10.30.21 - Hebrews 11.1-12.3: The Long Race (Kenny Camacho)

SCRIPTURE: Hebrews 11.1-12.3

“What can we do? We can live in relationship with God. We can fix our eyes on his example, and hold on to the combination of confidence in faith and humility in certainty Jesus embodies. When we wander from the actual example of Jesus into our assumptions about what God should do, we tend to cheapen our faith and trade it for pride. But the thing that makes faith so special is that it’s the only sense we have that forces us out of ourselves, out of our own narrow worldview. It’s the way we pick up on what someone else is doing, and seek to align ourselves to it.”

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS:

  1. How would you define “faith”? How have you heard it defined before? What makes this a particularly tricky term to work with?

  2. The anonymous author of Hebrews writes that “faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see.” Try to put yourself in the context of a Jewish Christian, living in the first century: how might this definition resonate with you? What do you think the author is trying to say to this audience?

  3. How do the stories of others’ faith help our own faith to grow? What is the difference, according to this letter, between the kind of faith our ancestors had and the kind of faith we, as Christians, are able to have?

  4. What actual example of faith does Jesus set? What was he like? How did he model faith…even though he was also God? What can we learn from this?

  5. What is the difference between confidence and certainty? Kenny made the case on Saturday that the American church has been “peddling certainty” in recent days, and that this is a source for real concern about our future. What did he mean? What might the problem be?

  6. How can we be confident in our faith, even when we still have questions? Can we actually live as healthy Christians if we are still wrestling with doubts?

Kenny Camacho