"By faith, Abraham obeyed when he was called to go out to the place where he would afterward receive an inheritance. And he went out, not knowing where he was going (Hebrews 11:8)."

IDEA: Before Abraham moved with God, God had moved toward Abraham.

PURPOSE: To help listeners understand that our faith is a response to, not the cause of God's initiative.

What would you say to someone who reads about a man like Abraham in the Bible and understands that Abraham was a person of faith, but dismisses what the Bible says by saying, "I don't have faith like that"?

I. When we say that we are saved by faith, is that completely accurate?

When people say they are saved by faith, what do they mean?

We sometimes can imply that it's the quality of our faith that brings us to God.

Nowhere does the Bible say that our faith saves us.

Hebrews 11:8 says that by faith, Abraham obeyed when he was called to go out to the place where he would afterward receive an inheritance. And he went out, not knowing where he was going.

Notice that God acted first: God called Abraham.

In spite of all that Abraham did "by faith," it was not because God looked down on the earth and found that Abraham possessed a faith that no one else have, and then decided to reward him.

II. Nowhere does the Bible say that we are brought to God by our own efforts, nor does it say that we come to God because of our faith.

Abraham's faith is not a virtue to be rewarded. The value of his faith was that it was an instrument through which he responded to God who had acted and spoken first.

How much merit is there in believing in a $20 bill? What makes the bill valuable? Is it our confidence or the fact that the U.S. government has issued the bill and its promise to pay stands behind it?

Faith by itself is worthless. The question is, what do you trust or whom do you trust?

True faith takes the unsupported promise of God as being reality.

Faith is the condition, not the foundation, of our salvation and our relationship with God.