Fruit of the Spirit: Faithfulness

And I love watching people in this room that I know some of the things that they're going through raise their hands and just declare that God won't fail. God won't fail. What a joy it is to be together this morning. If today is your first time or you've been here a long time, I'm glad you're here and I'm glad you're here because I believe, actually believe. I don't just say that I believe.

I really believe that God has something in mind for you today, that it's not happenstance that you're here today or listening online right now, that God has something in mind for you today. My prayer has been that you will be open handed to whatever that is. And the truth is, whatever, whatever belief you came in with or struggles you came with or baggage you came with or joys you came with today, you're welcome here. You're welcome here. And we're glad that you're here.

And if you're, if you're new around here or you haven't connected much further than just coming to a service, we would love to, to connect with you, to get to know you. We've got a great team out in the foyer if you want to go after the service out to the information desk. They can help get you connected here, get you in community, help you find a place to share your gifts or answer any questions that you have. So please do that one thing today if you've not done that yet. But it's good to be back with you.

I feel like it's been longer than it has even because two weeks ago, right at the start of 9:30, it's snowing like crazy and so a bunch of people didn't come. So I didn't get to see you then. Then last week on top of that, I was out of town and so it's good to be back. It's good to be back. And can I say, Russ and Micah crushed it the last two weeks.

Man, I'm so thankful for those guys. We are so blessed to have a great team here teaching. And I'm just so thankful for all their commitment to God, their love for the Word, all the time and energy they put poured out for all of us. So thank you, Russ and Micah. One more thing before we get into the message.

This past Tuesday marked one year that I've been here on staff at Whitewater. Man, it has been. I mean, I'm glad you guys have enjoyed it too. We've really enjoyed it. My family has been so blessed.

I was just meeting a new couple this morning and telling them, I know I'm supposed to say this, I. But I love it here. I really do. And my family loves it here. So thank you for all of your generosity toward us to your kindness.

Thank you for welcoming my family here. We're blessed to be here. Let me pray and just thank God for a year. God, thank you for all that you're doing here, all the things that we can see, all the things that we can't see. Thank you for everybody who came today.

And I pray that your Word will be declared in power today. And I pray that this would be way more than a nice series packaged up with some fruit. But I pray today that this would actually get into us. It would seep into us that you would meet us wherever we are today and that you'd help us take a step toward you. Thank you for a really fun year.

It's been full, but it's been good. And I pray that this place, this community, we as your people here, as this outpost of your kingdom in Cleaves, Ohio, that we can just be and do and say whatever you want us to be and do and say not my plan, not somebody's favorite thing to do, but exactly what you want. God, I thank you for blessing this year and I pray for many more ahead. In Jesus name, Amen.

Well, today we're in week eight of this series. It's been a really good series. It's been really practical. I keep hearing from many of us, from kids up to adults who have been encouraged and challenged. We've been practicing some things together right as we're learning.

We've been praying for our enemies. We've been practicing what it looks like to love the one in front of us now. We've been asking God in traffic what he wants to do in our waiting. I did that again this week.

We've been reading scripture and memorizing it together. We've been asking God what He's up to. Let's keep doing this stuff. This should not be a week long pursuit. This should be a lifelong pursuit of all of these things.

We can keep practicing them now. The fruit of the Spirit, love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faith, faithfulness, gentleness and self control. This is all fruit that comes from the Spirit through the power of the Spirit. Jesus says when we abide in him, we do that by naming him as Lord and Savior of our life and spending time in the Word and spending time with Jesus when we abide in Him. That the natural Result of that abiding through the power of the Holy Spirit, the cultivation of practice, is this Fruit of the Spirit.

Jesus says, we will produce much good fruit, just like real fruit. This growing takes time. You can imagine if I had an apple tree right here on the stage with me today, and I said, watch this the whole time that I'm preaching today, and let me know if you see it growing. You wouldn't be able to see it, but it's growing. It's doing something even when we can't see it.

And Fruit of the Spirit is similar to that. It takes time. It takes time. We need to be patient. We need to be patient with the growth of this spiritual fruit in our lives.

Heidi. Heidi and I know someone who took her daughter to the nursery, and they bought strawberry plants, and they were so excited to take them home and plant them in the dirt. But her daughter would go out every morning looking for strawberries, and she was disappointed because there weren't strawberries there to eat every day. And so her mom, without telling her, decided to forego the growing process and went to Kroger and got a pint of strawberries, and she put them on the plant and around the plant, and she took her daughter out there that next day, and she was so excited to see that strawberries grew overnight. I don't know about you, but that's exactly how I wish this stuff would grow in me.

That somebody would go to Kroger and get me a pint of Patience and put it all around the plant, and I'd just wake up and go, wow, look how patient I am.

This is not how it works. This is not how it works. Now, today we get to the spiritual fruit of faithfulness, and with all of these messages, they can stand on their own, and there's plenty to learn from each one. But we have built them in a way that they're actually stacked on top of each other. So if there are any of the messages that you've missed in this series, I want to encourage you to go back and listen to them because it gives you such a fuller and richer understanding of what we're talking about.

So don't miss those online. But today, we're in faithfulness. So what is faithfulness? Well, if you're a literal kind of person, kind of like I am, maybe your mind went to the same place that mine did. Faithful is being full of faith.

That makes sense, right? So I have a lot of faith in my life, and therefore I have the fullness of faith. I'm full of faith. But that's not actually what the Bible says is faithfulness. The Greek word used here in Galatians 5.

For faithfulness is a word pistis. And while it includes faith or having faith, it goes beyond that to trustworthiness, consistency, reliability. One who has faithfulness is one who is known to have regular allegiance to something or someone. Our students are currently in a teaching series on integrity on Sunday nights. And integrity is about wholeness and alignment.

And integrity and faithfulness are two sides of the same coin. I'll insert a shameless plug here for student ministry. If you are a middle school student or a high school student here and you have not connected with our Sunday morning or Sunday evening gatherings, you are missing out on a great community and a lot of fun. We would love to see you there tonight at six o' clock over here in the Union. We'd love to see you there in shameless plug.

My kids will be there and it's a lot of fun. Another way to narrow in on what faithfulness is is it has two. It requires two halves. There is a participant, recipient, a participant and a recipient. There is the one who is doing faithfulness, and there is the object of receipt, or the person or the thing that that faithfulness is being done.

To see, in faith, you can have faith in something, but you can have only faithfulness to something. It has to be aimed in a direction. Faithfulness isn't about the fullness of our faith. It's actually about consistent action of allegiance to the thing that we have faith in. Now, of course, God is the perfect example of faithfulness.

All through the pages of Scripture we see his continued faithfulness, faithfulness to fulfill the promises that he's given, to provide for his people, to protect them. God's faithfulness to forgive and restore, it's perfect, it is unchanging, it's enduring, it's constant and dependable. It's like time. It just keeps ticking and ticking and ticking. No matter what we're going through, if we're on a mountaintop experience or we're down in the valley, the seconds and minutes and hours of God's faithfulness and just keep coming, perfectly unaffected by our emotions, unaffected by our situation.

Deuteronomy 7:9 says this. Know therefore, that the Lord your God is God. He is the faithful God, keeping His covenant of love to a thousand generations of those who love him and keep his commandments. Psalm 33:4. For the word of the Lord is right and true.

He is faithful in all he does. Hebrews 10:23 Let us hold unswervingly to the hope we profess, for he who promised is faithful. We can have unswerving hope because he is faithful. Remember, we said that faithfulness requires a participant and a recipient. And in this way, God is the perfect participant, and we are the perfectly undeserving recipient of his faithfulness.

And then, as we seek to bear the spiritual fruit of faithfulness in our lives, we're to reciprocate and emulate his faithfulness back to Him. And we are the participants, and he is the recipient. Now let's look at what faithfulness isn't. The opposite of faithfulness is pretty easy. It's unfair.

Now I'll ask you, when I say she was unfaithful, what context does that immediately bring up for you? Come on, a little louder. Adultery Marriage. In fact, this is God's number one example or picture of what it looks like to be faithful or unfaithful. Some of the most brutal and quite frankly rated R language in the Bible is around unfaithfulness, how God describes His people as unfaithful.

Lots of times in Scripture, God's people choose to be unfaithful by ignoring his laws and ways or by worshiping other gods. And when they do, God describes them as an unfaithful wife, a prostitute, a harlot. Judges 2:17 says, yet they would not listen to their judges, but prostituted themselves to other gods and worshiped them. They quickly turned from the ways of their ancestors who had been obedient to the Lord's commands. Jeremiah 3:20 says, but like a woman unfaithful to her husband, so you, Israel, have been unfaithful to me, declares the Lord.

Ezekiel 16:32 you adulterous wife, you prefer strangers to your own husband. This is man. This is brutal language here. And the whole book of Hosea in the Old Testament is this story of how God tells his prophet Hosea to marry an unfaithful woman and keep taking her back over and over and over. Because that's what it's like with us and God as we're unfaithful to him.

He just keeps taking us back and taking us back and taking us back. This picture of an unfaithful spouse is just on repeat. And it's because God knows that this is the most impactful way that we can understand what it's like for us to be unfaithful to Him. Some of us know all too well that there might not be any deeper hurt than the unfaithfulness of a Spouse. God knows that.

That's why he uses these terms to describe it. Now, most of us probably hear about this unfaithfulness of God's people in the Bible and we think, well, gosh, I mean, I don't have any idols in my house or anything. It's not like I'm making sacrifices to false gods. I'm not like them. I'm not that kind of person.

But our unfaithfulness shows up in a lot of small ways, actually. Again, let's go back to the example of marriage. If my faithfulness to Heidi is measured only by not sleeping with other women, that's a pretty low bar. That's a pretty low bar, isn't it? What kind of husband am I if I just say, hey, what's the least that I have to do to prove that I'm faithful to my wife?

Not sleep with other women. Check. Got it. I'm perfect.

There's a lot more to being faithful or unfaithful in my marriage than not sleeping with other women. And that's true in our relationship with God, too. Truth is, we can be unfaithful in our marriage in a dozen other ways, like secretly spending money without letting them know, tearing them down in an argument, speaking poorly about our spouse to friends and co workers and family, undercutting our spouse in front of our kids, neglecting prayer with and for them, not ever really being present when we're all together, withholding affection or kindness or honesty just to maintain control or keep peace or prove a point, saying yes to everyone else and everything else, neglecting them. I could go on and on. And I think if all of us just take a few minutes to examine our hearts and examine our lives, whether we're married or not, we're going to find that we have been unfaithful in dozens of ways, in dozens of relationships in our lives, not least of which is our relationship with God.

Our faithfulness is fickle. It's conditional. Our faithfulness is consistently inconsistent. And worse, many of us listening today spend a lot of time justifying our unfaithful lives during the week by showing up to church on Sunday morning or serving or writing a check. We're like the unfaithful spouse who has other lovers, but justifies this behavior by saying, at least I come home every night.

At least I put the dishes in the dishwasher. At least I paid the bills.

Trying to convince others that we're faithful kind of people by faking faithful ish behavior instead of simply being faithful. This is the Fake plastic fruit of. Of faithfulness. It looks like outward consistency, outward activity with inward compromise. This is when we show up and we say the right things and perform the expected duties, but our hearts are disengaged.

It is mechanical faithfulishness. That's my word. Faithful ishness. Without real devotion, it would never fly in our marriages. And it definitely will not fly with God either.

Jesus confronted this kind of behavior and heart issue in the Pharisees. They were the religious elite who appeared faithful on the outside, but were actually lacking love for God and for others on the inside. Matthew 15:8 Jesus said, these people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. Matthew 23 Jesus gives several woes to them, warnings to them. He says, woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, for you tithe mint and dill and cumin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law, justice and mercy and faithfulness.

He's like, you are tithing off of the most insignificant stuff, but you're not doing the important stuff. These you ought to have done without neglect to the others you blind and guides, straining out a gnat and swallowing a camel. A few verses later, he gives them another woe. Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, for you are like whitewashed tombs which outwardly appear beautiful, but within are full of dead people's bones and uncleanness. So you also outwardly appear righteous to others, but within you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness.

Once again we hang this plastic fruit on our branches. It makes us feel a little better. We might convince the people around us that we are being faithful, but this false fruit is not from the Holy Spirit. And God is the perfectly discerning recipient of our faithfulness and he knows whether it's the real thing or not. And then there's this poisonous fruit of the flesh that is the counterpart to true biblical faithfulness.

This comes in the form of performative or manipulative faithfulness. We do faithful looking things so that others can be impressed by our faithfulness. Or we do faithful looking things so that we can manipulate God into having to do good things for us. Hey God, I did this for you. You owe me.

Now we don't say it that way, but man, we sure expect it. And that shows up when we realize how mad we are at God for not doing something when we did the thing to perform for him and do a trick so that he would owe us this thing. Thing? Tell me you don't see that in yourself too.

Performative and manipulative faithfulness are not only false, they're toxic, they're poisonous. Let me go one layer deeper on why our faithfulness matters so much. You know the number one complaint that people outside of the church have against Christians? That we're hypocrites, that we say one thing and do another thing. And when we are unfaithful, when we're not consistently faithful to God, when we are unfaithful, not only are we harming ourselves, we're literally driving a wedge between other people and Jesus because we're a poor representation of.

Of faithfulness. Now, there's grace for that, too. And don't you think for one second that half the room or anybody else in this room has figured out the perfect faithfulness in their lives. We're all broken and all in need of grace. But if our faithfulness is not in place, we can absolutely be driving others away from Jesus.

Real, true biblical faithfulness, it's consistent, predictable. It's unconditional. And like the other fruit we've described in this series, while we can't squeeze really hard and make it grow, we can cultivate this kind of fruit in our lives through partnership with the Holy Spirit and through cultivation and practice. True biblical faithfulness is grown or proven over time. And while this can make us impatient in the process, the good news is that God's design is that faithfulness starts small and it grows from there.

This is a pattern that's on repeat in the Bible. If we're faithful with a little, then God entrusts us with more and more and more over time. This past year, I learned to snow ski for the first time in my life. I went to Perfect North. I rented some gear, watched some YouTube videos.

Cause that's what you do when you're trying to learn how to do something right. And I thought, I bet I can figure this out. So I get out there and I awkwardly carry the skis out and clumping around with those big boots. And I get out and I clip the boots into the skis, and I go right past the instructors who are offering a lesson. And I thought to myself, I bet I can do this.

So some of the best advice I got was, don't go on a real hill until you can stop and turn. I was like, okay, cool. Got it, got it. So I awkwardly get on that little moving sidewalk thing that takes you up to the top of the bunny hill, the easiest one, and I start skiing. Well, I mean, sliding down the Hill, at least.

And so I get to the bottom of the hill, and I'm still standing and alive. And I thought, well, okay, all right, I'll do it again. So I go back and I do that a couple times. Then I go back and loop back around, and I thought, I'm gonna stop halfway down the hill just to see if I could do it. So I stop halfway down the hill, and then I can turn, and I'm turning, and I get to the bottom, and I'm like, I got this.

I got this. And so I go to the next hill, and then I go to the second level and the third level and the fourth level. And I am proud to say that the very first day that I ever went snow skiing, I never fell once.

But then there was the second time that I went skiing, and this time, we went with the whole family. And so this time, I'm teaching my kids what I learned. And we actually get an instructor this time, which is really helpful. All the things I thought I was doing right that I wasn't doing right. And we're all learning how to ski, and we do this same thing that I went through.

Okay, you got your. You got your wedge, your pizza. You know, you got to stop and turn. We get to the bottom of the bunny hill, and it's step one and step two and step three and step four. And my boys are getting pretty good at this.

Like, they're champing at the bit. They just want to get on a bigger hill and a bigger hill and a bigger hill. And so finally, I'm like, okay, we'll get on a big hill. So here we are on the lift. I'm excited because I'm basically a professional skier at this point, right?

And so we get to the top of the hill, and my boys. I'm not gonna let them get down the hill faster than me. I'm gonna pick up some speed. Cause I'm a professional skier. And so I pass the boys, and I'm flying down the hill.

I am crushing it. Like, just put me in the Olympics. Okay, now, the boys are behind me on the hill, and thankfully, they have their action cameras that they got for Christmas strapped to their chests, and they're recording me as I pass them, and I'm going so fast, and everything is so good. And then I start getting towards the bottom of the hill, and I realize that I'm going too fast for the distance that I have left to stop. Let's just say, like, the Runway is too short for my landing.

Okay, now good News is, Heidi was also at the bottom of the hill. We with her phone recording my awesomeness. And so I try to throw on the brakes and somehow end up on one ski. And then I hit a divot and my Olympic dreams come to an abrupt halt as I absolutely eat it in front of everyone on camera from three distinct angles.

Now, I considered showing you all the slow mo video from three angles of me looking like a complete loser, but you might feel sorry for me, some of you. And the point of the story is that I was far too excited to operate at a level of skiing that I was not prepared to operate at. And I think most of us are doing this the same way with all of this fruit and especially with faithfulness to God. We want to go from the bunny hill to the black diamond because we think it makes us look awesome. But instead, it often ends in an embarrassing crash.

And then we might get up and be so sore that we don't go back. The biblical model of growing in faithfulness, and in all spiritual fruit for that matter, is a slow, steady increase over time. This is good news. God is patient with the production of this fruit. In Mark 4, Jesus tells several parables about planting seeds and growing a harvest.

These parables, they're just short stories with a spiritual lesson. And he says in Mark 4:26, he also said, this is what the kingdom of God is like. A man scatters seed on the ground night and day. Whether he sleeps or gets up, the seed sprouts and grows, though he does not know how. All by itself, the soil produces grain.

First the stalk, then the head, then the full kernel in the head. As soon as the grain is ripe, he puts the sickle to it because the harvest has come. The spiritual fruit of faithfulness comes through our preparation and practice, yes, but also by God's miraculous power and work in us. In the same way, you can't hold a seed in your hands and force it to grow something. True Biblical faithfulness can't be grown without the miraculous help and power of the Holy Spirit and without time.

There's this great quote from a guy named Derek Prince. He said, you show what kind of a person you are most clearly when you're taking charge of some small and apparently unimportant responsibility. That's where your character is tested. And in God's kingdom, if you're not faithful in small things, you never will be promoted to the big things. So as we wrap up today, I want to invite us to take the idea of faithfulness beyond just Sunday morning.

And turn it into a Monday through Saturday way of life. Remember, real fruit doesn't grow overnight. It grows in the everyday, in the small, faithful steps we take. And our choice is to either chase after a one time dopamine hit and go buy the strawberries at Kroger instead of waiting for them to grow, or go with God's design that we go out every morning and we enjoy and rejoice in a little more growth and a little more growth and a little more growth. And then there is nothing sweeter than getting to taste that fruit for the first time and share it with others.

After all the tending, after all the waiting, after practicing, we get to finally enjoy the fruit. This is the model. So here's our challenge to cultivate faithfulness this week. First is this. We pick one simple everyday task.

It could be any number of things. Maybe it's setting aside five minutes each morning to be silent with God. Maybe it's praying a prayer of gratitude before meals or before you get out of bed. Maybe it's reading one chapter of scripture every day or continuing any of the practices that we've talked about for the last seven weeks. But we're committed to something.

One small little step. When we're faithful in small things, God prepares us for more things. Second, choose one relationship. One relationship where you can show up consistently to embody this kind of faithfulness. Other people so we got one act and then one person.

Think of anyone in your life. A friend, a spouse, a child, a co worker who needs your consistent love and presence right now, this week. Reach out, send a text, make a call. Just show up. Let's not be people who only say we care.

Let's be people who prove it by showing up and actually embodying faithfulness so that they can see a picture of what God's faithfulness looks like. And then the last thing. One step, one person prayer. Pray and pray for faithfulness every morning. This week.

I challenge you to start with this simple prayer. Lord, make me faithful today in my thoughts, in my words and in my actions. Lord, make me faithful today in my thoughts, my words and my actions. See, when we invite the Holy Spirit to grow this fruit in us, he's faithful to respond. Church.

Let's not try to force the fruit to grow overnight. Instead, let's be a people who cultivate faithfulness day by day, step by step, moment by moment, small thing by small thing, trusting that God is at work even when we can't see it working. Remember, God is patient with us. He's patient with you don't you think that you should be patient with yourself too? Let's pray.

God, thank you for your faithfulness toward us.

Give us some encouragement today that like a dormant winter fruit tree, you're still doing work. Even like the one in the spring, the slowly buds, or the one in the fall that's full for harvest. Each step takes time, takes your power. It takes things that we cannot control. We cannot.

We cannot bring the sun, we cannot bring the rain, we cannot bring the heat that's needed. We cannot bring the nutrients from the soil.

Thank you for being patient with us. Help us to be patient with ourselves. Help us to take a step this week, to find a person this week and to ask you to grow faithfulness in us.

Lord, I thank you for this series. I thank you that you have in mind that we would not just be aimless rule followers losing and winning, but that you have in mind that we over time would become more and more like your son, Jesus. What an incredible thing. What an incredible thing. No other God, no other king, no other savior wants us to become like him.

But you are a gracious Father. Thank you. In Jesus name, amen.