Faithfulness

What does it mean to be a faithful people?

We live in a world of broken promises, rife with divorce and where we almost expect people to let us down.

What God teaches us through his word is that He is a God that we can trust. That He is faithful. The Old Testament is full of stories of God doing what He promised to do both good and bad.

The bad stories can be hard to read, like with the context of Lamentations where God’s judgement is poured out over His people.  But they are also necessary.

I think of a parent who makes a threat to their children, “If you don't tidy your room by the time we are meant to leave you will not go to the birthday party”.

But then when one of the children fails to tidy their room the parent doesn't follow through with the threat and duly takes them to the party anyway.  Their mercy overrides their judgement.

What kind of justice is that?

If you were the sibling who tidied their room in order to get to go to the party and the other child does not tidy their room but still gets to go, that is unfair, it is unjust.  And most likely they both won’t tidy their room next time the threat is made as they don’t believe the threat is true.  The parent has in fact broken trust with those children and demonstrated that the child cannot have faith in what they say.

We serve a God who is both just and merciful. These are elements of His character that He cannot change but both have to be applied.

God promised early on in the biblical narrative that He would provide a way for us to become right with Him, that He was a God of mercy.  But He also promised that He was a just God.

God is faithful to that promise. He answers both truths about himself and his promise of reconciliation through Jesus Christ.

Like that parent, if God were just merciful and forgave the consequence at no cost, He would not be just and so would not be faithful to His word.

An unfaithful God, a God who does not follow through with promises both good and bad is not a God worth following.

We as followers of Christ are called to likewise be faithful.

We are called to be trustworthy.

We are called for our yes to be yes and our no to be no, even if there is a price to be paid for that.

God sets this ultimate example of faithfulness as He experiences the personal cost of Jesus’s death on the cross in order to fulfill the promise that He would be both merciful and just and at the same time to reconcile us to himself.  By placing the judgement we deserved on Jesus allows God to be merciful towards us as believers of Him.

This transformation of us as followers into faithful people who can be trusted is not in our own strength, rather we are to allow the Holy Spirit to grow within us so that through the power of God we might become people who can be trusted, that we would be faithful to our word, no matter the cost.

It is God in us, through His spirit, transforming us into His likeness that should result in us being a faithful people.

What an awe inspiring God we serve and so would we allow the Holy Spirit to work within us, to make us faithful people who are true to their word as in the nature of God.