All right, end of family meeting.

Back to regularly scheduled programming in the book of Hebrews.

Don't turn there.

Because we're in this weird part of Hebrews where we're not necessarily reading the actual

passages of Hebrews, but we're reading about the people who are mentioned in the Hall of

Faith and their actual stories from the Old Testament.

So quick catch-up moment if you're just joining us. The book of Hebrews is this New Testament

letter written by someone who we don't even know who he is, but it's written to a church

and we know what they're going through. They're Jewish believers who are being persecuted and

rejected from multiple different groups. And so because this is

the first century and because the persecution and rejection is so strong, this church is thinking about

giving up. So the writer, even though we don't know who he is, we know the reason why he wrote it is

because you have a church who loves Jesus who are thinking about tapping out. They're thinking

about walking away. So the theme of

Hebrews is the word perseverance. If you want me to describe Hebrews in three words, it's perseverance

in gratitude, that you would stay grateful for what Jesus has done and you would persevere in your

faith. And the writer uses all kind of different ways of motivating your perseverance. But in

chapter 11, the method for motivation of perseverance is reminding you of faith heroes from the past.

But the purpose isn't to create a hall of fame of all these men and women who it's like, there's the

impossible standard you got to live up to. It's you belong to the same family as these men and women,

and you walk on the same faith invitation in your life individually.

So we're reading things like, remember, don't turn there because it's not where we're living.

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