For he was looking forward to the city that has foundations whose designer and builder is God.
– Hebrews 11:10
Man, it’s hard to pick one verse out of all of Hebrews 11 to pray according to, I mean, I could pick any one of the 40 verses in this chapter. But I’m choosing this verse in particular because of one phrase.
Hebrews 11:10 teaches us about the spiritual mindset of Abraham.
In Hebrews 11:10, the author of Hebrews writes that Abraham was looking forward. So, just the context, right before that, in verse eight, it talks about how God had called Abraham to go to a place, to a land, that he would eventually receive as an inheritance.
Verse eight says, “He went out not knowing where he was going, but by faith, he went to live in this land as in a foreign land, living in tents.” It talks about Isaac and Jacob who were heirs of the same promise that God was going to give them this land. And in all of this, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob were looking forward by faith to what God had promised for the future.
If you know the rest of the story, it was hundreds of years before that promise came to fulfillment, and God brought his people into this land. The point here in Hebrews 11 is that faith looks forward to the fulfillment of God’s promises. I just want you to think about your life in that way today. The life of faith is a life of looking forward. That’s how Hebrews 11:1 starts. It says, “Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” It’s hope, it’s assurance in things you don’t have yet. I just want to encourage you today in your life, the life of faith is always looking forward.
Hebrews 11:10 teaches us to look beyond the temporal towards the eternal.
You think about how many times our circumstances, especially when we’re going through hard times, difficulties, and trials, we can get so focused on what’s happening now that we can lose hope. The Bible calls us, God in his word calls us to look forward. One day, all these things that we don’t understand in our lives God will have worked together for our good. That’s a promise and part of all of his promises. That’s the last part of Hebrews 11:10.
He was looking forward to a city with foundations whose designer and builder is God. You can be confident, no matter what happens in your life, that there is a divine designer and builder who is working all things together for your good and will ultimately bring you and me all who trust in Jesus, all who live their lives looking forward, he will bring us to himself, to perfect peace, to a new heaven and a new earth where his righteousness and justice and mercy and comfort and joy reign perfectly where we will enjoy him perfectly, enjoy each other, all who are in Christ perfectly forever.
This verse encourages us to develop a future-oriented faith.
So, live your life today looking forward to that day and looking forward to all the fulfillment of God’s promises. Oh God, we praise you for all of your promises toward us. Promise, specifically, as we’ve mentioned, to work all things in our lives together for our good and for your glory. So, help us today to live looking forward.
Help us not to be dismayed, discouraged, disheartened by our present circumstances, by the challenges we see around us in our lives, in our families, in the world around us. God, as we see all these things and we walk through these things, God, we pray that you would give us a perspective all day long in everything that is looking forward. It’s looking forward the fulfillment of your promises, that is looking forward to seeing how you, the divine, awesome, omnipotent, omniscient, all-wise, builder and designer are working all these things together for our good.
Prayer for the Bayad People
God, we praise you for this confidence and we pray for people who don’t have this confidence, who don’t have eternity with you to look forward to right now. Lord, help us, we pray, to share the gospel today with somebody around us, the good news of eternal life. God, help us to share Jesus with someone around us today. And God, we pray for the Bayad people of Mongolia, 67,000 of them in this remote part of Mongolia.
God, please cause the good news of your grace to spread to them. They don’t have an eternity to look forward to right now. They have an eternity to dread without you. Jesus, we pray for the spread of the gospel to the Bayad people of Mongolia and to thousands of other people, groups like them, that are unreached with this good news of eternal life to look forward to. God, we pray all of this according to your word in Hebrews 11:10. In Jesus’ name, we pray as we look forward. Amen.
David Platt serves as a pastor in metro Washington, D.C. He is the founder of Radical.
David received his Ph.D. from New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary and is the author of Don’t Hold Back, Radical, Follow Me, Counter Culture, Something Needs to Change, Before You Vote, as well as the multiple volumes of the Christ-Centered Exposition Commentary series.
Along with his wife and children, he lives in the Washington, D.C. metro area.
