The Faithfulness of God

       Have you ever had someone let you down?   A good friend gossip about you?  A business partner steal from you?   Faithfulness matters. Imagine sitting on the death bed of your beloved spouse of fifty years and he tells you that he has been 95% sexually faithful to you!  According to our school district that would be an A.  But somehow that does not feel like an A, does it?  Human relationships often are marked by faithlessness.   In contrast, God is faithful.  Look at the challenging relationship God has had with the Jewish people.  In many seasons of their history, they have been faithless, even rebels, yet God loves them.  God even gives a strange order to Hosea the prophet to marry an adulterous woman named Gomer (Hosea 1:2).  I think it would be painful to have to marry a woman named Gomer, let alone a woman with such corrupt character.  He marries her, loves her, has children with her, yet she has a seemingly insatiable taste for immorality and is often unfaithful.  She completely ruins her life; yet Hosea steps in, forgives and saves her.  God sets up this painful marriage to illustrate His relationship with His people.  And let’s make sure that we do not just point fingers at the Jewish nation; in many ways this is our story as well.  The ten commandments begin with “you shall have no other gods before me.”  Have you kept this commandment?  I certainly have not. 
     If a god or an idol is anything that we put ahead of the one true God in our lives all of us have some explaining to do.  Some of the popular gods of our age are people pleasing, family, work, pleasure, sports, and immorality.  These gods are not even all bad.  Family is certainly one of God’s great gifts, but Jesus makes it very clear that even family cannot come above God in our priority list (Luke 14:26).  In countries where Christians are aggressively persecuted, those believers often are required to choose between what would temporarily be best for their families and loyalty to Christ.  In a much smaller way, over twenty years ago I came to believe that my wife and I were called to move to Fairbanks and start a new church called Journey.  My mom had just retired as a public school teacher and she and my father were looking forward to spending more time with us and their grandchildren.  Instead, I told them that I was going to move thousands of miles away to Fairbanks to start a church.  I am close to my family of origin.  This move was hard for me and them.  My parents went from seeing their grandchildren multiple times a week to twice a year at the most.  But following God’s call in our lives is worth any price we are asked to pay.  Most Christians I know strive to be faithful to God.  But we should acknowledge that our faithfulness is fractured at best. 
     In contrast, God is faithful.  He loves us fiercely.  He paid the ultimate price to have a relationship with us by sending His Son Jesus to die on a cross to resolve our sin problem (John 3:16).  He offers us grace which simply means unmerited favor.   I appreciate the lyrics of a song “The God Who Stays” by Matthew West.  He writes, “You’re the God who stays.  You’re the one who runs in my direction when the whole world walks away.  You’re the God who stands with wide open arms.   And You tell me nothing I have done can separate my heart from the God who stays.”   These lyrics remind me of where the Apostle Paul writes, “For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.  (Romans 8:38, 39).  Now that’s loyalty.
     Thankfully our relationship with God is not dependent on our fickleness but God’s faithfulness.
Pastor Derek Dickinson
Journey Christian Church