Not Ashamed

You who frequent my small corner of the blogosphere know that I love finding new nuggets of truth nestled in very familiar passages of Scripture. Yesterday I ran across another one.

I was reading through Hebrew 11. You know, the Faith chapter. How many hundreds of times have I read this, heard it preached, even memorized portions of it? But today it wasn’t the patriarchs and their feats of faith that caught my attention. It was a small phrase embedded in the middle of verse 16: Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God.

Usually when we think of “ashamed” and our faith, we think of Paul’s declaration in Romans 1:16: For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ. We consider that we should not be ashamed of Him. Rarely do we contemplate that He might be ashamed for us to call Him our God.

Ouch! I don’t want the Lord to be ashamed that I call myself His child! So if I go back to Hebrews 11, how did the saints of old live lives that didn’t bring shame to their God? I think the answer lies at the conclusion of Hebrews 11:11: She considered Him faithful who had promised.

This verse refers specifically to Sarah, but I think it applies to the entire “hall of faith.” Their faith didn’t rest in a “happening,” a situation, a circumstance. Their faith remained though floods and barrenness and captivity and martyrdom, through miracles and victories and freedom because they believed in the faithfulness of their God.

That’s the kind of faith I want to have. Faith in the One who is always faithful. For while I might declare myself not ashamed of the gospel of my Lord, an even greater travesty would be for the Lord whose gospel it is to be ashamed of me.