So if you weren't with us last week, I got to catch you up. Because this summer, we're doing

what's like a series within a series. We're preaching through the book of Hebrews in a nine-month

journey that's going to take up most of 2025. But what we decided to do when we got to Hebrews

chapter 11, this is a famous chapter of your Bible. It's what's known as the Hall of Faith.

It's a list of men and women from the Old Testament who God filled with supernatural power

because of faith and did things that story after story you're going to recall lessons of old,

especially if you grew up in church and names that may be familiar. And we thought, man, with a

three-month gap in the summer where so much of our church is all over the place, why don't we just

camp out in Hebrews chapter 11 for the entire summer before we hit the epic portion of Hebrews chapter 12? That's sort of the climax of the entire book of Hebrews. Let us run this race with perseverance, fixing our eyes on Jesus and all of those things. So the theme of Hebrews is perseverance. But what we saw last week is you don't get perseverance without faith. If the message is perseverance,

then the mechanism must be faith, because faith builds your hope over time. And when we talk about

faith, we're not talking about this blind hope and trust we have that God might be real and Jesus

might have died on the cross and we need to feel better at funerals because we don't really have

answers for the meaning of life. So we found it in this. No, faith is actually rooted in tangible evidence that began at creation.

The writer of Hebrews is beginning at the very beginning of the story and then walking us through

what God did. And what we saw last week is that faith is actually relational trust. It's the proven

trust of God over time that begins at creation,

but is ultimately revealed in the story of God's people culminating with Jesus and your faith becomes

real, not once everything makes sense in your mind, but as you trust God with your heart and find

out that everything you see in the created world around you is pointing to a story that's

revealed in Christ and confirmed by the resurrection. So faith is relational trust that builds over time.

Last week was the foundation of everything we're about to see this summer. And now today,

we're going to look at our first two characters who have modeled faith for us in the book of

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