Galatians 5:22-23
Amen. You can be seated. Please
turn in your copy of God’s word to the book of Galatians. Galatians
chapter five verses 22 and 23 contain the fruit of the Holy
Spirit. Today, we want to think of faithfulness
and we think of the fruit of the spirit of faithfulness in
light of the faithfulness of the Lord Jesus Christ. If you’re
using the pew Bible, you can find this on page 975. Hear the word of the living God.
Galatians chapter 5 verse 22 says, but the fruit of the spirit
is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness,
gentleness, self-control. Against such things there is
no law. And those who belong to Christ,
to Christ Jesus, have crucified the flesh. with its passions
and with its desires, amen. The word of the living God, may
he write its eternal truths in our minds, on our hearts, and
may we put it into practice in our lives by his grace and for
his glory, amen. The Proverbs pose many questions. One of the great questions of
the book of Proverbs is this, a faithful man who can find. a faithful man who can find? And I think the answer in this
world is none, no one. Hold on, there’ll be some good
news in a moment. But in this world, a faithful
man cannot be found. What is faithfulness? What does
it mean to be faithful? It means to be true. It needs
to be trustworthy. It means loyalty or fidelity. Think back to a day when we didn’t
really name dogs after human beings. I can remember that. And we used to chain them up
in the backyard and they had a little oil drum on the side. I remember that. It’s illegal
now to do that, I think. But remember when a dog’s name
was Fido? Fidelity, faithfulness. I think
of the great story of Lassie, not the 70s or 80s television
show, you know, with Lassie and Joe. But I think maybe the 1940s
movie, Lassie and Joe, times were hard post depression over
in Europe. And Joe’s parents couldn’t afford
to keep the dog anymore. And so they sold Lassie to a
country gentleman who had had his eye on Joe’s beloved, faithful
dog, Lassie. And so the man takes the dog.
The dog is miserable. The dog sneaks out of the kennels
many times. And at some point the man moves
hundreds of miles away up in, I think, to the Highlands of
Scotland. And Lassie, faithful to Joe, travels all the way home
to see Joe. And what a reunion that was.
A faithful dog who can find, yeah, It’s in their blood, it’s
in their instinct, but a faithful man who can find. Or we think
of those who serve in the Marines, Semper Fi, always faithful. It’s a statement, trustworthiness,
faithfulness. It’s a statement of character.
A person of faithfulness is rock solid. You can always count on
them. I think big picture, We must
understand faithfulness is an attribute of God. Now God has
two types of attributes. He has communicable attributes. I know that sounds like a disease,
but it’s attributes that you in a small way can imitate. God
is love. You can be love. God is faithful. You can be faithful. He does
it infinitely. We do it finitely and sinfully.
And there are attributes of God that we cannot mimic. We are not all powerful or all
knowing. Some of us probably think we
are, but we’re not. And those things about God cannot
be attributed to us. But God’s faithfulness is absolute. God’s word is forever sure. God is a covenant making and
covenant keeping God. And when you see the word faithful
or faithfulness in the scriptures and just look it up in an English
translation, it’s all over the Bible. The faithfulness of God
often goes with his steadfast love. And so God’s covenant love,
his steadfast love, is part of his faithfulness. He can’t be
unfaithful because then he would not be a covenant-making, covenant-keeping,
faithful, true, rock-solid God. Well, the question we’ve asked,
where is the faithful man? Where can one find someone who
is faithful and true? Well, since sin has entered into
this world, no one is faithful. No one is faithful apart from
the intervention of Almighty God, a faithful man who can find.
It’s an age old question. There’s two Psalms that ask this
question, maybe in a different way. Psalm 15 and Psalm 24. Psalm 15 says, who can ascend
God’s holy hill? Who can sojourn in God’s tent,
the tabernacle, his place of meeting? Psalm 24, verse 3, who
can ascend God’s holy hill and who can stand in his holy place?
And it’s it’s sort of like that question that gets asked in heaven
when John has a vision of the heavenly things at the end of
his life, at the end of the first century, when it says who is
worthy to take up the scroll and to open its seals so that
redemption may unfold. And any time the question is
answered, where is a faithful man to be found? The answer is
always Jesus. Okay. It’s never us, right? We like to be the hero, but there’s
only one hero in the Bible. And who is that? It’s Jesus. Of course, we’re being conformed
to his image. We’re being worked at by the
Holy spirit and the word. And we more and more, as we die
to sin, live to righteousness, we can become faithful people.
So don’t lose all hope just yet. Um, But what wonderful question
Psalm 15 asks, Psalm 24, who can ascend God’s holy hill? Who
can stand in his holy place? Who can sojourn in his tent?
And who can be in his presence? That’s a big question, isn’t
it? For Isaiah says, all we like sheep. have gone astray. Each of us has gone our own way. And we know this to be the true
story of redemptive history. God made the world and everything
in it. He took what was formless and void and he formed it and
he filled it. And at the crown of his creation
on day six, he made man, he made Adam in his own image with knowledge
and righteousness and holiness. And he charged him with dominion
over the earth. But Satan and sin entered the
garden as Satan tempted Adam and Eve to be their own gods,
to be their own kings, to be their own rulers. And so no longer
because of sin could Adam sojourn in God’s garden or could ascend
his holy mountain and worship him or stand with God in his
presence. There was exile. There was banishment
from the garden. And you quickly see, as you read
through the book of Genesis, how from Adam came Cain, who
killed his brother Abel, but also from Adam came Seth, and
from Seth came Enosh, and from Enosh came Enoch, who the scripture
tells us walked with God, pleased God, and God did not let him
taste death, but took him into heaven. And then there was Noah. When wickedness had risen across
the entire face of the earth, there was not one righteous person,
but Noah and his family. And so for a hundred years, Noah
hammered and sawed and nailed and formed and fashioned an arc
of safety so that he and two by two, the animals could enter
the arc and escape that destructive worldwide cataclysmic flood that
destroyed all living things. that had breath in its nostrils,
except those who entered the ark. And isn’t that a foreshadowing,
a future picture, that we who find ourselves hidden in Jesus
Christ will escape the great deluge of God’s wrath at the
last day, because that deluge of wrath for us was placed at
Christ on the cross. That’s why he swept droplets
of blood in the garden of Gethsemane. That’s why he prayed, God, if
there be another way, Remove this cup from me. Well, a very few faithful men
could be found throughout human history. A very few faithful
men could be found who feared God and who kept his commandments. They lived for God in a world
that did not. I’ve been reading a book lately
called Post Christian. It’s a book by Gene Edward Vieth,
who wrote a book back in the 90s, I think called Postmodernism. You know, we got to name culture,
modernism, postmodernism. Now we think it’s either post-Christian
or post-secular. And as we are seeing all around
us, and I believe the events of 2020, both COVID and the racial
riots and political upheaval we’ve seen in our country have
put At a rapid pace, a more rapid pace, Christianity on the back
burner. Actually, that’s giving, that’s
being nice. They’ve done everything but kick
Christianity out. Did you hear what today is being
celebrated as? I won’t even mention it. It’s
so blasphemous. But Christianity has been put
out of the world. And what happens when a world
that used to have Judeo-Christian values doesn’t mean everyone
was a Christian. But it does mean that Judeo-Christian
values had a very heavy civic influence. You went to church
because it was respectable. You went to school and obeyed
your teachers because your parents expected it of you. on and on
in business. If you shook a hand, it mean
yes. If you said no, it meant no. And on and on, there was
very little corruption and other like sins as we see today. Oh, there were sinners and bad
people for sure. But society has gotten worse
and worse. It has come unglued since We
have come unmoored from Judeo-Christian values. And so the question,
a faithful man who can find, it’s a hard question to answer
in today’s world. But that’s the way it was for
Abraham. And that’s the way it was for Noah. That’s the way
it was for King David. That’s the way it was for Daniel
in Babylon, where he determined that he would not defile himself. by eating the king’s rations
from the king’s table. So where can a faithful man be
found? You find faithful men and women
and boys and girls when they fear God, when they have faith
in the Messiah, and when they study and keep the law of the
living God and are made alive by the Holy Spirit. That’s the
case through all ages, from Adam all the way to today. And it’s
rare. It’s rare to find a faithful
person. It’s rare to find someone who hasn’t bowed their knee to
Baal or doesn’t love themselves so much that they have no room
for God, no room for others. I think it’s one of the classic
understatements of the scriptures when you read in the early accounts
of Genesis. And God looks down on the world
that he made and he sees that men are only evil continually. And God says, he is sorry that
he made man on the face of the earth. And he says, I’ll destroy
the earth with a, with a flood. And isn’t it, but for God’s mercy
and restraining grace in Jesus, that he’s not destroyed this
earth again. He promised with the rainbow
and the clouds, I will not destroy. earth again with the flood. And
so we are assured of God’s restraining worldwide wrath. But we see his
wrath in little bits and fits. These are harbingers of things
to come, the great judgment at the last day. But it is a corrupt
and it is a violent generation, just as it was in the days of
Noah, a faithful man who can find. Where is the one who fears
Yahweh? Where is the one who has faith
in the Messiah, the Savior of sinners? Where is the one who
studies and delights in and seeks to do the law of God in this
world? You’re beginning to see, I hope,
that apart from God, apart from Jesus Christ, apart from saving
faith and the ongoing work of the Holy Spirit and the life
of the believer, there are no faithful people. Only those who
seek the Lord and rest in Jesus and have the Spirit’s work in
them will be faithful. Oh, yes, there’s civic faithfulness. There’s people who keep their
word because they ought to. It’s the decent thing to do.
But I’m talking about faithfulness, true faithfulness out of a changed
heart, out of a transformed life. Apart from Jesus, no one is faithful. And you can rinse and repeat
and read human history about the cases and the stories of
unfaithfulness. And don’t we see it in the world
we live in today? I mean, just Friday, a young
man went to prison for 25 years for bilking people out of money.
Just a year ago, we saw a bank, which we used to call a bank
and trust, who had fiduciary, faithful responsibilities. We saw Silicon Valley Bank, their
investments devalued and there was a run on the money and the
bank had to crash. Something really hadn’t been
seen in about a hundred years. And so can you put your money
in the bank and trust it? Can you give your money to an
investor and trust it? Can we trust our politicians
or the education system, particularly the higher education system,
Is there anything we can trust? We’re beginning sadly to see
over the last 25 years of news headlines, it’s hard to trust
even the church. The Roman Catholics had their
scandals and now it’s the Southern Baptist turn. And that’s faithfulness to one
another. Think about the unfaithfulness
to the scripture in the mainline churches. Oh, the Bible’s an
antiquated document. We’ll put it aside and we’ll
make a new way to heaven. We’ll make all roads go to heaven
and to faith. And on and on we go until we’ve
stripped the Christian faith down to nothing. And so we must
be faithful towards one another, but towards God and to his scriptures. It’s a hard world to live in
when there are few faithful people, but there is one hope. And that
one hope is in our redeeming God, who is the faithful God,
who keeps his steadfast love and his covenant. He’s the one
that when mankind sinned, Adam and Eve, and they were hiding
from him, he came looking. He was a pursuing God, a chasing
God. And he came to them immediately
and he took away their fig leaves, their self-righteousness, their
self-covering of sin. And he took the life of an animal. that would foreshadow the life
taking of his son. And he clothed them with the
skins of something that lost its life in their place. And
that’s what we find in Jesus and the cross. Something died
in our place, not something, someone, the son of God, the
savior of sinners. And so this one hope in our redeeming
God, who is a God of steadfast love and faithfulness, he seeks
sinners. He sent his servant Moses to
Egypt to redeem and rescue his people from Pharaoh and from
slavery and from all that burden that was placed on them. And
Moses was a faithful servant. The book of Hebrews chapter two,
and then especially chapter three speaks of Moses being a wonderful,
faithful, obedient servant. God called him Moses out of the
burning bush, go to Egypt and save my people. And now we all
know Moses whined a little bit and tried to get out of it, but
he, he, he did it. And he was faithful those 40
years. And he was faithful and led the people up out of Egypt
into the desert, to the mountain where they worship God. He built
the tabernacle and he led them all the way to the promised land.
God didn’t let him in because of his disobedience when he struck
the rock out of anger. But nevertheless, the book of
Hebrews says, Moses was faithful in God’s house. But he says,
Moses was just a member of God’s house. Jesus is the house builder. Jesus is the one who, because
of his life and obedience and his death and his resurrection
and his ascension, he is the cornerstone. He is the carpenter. He is the house builder. And
he’s taking you as his choice stones and he’s laid a cornerstone
in Zion and then he’s building it up a house of faithful stones
with you, his people who’ve come to him by faith. And so Hebrew
says Moses was faithful in God’s house. Yes. but Jesus, more faithful,
ultimate faithfulness in God’s house. And so by faith, when
we come to Jesus, the builder, we become one of the living stones
laid up and we are being built into a temple, not made with
human hands, but a temple of the Holy Spirit where God dwells
in each of us. And as we are washed by the blood
of Jesus, as we are cleansed by the spirit, as we are faithful
to feed our souls with God’s word and his Holy Spirit works
in our lives, it is perfectly possible. In fact, it is expected
of us to be a faithful people. And so a faithful man who can
find, well, on this earth, in the church, On this earth in
God’s house, on this earth in quiet places where people fearing
God, looking for the Messiah and living according to God’s
word by his spirit day by day. And it’s nothing big or flashy. We wake up, we do our chores,
we go to work, we take out the garbage, we load the dishwasher,
we unload the dishwasher. I think a spring is coming about
how futile yard keeping is. We spend all fall getting organic
material out of our yards, and then we spend all spring buying
more organic material at Lowe’s and putting it back in our yards. only for the summer heat to kill
it, and then we gotta do it again. It’s a wonder, this world we
live in. But as we live in this world,
a kind of mundane, ordinary, faithful, God-word, Christ-word,
word-centered, spirit-active life, who can find a faithful
man? Well, you’ll find them in all
sorts of places, all sorts of corners of the earth, and perhaps
like Noah, You’ll stand out and people will stand outside your
house as you’re hammering and nailing on your ark, figuratively,
don’t build one. But people will say, you, you
strange Christian, you think there’s a flood coming. And in
your mind, in your heart, you’ve said it, that there is a flood
coming. It’s a flood of God’s wrath at the last day. And only
those found in Jesus will escape. The rest of the world, like when
the rains began to fall on Noah’s generation, will cry out to the
mountains and to the rocks, and they will go into caves and ask
the earth to fall on them. It would be better to be crushed
by a mountain than to be crushed by the wrath and the judgment
of almighty God. We live in a world that scoffs
at faith in God. Now, it’s a spiritual world.
We’ll do spiritual things. We hear that all about us. We
live in a world that scoffs at faith in Jesus Christ. He’s a crutch. The answer is
more than a crutch. He’s life support. He’s everything. We live in a world that scoffs
at faith in an old book, The Word of the Living God. But it
ought to be, brothers and sisters, in spite of the world, it ought
to be our burden, our desire, our hope to live for God, to
live in Christ. And we’re watching, maybe some
of us, basketball. Some of our teams are out. I
won’t mention any of them. But we see their t-shirts, their
pep talk t-shirts. And I think of one probably from
a football season or two ago. It says, All In. Faithful people
are all in. They’re all in for the football
team. They’re going to come to practice. They’re going to eat
the diet. They’re going to do the work in the weight room. They’re
going to read their playbook. They’re going to memorize it.
They’re going to they’re going to give their all for their teammates
in hopes of a championship. And Christians ought to be all
in. All in with God, all in with
Jesus, all in the word, all in with letting the spirit do the
work so that we are faithful through thick and thin. We are faithful. We stand firm
and we hold fast no matter what waves wash over the church or
wash over culture or wash over people. We do not come unglued
like the rest of society. It’s an immoral world, isn’t
it? It’s a sloppy world. It’s a self-seeking,
self-serving, self-worshipping world. And we are seeing a world
that is conformed to the image of self. No longer does a handshake
affirm anything. No longer does a contract mean
anything. No longer does a promise mean
anything. No longer does a vow mean anything. And to Christians, these are
serious things for Jesus says, let your yes be yes and your
no be no. You know, one of the jobs I think
of a pastor, and I didn’t realize this till 10 or so years ago,
another minister pointed it out to me. The job of the pastor
is largely to help people make and keep their vows. That’s why
pastors do premarital counseling. so they don’t enter into marriage
unadvisedly because it’s a serious covenant. It’s why we look carefully
at those we ordain to the office of minister, elder, or deacon.
It’s why when we present our children for baptism, the pastor
and elders are going to say, now you’re going to raise them
in the fear of the Lord, aren’t you? And we give them books and
materials and helps and all the rest. And we encourage them along
the way because it’s a world unglued. from faith in God, love
for Jesus, and adherence to the word and letting the spirit work.
Where would we be if there had not been faithful people along?
Christians like William Wilberforce, who put an end to the slave trade
in Europe, or Martin Luther, who before the Pope said, here
I stand, I can do no other, God help me. Or Daniel in Babylon,
Or Joseph, when Potiphar’s wife offered herself to him and he
said, no, I could not do that to my Lord, to Potiphar. There’s faithful people from
time to time in this world, and aren’t they bright spots? You
remember, I think, in grade school playing musical chairs. Just
enough chairs for everybody minus one. And we played the music.
And as the music plays round and round the chair as you go,
and when the music stops, you need to be in a seat. And if
you’re not in a seat, you’re caught. Think of life like that
for a moment, the music is playing. God in his grace and goodness
is allowing history to proceed. But what if the music stopped?
And what if God entered this world to settle accounts? Would
he find you being faithful? Would he find you being a good
steward of all that he’s entrusted? Think through your spheres. Think
through your daily schedule. Think through those you influence,
the duties and tasks and responsibilities you’ve given. If God were to
come right now and say, settle up, would he find you faithful? Or would you say, Lord, I was
going to get around to it? I was going to invest that money, I
was going to dig it out of the ground and I was going to do
something with the talent that you entrusted to me. What if
this were to take place? What in your private life needs
fixing in order to be more faithful? What in your public life needs
to be fixed in order to be more faithful? Is your faith in God
growing, your trust in Jesus growing stronger? Is your reliance
on the word to guide you in this world? Your roadmap is the spirit
at work. You know, the real heroes in
this life are the quiet people who simply keep their eyes on
heaven. They keep their eyes on Jesus. They keep their eyes
in the scriptures and they let the spirit’s eyes be on them
to change and work in them. A faithful man, a faithful woman,
a faithful child who can find perhaps in his church today,
he’ll find a happy few. May it be so. Pray with me. Lord, we thank you that we have
truth to live by in this world that seems to be uprooting itself,
untethering itself from what you have said. We thank you for
coming into our lives and for changing our hearts, for prying
our fingers off our idols, for showing us your word and your
ways and your wisdom. And Lord, it’s easy to walk out
of this place today to receive your benediction, to go back
home, to flip on the TV or to follow the relentless leash and
harness of our calendars. And it’s easy to forget. But
Lord, keep our minds forever on faith in you and on Jesus
and help us to be all in so that the world will see that and see
faithfulness in a faithless, and untrue world. Hear us, help
us, bless us and redeem us more and more and conform us after
the image of Jesus. We pray in his mighty and holy
name. Amen.