Good morning, everyone. It’s really good to be together, isn’t it? To remember the Lord together—it’s just wonderful.
Well, for some time now, I’ve had a simple, single word on my heart. And that word is faithfulness. Faithfulness.
Given the amount of time I’ve had that on my heart, I haven’t been too faithful. But the real thought in faithfulness is that God is faithful—completely faithful. And I believe He would have us display that character of faithfulness; that He would be after a people of faithfulness. Faithfulness is part of the testimony of Christ, of Who He is, of Who the Lord is.
So there are just several verses. I’ll read these verses, and if you get these verses, you’ve got the message. So if you pay attention early, you’ll get it.
In the first two verses, the principle is that God is faithful.
Lamentations 3:22-23:
The Lord’s lovingkindnesses indeed never cease,
For His compassions never fail.
They are new every morning;
Great is Your faithfulness.
Revelation 19:11:
And I saw heaven opened, and behold, a white horse, and He Who sat on it is called Faithful and True, and in righteousness He judges and wages war.
Great is Thy faithfulness, and God is faithful and true.
The second piece of the thought is His desire that we be faithful.
Galatians 5:22-23:
But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law.
The fruit of the Spirit is faithfulness.
Luke 18:8:
I tell you that He will bring about justice for them quickly. However, when the Son of Man comes, will He find faith on the earth?
So we’re saying that God has a desire to see faithfulness in His people. And, of course, living faith in God expresses itself in faithfulness.
And then the third set of Scriptures says, what is the fruit of faithfulness?
Revelation 17:14:
These will wage war against the Lamb, and the Lamb will overcome them, because He is Lord of lords and King of kings; and those who are with Him are the called and chosen and faithful.
So we will be with Him. The faithful will be with Him.
Matthew 25:23:
His master said to him, “Well done, good and faithful slave. You were faithful with a few things; I will put you in charge of many things. Enter into the joy of your master.”
So let’s just pray a little bit.
Lord, we thank You for this time together this morning, just turning unto You and remembering You. We thank You that You are our life, and we just give You praise. We pray now, as we look at Your Word, that You would grant grace, that we could see what You’re after in this matter of faithfulness. In Jesus’ name.
It seems to me that the number of places and the number of ways that we see this word faithful in the Word show that it is very important to the Lord.
Of course, He’s obviously interested in us being faithful to Him, but He’s also interested in us testifying of Him. And I think that, as we’re His Body, His testimony, His witness, we should be those expressing His character, expressing Christ. And I think one way that we express His life is through faithfulness.
Our God is faithful, and He is interested in us being faithful.
James 2:17-18 says this:
Even so faith, if it has no works, is dead, being by itself.
But someone may well say, “You have faith and I have works; show me your faith without the works, and I will show you my faith by my works.”
Is the work of our faith faithfulness? I believe it is.
And I also believe, if we stop and think about it, we live in an environment—the day we live in—where there is no value placed on faithfulness. None.
And I just would encourage us not to be swayed, not to be overly influenced by the lack of faithfulness.
Think of marriage. You know, I’ve heard lately on the news, in one of these studies, that less and less people are just saying, “Forget it. No marriage. We’re not going to get married. There’s no need. We aren’t making a commitment.”
That certainly is a lack of faithfulness in our society. And if we do get married, what happens? Any of those who are willing to get married think nothing of getting divorced.
So that’s part of the environment we live in.
Another one is jobs. When some of us who have been around for a few years have a few miles on us, in getting a job, we thought when we were younger, it would be great to get a place to work for the rest of our days. We would be willing to give ourselves to that, and we, of course, would receive something.
Kenny Pittman has been there for a hundred years at Dunbar Mill, right? Jerry worked twenty-eight years in one place. I worked twenty-seven or twenty-eight years in one place.
But anymore, uh-uh. Nope. There’s no faithfulness from the employers, and there’s no faithfulness to the employers. Employees will go for a hundred bucks.
So let’s not get influenced by it.
Another thing—I haven’t heard it here, but I hear it in the different places I am—is that there’s no faithfulness and no commitment to the local assembly, the churches, if you will.
“Well, I’ve been looking for a church that really meets my need.” And we evaluate the churches. If it doesn’t meet my need, you know, I’m not going to go there.
The assembly, the church, is to meet God’s need. So let’s not get overly influenced.
And I just mention these things because I think we need our thinking adjusted and need to make sure we don’t get off.
So I’ve got a few points. Let me mention these points as we go through this.
Well, define faithful. I looked up the Greek word in a lot of sources, and I always get very frustrated trying to look up Greek words and lexicons and so forth, because I never understand them. I never quite come through, and it always reminds me why I’m an accountant.
You’ll find out that accountants and engineers went into those lines of work because they took rhetoric in their first semester in college. You may know what rhetoric is? No, they don’t. English. We just didn’t do too well in English, so we went over to the business school or engineering school and said, “You got anything else over there? What do you got over there?” Anyway, shut up.
I’ll just read a couple of definitions of these words that are used for faithful and faithfulness. I got it from Thayer’s Greek Lexicon. I could understand that a little bit.
The first word is pistis, the noun. You know, even if you can’t pronounce these words, you can go on the internet now and they tell you how to pronounce them. They give you the verbal pronunciation, but I can’t remember it. So if I said that wrong, I’m sorry.
But the noun, the first one, says, among other things, “conviction that God exists and is the Creator and Ruler of all things.” This is Thayer’s.
It also says, “a strong and welcome conviction or belief that Jesus is the Messiah.” Faith—living faith.
And the second thing he says in there is that it is the character of one who can be relied on.
Faith is a thing. Faith is a noun. And, of course, if we move from being a noun, being a thing, we move over to the adjective form, and that’s pistos.
And he says, among other things, “of persons who show themselves faithful in the transaction of business, the execution of commands, or the discharge of official duties.”
Those that are faithful—think of the business we’re faithful in. It’s the Lord’s business, you know?
William Barclay calls it the virtue of reliability.
And Webster, the one I can maybe relate to a little bit more, says faithful is:
Faithful: loyal, constant, staunch, steadfast, resolute, firm in adherence to whatever one owes allegiance.
So faithful is kind of like a word—if you have to define it, yeah, we know what faithful is, right? But anyway: reliable, faithful, consistent, constant.
So I’d like to look now at the second point: God’s nature is faithful. It’s cover to cover—the Book is faithful. But let’s look at that Lamentations verse.
You can find Lamentations because the title of that book is The Lamentations of Jeremiah. So it’s right after Jeremiah.
Lamentations 3:22-23. Let me just read the context of this verse.
The introduction in this Key Reference Bible says Lamentations is the work of one who had a broken heart. If, as had been the traditional view, Jeremiah was the author, it serves as a supplement to his longer work, the Book of Jeremiah.
Certainly, the author was a witness to the destruction of Jerusalem and its aftermath in 586 BC, and the book is largely comprised of elegies for Jerusalem.
And so, in the midst of that environment, being discouraged as Jeremiah must have been, what does the Lord have to say to him?
The Lord’s lovingkindnesses indeed never cease,
His compassions never fail.
They are new every morning;
Great is Your faithfulness.
So when we consider faithfulness, we first consider the faithfulness of the Lord. And I would encourage us all to stop and think about it.
The situations I believe most of us are in are not great. They’re probably not as dire as Jeremiah’s, but I believe many are in great trial. And what would the Lord say to us? Look off to Him. In the midst of that, “Great is Thy faithfulness, Lord.” And we thank You.
1 Corinthians 1:9:
God is faithful, through Whom you were called into fellowship with His Son, Jesus Christ our Lord.
Faithful to the end.
Revelation 19:11. The context of this verse—the section immediately preceding this in the New American Standard—is called “Marriage of the Lamb,” and this is the first verse of a section called “The Coming of Christ.”
So this is a great scene. This is a scene that we’re all looking forward to.
What would we say? What would be the description of the mighty warrior riding in on that great horse? Mighty God, powerful, victor, triumphant One—that’s probably all in there. But the first thing that comes out is:
And I saw heaven opened, and behold, a white horse, and He Who sat on it is called Faithful and True.
Above all, first, faithful and true.
We just praise the Lord for His faithfulness. Where would we be without His faithfulness? He is faithful to Himself, to His purpose, and to His people. He is faithful. He will get what He’s after, and He will get what He’s after in us if we’ll let Him.
If God is faithful in nature and character, I believe He has a heart after a people for Himself to be His witnesses. And I believe that His people would be those declaring His faithfulness in their lives.
His faithfulness expressed in a people is very much a part of the testimony of Who He is.
And I believe that faithfulness would build up—first, it’ll encourage Him; it would build up one another. We would build up one another by being faithful, and it would be a testimony to the world, to the seen and the unseen. We express faithfulness.
Luke 18:8:
When the Son of Man comes, will He find faith on the earth?
We talked about faith earlier—living faith, faith in God—and that faith expressed, if I can take it a step further, is faithfulness.
Our faith, our trust, our belief in God, the Faithful One, will demonstrate, will bring out, will bear faithfulness in us.
Hebrews 11:6. This is the famous verse that—I can’t remember why I put it down. Lord, help me.
This is the hall of faith—all those who have gone before in faith.
And without faith it is impossible to please Him, for he who comes to God must believe that He is and that He is a rewarder of those who seek Him.
So the Lord is looking for belief in Him, and that believing in Him, giving our lives to Him, might result in an expression of faithfulness.
Next, just a little thought: what is the way to faithfulness in our lives?
You know, naturally speaking, we just don’t find ourselves as being faithful people. If we’re faithful to anything, what are we faithful to naturally?
We have no problem being faithful to ourselves.
And, you know, from what I understand, there’s teaching even in the world and in the church that we need to be faithful to ourselves. And I don’t want to belittle that, but we just have to be careful with how much we emphasize being faithful to ourselves.
Because self-absorption and being caught up with our self-life is going to have a terrible end. We’re going to come to despair. We’re going to come to the end of ourselves. We can’t build that self-life up enough to make it through.
So I just believe that the way we express His faithfulness is by denying ourselves, taking up His cross, and following Him.
Galatians 5:22—we mentioned that the fruit of the Spirit is faithfulness. So, as we deny our self-life and take up His cross, we make room for the Spirit of God to find expression, to find sway—full sway—in us, to be expressed.
So what have we said? That God is faithful. We in the world are not faithful, but it is God’s desire that we, as His people, show forth His faithfulness. And we need to deny our self-life, take up the cross, and appropriate His life to show forth faithfulness.
Okay, what about some applications? What are practical ways to exhibit faithfulness?
The first way that came to mind was this: how do we enter into faithfulness? By being faithful to God—being faithful to Him.
Are we faithful to Him, His purpose, and His people?
As I said before, we’re taught to be faithful to ourselves, and we know that we quickly come to the end of our self-life. And we find that we are totally dissatisfied with our self-life.
But when we put the Lord first and find His life preeminent, we are very satisfied. He’s satisfied, and we find full satisfaction.
Seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness. And then we will be satisfied, and He’ll be satisfied.
Romans 12:1 says:
I urge you therefore, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies a living sacrifice.
And I think we’ve shared this before, but we’re just reminded that presenting is a one-time thing, but it’s a daily thing. We need to be faithful to present our bodies a living sacrifice.
Daily, give ourselves to the Lord at the start of the day. Daily, seek His face. A lot of this has come out in ministry lately. Daily, seek His will for our lives.
He will really give us that direction, and we really need to give ourselves to Him, to serve Him. Put Him first, and it’s going to be okay. You know, I just can’t get over that.
Seek first the kingdom of God, and He will be the complete satisfaction.
Second application: we need daily to be faithful and give priority to our spouse and our children—our families.
Now, we know some don’t have families. You’re blessed with not having a family—I didn’t say that—but you’re by yourself. And so most of these things apply; this may not.
But how do we put our spouses, our children, our families first? We need to be faithful to bring them before the Lord, to pray for them, to present them to the Lord.
And we need to pay attention to them. We need to pay attention to our families and give them time.
How easy it is not to do that. It was much easier when you were working long days and long hours. Maybe that’s a little bit of an excuse, but even in the midst of that—and even now—Sharon and I don’t have a daily job situation, honestly, but we need to make time to see each other, to talk to each other, and to find out where we are.
And particularly your children, brothers and sisters: pay attention to your children. Be faithful to your family.
Now, we all know that we can’t make them be good Christians. We’ve all been through it. We can’t direct where they go, but we can sure love them, pay attention to them, and find out where they are.
And maybe a good anchor for all that is: don’t give up the family altar. At whatever level you are, don’t give up the family altar. I think being together, opening the Word, and praying is a great thing.
So, families, let’s not forget our families.
Third thing: are we faithful to one another? Are we faithful to the brothers and sisters?
You know, in one sense, we’ve been born into a new family. We like to be with people just naturally. Most people like to be with others and are social.
But we, as born-again ones in a particular spiritual family here, really ought to be closer than even natural family. And we ought to just have our antennas up.
We’ve been talking about this with the brothers on Sunday nights for a while—pastoral care. You know, none of us can look after everyone, but we ought to have our antennas up.
There ought to be somebody that you’re related to in Christ. There ought to be some relationships you have in Christ. And don’t live by yourself.
So I just encourage us all to be caring for one another, looking out for one another. And even if it’s just a couple people we’re related to, that’s okay.
But, you know, that’ll satisfy the Lord, it’ll help one another, and you know what it really does when we’re looking out for someone else? It gets us out of ourselves.
You know, we become—I’m the worst—we become self-centered. But if we’re thinking of somebody else, if we’re looking out for someone, we don’t have time to be self-centered.
Over the years, several different brothers have made this comment to me: “My phone works both directions.”
Does that make sense? “Nobody’s called me. Nobody cares about me.” Well, how are you doing today?
Pick the phone up and talk to someone. Reach out to someone. It’s a big cure for being isolated. Tell someone about your condition, your problems, but communicate. We all need to look out for one another.
The fourth application for faithfulness is the local assembly.
I believe that we are all Christians, we’re born-again Christians, and by just being born again, we are part of the larger Body of Christ. We just are.
The church universal, if you will—the Catholic Church. That’s what that means: universal.
But at the same time, God in His wisdom has seen fit to set His people in local assemblies. And He’s put a priority on local assemblies.
If you look at the New Testament, most—all—the epistles were written to local gatherings, to issues in local assemblies. This whole concept is worked out through the local assemblies.
And what is He after here? I believe He’s after an expression of His character, of His very Person, that is able to be expressed through all the members of His Body, but to see it in practice locally in a local assembly.
You know, I’ve heard a number of times over the last few years, “It’s not about meetings.” And, you know, I really agree with that.
It’s not about meetings. It’s about perspective. Is a meeting just something you go to because we have it on the calendar? Is it something that is an organization—this is going to be this meeting? Or is it an assembly? Is it a called-out people assembled? Is it the Lord constraining us to be together?
I just believe the expression of Jesus Christ really comes into a level of fullness when we’re gathered together.
I don’t know about you all, but I’ve felt this for a long time. When we get together like we did this morning, and we’re each willing to open our hearts to the Lord, together I feel like we express Him way beyond the sum of the parts.
I think there’s a spiritual geometry. No—what’s the math, Kenny? Exponential. It’s exponential. How do we explain that?
And so the Lord’s happy, the Lord’s satisfied, in seeing His people together. We’re built up. We encourage one another by being together. Our feet are washed.
There’s an expression of Christ.
You know, we talked about long careers. I didn’t have a hugely long career, but I worked for a number of years for one company—controller, long days sometimes, pressure-packed days.
And I could often have said, “I’m exhausted. I’m wiped out. I can’t go to prayer meeting.”
And I don’t think there was ever a time when I came to prayer meeting feeling that way that I didn’t leave totally refreshed.
Now, that’s self-centered, but there’s a real place for being together. Our feet are washed, and we’re encouraged and built up, turned to the Lord. And I just think there’s a real exponential expression of Christ when we are together.
Hebrews 3:6-7:
But Christ was faithful as a Son over His house—whose house we are—if we hold fast our confidence and the boast of our hope firm until the end.
We are the house of God. We are His tabernacle, His expression. So we express Christ. Being together, we express Him in a way that’s really impossible when we’re apart.
Hebrews 10:25:
Not forsaking our own assembling together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another; and all the more as you see the day drawing near.
My understanding is that the context of this verse was that Christians were really being persecuted. And there was a real practical reason not to be together, because they didn’t want to be arrested and whatever.
But there were those who were not wanting to be together. So we’ve got all these situations. What is it that’s holding us from being together and longing to be together with God’s people?
Anyway, don’t forsake the assembling of yourselves together. So we need to be faithful to assemble.
And we declare to the seen and the unseen—we declare to the world, we pray to the heavenlies, to the angels, to the principalities and powers and world rulers—when we’re together under the headship of Christ, meeting around Him, holding Him up.
We’re making a great declaration, a great statement, a powerful statement. It’s one of the reasons He called us.
Okay, finally: what is the fruit of faithfulness?
I believe if we’re faithful, we will be greatly satisfied, if we are faithful to the Lord in His purpose.
We were created before the fall to live like this. We’ve fallen away, but now we’ve been restored. We are created to exist in communion, in relationship with Him.
If we create that relationship, the overflow will be expressing faithfulness. It’ll be wanting to be together—a relationship with the saints, with our families, and being gathered together under His name.
And what does the Lord have for those that are faithful? Let’s just look at two Scriptures.
Revelation 17:14:
These will wage war against the Lamb, and the Lamb will overcome them, because He is Lord of lords and King of kings; and those who are with Him are the called and chosen and faithful.
At the end of the age, I believe He has a place for us.
Let’s look at another, and this is a verse that really got me these last weeks: Matthew 25:23-24.
His master said to him, “Well done, good and faithful slave.
You were faithful with a few things;
I will put you in charge of many things.
Enter into the joy of your master.”
I really can’t do much but read that verse again.
His master said to him, “Well done, good and faithful slave.
You were faithful with a few things;
I will put you in charge of many things.
Enter into the joy of your master.”
We know that God, in summary, is totally faithful in His nature and His character. If we are to express Christ, I believe He’s looking for people to come under His headship and display His character.
He values greatly this faithfulness in His people.
And will He be able to say to us:
“Well done, good and faithful slave.
You were faithful in a few things;
I will put you in charge of many things.
Enter into the joy of your master.”
And a personal note on that as we close with that verse: “You were faithful with a few things.”
I think we get the mentality that the bigger our ministry, the more visible it is—if we could be a preacher. “I can’t be a preacher. I’m not an evangelist. I’m not a speaker, so I must not be worth very much.”
We all are given what God has given us, to be faithful with what we have.
I guess I’m speaking to one-talent brothers and sisters—my co-laborers.
Are we faithful with little things? Are we faithful with the little thing God has given us?
He’s just as interested in being faithful to the little we’ve been given as He is in those who’ve been given much.
He’s after eternity. He’s after eternal training. This pilgrimage we’re on is very short, but He’s after developing His character in us.
And He would call us to be faithful with what we’ve been given. Even what we consider to be little, He considers to be great.
So that’s it.
Lord, we thank You for Your faithfulness. We would be consumed, we would be done, but You are great and faithful.
Lord, I want to thank You myself for Your faithfulness. If my relationship and my life depended on my faithfulness to You, it would be a total shipwreck. But we thank You today for Your faithfulness.
And we pray, Lord, that You would grant us to be faithful to You, Your people, and Your purpose. In Jesus’ name.