Today, we are continuing our series, A Church That Pleases God. But before we jump into this morning’s message, I want to take a moment to remind you of what we have covered together, because this series builds on itself, and each week connects directly to the one before it.

In the first week, we talked about the awe of God. We said that awe is the beginning of wisdom, opening our eyes to the greatness of God, and preparing our hearts to trust him. A church that pleases God is one that walks in the awe of God, where the presence of God is not taken for granted, worship is not routine, and the people who gather carry a deep, settled awareness that they are standing before a holy God who is worthy of everything they have to give.

Last week, in week two, we talked about obedience. And we saw that obedience is the believer's response of love, flowing from a heart genuinely captured by the goodness and the grace of God. We saw that obedience is the fruit of faith and that obedience is not something we manufacture in our own strength; it is something the Holy Spirit does in us as we surrender to his work in our lives.

Today we build on that and take the next step. A church that pleases God is one that walks in faith. But I want to be careful this morning and define that clearly, because faith is one of the most used and misunderstood words in the Christian vocabulary.

Faith is not a feeling that comes and goes with your circumstances. Faith is not a wish you make and then hope for the best. Faith is not positive thinking dressed up in religious language. Faith is confidence in God. Faith is trust in his character. Faith is the settled, unshakable conviction that what God said is true and that what God has promised will come to pass, even when everything you see with your natural eyes seems to say otherwise.

And so, we want to be a church that pleases God, but the Bible says,

“Without faith it is impossible to please God, because anyone who comes to him must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who earnestly seek him” (Hebrews 11:6).

That single verse has anchored this entire series and reveals something profound about the heart of God. Of all the things he could have said he’s looking for in his people, he says he’s looking for faith. In other words, he’s looking for people who believe he exists and that he rewards those who seek him. That is not complicated theology; it is simply the cry of a God who wants to be known and trusted.

In fact, the Spirit of God gives us the defining statement of what faith is through the writer of Hebrews.

“Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see” (Hebrews 11:1).

In other words, faith is confidence and certainty, not in our own abilities or plans, but in the unseen God who has never failed to keep a promise he has made. And so our faith lives in the gap between the promise and its fulfillment, between the word God has spoken and the moment that word becomes a visible, tangible reality. Our faith holds steady in that gap not because of what it can see but because of who it knows.

The first thing I want you to see this morning is that faith does not begin with us; it begins with God. He is the object of our faith, and therefore, our faith grows in direct proportion to how clearly we see him.

This is the connection between week one and week three that I did not want you to miss. Awe and faith are not separate topics; they are the same spiritual reality described from two different angles. Awe is what happens when you see God clearly. And faith is what that clarity produces within you.

In other words, when you see his power, you trust him. When you see his holiness, you honor him. When you see his faithfulness written across the pages of Scripture and woven through your own life experiences, you rely on him with a confidence that doesn’t depend on favorable circumstances. When you see his love demonstrated at the cross of Calvary, you surrender to him completely, because you understand that a God who loved you that much can be trusted.

The problem that many of us face from time to time is not that we have stopped believing in God. It is that our vision of God has been obscured by the noise, the pressure, and the accumulation of worries about daily life. And so, we start measuring God by the size of our problems instead of measuring our problems by the size of our God. When our view of God gets turned upside down like that, our faith begins to shrink. The giants look bigger, and God looks smaller. And so we end up paralyzed in the wilderness when the promised land is right there in front of us.

This is why prayer, worship, and time in the Word are not optional extras for the serious Christian. They are the means by which we keep our vision of God calibrated because every time you open the Scriptures, you remind your soul of who God is. Every time you enter a time of genuine worship, you lift your eyes above your circumstances and fix them on the one who holds all things in his hands. And so, faith is not blind; faith sees God, and a church that keeps its eyes fixed on God never runs out of faith.

The second thing I want you to see is that faith is not passive; it is active. Jesus commanded Peter to come. Then he got down out of the boat and walked on the water to Jesus (Matthew 14:29). You see, faith moves; it obeys; it steps out of the boat and onto the water without having to test whether the water will hold.

The writer of Hebrews makes that point in what is known as the Hall of Faith. He lines up man after man, woman after woman, and in every case, each one is remembered not for what they believed, but for what they did with their belief.

Rahab was a woman with every reason to stay hidden and keep quiet, but she had heard what God was doing for his people, and she chose to act on her faith. The Bible says, she protected the people of God, giving them a signal when she tied the scarlet cord in the window (Joshua 2:21). And so, she was not only protecting the people of God, she was staking her life and the lives of everyone she loved on the faithfulness of a God she had only recently come to trust.

Or how about Gideon, who faced an army so vast it could not be counted.

The Lord said to him, “With the three hundred men… I will save you and give the Midianites into your hands" (Judges 7:7).

And so, God stripped his army down to three hundred men so that no one would have any doubt about who won the battle.

In faith, trusting the word of God, Gideon marched those three hundred men into the darkness with trumpets and torches hidden under clay jars. When he gave the signal, they broke the jars, and their torches suddenly illuminated the darkness. When those 300 men began blowing their trumpets, the Midianites were startled out of their sleep, and the Bible says the Lord caused the men throughout the camp to turn on each other with their swords. And so the Midianite Army fled before Gideon (Judges 7:22).

Or then there was David, just a shepherd boy with no military training. He ran quickly toward the battle line to meet Goliath. As every other fighting man in Israel was running the opposite direction, David ran into the fight with only a sling and five smooth stones, declaring, “I come against you in the name of the Lord Almighty” (1 Samuel 17:45-49).

That is faith in motion, and not one of those moments made sense in the natural. Not one of them could be explained by human strategy or strength. Every single one of them was an act of faith in response to a word from God, even when it was uncomfortable, even when it required courage, even when the people around them thought they had lost their minds.

A church that pleases God is one that acts on what God says. I believe that somewhere in this room this morning, there is someone who has a word from God, just waiting for a step of obedience to bring it to life.

The third thing I want you to see is that faith trusts God in the waiting, and this is the dimension of faith most of us find hardest to sustain because we live in a world engineered to eliminate waiting. We want answers immediately, doors to open on demand, and when God does not move on our timeline, it is easy to interpret his silence as indifference.

But… “the Lord is not slow in keeping his promise, as some understand slowness. He is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance" (2 Peter 3:9).

The prophet Habakkuk understood the struggle with waiting better than most of us. He looked around at a world that seemed to be falling apart and cried out to God,

"How long, O Lord, must I call for help, but you do not listen? Or cry out to you… but you do not save?" (Habakkuk 1:2).

God’s answer was not an immediate deliverance, but a vision and a command. He said:

“Write down the revelation and make it plain on tablets so that a herald may run with it. For the revelation awaits an appointed time... Though it linger, wait for it; it will certainly come and not delay” (Habakkuk 2:2-3).

That is not the answer an impatient heart wants to hear. “Write it down and wait for it.” But notice what God is doing; he’s not telling Habakkuk that his prayer went unheard. He tells him that the vision is true, that the fulfillment has an appointed time, and even when it cannot be seen, the waiting itself is part of the plan.

Habakkuk’s response is one of the most remarkable passages of faith in all of Scripture. He ends his book by saying:

"Though the fig tree does not bud… and the fields produce no food, though there are no sheep in the pen or cattle in the stalls, yet I will rejoice in the Lord, I will be joyful in God my Savior" (Habakkuk 3:17-18).

That is a fully persuaded faith. That is a man who has anchored himself so completely in the character of God that none of his circumstances has the power to move him.

The apostle Paul upholds that same quality of faith when he points to Abraham in his letter to the Romans, saying:

“He did not waver through unbelief regarding the promise of God, but was strengthened in his faith and gave glory to God, being fully persuaded that God had power to do what he had promised” (Romans 4:20-21).

You see, a fully persuaded faith praises God in the midst of the process, not only at the end.

The disciples waited in the upper room for ten days between Jesus’ return to heaven and the mighty outpouring of the Holy Spirit on the day of Pentecost. It may have seemed like God was silent during those ten days, but he was preparing something that would change the world. And in the same way, we want to be a church that pleases God, trusting him in the waiting, holding fast to his promises, and giving him glory even before the answer arrives.

The fourth thing I want you to see is that faith is not silent. Faith speaks, and what it says has the power to shape the atmosphere of your life, your home, your family, and the community around you. Paul writes to the Corinthians, saying:

“It is written: I believed; therefore I have spoken.” And so, it is with that “same spirit of faith we also believe and therefore speak” (2 Corinthians 4:13).

In other words, faith and speech are inseparably connected. What you genuinely believe eventually comes out of your mouth, and what comes out of your mouth carries great power. The Bible says:

"The tongue has the power of life and death" (Proverbs 18:21).

And that is not a metaphor; it is a spiritual principle that operates in the lives of believers, whether they are aware of it or not.

You see, faith speaks hope into situations that look hopeless. Faith speaks truth over the lies that fear and discouragement whisper in the dark. Faith speaks Scripture out loud over circumstances that the natural eye would see as over, being finished, because faith knows that the last word never belongs to our circumstances, the last word belongs to our God.

"For the word of God is living and active. Sharper than any double-edged sword" (Hebrews 4:12).

And so, when you speak it in faith, you release something into the atmosphere that is more powerful than anything the enemy can bring against you.

This is at the heart of Christianity: the understanding that Spirit-filled believers speak with authority, that the name of Jesus carries power, and that the promises of God are not merely a source of comfort in difficult moments but weapons in the hands of every believer. Therefore, a church that walks in faith speaks life over its families, its community, and its future, and refuses to give the final word to anything less than the truth of Scripture.

The fifth thing I want you to see is that faith is not something you produce, something you work at, or a personality trait that some people have and other people don’t. Faith is an equal opportunity gift cultivated and strengthened by the Holy Spirit in the life of every believer who yields to him. Jude put it simply and powerfully,

“Build yourselves up in your most holy faith and pray in the Holy Spirit” (Jude 20).

Praying in the Holy Spirit is one of the primary means by which faith is built up in the believer. When you pray in the Spirit, you engage with God at a level that goes beyond what your natural mind can fully comprehend. The Scripture says:

"We have the mind of Christ" (1 Corinthians 2:16).

And so, when we pray in the Spirit, the Spirit who searches all things, even the deep things of God, we can understand what God has freely given us. In that place of prayer, the Holy Spirit does something in you that strengthens your confidence in God, deepens your trust in his promises, and builds a foundation of faith that circumstances are unable to shake.

In other words, when we are most tempted to forget God’s promises, the Bible says that the Holy Spirit will teach you all things and will remind you of everything Jesus said (John 14:26).

And so, when doubt is increasing, and fear is getting louder, the Holy Spirit reaches down into your spirit, pulls up the word that God spoke to you, the promise he gave to you, and he says, remember,

"I the LORD do not change" (Malachi 3:6).

I am still faithful, I’m still working, I’m still the same as I was yesterday, today, and forever (Hebrews 13:8).

A church that depends on the Holy Spirit to strengthen its faith doesn’t have to produce or generate confidence from its own resources because it draws from a well that never runs dry. Or as the prophet Isaiah said,

“Like a spring whose waters never fail” (Isaiah 58:11).

And that is the kind of faith that lasts not just for a Sunday morning, but for a lifetime. That’s what Jesus told the Samaritan woman at the well. That’s what Jesus later proclaimed in the temple courts. Remember how he spoke of streams of living water flowing from within, and John tells us that…

"By this he meant the Spirit, whom those who believed in him were later to receive" (John 7:38-39).

This same Spirit was poured out on the day of Pentecost, who now lives and works within every believer, strengthening us, encouraging us, and building us up from the inside out.

And so, today, as we come to a close, I want to bring all of this together because I believe everything we have talked about this morning is building toward something specific for us as a church in this moment.

A church that walks in faith is always being prepared for what God wants to do next. Those faithful men and women listed in Hebrews 11 did not have a complete picture of where the road was leading, but they had a Word from God and the willingness to move on it. That combination proved to be enough every single time, because when God calls you forward, he goes before you, and the God who goes before you is already in your tomorrow, preparing the way.

That is super important because we have things ahead of us as a church that will require exactly the kind of faith we have been talking about this morning. Steps that are bigger than our budget. Moments when the only explanation for what happened will be that God showed up. Because his people prayed and trusted him enough to take that next step. And so, I want us to be ready for those moments, not just because we have made the right preparations, but because we have cultivated the right kind of faith that gives God something to work with.

So, this morning, I want to invite you to bring your faith honestly before God. Not to measure it against someone else's, and not to condemn yourself for the places where it still feels weak, but simply to offer what you have to a God who honors even the smallest mustard seed of faith or act of genuine trust.

The disciples themselves felt the weight of that need when they came to Jesus and said,

"Lord, increase our faith" (Luke 17:5).

And that prayer, that request was never turned away. In fact, he is still answering it today, because a church that pleases God is a church that walks in faith.

Graphics, notes, and commentary from LifeChurch, Ministry Pass, PC Study Bible, Preaching Library, and Sermon Central. Scripture from the New International Version unless otherwise noted.