Imagine someone comes up to you and says, "I want you to follow me." You say, "Fine, where are you going?" He says, "I'm not going to tell you. You'll just have to trust me."

How willing are you and I to take risks? How much risk is involved in living everyday life? What are life’s greatest risks?

"We are risk illiterate," one safety expert says. "We have a completely distorted view of life's real perils." The chance of dying in a commercial airplane crash is just one in 800,000. You are more likely to choke to death on a piece of food. You are twice as likely to be killed playing a sport as you are to be stabbed to death by a stranger. And the chance of dying of a medical complication or mistake is tiny (one in 84,000). You take a far greater risk riding in a car. One in 5000 of us die that way.

The next time you buy a lottery ticket, bear in mind that you are at least 13 times as likely to be struck by lightning as you are to hit the jackpot... In helping to set insurance premiums, actuaries know that this year approximately 765,000 people in America will die of heart disease, 68,000 of pneumonia, 2000 of tuberculosis, 200 in storms and resulting floods, 100 by lightning, another 100 in tornadoes, and 50 of snakebites and bee stings.

Other experts tell us that, on average, being 30 percent overweight knocks 3.5 years off your life expectancy; being poor reduces it two years; and being a single man slashes almost a decade off your life-span. Unmarried females are luckier--they lose just four years off their lives. It has been calculated that for every cigarette you smoke, you lose ten minutes off your life expectancy...The grim predictability of mortality rates is something that has long puzzled social scientists.

A few years ago, in fact, Canadian psychologist Gerald Wilde noticed that mortality rates for violent and accidental deaths throughout most of the Western world have remained oddly static all through this century, despite advances in our technology and safety standards. Wilde developed a controversial theory - risk homeostasis - postulating that people tend to embrace a certain level of risk. When something is made safer, they will somehow reassert the original level of danger. If, for example, roads are improved with more and wider lanes, drivers will feel safer and go a little faster, thereby canceling out the benefits that the improved roads confer. Other studies have shown that where an intersection is made safer, the accident rate invariably falls there, but rises to a compensating level elsewhere along the same stretch of road. As the story goes, an American businessman named Wilson, tired of the Great depression, rising taxes and increasing crime, sold his home and business in 1940 and moved to an island in the Pacific. Balmy and ringed with beautiful beaches, the island seemed like paradise. Its name? Iwo Jima.(1)

Life if full of risks. It is impossible to go through life without risk.

Did you know that it is impossible for us to please God without taking risks? You may not have thought of it that way, but its true.

Verse 2 of our text says that the way people of old gained the approval of God was that they had faith. Verse 6 says that without faith it is impossible to please God. Then as you read the rest of the chapter you learn that every one of the faithful people mentioned took some sort of risk.

Faith involves risk. In fact, it can be said that faith, at the point where it intersects your living, is the biggest risk of your life.

"How so?" you ask. Let me show you. In the process of my showing you, I ask you to examine your own faith to see if it is the kind that gains God's approval or, if perhaps it might need some work to bring it up to where it should be. We learn first from this chapter that faith sometimes involves the risk of:

Verse 7 says, "By faith Noah, being warned by God about things not yet seen, in reverence prepared an ark for the salvation of his household…"

God warned Noah about things the patriarch hadn't yet seen. What was it that Noah hadn't seen? To start with, he hadn't seen rain - much less enough rain to destroy every air-breathing creature in a flood. For us living in the Northwest, that wouldn't be nearly as hard to believe, but for Noah, it was a huge step of faith.

Noah heeded God's warning and obeyed even though there was nothing that he had ever seen with his physical eyes that gave him any indication that such a thing was possible. In addition to that, God waited 120 years to make good on His warnings, so Noah's faith was tested to the limit.

Did anybody else in his day believe him? You would surely think there would be somebody who could trust God that much, even as preposterous as the idea of a universal flood sounded. But after 120 years of preaching and warning, only Noah's own family was willing to risk. As a result, Noah and his family became the only people who ever saw the earth before, during, and after the flood!

Noah took a big risk! Further, he did it alone. Can you imagine the ridicule he must have received, building this big boat out in the middle of dry land with no water around to float it? He did it solely on the basis of what God said was going to happen.

Verse 1 says, "Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen." It's that "not seen" part that makes up the risk.

Not all faith involves building a boat in the middle of dry ground, but it always involves taking God at His word and proceeding according to what He says is going to happen, even when it seems strange and unbelievable.

What would be a modern example of faith? Try this: In Romans 8:28, God promises to "work all things together for good" for His people. Perhaps right now you're in the middle of the most miserable crisis of your life. It looks as if it will never end. Well-meaning friends are telling you to bail out. Do you take God at His word, though you see no end in sight? That is what faith is all about!

Secondly faith sometimes involves:

Look at verse 8: "By faith Abraham, when he was called, obeyed by going out to a place which he was to receive for an inheritance; and he went out, not knowing where he was going."

Imagine someone comes up to you and says, "I want you to follow me." You say, "Fine, where are you going?" He says, "I'm not going to tell you. You'll just have to trust me." That’s the kind of risk Abraham took.

Actually the language here is present tense. It could read: "as he was being called - he went." In other words the response was immediate. He went from what was probably a comfortable, established lifestyle in Ur to following a God he barely knew!

How willing would we have been to follow God under those terms? Or, perhaps closer to where we live, how willing are we to do what God says today when we don’t understand why he wants us to do something?

Here is an example: God in His word calls on you to change a certain behavior. You say, "Why? Give me one good reason why I should change what I'm doing. It's enjoyable. It helps me cope. I cannot see that it is hurting anyone." In response, the Scripture gives no reason. It just says, "do it."

I realize it is easier to obey when we understand what is going on and why. One of the most common questions people ask me is some version of "Why must I do this?" The trouble is, I can't always produce an answer. Whenever there is an answer, I agree that we need to know it. But the answers aren't all there. Sometimes we have to take a risk and just believe that God knows what He is doing even when we don't.

Is your obedience dependent upon your always understanding the "why" of God's commands? If so, then your faith falls short of the kind that gains God's approval. It needs to grow. You need to obey even when you don't understand why.

Thirdly, faith sometimes involves:

Verse 4 says, "By faith Abel offered to God a better sacrifice than Cain."

Here the writer of Hebrews goes back to the very first description of worship in the Bible - that of Cain and Abel. It says that Abel's offering was better by faith. We read in Genesis 4:3-5:

Students of the Bible differ widely on the reason for God accepting the one offering and rejecting the other. It has been suggested that the issue was that of a blood offering vs. a vegetable offering. While I cannot deny that may have been the case, that isn't what is mentioned. The only thing that is mentioned is that Cain brought a vegetable offering (that is reasonable - he was a farmer) and Abel (a shepherd) brought the firstlings of his flock. The "firstlings of the flock" would be the first born - the very first animals of the herd's increase. Whenever the Bible speaks of the first of the vegetable harvest, it refers to the "first fruits," the very first harvest brought to the barn. No "first fruit" is mentioned here in regard to Cain's offering. It may just be that Abel's offering was accepted because he gave God the first of His increase, not knowing if there would be any more animals born. Cain, on the other hand, may have waited until he had his harvest in the barn, then he cut out some of the increase for God. It takes very little faith to give out of your abundance. It takes great faith to give all that you have to date!

The issue of giving the first fruits or the "firstlings of the flock" is that you don't know if anything else is going to come in! You can see the risk in that. That's where the faith is!

Faith is giving when we don't have. Faith can also be:

In verses 24-25 we read, "By faith Moses, when he had grown up, refused to be called the son of Pharaoh's daughter; choosing rather to endure ill-treatment with the people of God, than to enjoy the passing pleasures of sin."

The Bible makes no secret of the fact that sin brings pleasure and that turning away from sin can bring suffering and ill treatment. It certainly did for Moses. People who live lives where their feelings are supreme ("If it feel's good, do it") think such a decision as Moses made here is stupid. Why would you do something that brings pain? Why would you turn away from things that make you feel good? Especially for something you cannot see? It does seem strange to many.

Peter writes of those around us who don’t understand why we would deny ourselves the pleasure of sin: "They are surprised that you do not run with them into the same excess of dissipation…."(2)

Yet we know that, understood or not, faith is choosing to do right when I don't necessarily feel like it.

Fifthly, faith can be expressed in:

Verse 30 says, "By faith the walls of Jericho fell down, after they had been encircled for seven days."

The story of the conquest of Jericho in the book of Joshua is an incredible one. God told the people to take the city. However, rather than laying siege to it in the normal way, they were told to go out and march around it, not uttering a sound, with the priests blowing trumpets, then to return to camp. They did this one day, two days, three days, all the way up to the seventh day. Nothing happened. They had not been told that something would happen on the seventh day. They had merely been told to march around the city each day and return to camp. Don't you suppose they felt a little stupid out there marching, looking up at the people on the wall, and then going back to camp without doing anything? Yes, God had told them He would give them the city, but He didn't tell them how. After six days of marching, what do you suppose it looked like to them? Then on the seventh day, they marched around one, two, three, four, (Don't you suppose they felt a little ridiculous? Don't you suppose by now they were being mocked and laughed at by the Jerichoites?) five, six, seven - still nothing. Then they were told to shout. They shouted and the walls crumbled.

"Where is God? Why isn't He answering my prayer? It has been so long since I made my request. Why doesn't He do something about my situation? I don't understand?"

Whenever we ask things like that, we need to realize we're like those Israelites marching around that city - we're wondering what is going on. If God could do it on the seventh day, why couldn't He do it on the first - or at least the second?

Ecclesiastes says, "Cast your bread upon the surface of the water and you shall find it after many days." Faith is hardest of all on all those days that come between our throwing our bread and the end of God's definition of "many days!"

Do we trust God when we haven't received His answer yet? That's risky business, but it is what faith is all about.

Finally, faith may even involve:

Wow, is this tough or what?

Verses 39-40 say, "And all these, having gained approval through their faith, did not receive what was promised, because God had provided something better…"

A little context is in order here. If you back up to verse 35 and begin reading, you'll find that a lot of faithful people are mentioned who died before God fulfilled His promises to bless their lives. Why would God allow that to happen? If He promised it, how could he let them die without receiving it?

The answer is simple: He had something better in mind - something eternal. That's what it says in these verses: They "did not receive what was promised because God had provided something better…"

Now we're getting to the point where faithless people usually jump off the wagon. The thought that God would actually allow us to live with difficulties for the rest of our earthly lives in order to bless us in eternity is just too much for some.

Yet that idea is not foreign to the rest of the Bible. Neither is it beyond the understanding of Bible characters. I think of Shadrach, Meshech, and Abednego in the book of Daniel. They were seconds short of a barbecue with them as the main course. All they had to do was curtsy to the King's image and they could go home. Do you remember their words? You can read them in Daniel 3:17-18: "…our God whom we serve is able to deliver us from the furnace of blazing fire; and He will deliver us out of your hand, O king. But even if He does not, let it be known to you, O king, that we are not going to serve your gods or worship the golden image that you have set up."

They were confident that God was trustworthy even if He did not deliver them in this life! Are we?

Then there are the words of Job. Boils head to foot. Cursed by his wife. Left alone without a family. Friends turning against him. Where was God? Why didn't He answer? Then in a burst of trust that must have even surprised Job, he said in Job 13:15, "Though He slay me, I will hope in Him..."

Have you ever been at the place where you had to trust God when: