Beloved
in Christ, we now turn to faithfulness, the seventh facet of the fruit of the
Spirit. Greek doesn’t have two words (as English does) for “faith” and
“faithfulness.” Instead, it uses the same word for both concepts. And that
makes a good deal of sense. If you truly have faith in someone, you will be
faithful to him or her. If you have lost faith, you won’t be faithful to that
individual, even if you continue to go through the motions. Where a person’s
faith is determines to whom or to what a person is faithful.
That’s
what Jesus was getting at in today’s second reading. He said, “No servant
can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or
he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and
money.” Now we tend to love and trust in all sorts of things to varying
degrees. We do try to love several people and things and hope that they will
all be pleased with having a little bit of our affection. But when push comes
to shove, there is one person or one thing that we end up loving more than
everything else. We may trust in all sorts of things, but ultimately there is
one thing or one person that we trust in more than everyone or everything else.
And that is a god.
 |
| The Worship of Mammon Evelyn De Morgan (ca. 1909) |
All
people have a god. Everybody loves and trusts in one thing or one person above
all else. Even atheists have a god. It may be themselves or their intellect or
science or whatever. But we all naturally look to something above all else. The
question, though, is what kind of a god we have. If we put our trust in the
LORD God, the Triune God, then we can spell the name of our God with a capital
“G.” But if it someone or something else, then we spell it with a lower case
“g.” Of course, we want to put our trust in the real God who can help us rather
than in someone or something that will let us down.
We
have to know what is top priority because it helps us to make some choices. You
may remember a few years ago that there was a hiker who got caught in a
landslide. Some boulder came crashing down and pinned his arm. He couldn’t free
himself, no matter what he tried to do. He was walking alone, and he hoped that
someone would stop by, but no one did. He knew that he could not stay trapped
there indefinitely or the wild animals would devour him. And so he created a
tourniquet of sorts near his shoulder and then cut off his arm. It was
literally his arm or his life—and he chose his life. Now usually we don’t have
to go around choosing between our arms and our lives. Thank God for that! But
at that moment the hiker had to choose which was more important. He didn’t
necessarily hate his arm, but it looked that way when you saw his love for his
life.
Our
Lord laid out a similar stark choice for us. “You cannot serve God and
money,” He said. Now He was not forbidding us to have any money or to
make use of it. Instead He was pointing out that ultimately there has to be one
lord in our life. Sometimes we will have to make sacrifices of one to please
the other. And the LORD God wants us to put Him first and not money. In those
moments it will look as if we hate money because we love God so intensely.
Looking at it more objectively, though, you will see that we do not despise
money or any of the other creaturely gifts God has given us. We just love the
LORD God so much more. Or at least that is what we should do.
God
calls us to be faithful to Him, for He is the only one who can save us. The
tragedy is that we are naturally not faithful to Him. Instead we choose all
sorts of other things to be faithful to, things that will in the end disappoint
us. Christ used the example of money as one of the things we tend to devote
ourselves to, probably because it is one of the most common things that people
love and trust in more than the Lord God. But there are any number of things
that we could have chosen to love. And every sin we do is because we love or
trust something more than the Lord God.
Instead
of putting our faith in things that will disappoint us, why not put our faith
in the one who never will? After all, our Lord Jesus Christ was entirely
faithful to us, even though we were fickle and undeserving of His trust. In His
faithfulness He took on our human nature, subjected Himself to all sorts of
troubles and pains, and capped it all off by allowing Himself to be arrested,
falsely condemned, and executed in a most gruesome way. Because He was faithful
even to the point of death, we are freed from condemnation and spared the
eternal death in hell that we had deserved. We have a faithful Lord. Should not
we put our faith in Him?
Our
first reading shows us what a life of faithfulness toward God would look like.
That reading comes from Lamentations, a book of poetry written shortly after Jerusalem
had been destroyed and its inhabitants killed or dragged off into exile. (This
took place in 587 B.C.) God’s people had never known such a defeat before. Yes,
they had had their battles with Philistines and Midianites and the like. Yes,
they had been routed in battle. But they had never lost their entire country.
Armies had invaded their land and pillaged it, but they had always retreated in
the end. But now the whole country was lost. Worst of all, the temple had been
destroyed. The temple had seemed to guarantee Israel’s hope, for it had always
stood, but now that it had been ransacked and burned, there was no reasonable
hope for God’s people.
But
what does Jeremiah say? “The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases; His
mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is Your
faithfulness.” Even though everything seemed to have been taken
away—yes, even though God Himself seemed to have abandoned Israel—Jeremiah
thought that God was still faithful. Why could Jeremiah say that? He knew that
the final chapter had not been written. The Lord had to chastise and reprove
His people, but in the end He would save them. God was faithful and could be
trusted to come through when no one else could.
Therefore,
He said, “It is good that one should wait quietly for the salvation of
the Lord.” If God is faithful, we can bear with what He is doing, even
if it means a lot of pain for us right now. Jeremiah was willing to “put
his mouth in the dust,” “give his cheek to the one who strikes,”
and “be filled with insults.” He could do all those things
because He knew that God would not leave him in the dust forever.
Because
Jeremiah saw that God was faithful, Jeremiah himself was able to be faithful,
even when things were going badly. I have already told you about all that
Jeremiah saw happening to Judah. That was bad enough. But Jeremiah had an
additional burden that he had borne throughout his life: he was a prophet sent
by God to warn the nation of Judah, but nobody listened to him. Thus, not only
did he see his country fall apart, his own life had been a total mess all
along. And yet Jeremiah was faithful to the LORD God, for he knew that the LORD
God had been and would be faithful to him.
Faithfulness
comes from seeing things from God’s point of view. Faithfulness, therefore, is
a gift and a fruit of the Holy Spirit no less than saving faith is. You could
say that faithfulness is simply faith in God writ large. May God enable you to
bear that fruit abundantly! In Jesus’ name. Amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment