IDEA: People first received the Christian faith as an idea.TEXT: "For you have need of endurance, so that after you have done the will of God, you may receive the promise: 'For yet a little while, and He who is coming will come and will not tarry. Now the just shall live by faith; but if anyone draws back, my soul has no pleasure in him.' But we are not of those who draw back to perdition, but of those who believe to the saving of the soul" (Hebrews 10:36-39).

PURPOSE: To help listeners recognize the power of a biblical idea.

Does it disturb you that many people who say they are born-again Christians appear to know almost nothing about the Christian faith?

What do you think they are talking about when they say they are "believers"?

I. People first receive the Christian faith as an idea.

How does that work? Ideas about Jesus Christ enter through the eye or ear to the inner part of a person. How that person responds to that idea has eternal consequences.

Does that mean that Christian faith is only ideas with no place for emotion?

Does that mean that a person must know all about the Bible in order to become a Christian?

Does that mean that ideas other than the idea that Christ died for our sins are not important?

II. Even the simplest statement that we can make about the gospel is weighted with ideas.

Christ Jesus died for our sins. This is a basic statement of the gospel.

What ideas are bound up in that short statement?

Christ--what does that mean?

Jesus--who is He?

What do we mean by sins?

What do we mean by the statement that Christ died for our sins?

III. We cannot escape the fact that the Christian faith is first ideas that we either embrace or reject.

Many of the ideas of the Bible seem counter-intuitive.

We have a relationship with God totally apart from anything we do.

The just live by faith.