OVER the years of my life, we have had many pet dogs in our family.
Our children loved them, and I suppose we did too. Not that we loved them like we love people, but we showed them a bit of affection – we took them for a walk, and played with them in the yard.
We fed them regularly and took care of them if they were injured or sick. And how did our various dogs respond to all this? Well, in their own way, I suppose they loved us in return.
They licked our hands and wagged their tails – they brought the ball back when we threw it, and barked when there were strangers around. In short, we could say that our dogs were faithful to us.
We can also talk about faithfulness in relationships. When we speak of faithfulness in marriage, then we are referring to not having any kind of romantic or sexual relationship with anyone else other than your husband or wife.
We can also talk of faithfulness in the area of employment, where you show a strong commitment to your employer or employee, and each of you contributes towards the wellbeing of the other.
But when the Apostle Paul speaks about faithfulness as a fruit of the Spirit, he is not talking about how we relate to animals and animals to us, nor is he talking about how we relate to other people including our marriage partner.
Faithfulness really does have to do with faith, and when he tells us that we should be displaying the spiritual fruit of faithfulness, he is talking about our relationship to God.
It seems to me that this is a very important fruit in the list. Many times, when the Apostle Paul writes his letters to the different churches, he commends them for their sincere faith in God.
What does that really mean, to have faith in God? That is an important question, because people everywhere have faith. People of other religions have faith too, and sometimes their faith appears to be so much stronger than ours.
And even people who say they are unbelievers still have faith. It might be faith in something other than God.
It might be faith in their own ability to reason, or it might be faith in the general goodness of humanity, or faith in material possessions, or even faith in the ultimate futility of life.
But everyone has faith of some description. So what does Paul mean when he says that we should display faithfulness as a fruit in our lives?
Well, Paul is speaking of what we might call “saving faith.”
This is the faith that brings salvation from sin and everlasting life. It cannot be captured better than in John 3:16, which says: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have everlasting life.”
So what does it mean to believe in Jesus? What does this faith look like? What is it to have the fruit of faithfulness? Let me try and put it in a few simple statements.
Faith means believing all that God says in His word is true.
Faith means believing that when Jesus died on the cross, he specifically died for you, to cover your sins
Faith means following God’s instructions in his word.
There was once a man named Blondin, who was a tightrope walker.
He used to walk on a rope that was stretched across Niagara Falls in America & Canada, carrying only a balancing bar. One day he asked the great crowd of onlookers if they believed he could walk on the rope carrying a person on his back.
They all yelled out that they believed he could. He then asked for a volunteer from the crowd. No one offered to be carried across. They were all too afraid. They said they believed, but their actions said otherwise.
For the Christian, faith is not just believing, but putting your belief into practice. It is letting what you believe in be seen in your actions and decisions, even if it costs you.
That is never an easy thing to work out. Being faithful to God may well make us unpopular with some people.
Jesus warned his disciples that as they persecuted him, so they also will be persecuted. Faithfulness to God attracts the scorn and the opposition of the world, and sadly sometimes even from within the established church.
But if the fruit of faithfulness grows and shows in our lives, then despite what others may say, at the end, our heavenly Father will say: “Well done, good and faithful servant. Enter into your Master’s rest.”
And those will be the best words that anyone can ever hope to hear!
REV. KEVIN RIETVELD
(Rev. Kevin Rietveld is Director of Short Workshops In Mission (SWIM), a mission arm of the Christian Reformed Churches of Australia that is supporting local churches here)
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