Your Faith And Your Feelings Series

In the Pixar movie, “Inside Out” kids learn about their emotions. It all starts when the character; 11-year old Riley Anderson wrestles with conflicting emotions that comes from moving from her stable like in rural Minnesota to her unknown “to be” life in San Francisco.

Did any of you see the movie? The gist of the movie is to see how our basic emotions often control our acts: Joy, sadness, fear, disgust, and anger seem to be standing at the control booth of Riley’s life and directing it; literally, from inside out.

One of the quotes from the movie asks a simple question: “Do you ever look at someone and wonder what is going on inside their head?” (Joy)

Explanation:

The Book of Hebrews is a book that gets inside our head. No one really knows who the writer of Hebrews is and perhaps that’s by God’s design and will.

The reason is that it’s simply “the Word of God.” It’s God’s response to a bunch of people who weren’t feeling it. They started out the Christian life with the excitement of Pentecost. They rode the wave of the resurrection and the joy of hearing the stories of Jesus spread like wildfire and came to the area where they lived.

When they heard about Jesus; everything they had learned from their parents and teachers about God came alive and they quickly embraces and invited Jesus into their lives.

In response, they enjoyed the celebration of worship, lifting their hands in praise, and sharing the testimony of how Jesus changed and transformed their life completely.

Yet, in time, their feelings began to falter, the difficulty of living the Christian life in a time of persecution set in, their attendance at church seemed less enjoyable and being on God’s team was no longer popular; they were tempted to give up.

Perhaps they wanted to be like the traveling Christians who had seen the miracles of Jesus, were the eyewitnesses of the resurrection, and felt the joy of seeing the ascension. Yet, distance had left them out of such opportunity.

Suddenly discouragement set in. Perhaps a difficult diagnosis led them to fear and their faith started failing. Or an unexpected event shook their faith when they would have preferred the shaking of the ground beneath their feet like Paul experienced in Philippi.

Hebrews is not written to the people flying high spiritually; its written to the people who understood the struggles of life and the challenges that come to everyone; including Christians.

It’s written to the people who were simply: “Not feeling it.” It’s written to people who felt like John the Baptist who was in prison about to be martyred for his faith who said: “Go ask Jesus if he is the promised one of should we look for someone else? (He wasn’t feeling it)

It is written to people like you and me who face life’s struggles and silently ask God questions such as: “Where are you God?” “Why did you let this happen God?” Or even worse, “God do you even care?”

Transitional Sentence: What does God have to say to people who aren’t feeling it?

I. Faith is Not Feelings; It’s Facts

Hebrews 1:1- “God, “

Explanation:

When I was growing up there was an old song on the radio sang whose lyrics went something like this. It said: “You’ve lost that lovin’ feeling, Oh that lovin’ feeling...now it’s gone, gone, gone... (Do you want to sing it with me?) whoa, whoa, whoa.”

Strangely enough, that song was sung by a group called: “The Righteous brothers”—of course, the song was about the loss of feeling “in love” and the tragedy of that loss.

Yet, the writer of the Book of Hebrews is writing to a different set of “righteous brothers.” It is believed that they were believers, probably in small Christian community groups in Greece. Many were new believers who had heard the gospel from their believing neighbors.

Unlike the believers in Palestine, they had heard about Jesus second hand. Yet, they had enough time to mature as believers and to have their own life experiences journeying through life with Jesus like you and I do.

Yet, they were on the struggle bus. One of the greatest reasons why was because their faith was following their feelings instead of the feelings following their faith.

To get things back in order, Hebrews 1 starts out with one word and a comma. Did you read the verse? It simply says: “God (comma).”

God comma. Let’s stop there. What’s happening here? The writer is helping us understand how faith is supposed to work. Faith starts with facts, which produce faith, and feelings will follow.

God introduces Himself again. He takes them back to the very first book of the Bible and the very first verse in the Bible. He does not argue His existence; He states it. He’s not answering questions like: “God where are you” or “Do you really exist.” He just take them back and reminds them of what He first said.