Copyright © 2004 by Stephen S. Bilynskyj
It was a stinking mess. Danette, our church secretary came over to the sanctuary here to water the plants and pick up the welcome record. But when she came in she sniffed an awful smell. The big refrigerator in the kitchen had died and things were going bad. God bless her, she cleaned it all up.
So we will probably buy a new refrigerator. We could try and repair the dead machine, but it’s fifteen years old and probably not worth it. The best thing is to dump it and try to find another. That’s the way you and I handle often handle such things. This year our family has replaced a refrigerator, a garbage disposal, a washing machine and a car. They just weren’t worth repairing anymore. Better to get rid of them and find another.
That spirit of seeing things as always replaceable shows up even more in our use of other products. We use paper plates, paper napkins, Styrofoam cups, and plastic tableware. We buy disposable razors, disposable contact lenses and disposable cameras. Disposable cell phones are in the works. You can list for yourself all the things you buy, use once or twice, and then throw away.
Philip Kenneson believes disposable possessions are a challenge to our souls.[1] They teach us that any problem can be solved by severing our ties to something… or to someone. Even relationships are disposable. On Clark Howard’s radio show Friday he talked about how temporary agencies have many openings right now. Temporary help is in demand, which may be a sign of an upturn in the economy as employers need immediate new help. The problem, he explained, is that many temporary workers have become “perma-temps.” They may work full-time for a company for two, three, even five years, but they are paid less and receive no benefits. Whenever the economy turns down, they are let go without a second thought. They are a disposable workforce. And you all know that there really is no such thing as a permanent job anymore. Even regular full-time employees can be sacked on a moment’s notice.
All this disposability in our lives makes us, without even really knowing it, rocky ground for the seventh fruit of the Spirit. Real, lasting faithfulness is a rare virtue in our time – even in the church. In the little church I grew up in, it was standard practice to record Sunday School attendance and once a year give out awards for perfect attendance. They were lapel pins to which you added a little hanging bar for each additional year of a perfect record. I can’t even imagine that now. None of us, including your pastor, would qualify. We have so many other commitments and distractions in our lives that even the simple faithfulness of being present at church every Sunday morning seems impossible.
Yet faithfulness is at the heart of what it means to be a Christian. In Jesus’ parable of the seeds, it is those who receive the Word and remain faithful who prove to be the true believers, the ones who “produce a crop,” as verse 15 says. In His parable of the talents in Matthew 25 the Master says to each of those who serve well, “Well done, good and faithful servant!” In Matthew 23 when Jesus condemns the Pharisees He chides them for neglecting “justice, mercy, and faithfulness.”
Whenever the apostle Paul wants to especially commend someone, he calls that person “faithful.” He addresses his letter to the Ephesians, “to the saints in Ephesus, the faithful, in Christ Jesus. At the end of Colossians he names Tychicus to be a “faithful minister” and Onesimus to be “a faithful and dear brother.” In I Corinthians 4:17 he commends Timothy to Corinth as a son whom he loves, “who is faithful in the Lord.”
In Revelation 2:10, Jesus tells the church in Smyrna to “Be faithful, even to the point of death, and I will give you the crown of life.” In the great war against the beast in Revelation 17, it is said that the Lamb will overcome “and with him will be his called, chosen and faithful followers.”
Despite how rare it is today, faithfulness is supposed to be a quality of Christians. It’s a fruit meant by God to grow in our lives. Why? Because when we become faithful we become more and more like God Himself in whose image we are made. Even more than it talks about the need for you and I to be faithful, the Bible tells us that the Lord is faithful. We called ourselves to worship this morning with those beautiful words from Psalm 100, verse 5, “For the Lord is good, and his love endures forever, his faithfulness continues through all generations.”
Our faithfulness is based in and secured by the faithfulness of God. We can only be faithful because He is always and infallibly faithful to us. Even when we are unfaithful to Him, God remains faithful. I love the ancient song that is recorded in II Timothy 2:
Here is a faithful
saying:
If we have died with him,
we will also live with him;
if we endure,
we will also reign with him;
if we deny him,
he will also deny us;
if we are faithless,
he remains faithful
for he cannot deny himself.
Faithfulness is at the root of God’s character. Philosophers get all caught up worrying about the conceptual problems generated by the idea that God does not change. But the root of the Bible’s affirmation of divine changelessness is not the image of static Being with a capital “B.” It’s the story of an absolutely faithful Person with a capital “P,” a God who can always be trusted to keep His promises and show His love.
God is faithful and so you and I are to be faithful. Faithfulness means sticking to the course of faith and goodness all along the way, day in and day out, over and over, even when it’s hard, even when it’s monotonous, even when we get no immediate pleasure out of it. Faithfulness is what Friedrich Nietzsche called “a long obedience in the same direction.” He said, “there thereby results, and has always resulted in the long run, something which has made life worth living.” Though he scorned Christianity, he understood something of the virtue of faithfulness. Without it, life is not worth living. As Jesus shows in His parable, the crop is only reaped by the one who perseveres. Faithfulness is the fruit which produces fruit.
Her chapter on faithfulness is perhaps the best part of Evelyn Underhill’s little tract on The Fruits of the Spirit. She says that “Faithfulness is consecration in overalls. It is the steady acceptance and performance of the common duty and immediate task without any reference to personal preferences—because it is there to be done and so is a manifestation of the Will of God.”[2] To be faithful means a willingness to accept one’s life as it is and keep on doing your duty in whatever situation you find yourself.
Underhill points out that “The fruits of the Spirit get less and less showy as we go on.” There is nothing very glamorous or exciting about faithfulness. Faithfulness is a parent changing a diaper for the seventh time in a day. It’s a custodian emptying the same trash can every night. It’s a piano student practicing the same scales for the hundredth time. Underhill says that it is “Steady, unsensational driving, taking good care of the car. A lot of the road to heaven has to be taken at thirty miles per hour.”[3] I like that. Thirty miles per hour. How much of what we do in the church is more like trying to get to heaven at seventy or eighty or ninety miles an hour? When what it really takes is a slow, steady, faithful covering of one day of simple service after another.
Faithfulness is not showy and it’s not very popular. Our culture is against it. We have all sorts of strategies for avoiding long-term commitments to each other. Churches don’t expect perfect attendance and neither does business. Employers make employees feel disposable and they return the favor. The notion of giving one’s life in dedicated service to a single company seems as old-fashioned as hoop skirts.
The unpopularity of faithfulness is nothing new. Jesus saw it very clearly. As He explained today’s parable to the disciples, He knew there would be on them and on every Christian all sorts of pressure to be unfaithful to Him. At the very outset, in verse 12 we have an enemy, the devil, whispering in our ears and trying to get us not to make any commitment at all to God. He would like to eat up the seed of faith before it even sprouts. It’s happening all the time. An article in yesterday’s paper said that in the last ten years the number of people in our country who say they have no religion has grown from 9% to 14%. The devil is devouring the seeds all around us.
Then in verse 13 there are seeds that fall on rock. These are those of us who would like to believe, who have some faith, but find it impossible to be faithful. “In the time of testing they fall away.” Faithfulness is too hard. It requires too much. The seeds sprout but they have no roots, they’ve made no real commitment. How often do we do that in other areas of our lives? We use those simple words, “Maybe, but don’t count on me.” Our family did it on the 4th of July. We were invited over for barbecue, but we were trying to get ready to leave on vacation. So we waffled, we put down a shallow root. “Maybe we can come, but don’t count on us.” But that “don’t count on us” can become the story not just of little interpersonal moments like that, but of our whole lives. Jesus said that uncommitted spiritual life would ultimately wither and die.
Yet it’s the third kind of seed, in verse 14, which I believe describes most of us. We believe and then go on our way. We are faithful for awhile. The plant puts down roots. It grows up. But then weeds surround it. Worries, riches and pleasures engulf us. We have bills to pay, illnesses to treat, vacations to take and movies to see. We have to paint houses and fix cars and manage investments. And our faithfulness is choked like weeds grow up and strangle delicate vines. The sun is blocked out, the water is all sucked up, and no fruit is produced. Our vision for life is clouded, our energy is sapped and we are doing very little for God or for anyone but ourselves. That’s the form our unfaithfulness most often takes.
The weeds are choking the faithfulness out of us all the time. The culture around us teaches us that everything in life is disposable, both things and people. The only practical way to live is to avoid commitment, to forget about lasting relationships. The pragmatic thing is to take care of yourself, to look after your own needs, to focus on your own worries. Commitments will only drag you down.
Sometimes commitments literally drag you down. Last night we watched “Touching the Void” a PBS documentary about two British men, Simon and Joe, who made the only successful climb of the west face of a mountain named Siula Grande in Peru. The story tells of their perilous climb to the summit at over 21,000 feet. They hack their way up sheer ice, barely clinging to the mountain. But their real troubles began on the way down. Caught in a whiteout and unable to see where he was going, Joe fell and broke his leg. Simon made his way down to Joe and they worked out a plan whereby Simon would lower Joe by rope. Simon would make a secure seat in the snow and then brace himself to pay out 150 feet of rope. Joe would then anchor himself and give some slack while Simon tied in another rope to lower him another 150 feet. Then Simon would climb down himself. Then they would start over. It worked for awhile.
Then came a moment when Simon was lowering Joe that first 150 feet. He felt the weight increase, but thought nothing of it. But Joe had been lowered completely out over an overhang. He was dangling in mid air. Simon came to the end of the rope and tugged on it to signal that Joe should anchor and give him slack. But the rope stayed tight. The whiteout storm was raging around them and they couldn’t hear each other. Simon had no idea what was going on at the other end of the line.
Joe tried to climb back up the rope, but with frozen hands and a broken leg it was impossible. In the meantime, Simon sat there, also with cold hands, trying to hold his position. An hour and a half went by. Neither man knew what the other was thinking or doing or could do anything about. Then Simon began to slip. He slid a couple feet and managed to dig in again, but he knew he couldn’t hold on forever.
Finally it came to Simon that he and Joe were both going to fall if he didn’t do something. He remembered he had a pen knife in his rucksack. He worked it out, held it for an awful moment, and then cut the rope. Without the burden of Joe, Simon was able to make his way down the mountain and to the safety of their base camp.
The wonder of the story is that Joe also made it out. He fell into a crevasse and Simon left him for dead. But by enormous will and huge pain, he found a way out and dragged himself and his shattered leg over ice and rock for miles until he also reached the camp two days later.
At the end of the film there was a printed afterward telling how Simon has received nothing but criticism for cutting his friend’s rope. The commitment of a climbing partnership had been broken. It didn’t matter that they both would fall. Faithfulness required hanging in there, even to the death. Simon couldn’t do it.
Yet then we read that despite all the criticism, Joe stood by his friend. He staunchly defended Simon from the critics, saying he would have done it himself if he had been on the other end. His friend had been faithless, but in another way Joe remained faithful. That, friends, is how God is with you and me.
As II Timothy says, even when we are faithless, Jesus remains faithful. As Romans 3:3 says, our lack of faith does not nullify God’s faithfulness. It’s not that He would be faithless in our place like Joe said about Simon. Jesus Christ was in our place. He was pushed to the very limit of human endurance and He remained completely steadfast, even to the point of dying. But because He was human, Jesus understands our weakness, and He is always and forever faithful to us.
That is the root of our hope to grow the fruit of faithfulness. We do not count merely on ourselves to stand the tests of life. We rely on the faithfulness of our Lord who will not ever let us down. Because God is faithful, you and I can cultivate faithfulness in our own lives.
I hesitate to share this next because it could sound too smug and some of you have experienced pain and struggles that would have knocked us out long ago. But as we approached our twenty-fifth anniversary last month, Beth several times turned to me and said, “Isn’t it easier just to be faithful? Doesn’t all the real struggle and heartache come when you’re not?” Please don’t hear this wrong. We are not perfect. We’ve had our share of cold silences and ugly shouting. Being faithful has been terribly hard sometimes. But I want to share with you the positive side of faithfulness, not just the struggle.
Evelyn Underhill relishes the character of Faithful in John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. What she notices is that while the character of Christian has great struggles and trials, everything seems to go a little easier for Faithful. He didn’t fall into the Slough of Despond like Christian. He doesn’t stop and ask for explanations, “He just plods steadily on.” Later on when Christian meets up with him again, Christian “is surprised to find how well Faithful has got on and says, ‘But what about the lions in the path?’ Faithful said he never noticed any lions.” Entering the Valley of Humiliation he did suffer two temptations but then went the rest of the way and on through the Valley of the Shadow of Death all in sunshine.[4]
Let us be counter-cultural. Let us learn again what it means to be faithful – to God and to each other. It really is the better way. Jesus talked about faithfulness in terms of each of us carrying a cross, a terrible load. Yet our Lord who carried a truly awful Cross of real wood also said that His yoke is easy and His burden is light. As difficult as faithfulness can be, in the end it really is the smooth road to take and the light burden to carry. May you and I find that faithful road and lift that gentle burden together.
Amen.
Valley Covenant Church
Eugene/Springfield, Oregon
Copyright © 2004 by Stephen S. Bilynskyj