PBPC Update - Sunday Sermon
Here is the link to today's sermon, and the manuscript is attached. Hope to see you on Zoom for worship next Sunday!
- June 14, 2020 - "Growing in Faithfulness"
Have a blessed week,
Pastor Chris
Sermon – "Growing in Faithfulness"
June 14, 2020
Chris Coon, PBPC
Today we are continuing in our sermon series on the fruit of the Spirit, the qualities of the new life that God wants to grow within us through the presence of the Holy Spirit. Today we move forward to faithfulness. Have you known someone who is truly faithful? Have you known someone who wasn't faithful?
Over the course of my eighth grade year I had a paper route. This was back in the days when paper routes were done by kids, not adults driving around in cars. I think that every kid should have the experience of a paper route – especially a morning paper route. My friend and I decided to take over our neighborhood route together to earn some money. Every morning, seven days a week, the bundles would be delivered to my house at around 6am. My friend would come over, we would add all the sales inserts into the papers, fold and rubber band them, and then walk around the neighborhood dropping them on porches.
It was a lot of work for not very much money. And it sure made us appreciate hard work as well as the value of money! Most importantly, it taught responsibility. I had to get up at 5:45am every morning to start folding those papers, whether I felt like it or not. And as the year progressed, it got darker in the mornings, and colder, and eventually started to rain. The fun part was taking on this challenge together with my friend. But one day, my friend didn't show up, and I had to do the whole route on my own. When I saw him later in the day, he let me know he had overslept. This happened again a week or two later, and then more often, until one day he just stopped showing up. I continued to do the paper route by myself for the rest of the year. I learned many things, but unfortunately one of the things I learned was that my friend was not reliable.
We have all had the experience of being let down by people who turn out to be unreliable or unfaithful – perhaps in something much more important than a paper route. These experiences can shape and form our ability to have faith in others, and to be open to the faithfulness of God toward us.
Our Scripture reading today is Romans 8:31-39.
31 What then are we to say about these things? If God is for us, who is against us? 32 He who did not withhold his own Son, but gave him up for all of us, will he not with him also give us everything else? 33 Who will bring any charge against God's elect? It is God who justifies. 34 Who is to condemn? It is Christ Jesus, who died, yes, who was raised, who is at the right hand of God, who indeed intercedes for us. 35 Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? 36 As it is written,
"For your sake we are being killed all day long;
we are accounted as sheep to be slaughtered."
37 No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. 38 For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, 39 nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.
In the Bible, the word faith means that we believe in something so strongly that we are willing to put our complete trust in it - and of course, the object of biblical trust is God. Because faith is so often associated in modern times with having very strong spiritual or religious beliefs, it is usually more helpful for us to simply substitute the word trust every time we see faith in scripture. To trust in God means that we actively depend on Him for our welfare and our very lives.
Scripture tells us that we can trust in God because of his faithfulness - which we can think of as trustworthiness. God is worthy of our trust because He loves us, because He has promised to always be with us, and because He has demonstrated His care and compassion to us in many ways. The scriptures are provided for us so that we can remember and continually remind ourselves that God is worthy of our trust. The stories of God's deliverance, especially of the Israelites being freed from slavery in Egypt, were especially important for God's people to remember together.
But it is also important for us to remember and reflect upon God's faithfulness in our own lives. How has God been faithful to you? What sorts of difficulties has God brought you through, how has He worked good out of what appeared to be a bad situation, how have you been aware of God's presence so strongly that you knew you weren't facing your challenges alone and knew that you didn't need to be afraid?
Of course, as Paul has written in this passage from Romans 8, the ultimate demonstration of God's faithfulness is that He gave His Son Jesus Christ for us – if God was willing to do this, wouldn't He be trustworthy to give us all that we need? And Jesus himself was not only faithful to God in obedience by going to the cross, but He continued to be faithful to us who belong to him by interceding for us with God the Father. Jesus is your personal advocate with God, right now, looking out for your best interests.
But life is hard, and we may wonder where God is at sometimes, especially when difficult times or even tragedy comes our way. We all experience hardship and loss, but some of us seem to have a greater measure of pain than others. When the course of our lives takes us through the dark valleys, it is natural for us to wonder where God is and what happened to His faithfulness. This passage is so important because it doesn't promise us that our lives as Christians will be easy – quite the opposite in fact. Paul assumes that there will be hardship, distress, persecution, famine, nakedness, peril, and sword – hopefully not all of these for any of us, but his point is that God is faithful in the way that matters most: nothing can separate us from Him and His love. He will always be with us, and not even death can separate us from Him. We are His for all eternity. We can trust in Him – He is faithful.
Which brings us back to faithfulness as a fruit of the Spirit – which is our faithfulness. Not only does God want us to have faith, but He wants us to become faithful people as well. It is good to remember that all of the fruit of the Spirit describes the character of God and was tangibly demonstrated to us in the life of Jesus. The New Testament tells us that we are to become like Jesus, which means that we are to become like God. This is not meant in any heretical sense – we will never be like God in His power, but we are to become like God in His character, in His heart. This is what it means to be created in the image of God, in it's deepest and most significant sense.
Faithfulness is trustworthiness over the course of time. Like the other fruit of the Spirit, faithfulness is developed and grows within us over time. It begins with good intentions and it is empowered by the Holy Spirit within us, but it also consists of day-by-day commitment and discipline. Faithfulness means that we are trustworthy, that others can put their trust in us.
First of all, we are faithful to God, through Jesus Christ. As Christians, our Master is Jesus Christ. What does it mean to be faithful to Jesus? It means that we allow our lives to be shaped by him, it means that we follow him and seek to know him and obey his commandments. It means that we try to do what he would have us do in any situation. There is not room in the biblical worldview for mere belief in God. The book of James tells us that the Devil believes in God, and trembles! No, our belief must lead to faith (trust), which then leads to our own faithfulness to Jesus.
The disturbing and comforting thing is that Jesus knows us – he knows our heart, he knows our intentions, he knows our doubts and he knows our shortcomings. So this is disturbing – he knows the real you! But this is also comforting – he knows the real you, and loves you anyway! Remember the story of Peter, Jesus' lead disciple who nevertheless denied Jesus three times on the night of his trial. Jesus knew Peter's heart, knew what he was capable, knew how he would fail, and yet forgave him and called him to even greater faithfulness. Jesus knows that we will fall short of perfect faithfulness, but calls us to return to him, and through his grace continue on in the journey of faithfulness.
We are also called to be faithful to God with what God has entrusted us. We can think of everything that we have in our lives, whether it be our possessions, our opportunities, or our relationships as a gift from God that we have been entrusted with. What does it mean to be faithful with our possessions or to be faithful with the various opportunities that we have been given?
More importantly, we are called to be faithful to the people that God has put in our lives. Whether to those whom we have made formal commitments to or have direct responsibility for, such as our family, or more narrowly defined commitments, such as our work relationships to those over or under us, or more open relationships such as with friends, neighbors, your church family – the fruit of the Spirit of faithfulness is to characterize all of these. Would people describe you as a faithful person? A trustworthy person? Do you commit to what is truly important, and then follow through? Are you a person of your word, someone who can be counted on?
And does your faithfulness to Jesus come through in your faithfulness to others? Do other people experience the love of God through you? When they look at your life, do they begin to see the image of Christ?
It is important to remember that our faithfulness is a response to God's own faithfulness toward us, and it must be balanced with God's grace and mercy. None of us have arrived, but the important thing is for us to be on the journey of growing in faithfulness – to desire to be more like Jesus, and at the end of our lives to hear the words, "Well done, good and faithful servant."