Greater Shiloh Missionary Baptist Church

Guest (Male): You are now listening to an inspirational message from the Greater Shiloh Missionary Baptist Church where Dr. Michael Wesley Senior is pastor. Please join the service in progress.

Dr. Michael W. Wesley Sr.: Our heavenly Father has so many different ways in which he blesses us as children. Revelation of God as it is gradually unfolding shows the various dimensions in which God has offered support to his creation. Certainly, angelic beings have a part and have had a part and will have a part when it's all said and done.

I know today that I thank God for all that he does. I don't care how God blesses me. I just want him to bless me. He can send an angel, he can send you, he can send the next person. Just anyway you do it, God is all right with me, as I feel. God has a word for us this morning. I want to get to that word, so I want to invite you to join me in this time of prayer as we ready our hearts.

Holy Father, in Jesus' name, we thank you for the privilege to come together again on another Lord's Day, to be in the house of prayer with our brothers and sisters in Christ, to share in the singing of Zion's songs, and to pray with and pray for one another. We thank you for the covering of prayer. We thank you, Lord, now for the word of God which instructs us and deepens our walk with you.

As we open together the pages of scripture, we pray that you would open our hearts and our minds that we will hear your word and not only be hearers of your word, but that we will be doers of your word. Speak, Lord, your servants are listening. We know that with you, there will be a word; without you, there is no word. So bless now the words that you have placed in my mouth, the word that we've been meditating on in our hearts.

Pray that you would speak it so clear, so deep. Allow the truth to go as far as you will. Give it legs to run through the streets and avenues of this community and all over the world. In Jesus' precious name we pray. Amen. Thank God. I want to begin again a mini-series this morning, talking about the power of faith. This first installment will come to us from the book of Hebrews, the 11th chapter, and I'd like to direct your attention there for the reading of the word.

Hebrews chapter 11, and we'll look at verses 23 through 29 in your hearing. There the word of God says, "By faith Moses, when he was born, was hid three months by his parents, because they saw he was a proper child, and they were not afraid of the king's commandment. By faith Moses, when he was come to years, refused to be called the son of Pharaoh's daughter, choosing rather to suffer affliction with the people of God, rather than enjoy the pleasures of sin for a season."

"Esteeming the reproach of Christ greater riches than the treasures in Egypt, for he had respect unto the recompense of the reward. By faith he forsook Egypt, not fearing the wrath of the king, for he endured as seeing him who is invisible. Through faith he kept the passover and the sprinkling of blood, lest he that destroyed the firstborn should touch them. By faith they passed through the Red sea as by dry land, which the Egyptians assaying to do were drowned."

This is the word of God for the people of God. Thanks be unto God. I want to talk today in this first installment—The Power of Faith is the overall theme of the series—but this morning, things that faith rejects and things that faith accepts. Things that faith rejects and things that faith accepts. What I want you to hear is that decision making is an important part of our human life. None of us can live effectively without making good decisions.

You can live for a little while on bread and water, but you cannot live with power, you cannot live with determination, and you cannot live with hope in your heart without faith in your bosom. Faith is the substance of things hoped for according to Hebrews 11:1. It's the evidence of things not seen. That is fine for an academic definition of what faith is. But practically, what faith is is to live with the certainty of an inner conviction.

Faith is an "I know" thing. It's an "I know who I believe, I know what I believe, I know why I believe," and I know that God is the very rock that I stand on, the very staff that I lean on, the very fountain that I drink from, or he's nothing at all. Faith is "I know" things. In order to make great decisions for your life, you have to live with a level of faith.

I mean, you go out of your door, you live by faith. You drive your car, you move by faith. You came in here this morning and you sat down by faith. If you came last week and you hit the floor when you sat down, this week you would have came in and you would have been feeling to make sure. But you just put it down by faith because the last time you put it there, it held.

And I am telling you, decisions: what, where I go to school, what organization I want to be a part of, who I end up marrying, where I work—all of those kinds of decisions are made by faith and in faith. I just want you to understand that there is a power that is released into your life when you do make decisions based upon faith in God. Faith in God is the certainty. I feel sure of who he is. I really do.

Listen, if I'm just praying and I don't have any idea who I'm praying to, I am just talking in the air. That is not how I feel. I feel like I am talking to God. I know I am, and that's the certainty that I live with. So I don't mind asking him for my daily bread because I know he's my father and he will supply. I don't mind asking him to help in times of trouble because he has been there with me before.

I just want you to see faith and decision making and the power that is released in one's life when one chooses by faith. As we look at the scripture passage for the morning, we would know that the book of Hebrews is a book where the author is unknown. While the author is not the most important thing, what he says is. Most of the New Testament books are listed in the canon of the Bible because the author can be verified.

Because this author could not be verified, it's just listed as the Book of Hebrews. We know who it was written to. It was written to the Jewish people who were spread out during the diaspora. This writer was trying to convince the group, recognizing that in the group that he was writing to, there were some believers, there were some who were sitting on the fence who wanted to be believers but yet still trying to hold on to their Jewish roots.

Then there were some who were just not sure at all and over in the area of not knowing. So he writes this letter to address everything for ten chapters in the Jewish vernacular to help them to understand you don't have to go back to Judaism. Faith in Jesus Christ is better. He starts off saying, "God in times past spoke to us through the prophets, but in these last days has spoken to us through the son."

The son is the latest and the greatest and the last revelation from God. He goes on, just to whet your appetite a little bit, he goes on to say that Jesus was better than angels. We just got through singing the angel song, and everyone knew that angels were messengers who were sent from God. But he says Jesus was better than angels. Angels were messengers; Jesus is the son.

He goes on to say Jesus was better than Moses. They go, "What?" Everyone knew Moses was the lawgiver, but Jesus is the son of God. He goes on to say Jesus was better than the priest, better than the high priest, and he walks through for ten chapters. Then he ties a bow to it, and he says and all of the great ones out of the Jewish culture of history all lived by the principle of faith.

He starts naming them in this great hall of fame of people of faith. He says, "By faith Abel offered a more excellent sacrifice than his brother Cain." Then he talks about the walk of faith. "By faith, Noah walked with God. Enoch walked with God and was translated." Then he talks about how Noah preached for God for 120 years. Then he comes down through and Abraham and Joseph and all of those he lists in the Hall of Fame.

Then at the portion of our scripture for the morning, he lifts up Moses. He says, "And Moses made a decision based upon faith." Now let's look. I want to pick it up in verse 24. I will come back and get verse 23 if it is all right. It says, "By faith Moses, when he was come to years..." How old was Moses when he came to those years? He was 40 years old. I'm skipping his early part; I will get that in in a minute on purpose.

I am shifting on you. See, there were some people here at 8:00, they are thinking they know where I am going. I want to keep them on their tiptoes. So at age 40, Moses makes a life-changing decision. A monumental decision. At 40 years old, he is good and grown. He is mature. He is supposedly wise and even has had life experiences to the point that at this stage in his life, he wants to be sure about what he's going to do with the rest of his life.

His decision is either he is going to accept being a part of the Egyptian culture from now on, or he is finally going to identify with his roots. That is a major, major decision. It's a major decision, and in making that decision, he has to reject some things. Because there are some things, if you're going to walk with God, you have to learn how to reject. It is not easy to reject the kinds of things Moses ends up rejecting, and we're going to talk about it.

The first thing he rejects is he refuses to be called any longer Pharaoh's daughter's son. Now in his early life, you know Moses' parents tried to keep him when he was born. Because he was a little baby, he couldn't hang around because babies keep up too much noise and it could have caused problems for them and for him. He could have been killed as a child. So his mother put him in a basket.

When she put him in the basket, Pharaoh's daughter came down to do a little skinny dipping, a little bathing. She saw this basket and she opened the basket, and there was this baby, Moses. Moses' sister was right there, Miriam, and she said to Pharaoh's daughter, "Do you want me to go get one of those Hebrew nannies, one of those Hebrew women, to nurse this child?" Three-month-old baby, they didn't have any Gerber; there was no formula.

So babies were breastfed. Pharaoh's daughter didn't have any milk. So she went and got Moses' mama. Moses' mama had the chance to raise her baby and get paid for it. What God will do. God will do some amazing things. What she was doing was she was putting in her child an understanding of who he is. She put deep in that young baby's mind, "You are a Hebrew, and don't you ever forget who you are, and don't you ever forget where you come from."

I think that lesson is missing today. I think that somewhere in the installing of the software, we malfunction in putting that deep enough into the hearts and minds of our sons and daughters. It is important. It doesn't mean you're better, it doesn't mean you're grander, but at least it says this is who I am and you ought to be proud of who you are. So she put that in Moses.

Now look, he grows up with that in him. Even though he is educated in the best of the schools of Egypt, he is put in a situation where he has everything at his disposal, and now he comes to 40 years old. I remember when I was 40. That wasn't that long ago in my mind. I was in a good stage. I was in a good place. I felt good about where I was trying to go in my life.

It was because I had made a decision, and it was the same decision that Moses makes here. And that is—listen, here it is—that he's going to reject the world's prestige. Say it: world's prestige. The world's labeling, the world's stamp of approval, the world's lifting, the world's standard that I'm going to live by—I had to make a fundamental decision that that was no longer good enough for me.

I had grown and matured to the point that I realized that while there were some inviting processes in the world, there were also some challenges that I did not necessarily need as a part of my life. There are pressures that come to people when you make a decision like that. When you decide that you are going to push back against the world's prestige and that you are going to accept God's own direction for your life, that comes at a cost.

But it's a cost that faith will help you through. That's where the power comes. The power to decide to reject the world and its standards. What does the world honor? The world honors people. See, this was Pharaoh's daughter's son; that's who Moses was going to have to be known as the rest of his life. Yes, he would be a prince in Egypt, but he would be known and tied to the legacy of the Pharaohs.

And that meant he would have to reject—