The fruit of the Spirit is…faithfulness
One of the most frequent refrains throughout the Psalms is “Great is your faithfulness, O Lord.” The people of God delighted to praise God for His faithfulness. Partly because if God were not a faithful God, the history of Israel would have been very short and the OT would have been a very small book. But even though Israel tested God’s faithfulness over and over and over again, God proved His faithfulness beyond a shadow of a doubt. God demonstrated His faithfulness by keeping His promises and by being utterly and completely reliable.
And one of the parts of the Spirit’s ministry is to make us like our heavenly Father by cultivating the fruit of faithfulness in our lives. What does it mean to be faithful? It means to be enduringly trustworthy, reliable, and devoted.
When someone is enduringly trustworthy they strive to do what is right not only in public before the eyes of others but in secret as well when the Lord, alone, is watching them. They can be trusted with your most precious secret and your most valuable possession.
When someone is enduringly reliable you can take their word to the bank, you can plan on them to be there when they say they will, and you can count on them to help you in a time of need.
When someone is enduringly devoted you see it in there walk with God how they follow the Lord in trial and prosperity in good times and hard times. They stick closer than a brother.
Faithfulness means being enduringly trustworthy, reliable, and devoted. Sadly, though, rather than reflecting God’s faithfulness, we usually stand out as a contrast to it.
Of all the lines of all the songs we sing here the one I feel most comfortable singing is this:
“Prone to wander, Lord I feel it,
prone to leave the God I love.”
As uncomfortable of a thought as this is, we need to understand that every sin we commit, knowingly or unknowingly, is an act of unfaithfulness to the Lord.
And, on a horizontal level, we demonstrate that we are not completely faithful even when we speak to others with good-intentions: We say things like “I’ll pray for you” and then never pray, we say “I will be there” and don’t show up or cancel last minute because we found something more interesting to do, or we say “Let’s get together” and never follow up.
In light of this, we need to pray to our faithful God and confess that we stand out as a contrast to him. Here are some words to help you do that:
Our Heavenly Father,
Your steadfast love extends to the heavens and Your faithfulness reaches to the skies. Yet we have been faithless.
You are the God who always keeps His Word, yet we have failed to always keep ours.
Forgive us for being like sheep that have gone astray.
We are prone to wander and prone to leave the God we love.
Forgive us in Christ we pray, Amen.
When we confess our unfaithfulness, we need to remember the place where God has supremely displayed His faithfulness to us, the Gospel of Jesus Christ. We read in 1 John that…
If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness…My little children, I am writing these things to you so that you may not sin. But if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous.
God’s faithfulness is good news when we flee to Christ, because God will always faithfully forgive the sins that are covered by the perfect sacrifice of Christ.
