« The Plight of Our Humanity | Main | What Makes a Nation Great? »
June 27, 2004
Faithfulness
Faithfulness
Psalm 32 / I Samuel 12: 19-25
Romans 9: 1-5
June 27th, 2004
We look around this morning and see reminders of another very happy week of Vacation Bible School. Every year since before I arrived as pastor, this congregation has offered its children and others an intense time of learning Bible-truth lovingly and with great imagination. This year VBS was led by three of our young people who enjoyed VBS as children. The next generation has stepped up to the plate. And I am very grateful. They dun good.
How suitable that on a Sunday when the theme before us is faithfulness, that we should have taken part once again faithfully in a ministry to our children—with our children, now grown, leading the way. Faithfulness is something that takes place in small bites. It unravels slowly against the tests of time. The folk who have led it for years have gray heads now, and they haven’t quite the energy they had before. But we found new strength to keep on. Faithfulness unfolds over generations, and it grows in moments when what we want to do comes up against what we ought to do, and what we ought to do wins.
This morning I hope I may stir you to remember that though faithfulness costs us something, it is worth it. Faithfulness is as necessary to our well being as water is to fish. As a fish out of water dies so we die a slow death if we are removed from an environment of faithfulness. Faithfulness provides an environment that we must help build. We trust in the faithfulness of God. His faithfulness rubs off on us, and our faithfulness rubs off too. We are happiest when we are faithful. Faithfulness builds strong friendships, strong homes, strong churches. Faithfulness is good air to breathe.
We have been following the story of I Samuel over the past few months. And we have lingered for some weeks on the theme of Israel’s rejecting God as their king, whose will was mediated through Samuel. They wanted to be like other nations that had a king. Samuel took it hard. It felt like they had rejected him. What had he done wrong by them? He wondered. Actually nothing. Their desire for a king to be like every other neighboring country was like other quibbles they had with previous leaders and with God. Discontent displaced gratitude.
A bit later in I Samuel we read, “Rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft and stubbornness is as iniquity as idolatry.” Israel spun out a story of discontent. The effects of a discontented spirit are like black magic, contaminating everything. To discontented people nothing is right. Even what is obviously good is given a sorry twist by someone who is discontented. The story of Israel as it unfolds is like a chain where the links are moments of discontent, where even what was good was made to seem bad. “You brought us out of bondage in Egypt only to starve us to death in the desert.” Rebellion against God grew in small moments of well- rehearsed discontent.
This week our children learned of Israel’s complaining when water was not instantaneously available when they were thirsty as Moses led them through the desert. They complained when they were hungry. Though I suspect we are hard on Israel because we would no doubt have found life in the desert daunting too. But it is not beside the point that God had cared for them in every instance of their need. Each time they faced a need they might have remembered that God had supplied their need before—and in remarkable ways. But they didn’t remember. So they complained. Waiting is a hard game to play.
The desire for immediate gratification is not a new thing, an American thing. Sure it was tough living in the desert, but they knew a Promised Land awaited them. And it was worth keeping on to get.
You and I who make it through the ordeals of a long educational grind see before us a career, a way of earning a living congenial to us, so we keep on going. Israel faced a like gauntlet of tests, but with a terrific goal ahead of them. God was testing them, not just to see if they had stamina, but to build in them the character they would need to live well in the Promised Land. Forgetfulness replaced faithfulness.
They forgot so soon the literally miraculous way God got them out of slavery in Egypt. God unleashed ten plagues, unusual scourges accompanying Moses’ insistent plea to the king, “Let my people go.” Israel saw these plagues hit Israel and knew they were by special act of God.
We haven’t time to go over the whole story of their discontent. But this morning we have come to a moment when Israel realized that their rebellion against God and Samuel had reached a danger point. We read that “all the people said to Samuel, ‘Pray for your servants . . . that we may not die, for we have added to all our sins this evil, to ask for ourselves a king’.”
I imagine some leader emerged from the people who realized that the common-sense thing to do, to have a king as the Ammonites and Moabites did, and the Egyptians, and all the other nations, was a violation of their relationship with God. Perhaps he drew together a caucus of the leaders. He told them, “Look fellows, at what this means. It means we’re rejecting that whole way of life that began with Abraham, and grew stronger with Moses. It seems right but it’s wrong.”
So this leader of the rebellious movement came to Samuel, surrounded by other leaders in front of hundreds of people they had persuaded to think again. “Pray for us, Samuel, that we don’t die.” Because asking for a king was taking the first big step in the direction of death as a nation. Asking for a king was a giant step of faithlessness, rejecting God’s leadership, rejecting the leadership of good men like Samuel, as they had fought against all the other judges God had raised up for them.
They fought the way children sometimes fight against mom and dad in the home. God’s way was boring. Face it, faithfulness has always required a little boredom. Faithfulness is probably the least exciting way of life imaginable.
But God was not so bored with Israel’s faithlessness that he could no longer be faithful to Israel. Samuel said to this assembly of people who had come to him fearfully, realizing what they had done in asking for a king, “Don’t be afraid for the Lord will not cast away his people. Why? For his great name’s sake, because it has pleased the Lord to make you a people for himself.”
Faithfulness does not work if it is only offered in exchange. When you and I live by a principle that we will be faithful if the conditions are right, that’s not faithfulness. Faithfulness requires an element of “in spite of” to keep on. God said to Israel, I’ll be faithful because that’s my way, not because you earned it.
God remained faithful.
So did Samuel. Samuel said to this embassy that came to him in fear, “As for me, far be it from me that I should sin against the Lord by ceasing to pray for you. I will instruct you in the good and the right way.” Samuel might well have given up on this discontented people. “Let God care for them, but I’ve had it.” But Samuel was faithful to his task of leading Israel on, despite their antagonistic response to him. He kept on, day after day, overcoming his disappointment. This is faithfulness, keeping on, no matter what.
Yet in the story of God’s unfolding faithfulness a very scary moment came. In Exodus 32 we read of a moment when God had about had it with Israel. After Moses’ brother made them a golden calf as a focus for their worship, the Lord told Moses, “I have seen this stiff-necked people; now therefore let me alone, that I may consume them, but of you I will make a great nation.” This means that God was going to give up on Israel and start again with Moses.
It was quite an opportunity for Moses personally. Opportunity not only knocked for him to make it big, but it was God who did the knocking. It was a chance for Moses to become the leader of a new wave. God’s people would no longer be called Israelites but Moses-ites. But Moses refused this honor, even though God offered it to him. In utterest faithfulness, remembering that God had made a covenant with Israel, and that God does not forsake his covenants no matter what, Moses defended God’s honor and Israel’s future. He stood up to God and said, “NO.” He pleaded with God, putting himself on the line. “If you will not forgive their sin, blot me out of your book which you have written.”
Moses was saying, “Send me to hell, but don’t forsake your people.” That’s faithfulness, folks. He was faithful to his people even to the point of sacrificing his eternal destiny for them.
Faithfulness works itself out when we feel like quitting. God felt like quitting, giving up on Israel. It sounds almost blasphemous to say, but how else can we read this story. Because Moses was faithful, God resumed his faithfulness to the covenant with Israel. The Lord replied to Moses, “Go, lead the people to the place of which I have spoken to you.” In other words, I’ll keep on being their God. They survived this test of God’s patience. God remained faithful in this moment of severe testing. We can hardly imagine what a momentous decision weighed in the balance that day.
Faithfulness is the acid test of love. Faithfulness requires self-sacrifice over and over again. Faithfulness mimics God’s ways. Faithfulness creates an environment in which we can thrive. It reproduces in human society the ways of God.
One of my favorite hymns is “Great is Thy Faithfulness.” I expect many of you would claim this too.
It is based on a brief remark in the otherwise very gloomy Book of Lamentations. Jeremiah the weeping prophet, looking at the precipitous fall of his country, enemies waiting to destroy the beloved Temple and lead his people away into exile, writes:
“Remember my affliction and my bitterness, the wormwood and the gall! My soul continually thinks of it and is bowed down within me. But this I call to mind and therefore I have hope: The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases, his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is thy faithfulness. The Lord is my portion, says my soul, therefore I will hope in him.
A Methodist pastor from Kentucky, Thomas Chisholm, pondered this passage from lamentations and wrote these words. Pastor Chisholm died in 1960 after serving small churches in the Lexington area. What a gift to us this hymn is.
He breaks down God’s faithfulness into categories. “All I have needed Thy hand has provided.” “Summer and winter and spring time and harvest, sun, moon, and stars in their courses above, join with all nature in manifold witness to Thy great faithfulness, mercy and love.” “Pardon for sin and a peace that endureth,” “Thy own dear presence to cheer and to guide.” On we sing of the details of God’s faithfulness. Few of us can sing this without feeling strong emotions rising inside.
Why? Because when we think of God’s faithfulness it is the capstone of the whole environment in which we learned to trust. God has built into the fabric of our being an expectation of faithfulness.
Very soon after we were born you and I began to learn to trust our parents faithfulness to us. First there was that soft, warm form with a familiar face that smiled and spoke gently and tenderly as she nurtured you from her own body. You learned of faithfulness first from her. In order to faithfully care for you, your mother endured sleepless nights, keeping on when she was very, very tired. You didn’t know about the tiredness. All you knew was you could trust that person to care for you.
The school of faithfulness has other teachers. If you were born into a loving home where the parents were integrally involved in a local church, you discovered you were surrounded by people that you could trust. I see that one of the most important gifts we offer the next generation is the interest and support we give as a congregation. Faithfully you greeted my children and spoke with them as they grew up here and they learned that the people of God provide an environment very congenial and warm. A faithful congregation teaches faithfulness over the years.
But in every one of us there is a collision between our longing for faithfulness and our ability to be faithful. We struggle against the “realities” of life. The realities of life include weariness, disappointment, disagreements, disillusionments, discontent, and a host of other “dishes.” The burdens of life are so varied. When our burdens get heavy we are tempted to give up.
We turn to God and in our hymns praise his faithfulness. But we need reminders faithfulness from people too. God has graciously, patiently provided a school for faithfulness that allows the risk of disappointed, discontented people participating in the teaching. It is a delicate task God has given us, to be faithful. But if you want to be deeply happy, be deeply faithful. If you want to breed in the coming generation ways that lead them to happiness, be faithful. If you want to finish your course with joy, so that at the end of your life you can hear the gentle voice of your own conscience echoing God’s approval, be faithful.
I am thankful for those whose faithfulness taught me faithfulness. I am thankful for those here whose faithfulness provided a haven for my children to come to think of God and God’s people as faithful. I am glad we can have a part in God’s on-going work, displaying his faithfulness, nurturing faithfulness in us too.
Let us pray: O faithful Lord God, when we are tired or disappointed, it is hard to be faithful. Give to us your Holy Spirit to lead us to do what you have surely taught us is right, and that pleases us best, to live faithfully. In Jesus’ name. Amen.
Pastor Stuart D. Robertson
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906
Posted by faithpres at June 27, 2004 09:30 AM