Faith, brothers and sisters, is mainly a falling in love with the reward, with God, with all that he promises to be for us

in Jesus so that bridges are burned in our heart between God and sin.

So that when crises come in our lives and the emotions of fear and all kinds of stress just threaten to take us over and we look back to safety.

The bridge is burned. It's gone.

There's no turning back.

Stress is the kind of thing that when you feel it and you're getting knotted up inside, it's hard

to get your bearings to live a life of risk-taking love.

In this episode of Light and Truth, John Piper opens Hebrews 11 23 to 28 to show how to handle crisis and stress by faith.

This sermon was originally preached at Bethlehem Baptist Church on August 3rd, 1997.

Now the situation you remember is that the king of Egypt became fearful that there were so many baby boys being born to the Jews and the numbers were great and these were good workers and who knows what might happen

if they became too many and so he said kill the boys leave the girls alone.

In Exodus chapter 1 verse 22 it says,

then Pharaoh commanded all his people saying,

every Jewish son who is born,

you shall cast into the Nile and every daughter you shall leave alive. Now notice

there are two threats here not just one. This is very crucial because if you see

only one threat you won't understand this verse. It's a very perplexing verse in one sense

verse. Here are the two threats. The first threat is to the children.

Kill them, he says. If there's a baby boy born, make sure you find him and throw him in the Nile so that we can deplete the population here of Jewish boys.

Now that's the first threat. The second threat is implicit.

This is a command from Pharaoh and if you disobey this command

you're in big trouble. Pharaohs didn't give commands to be flaunted or ignored.

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