then eventually tells him, I want you to go down to Canaan land. That's gonna be the land of promise. And I'm gonna make you a great nation, their Jewish nation, and through you I'm gonna bless the entire world by sending the Messiah one day and he goes toe Iran not knowing where he's going.

He must have not been Taipei. Correct? Exactly where are we going? How long am I going to be there? I mean, I got to calculate. Do I have enough fuel to get Except Hey, he just went. He did. He did exactly what God wanted him to do.

So what did he do? He gave up the familiar for the unfamiliar. He gave up security financial for insecurity gave up predictable. Born and raised in or for the unpredictable. He gave up safety for danger.

I gave up the ease of life for possible hardness. He gave up leaning upon himself and trusting what he could provide in the city of or two I'm going into. I don't know where. See, This is great faith.

He had high definition faith. He gave up, he went out for God. And then God blessed him greatly by making him the forefather of the Jewish nation through whom will come the Messiah. Jesus. See, some of you had the same kind of high definition faith because I know because I've seen you in action.

Some of you are here because you passed on a really great job somewhere else. Because you wanted to stay here because of what this church means and what this church is doing. You don't wanna miss it. So you made a sacrifice to stay here, and God has blessed you because of that.

Some of you were a part of the original group that started this church on. You wanted to make a Bible teaching culture impacting church in a very progressive, uh, non Christian environment on you set out to do that and look at what God has done.

You gave up the comfort of the church you were in and you came to start a church. And God has blessed you in that Some of you travel an amazing amount of miles to get here to this church. You give up much to live, you live far away.

But you come here because the word of God has taught here. And I know you live a long ways away because I've actually gone to your houses for dinner. When the GPS stops working on my phone, this sheeps gotta move right here.

I mean, this has happened. I get It's like, I don't know, it's kind of babe. We're just kind of following the roads. Some of you live a long ways away. But why are you here? You're giving up where you are to travel here toward the word of God has taught God will bless you and has blessed you.

When the older council came to me and Darren back in the day and said, you know, we want to build this building, it's gonna cost about $18 million We want you to guys to get together and figure out how to raise nine million to put down as a down payment.

Huh? You You called me to preach, not be a fundraiser. So, Darren, I'm like, Okay, now. Now what do we dio and so many of us? We presented the vision for you. The faith of what God was gonna dio. And then how much did we raise? Do you know what was it? Nine million wasn't 10 wasn't 11, but through the gifts of God's people, $12 million and more was raised for the down payment of an $18 million billion.

That's the movement of God himself. See, God says you go out with your finances, give up things, and I will. I will give unto you and God has so we are church of high definition faith. We understand what Abraham went through, and we want to continue to live like that.

So how many people can actually go to the church on this property? 3000. So you figured before the virus hit we were running around 2500. So once we get everybody back in church and we go back to two services and three services.

A lot of services. I'm just saying When we go back to two, we could only have about 3000 here. So what's faith say? We like our forefathers need to dream that well, we need to go out from here and plant churches elsewhere and do greater things for God.

Maybe this is the hub from which we got to do more for God, around the community and in the area. Another snapshot about faith I find most interesting. It's the last one versus 11 and 12. It za about Abraham and his wife, Sarah.

This one tells us that high definition of faith sees obstacles. It encounters them, but it sees them as divine opportunities. Notice what it says by faith. Sarah herself also received strength to conceive seed.

And she bore a child when she was past the age because she judged him God, who is faithful to what he had promised. She got pregnant in her eighties. Did you hear me? There's no gasp. You're just sitting there going house normal.

No, no. How Maney here would want a child to be how many we would want to be pregnant at at 80 late eighties. Is it even possible if you ever tell me that the Bible is so boring? No, it's not. I mean, consider what God does.

He waits the worst possible time. A lady in a lady in her late eighties and her husband and is in her late nineties. And he tells them, you're gonna have a promised child through which the Messiah will come one day and I'm going to do this myself.

It's an obstacle that you're that old, but I'm going to give you a child if you go back. And you read the account in Genesis 18. When this happened, it says, the angel of the Lord went toe Abraham's tent and hey, had some angelic accompaniment with him.

This is probably the Korean pre incarnate Jesus who goes and tells him you're gonna have a son who's gonna have another son who eventually have a son from the tribe of Judah and David the King. Except then the Messiah will come.

But you old couple are gonna have the first of those sons. The promise that it says in Genesis, Chapter 18 versus a 1 to 12, that when Sarah, who's behind the tent listening to the angels talking toe Abraham when she heard this news is she was gonna get pregnant.

What? She dio she left. Wouldn't you like you? Are you kidding me? Do you know how old I am? There is no way. Have you seen my husband? He's 99 years old. There's no way we're gonna have a child. She left, You know, She must have stopped laughing because it says in Hebrews 11 that she was a great woman of faith.

So she came to embrace that. And then she She had this little boy. What was his name? What was his name? Isaac. She had Isaac. What's his name mean In Hebrew. Laughter. Every time she said his name, it was reminded what she did.

When God said, I'm going to bless you with the child. I'm gonna take your obstacle. I'm gonna make it an opportunity. She had that child when she was 90 years old and her husband was 100. Do you want a child when you're that old? See, when Liz was pregnant with Nathan, our firstborn guys, have you ever said something really lame? Come on, get confessional.

Don't just be looking at me going, not me. Yeah, I said some dumb things in 40 years of marriage. Here is one of them. Eliza's pregnant with Nathan. It's, you know, in Dallas it's hot, It's humid. She's eight months in, It's almost over.

And so I looked at her and I said this to her. I said, Honey, I cannot wait till you have this child so we can get our lives back to normal. Uh huh. Is that not lame? Yeah. So do you think it's been normal since then? No, no, it has not been normal.

You know, when you have a child, because what do they do at night? In the middle of the night? Cry, scream. I had advanced Greek. I had six. My sixth year Greek was the 7. 45 in the morning. And there, Nathan screams all night.

I'm wired. I can't. I've slept. And I'm like, Why do people have Children? You know, men see, they had this child in there, you know, latter years and God bless them greatly. See, God takes difficulties and he turns them into great opportunities to advance his cause.

Think about this church when it was planted back in the 75 1975. They met in schools. Burke Elementary School, Cardinal Forest Elementary School. They eventually grew to the point where they needed some land.

So they bought some land in a street named Bel Air. 45 acres. They thought that's all we need. The church kept growing, became an obstacle. Now what do we do? We bought land, but it's gonna be too small for the size of the church.

So they wound up buying this land through the assembly of God Church that owned this gym over here. They bought that 13 acres. Perfect what they want to do on these 13 acres? Well, they want to build a sanctuary that could see about 1100 people.

Guess what happened. That vision from those people back in the seventies became a reality is God said I don't care what the obstacles are. I'm gonna overcome and bless this area. This part of the country with the church that teaches the word of God.

Do you think we had obstacles when we built this thing? Yeah, slightly. How many days did it rain? Has we built? Yeah. At one point we were deciding We should be building a boat. You should be. We should be building a boat, not a church.

Remember that They built this giant basement over here and 1200 dump trucks haul all the dirt out, etcetera. And the poor guy that parked his bobcat down there one day on a Friday and said, You know, I'll come get it Monday.

Oh, yeah, He need a boat to get to it because it rained for 70 days. We had all kinds of obstacles, but all along the way, we didn't falter because we knew God to call us to do this on you supplied the gifts to make it happen.

And together with all of our work, God gave us this great building. It's a It's a huge responsibility to use it to his glory. But we're the kind of church that said, Well, there's obstacles. There was a soccer field here.

There was a forest here. We're thinking, man, is there some kind of protecting squirrel on our property? No, God took us through all the obstacles and blessed us. I'm glad you are part of the journey.

It's exciting because God not done. But what kind of people do. We need to be people with great, great faith. It consists of three things. What are the three things? It's test time. I know it's not early because it's almost lunch.

What's the first thing? Faith is what? It's rational. It's not irrational. Second thing about great faith. What is it? It goes out. It gives up much forgotten. It goes out and looks for God to bless you.

It's sacrifices, things. And then, lastly, it looks at obstacles that you encounter and says, No, God's going to use the obstacle. That's how he rolls. We're gonna face many of those obstacles in the days ahead.

But bear in mind, we serve the living God who, Well, nothing is too hard for him. As he told Sarah, Is anything too difficult for me? If he could speak the cosmos into existence, then he could take an 80 something year old woman to give her Ah promised child.

That's how great he is. So whatever we face in the future, we serve the same God, I'm glad you are here. You are here to serve that God with that kind of faith, and it's gonna be exciting to see what he's going to do.

And I'm glad you're in church today. Let's pray. God, what a great thing it is to worship you and honor you. We praise you for who you are. Thank you for just the opportunity of faith. Based on great evidence is you don't so disclose yourself.

You override our free will. You don't So remove yourself that we could never find you. You give us just enough evidence to consider the fact that you are and that you love us and that you provided a plan to redeem us from sin.

Thank you for who you are. Now, as we seeing this told him about your faithfulness to us, as we see Might it truly come from our hearts A za point of great praise and adoration. Amen. Why don't you stand as we've seen? Great is like faithfulness