# 19 2020 Dev. Hebrews 11:16. The Promise! Read all of Ch.11. The purpose of these devotionals is to draw closer to God and grow spiritually by applying His Word to our daily living. All passages are taken from the NIV.
Heb. 10:16 “Instead, they were longing for a better country—a heavenly one. Therefore, God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared a city for them.”
Hebrews 11 begins with this statement: “Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see.” Faith is to believe the promises of God against all odds. The promise of God is a covenantal relationship of God with His people: “I will be their God and they will be my people.” If ever we need to believe the promises of God it is now, during this difficult time of separation, this time of death, 71,000 and rising and during this time of economic difficulty, 21M unemployed, 16% of the country. This is in the US and hundreds of thousands more world wide. We thank the health workers on this day and look to the National Day of Prayer tomorrow. Is anyone paying attention?
The author goes on with a long list of the pre-Christian heroes of the faith, starting with creation and ending with the period between the Testaments of the Old and New. Faith is not limited to those righteous but also to people like Samson and Rahab the prostitute, from Enoch who walked with God to Abraham the father of believers and every kind of person in-between, according to the will of our God. Praise the Lord!
Have you ever been a stranger in a strange land, not knowing the culture, or the language? That is an experience that calls for faith in action. Unless the world is too much with you that is the experience of followers of Jesus, we are strangers to the ways of the world, we are strangers to what is acceptable to the scoffers, to the those who reject God and His ways, truly we are wanderers on the earth. As in the past: “the world is not worthy of them (us), they wandered in deserts and mountains living in caves and holes in the ground.” Are we paying attention yet?
The answer is that we do not belong here: “Instead, they were (we are) longing for a better country—a heavenly one. Therefore, God is not ashamed to be called their (our) God, for he has prepared a city for them (us).” The amazing thing is that God connects us with the heroes of faith the author of Hebrews is telling us about: “These were all commended for their faith, yet none of them received what had been promised, 40 since God had planned something better for us so that only together with us would they be made perfect,” In Christ Jesus, Amen!
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