Galatians 5
So we’ll read from Galatians
chapter 5, beginning of verse 16, where it says, But I say,
walk by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the
flesh. For the desires of the flesh
are against the Spirit, and the desires of the Spirit are against
the flesh. For these are opposed to each
other to keep you from doing the things that you want to do.
But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not under the law. And
then down to verse 22, but the fruit of the Spirit is love,
joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness,
and self-control. Against such things there is
no law. And those who belong to Christ
Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires.
If we live by the Spirit, let us also walk by the Spirit. Let
us not become conceited, provoking one another, envying one another.
Pray with me. God, make your word effective
tonight. Effective unto salvation, to
the salvation of sinners, but effective unto your children
who need to be built up in the most holy faith and to be fortified
against the world, the flesh, and the devil. And this we ask
in Christ’s name, amen. I got in my car on Friday morning
to go over to my parents’ house and help out with some chores.
Got in and stuck my key in the ignition just like I always do,
and guess what Old Faithful did? Old Faithful let me down. had
a dead battery. But you know, we rely on things,
don’t we? We rely on things. We expect
to be able to get in our car, stick the key in and turn it.
We expect to open the refrigerator and find that our food’s been
kept cold. Some of you are firing up your furnaces this week and
you’re switching that switch and hoping, just hoping that
furnace is going to fire up and provide warmth and magic heat
in your house. We put our faith and trust and
hope in things. And we live in an era where things
are pretty reliable. I mean, I can remember, I’m not
that old, but not that young, where cars didn’t last like they
do. You know, a car, if you got 70,
80, 90,000 miles out of it back in the day, that was a pretty
good deal. Now, if you treat a car right and baby it along,
you might get half a million miles out of it if you play it
safe and well. But what about with people? The
fruit of the Spirit is faithfulness. What do we find in the world?
What even do we sometimes find in the Christian church with
fellow believers? Well, we use words like, he bailed
on me, or she stood me up, or that person has jumped ship,
or I’ve been stiffed, or I’ve been stood up. And often we come
to these words like this and we think of what type of people,
we think of politicians. That’s who does this sort of
thing. We think of bankers or judges or referees if you’re
into sports. But think about God’s call on
us as his children. He asked us very often to make
vows. He asked us to make commitments.
And very often he asks us to save the day. Now let’s go through
those backwards. What date does he ask us to save?
Remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy. And so faithfulness
on our part is keeping Sunday empty for church, keeping the
calendar clear for the Lord’s day. It’s good to say it this
way. I have Sunday set apart to be
in the Lord’s house on the Lord’s day with the Lord’s people to
hear the Lord’s word. That’s a great priority, so we
save the day. We make commitments. We make commitments to one another.
I’ll serve you and you’ll serve me. That’s what Christian love
is, agape. We looked at that several weeks
back. But a big part of the Christian life is we make vows. A couple
years ago when I took a little time off between ministry calls. One of the goals that I had was
to take a pastoral ministry class and just sort of hit reset. It
had been about 10 years, I think, since I was in ministry and I
had a little opportunity and so I set up some goals and one
of those was hit reset and go sit under a seasoned pastor and
say, if I knew nothing, what would you tell me? And one of
the things this pastor that I sat under said this, he said, your
job as a minister is to help people make their vows and keep
their vows. I thought, what a simple outline
that is. And what vows do people make?
They make vows of membership, vows when their children are
baptized, marriage vows, ordination vows, and from time to time other
sorts of things pop up. But we make those vows before
God and before men. And so faithfulness is a huge
part of that. And so I very often think of
that little two-step job for a pastor. We help people make
and keep their vows. Now making vows is easy, right?
I can ask you the seven questions of membership and you say, oh
yes, I love being part of the church, yes, yes, yes, seven
times, I’m happy. But it’s the keeping of the vows,
right, that’s difficult. I’ll love God, I’ll be faithful
to his word, I’ll be faithful to his people, I’ll submit to
the elders, promote peace and purity and prosperity, that’s
when the going gets a little tough. But you see how the fruit
of the spirit of faithfulness can help us. Now, my old Chevrolet,
you know, what’s the old saying? Chevrolets are like a Rock. They don’t make those commercials
anymore. And it has been a good car, but you know from time to
time I expect my battery to die. I expect a water pump to go out
or to have forgotten to go to the gas station and fuel up.
So I know there’ll be times where it will let me down, but I also
know there will be times where humans will let me down. Or I’ll
let other humans down. That’s the nature of living life
in a sin-filled world. But how should we think about
faithfulness? How should we think about Faithfulness. Well, think of it this way. Think
of words like fidelity. I saw a Marine shirt in here. Oh, Lynn has that on. What’s
the motto of the Marines? Semper Fi. Always what? Always
faithful. So the word fidelity, faithful,
is there. Or how about trustworthiness?
That’s a big word. You ever get a phone call from
an employer and they say, well, you know, Jimmy put his name,
your name down as a reference. What do you think of old Jimmy?
What do they want him to know? Is Jimmy trustworthy? Can I have
him, hand him a key to my store? Can I, can I give him a job and
know that he will do it? Or how about loyalty? Think of
Ruth and Naomi in the scripture. And no matter how much Ruth told,
or Naomi told Ruth, go back to your people, go back to your
people. She said, no, I’ll stay with you. I’ll be faithful to
you. So there’s fidelity and trustworthiness, there’s loyalty.
But there are also words like this, firmness. Somebody who’s
gonna stand and when the wind is blowing and the rain is beating
down, you know that their feet are firmly planted on the ground.
They’re gonna stand firm and hold fast and be faithful. Or how about the word security?
In faithfulness, there is security. There’s constancy. But there’s
also this idea of being believable. Do you know somebody that they’ll
give you their word, hey, I’ll be there. And the very minute
it rolls off their tongue, what do you say? They won’t be there.
That’s a good sign of unfaithfulness. Well, on us to think about faithfulness,
now that we’ve thought of some of the key words, let’s think
about faithfulness in two ways. Faithfulness to one another,
and then the faithfulness that we’re obligated to have towards
God. Faithfulness to one another. We make vows, we make commitments.
I’ve made a bunch of vows. I’ve got vows of ordination.
that I’ll be a faithful minister. I have vows of installation.
When I was installed here as your pastor, I made a promise
to pastor you. I have vows of marriage to my
wife. I have vows of baptism to my children. And so what does
it look like to be faithful in those vows and in those commitments?
Well, it’s to wake up every day and say, no matter what else
comes, these are the things that we must follow after. And so
we think of the obligations we have and our duty as Christians
to fulfill those obligations by God’s grace. We’ve talked
about the fruit of the spirit, love, joy, peace, patience, kindness.
What is tonight? Faithfulness. And then what do
we have next? gentleness, we have self-control. And so faithfulness to others
often is going to express itself in the fruit of the Holy Spirit.
Now if you turn to 2 Timothy chapter 4, 2 Timothy chapter
4, or 2 Timothy is the very last book that Paul wrote. When you
get to 2 Timothy chapter 4, you realize Paul is at the end of
his life. It’s somewhere probably in the late 60s. About 30, 35
years after the death of Christ, after Paul’s conversion, he’s
been on four, five missionary journeys, but he’s been in prison
for the sake of the gospel, he’s already been shipwrecked. And
he says in chapter four of 2 Timothy, look at verses nine through 12,
he says, he’s giving some little personal writings here, he says,
do your best to come to me soon. For Demas, in love with this
present world, has deserted me. He’s gone to Thessalonica. Crescens
has gone to Galatia. Titus to Dalmatia. Luke alone
is with me. And that’s, of course, the gospel
of Luke and Acts. Get Mark and bring him with me,
for he is very useful to me for ministry. Tychicus I have sent
to Ephesus. When you come, bring the cloak.
that I left with carpets at Troas, also the books, and above all,
the parchments. Alexander the coppersmith has
done me great harm. The Lord will repay him according
to his deeds. Beware of him yourself, for he
strongly opposed our message. And then listen to this. This
is Paul, faithful to the Lord at the end of his life. At my
first defense, no one came to stand by me, but all deserted
me. May it not be charged against
them, but But the Lord stood by me and he strengthened me
so that through me the message might be fully proclaimed and
all the Gentiles might hear it. So I was rescued from the lion’s
mouth. The Lord will rescue me from
every evil deed and he will bring me safely into his heavenly kingdom. To him be the glory forever and
ever. Amen. Here’s Paul at the end
of his life and what is he saying? He’s saying, I’ve sent some people
off to do work. Luke is here with me, but what
does he say about those who should have stayed with him? They’ve
deserted him. And so sometimes we can experience
the great treason and treachery of unfaithfulness from people. But did you notice where Paul
ends up? Does he sit bitter at the end of his life? He says,
no, God is with me. God never left my side. He strengthened
me so that through me the message of the gospel and all the Gentiles
might hear it. We don’t really recognize this,
but Paul is writing his epitaph here in a sense. Remember on
the Damascus Road, what was Paul’s call? His call was to preach
the gospel to the Gentiles and suffer for the name of Christ.
And so what’s he saying here at the end of his life? Yeah,
everybody skipped town on me. But God has strengthened me to
do what? To preach the gospel message to the Gentiles. You
see what he’s saying? You see how wise and gracious and thankful
he is. Yes, everybody’s left my side,
but God hasn’t. And he’s accomplished all his
holy ends. So there’s faithfulness to one
another. But there’s also faithfulness to God. And there’s a couple
ways we ought to be faithful to God. We first ought to be
faithful to his will. Why do we read his Bible? Is
it just so we can check in those little squares I read on January
1st? January 2nd and January 3rd and I read my three chapters
of Old Testament and somehow suffered through it and I read
my one chapter in New Testament. Is that why we do? No, we read
so that we can know who God is and what he’s done and how we
can best glorify and enjoy him. So our faithfulness to God is
to know him so that we can do his will. Our faithfulness to
God is also to be faithful in hard providences. Here’s Paul
in prison. Here’s Paul abandoned by his
friends, his companions, even in the gospel ministry. You’ve
probably experienced it yourself. Hard providences of God. A medical
diagnosis you would rather have been left under the microscope
or in the lab of your doctor’s office. But we think of how God
always brings beauty from ashes. Do you remember Jeremiah after
he sees the destruction of Jerusalem in Lamentations chapter three,
he says some words that we sometimes sing in a song. The steadfast
love of the Lord never ceases. His mercies are new every morning. This is what under the inspiration
of the Holy Spirit, Jeremiah said as he stood and watched
the city of Jerusalem burn. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen
Rembrandt’s Jeremiah. But in the background, you see
a prophet weeping, but in the background, you see the city
utterly destroyed, the city of David, the city of Solomon, the
great city of God. Or how about Revelation 2.10?
We’re to be faithful in the hard providences of God. What does
Revelation 2.10 say? Be faithful unto death. Those are the great words of
Epitaph on the tombstone of J. Gresham Machen, the one who stood
up against the rising tide of liberalism in the Northern Presbyterian
Church and at Princeton Seminary. From his labor comes the Orthodox
Presbyterian Church. From his labor, we get Westminster
Seminary in Philadelphia and now out in California. But on his tombstone, it said,
be faithful unto death, because he was. He was faithful in God’s
hard providences. We also, third, should be faithful
to God in the gospel. Some of you ladies who are in
the Wednesday Bible study group, we’ve been making our way through
Galatians. And do you remember what Paul’s big fuss with the Galatians
is? You’re not true to the gospel.
You’ve said Jesus plus Jewish Old Testament customs equals
salvation. If you become a Christian, according
to some of the Jews in the church at Galatia, you’ve got to be
circumcised. You have to follow dietary laws. You have to follow
the purification laws. And Paul says, that is no gospel
at all. Jesus has come and saved us from that. And why is Paul
so upset with them? It’s because they are being unfaithful
to God because they are unfaithful to the gospel. And so we’ve got
to be faithful to God in keeping the gospel whole. Connected to
that, we need to be faithful in our doctrine. You know, sometimes
we may wonder why it is we say the same creeds over and over.
Why do we say on one Sunday the Apostles’ Creed, on another Sunday
the Nicene Creed, on another Sunday the Heidelberg Catechism,
on another Sunday we might say, what do we do today, Philippians
1 and Hebrews 1? Why do we say those creeds? Why
do we say them over and over? Well, it’s to get it in our heads.
And so when we hear somebody say, well, I believe there’s
more ways to heaven than just God, what do we say? Ding, ding,
Apostles’ Creed, Nicene Creed, no, no, no, that’s wrong, right?
We say these creeds to affirm our faith. We say these creeds
to tell the world we don’t believe this other hooey that’s out there.
But we say these creeds as a teaching tool to say to ourselves, I know
what I believe, and I must persuade others to believe the same. But
we need to be faithful in our doctrine. Paul says somewhere
else in his writings that we need to be careful not to follow
every wind of doctrine. Why is it that we come to church?
Why do we hear the word? Why do we let the elders teach us
and guide us? It’s so that we won’t be tossed
to and fro by every wind and wave of doctrine. And that’s
very easily done in today’s culture. Well, a final way that we need
to be faithful to God is to be faithful to his church. And in
doing so, we’re faithful to the brethren, but faithful to God
and his church. We used to, in one church where
I served, say that on any given Sunday, there’s 50 people who
could be here and they’re not here. And that was always a different
50. And the reasons they weren’t there were different. Some of
them was because they had a beach house or a mountain house, or
they were traveling, or there was a golf tournament or a soccer
game, you name it, they were sick or whatever reason. But on a given Sunday, there’s
50 people who could be here who aren’t here. We decided that was a problem.
We decided that was a problem because the gathered people of
God ought to want to be together. And God says to us in the book
of Hebrews, let us encourage one another as long as it is
today. to be faithful. We’re to spur one another on
to love and good deeds. And we’re not to forsake the
assembling together. And he goes on to say, as some
are in the habit of doing, but we need to be faithful to the
brethren. Now what does that look like? It’s keeping our vows,
it’s serving one another, it’s simply showing up. But it’s also
helping others around the world who are part of the brethren
who are doing the good work. In 3 John, John the apostle writes,
that we should be hospitable to those who labor in the gospel
ministry. Now, in his time, there were
traveling preachers. Churches weren’t established like they
are now. And so he was saying, it is a good thing when you entertain,
when you are hospitable towards those who serve. And if you look
at the end of Galatians, right after the fruit of the spirit
in chapter six, look at what he says, Paul says in his little
closing of Galatians. He says that in Galatians six,
Verse 10, so then as we have opportunity, let us do good to
everyone, and especially those who are of the household of faith.
And so our faithfulness to God is expressed in our fidelity
to the gospel and doctrine, to live well through God’s hard
providences, to follow his will. But our faithfulness to God is
best expressed in our faithfulness to one another. Because where
is God? He’s in heaven, but His presence
is with and among us. Well, as we think on these things
and close for the night, I want you to think about this. When
you go to your cabinet and you pull out a jar of food and it
says tomato sauce on it, and then you turn it around and you
read the ingredients, what do you expect when you pop the top
on that jar? You expect that what it says on the label is
to be there. The Food and Drug Administration
has made possible for that to be
so. What else is it? The Department of Agriculture
and systems of weights and measurements and all that. But we need that
with each other, don’t we? We need to say, whatever I say
is good, my word is true. If you look at me, you see faithfulness.
If you look at me, you see fidelity. If you look at me, you see trustworthiness. Jesus said to the scribes and
Pharisees, woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, you do this, this,
and this, and this, listing all the things they do, but he says,
you neglect faithfulness. And that is quite a curse put
upon people. That is quite a judgment put on them. You do all these
things, but you neglect faithfulness. We need to remember that ultimately,
it is God who is faithful. Paul says at the end of 1 Thessalonians,
he says, God is faithful. And then simply put, he will
do it. He’s speaking of God’s work in
us. So here’s a challenge for you as we close tonight. And
simply this, be reliable. And may God give us grace to
do so. Let’s pray together. Our God, help us to be faithful.
Faithful to you and faithful to one another. so that when
the world sees us, our good name reflects the character of God
in us through the power of the Spirit and through the work of
Christ Jesus on the cross. And we ask it all in Jesus’ name,
amen.