Good morning, everybody, and welcome and if you’re watching this online, super, super glad to have you here with us as well. it’s awesome to be able to be together, even if it’s in this way, just to see people’s faces and to hear voices really does encourage my heart and and spurs me on.
We are, we started a series at the beginning of the year five weeks ago called Picking Up the Pieces with one goal in mind. My hope as we started five weeks ago was that we would be able to give our church family some tools, some new ways of framing the clearly visible, unmistakable cracks that have been brewing under the surface of our lives. We started in week one, I’m going to give you a little bit of review just in case you weren’t here,
but if you hadn’t watched them, I encourage you to go online and check it out. But we started in week one with a man named Jobe, a person who understood the value of brokenness. And we said that it was important for us to realize that pain was actually a pathway into the presence of God. It was a man who, though he didn’t understand for us, was that we would begin to look at the trials
that was the year 2020 and think, OK, certainly it was difficult. Maybe it was a little bit uncomfortable, but God loves to make beautiful things out of broken people. And so we started on this journey and we looked through some of the fracturing that 2020 didn’t cause, but exposed. We talked about Jesus’s call to exchange our chronically overwhelmed burnt out culture for a yoke that Jesus describes as a yoke of rest. Within an age of anxiety,
Jesus has equipment for us, a new way of living, a new way of carrying our burdens his way, which then led us into our third talk we talked about and we focused our attention on the influencer culture and the following culture and we said that following only has value if you follow the right people. That’s why Jesus didn’t just come as Messiah, but he also came as rabbi or teacher, someone to be with, someone to learn from and someone to get our marching orders from.
We talked about the need to practice the ways of Jesus if we were truly to have a life, fully a life to the full and a life that was full and a life, actually. And we talked about what it meant to be a follower that actually, if we were a follower of Jesus, that we would give our whole life to him, that we would follow his steps and that we would bring his way forward.
And then we we talked a little bit last week, Monte talked about truth. He reminded us that we live in an age like Isaiah, chapter 59, where justice, mercy, honesty are being pushed back. And the only way to go on the offensive is to begin to examine everything through the lens or through the filter of Jesus, who himself is the personification of truth. That’s been our study, we’ve talked about the fracturing of an emotional, kind of distraught culture, the fracturing of following the wrong people, and then lastly, the fracturing of truth.
And today, we begin to wrap up our series. And, you know, for the majority of this series, I’ve been trying to inspire us to give up a lot of our ways of being that have found their ways into our heart and I’ve asked you to look at Jesus and look at him and model your life after his. In fact, this whole discussion has been anchored on this idea of us becoming followers of Jesus’s way.
We will have much more to say about this concept in the upcoming months, but that’s really been the crux of the matter for our sermon, but here’s what’s an interesting thing. We all agree, and I don’t have to remind you that the world has issues. We all agree that we are fractured, everyone agrees from academics to to all media outlets. Everybody agrees. But the way of Jesus isn’t in the world
your only option. In the world, we live flooded with options as we look at the fracturing of our world, there are lots of different choices we can make about how to rebuild our lives. Would their options vary as wide as the dinner options from uber eats or whatever? You can choose any way to build your life. And my point is that the fact that we are broken doesn’t immediately necessitate following God’s way. So in the chaos of options, we have to do our best to pick the best option. If we are broken, we need to figure out what then to rebuild our lives based upon.
It’s like a home renovation, you better check the reviews of the contractor before you book them because if you book somebody who never gets the job done on time and never keeps his word, you’re in for a nightmare. You got to review the you’ve got to review the reviews, you have to check if he or her is trustworthy or like reconstructive surgery, you better pick a doctor who keeps his word, because if you go in for minor surgery and you come out looking like a different human being, you’ve got a problem. In any renovation, be it one on your jaw or one with your life, you better make sure that the word, the person that you’re working with is trustworthy,
he is promise keeping and faithful. So here we are at church and I’ve told you that your life is broken and I’ve told you and you know that your life is broken a lot that lives in the world are broken, that there seems to be something missing. And in many ways, I’ve been making the case that Jesus is the best way. Maybe that but honestly, you can go with lots of other different ways. You could say maybe the best way to fix my life is minimalism.
If I just became a minimalist, then my life would be better or maybe it’s capitalism, maybe that’s really the issue. We just have to have free markets and things will be better. Maybe it’s socialism? We just need more government intervention and things will be better. Maybe it’s Hinduism or Islam, or maybe it’s a pill that hasn’t been invented yet. You’ve got you’ve got a load of options, a lot of choices to put the pieces back together.
But here’s here’s my pitch. If you’re going to rebuild your life, you better pick someone or something trustworthy. With a long view of success in keeping their word and here’s my thesis, if you’re going to pick someone trustworthy, then God is not only your best option, he’s actually your only option for the rest of this time i’m going to try to prove that. So here’s the question for you. And I know maybe you all think this to be true, but I want to just throw it out there and we can battle with it.
Here’s the question. Is God trustworthy?
Does he keep his word? Does he do what’s right, even when it’s difficult? Well, I’m going to tell you what the Bible writers think, and then I’m going to tell you what why I believe that’s true. The Bible writers seem totally convinced of this idea that God is, in fact, trustworthy. The Old Testament writers thought it was possibly the most important aspect of God’s character, his emeth…
This is the biblical word, trustworthy. It can be translated firmness, faithfulness, truth, sureness, reliability, sustainability, continuance, faithfulness. God is described as this about a hundred and fifty times in the Old Testament. For comparison, God is described as love, about one hundred and twenty times. It’s this idea that you, the Bible writers, believe that you could count on him, that He would never let you down, the Hebrew writers saw God as someone who was totally and utterly unlike us because when life gets hard for so many of us, we bail.
When it’s not easy or fun or novel, when it’s difficult or uncomfortable or maybe just boring, we leave, we leave our jobs, we leave our cities, we leave our churches, we leave our friendships, we leave our marriages, we cut ties and we move on. We’re a generation raised on text messages and flakiness is more prominent than it’s ever been before. But when the biblical characters understood or looked at God and tried to understand him, they thought, God is not like that.
Instead, he is faithful, trustworthy. He keeps his promises.
Here are a few examples of what the Bible writers thought about God’s character in regards to this. This is God saying his own name. He says, The Lord, the Lord, compassionate and gracious, slow to anger and abounding. This word means overflowing in love and faithfulness. How about Psalm chapter eighty nine, verse one, this is the Psalmist talking about God’s faithfulness, He says,” I will sing of the Lord’s great love forever and with my mouth, I will make your faithfulness known through all generations.”
The thought here is that they believe that God is loyal, that he never abandons his people, that He’s faithful to the bitter end no matter the cost. And later in the text, God speaks of his own faithfulness as it relates to the Messiah who is to come.
He says this, “I will not take my love from him, nor will I ever betray my faithfulness.”
These are a few samples of a hundreds, I’m not even exaggerating, this is a major theme of the Bible. It’s one of the main themes in the Psalms, God’s faithfulness. It sparks so many of the songs that we sing in church. All of the songs had that same arc that we sung today, of God’s faithfulness. This idea has inspired art and architecture and beautiful poems, according to the writer’s God is faithful.
Now, I know this raises all sorts of questions. If you’ve grown up to be a skeptic or you kind of dealt with some skepticism like I have in my own life, you might hear this and go, OK, God is faithful, but then all right, fine, I get that, but then how come I ended up in an unhappy marriage? OK, OK. Then why am I 40 and I’m still single, even though I want to be married?
How come I have a chronic illness? Why did I have a miscarriage? If God is faithful, why did my parents abandon me when I was 10 years old? Why was my child born with special needs? Why’d to get fired from my dream job? Why am I upside down on my own finances? And why was I born into a world with so much hatred and animosity? See, the idea is this, that at times it’s hard to reconcile God’s trustworthiness with our own lives.
So we have to try to work this out if this point that God is faithful is true. See, I can’t even begin to try to convince you of God’s trustworthiness unless you first get a glimpse of the entire arc of the Bible. You have to have at least a basic understanding of it. Don’t worry, I’m not going to take too long to do it. The Bible writer, the Bible is written with with a theme two major themes, a theme called a covenant, covenant.
It’s a word from a different time in a different place. A covenant is basically a cross between a promise and a legal contract. Two or more people would make a promise and then sign the contract with clear blessings and also with clear curses.
So if you kept it, there were blessings. If you broke it, there were curses. The closest thing we have in our modern world is the covenant of marriage. 10 years ago, when I looked in my wife’s eyes and I said, I’ve promised to marry you, I was making a covenant. I promise. I promise. I promise. I promise. I promise. I do. This is all this is all kind of covenant language. Marriage is a covenant.
It’s a promise to love, to stay faithful to your spouse. It’s a covenant to bring, it’s a it’s a covenant that brings a binding contract. When you get married, you basically sign your life away. There are consequences if you don’t keep that promise, not only emotional consequences, but legal consequences and financial consequences. And what’s interesting is that the story of the Bible has a lot to do with God making covenants.
And there’s one that is really the key. It’s like the fulcrum of the entire Bible and it’s found in Genesis Chapter twelve, you can turn there if you want to look at. It in context, Genesis chapter twelve is in this place after God has seen the disaster of his own people. This God’s beautiful, awesome world has been defaced by evil, Adam and Eve were in the garden, they stole the fruit from the tree and they set in motion just kind of this visceral that entered the world of violence and evil.
And whether you think it’s exactly what it was or a metaphor or whatever, it doesn’t really matter, but the point of the story is so beautiful. That men were in a perfect world with God and then men destroyed the perfect world.
And so God is trying to set back a plan to redeem mankind because that’s always been the goal. So the Lord calls a random desert bohemian guy named Abraham, to get the story back on track. The first thing God does with Abram, which is his name when he’s called, is he makes a promise. This is Genesis, chapter 12, verse one, It said, “The Lord said to Abram, go from your country, your people and your father’s household to a land
I will show you. I will make you into a great nation and I will bless you. I will make your name great and you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you and whoever curses you. I will curse and all people on Earth will be blessed through you. Noticed all the I will pieces of the language. That’s a covenant motif. God’s making a promise that Abraham’s family would become a great nation. His promise is that that family will then bless every nation on Earth.
Not just that, but that he will bless all people through Abraham’s family. Basically, God is saying that he’s going to use Abraham and Abraham’s family to put everything right that has gone awry in the world. He’s going to rebuild the world through Abraham’s family.
You’ve got the concept, so the world has been broken in Genesis two Genesis three, God is setting a plan in motion, starting Genesis Chapter 12 to redeem men. He says, Abraham, I’m going to use your family to do it. I’m going to use your family to pick up the pieces of this broken array that has been scattered all over the face of the earth. Abraham’s family is later called the Nation of Israel, just keep that in mind.
And this is an incredible promise. But you have to pay careful attention to it in context because God does not promise Abraham an easy life. He doesn’t promise him a carefree life, he doesn’t promise him money in the bank or a condo on Daytona Beach, he doesn’t promise him he doesn’t promise to bless Abraham so that he can have a Maserati. He blesses him so that he could become and this is the whole idea that Abraham’s family will function as a conduit of God’s blessings on the whole earth to spread and give his regenerative blessing on every square inch of the world.
And a few chapters later, those I wills, I wills, I wills become a full fledged covenant.
You can look in Genesis 15, they’ll be up on the screen if you want to look there, it seems like it’s so that’s promises made in Genesis Chapter 12. And it seems like, you know, God has kind of forgotten Abraham because three chapters later, nothing has ever happened. In fact, it’s so bad because Sarah, who is Abraham’s wife, can’t even have children. So how are you supposed to make him into a great nation if you can’t even have children?
Doesn’t make any sense at all. How are you supposed to supposed to have, you know, like a lot of children when you’re both very elderly, you’re way past baby making phase of your life? But here comes this incredible chapter in Genesis Chapter 15, I for warn you, it’s a little bit weird. It’s one of those stories you just skip over, but it’s super important and hang on as we walk through it. Basically, Genesis 15, God tells Abraham to gather some animals and make a sacrifice.
He gathers a heifer, ram a goat and a couple of birds, and God instructs him to cut the animals into half.
This is not like a barbecue set up. This is actually something that was done in the first century or in Abraham’s Century.
Basically, they cut the animals in half and they spread them on the ground, one on either side. And it’s a super strange story, but it’s called cutting the covenants, you cut the animal in half and then the people are supposed to walk between the little alleyway of these dead animals. And it symbolized this idea that if you don’t keep your word, you’re going to end up like one of these animals. So if you don’t follow what you say, you’re going to follow, you’re going to be killed.
That’s the thought. You’re making a promise. This will happen to you if you don’t do it. So this is what happened says in verse 12, it says The sun was setting, Abraham fell into a deep sleep after he cut the animals and a thick, dreadful darkness came over him. Then the Lord said to him, know for certain that that’s that idea of covenant. I’m making a promise to you and then Abraham and then God tells Abraham the future of his family.
God tells Abraham to be convinced, and then God makes Abraham fall into the sleep. He sees this vision. And this is the vision verse 17 and says, when the sun had set and doctors had fallen a smoking fire pot, which was the image of the presence of God with a blazing torch. I know it’s weird, but just follow me. A blazing torch appeared and passed between the pieces.
Abraham sees God in the image of the smoking fire pot and what is God doing? He’s walking through the animals, but notice what’s missing. Abraham is not walking. It’s God walking all by himself. It may be bizarre, but it’s actually a really powerful moment. It’s God’s way of saying even if Abraham and his family don’t keep their end of the bargain, God will still keep his promises. He will rescue and save the world through his soon to be nation, no matter the cost, and if blood has to be spilled,
It’s not going to come from Abraham, it will come from God himself. He’s saying, I am so committed to doing what I’m doing, what I said I’m going to do through you and your family, that I will do it at any cost. And if you’re a Christian right now, if you know the story of the Bible right now, your mind is already jumping ahead and connecting to the dots to Jesus. We’ll get there in a second,
Don’t get ahead of me. See, this happened two thousand years before the Cross and the rest of the Bible is about God faithfully keeping this promise that he made to Abraham’s family.
That’s what the Bible is about.
And Abraham and his family, Israel, failing miserably, their end of the bargain, the entire Bible, is a collection of moral stories.
That are just brutally honest, raw, uncut, and their stories about God’s faithfulness to Israel and humanity’s constant struggle to be a faithful bride in return.
And so I understand when people read the Old Testament and think, wow, this is so confusing, why is there a murder and rape and polygamy and betrayal and divorce and and domestic abuse and death and genocide and they wonder about God’s character. But we often miss the idea that that the Bible writers understood that this wasn’t about God being evil. It was about God, God coaxing good out of every hellish evil. It was God ability to, as the sermon series talks about God making blessings out of brokenness.
It was about God’s faithfulness, and so every terrible thing that happens is a is an opportunity for God to bring something beautiful out of it. He doesn’t step back when it gets messy. He actually steps in. And that’s the story of the whole Old Testament, men sin God is faithful. And every once in a while there’s a guy or girl who acts righteously and the Bible celebrates them, but that’s not really the point of the Bible. One of my favorite passages as a summation of the entire scriptures comes in Nehemiah chapter nine, verse thirty two.
And it says this, it says now, therefore, our God, the great God, mighty and awesome who keeps his covenant of love. This is Nehemiah recognizing that God has followed him. This is about a thousand years after Abraham’s family. He says, who keeps his covenant of love, do not let all this hardship seem trifling in your eyes, meaning that they have failed so much, the hardships that have come on us, on our kings and leaders and our priests and our prophets, on our ancestors and all your people from the days of the Kings until Assyria, sorry, kings of Assyria until now.
He’s saying like he’s like when you look at the history of mankind, he’s talking to God. Don’t be overwhelmed by this. We have been evil. He goes on to say this. I love this verse 33 and all that has happened to us, all of the evil, all the terribleness. You have remained righteous. You have acted faithfully while we acted wickedly. For Nehemiah, all that had gone wrong in the history of Israel was actually faithfulness about and like any good father, he let Israel, he let Abraham’s family deal with the consequence of their own sinfulness, to disciple them.
But then here’s a turn, the Bible story continues, it has this beautiful arc from the promise from Abraham to the sinfulness of Israel. And then four hundred years after that passage I just read, in two thousand years ago, Jesus comes. For two thousand years, people have been wrestling with the identity of Jesus of Nazareth, it’s a mystery. They wrestle with Jesus being divine and human at the same time, but I think in the context of what we just understood, it becomes so much more beautiful. Because God, because Jesus is God in flesh and blood.
But here’s the other thing that’s really interesting. He’s also Abraham’s son in flesh and blood. He’s Israel’s king, her representative drawing the story on his shoulders. Jesus is God.
Jesus is Abraham’s son. Jesus came to do. Jesus comes to do what Abraham and Abraham’s family were supposed to do, but could never do. He came to bless the world and because thousands of years before God made a promise, he kee- and because he keeps his word at the very end of Jesus’s life, we see God paying the penalty for Abraham’s unrighteousness. So in Jesus, what he does is he takes all of the failures, millennial, a millennial of brokenness, and he drags it to the cross, absorbs it on his death, and then breaks the hold its hold on humanity forever.
This is the completion of Abraham’s promise, and this is why for the early Christians, the gospel didn’t start in Matthew Chapter one, it started in Genesis Chapter twelve.
Yahweh, God was made a promise and he was faithful to the point of his own death. That’s the idea, proving that God came, that God’s word always comes to fruition, that he is trustworthy, that he knows what he’s doing, that he is faithful and keeping his promises. The idea of God being faithful is the bedrock of our faith. No matter how many wrong turns we take, setbacks we face, we can sleep soundly tonight because we know, like KNOW, one day, all the promises that God make will happen.
When God says sin will be eradicated forever, it means it will be eradicated forever. When He says that He can rebuild the pieces of your life and make something beautiful, that means he can rebuild the pieces of your life and make something beautiful. He will remake the world into a city where he lives a second Eden and he will bless all people on Earth through his son Jesus, who also happens to be the son of Abraham. I tell you all of these stories for a reason, it’s because Israel’s story is actually your story.
And it’s my story, you and I have failed over and over and over and over and over and over and over again, but God has been faithful. I love how the apostle Paul says it in this letter to his young apprentice, Timothy. He says, If we are faithless, he remains faithful, for he cannot disown himself.
He could no sooner be unfaithful than he could lie, steal or cheat, God is faithful even when we’re not, even when we’re flaky and skittish and we dropped the ball. But there are times when it doesn’t feel like God is faithful and there are times when it doesn’t feel like God has been keeping his promises to us. Like when you’re Abraham and your wife is 90 and you’re still not pregnant and you think, where have you been, God and all of us begin to ask these questions of God’s faithfulness.
You know the questions it’s the questions we started with. You know, my dad abandoned me when I was ten. How is God faithful? I went through a nasty divorce, how is God faithful? Now left alone with two kids? How is God faithful? How is God faithful? I was diagnosed with cancer. Why I’m in so much pain. How is God faithful? Maybe there’s something else that we learn from the story as we rebuild our lives, you have to remember the Covenant.
What did God promise? Again, that he promised an easy life, health or wealth, no. God promised to bless the world through his people, God’s promise is to create blessings out of brokenness.
When I say God is faithful, I’m not saying never experience suffering a lot of merits. So when tragedy strikes and the economy goes south and we test positive, our business goes out of business, and we don’t find a spouse, we start thinking, well, God has been unfaithful. But if you read it that way, you’ve kind of missed the whole point. You were never promised the trouble free life, Jesus, in fact, made the opposite promise, he says in this life you will have trouble.
It’s not that God doesn’t want you to have a satisfyingly happy, healthy, wealthy life. I think he does because he’s your dad. But the fact is that God’s view, God always takes the long view. God always takes the long view, and he is more concerned with your long term character than with your short term happiness always, and he’s more willing to sacrifice one to get to the other, like Abraham and Moses.
You may not see it for a long, long, long, long, long, long time. But God is faithful. So can you trust someone like that, I wonder? Can you trust someone like that who helped you rebuild your life and always keeps his word, who puts the pieces back together? Can you trust someone like that? Can you trust someone like that to be your guide? Can you trust someone like that to follow someone who looks out for your benefit for the long term and doesn’t care about your short term happiness?
Let me tell you, I’m trying to have someone like that in my corner than someone that is just a people pleaser. I don’t want a God who’s a people pleaser, I don’t want to follow someone who’s a people pleaser, I want to follow someone who views my life as a holistic, eternal being and not just as a short term drop in a bucket. And before we close, I’m going to flip it around, because if you’re a follower of Jesus or if you want to be a follower of Jesus, we’re super grateful that you do.
Your goal then is to mimic the character of Jesus. And so here’s a question for you. Are you faithful? As people, this idea of faithfulness is becoming alien. The average stay in a marriage is about eight years. When my parents were growing up and their parents were growing up, the average stay in a marriage was forever. Now, it’s eight years, the average stay in a job is four years, you know, your great grandparents or your grandparents worked at General Electric for like thirty five years.
Faithfulness has become like baggy jeans, they used to be cool, few people still think they’re cool, but for the most part, they’re long gone. And here’s the problem with that, the best things in your life are result of your own faithfulness. Usually it takes years, if not decades. Benja, you can come on up. To create faithfulness, faithfulness is long obedience in the same direction in the age of instant gratification. We want a short cut to life, we all do, because we were raised on the microwave culture and I was raised on Amazon Prime instant messaging and TV on demand, I want things at my fingertips.
We want it all and I want it all right now. But God has designed us to be like his image and God could have at the end of Adam and Eve, like had someone die at that moment and then restore mankind. Instead, he took thousands and thousands and thousands of years to bring the story beautifully together. His view of faithfulness means having a view for the long term. There’s no shortcuts in life, you can’t microwave your character, you can’t buy joy on Amazon Prime.
It’s like a tree and only tree- the only tree that ever survives a hurricane is the one with deep, deep roots. We need to learn to stick it out to stay faithful in the good times and the bad, because after all, that’s what our God is like. Think about the implications
if you’re married for your marriage, maybe your marriage is difficult. What would it look like for you to stay faithful, to remain faithful, as faithful as as God was to Israel, no matter what your word meant something.
What if you what if you remain faithful to the city you were placed in or the town that you were given to, or the church that you’re a part of or your neighborhood, how big of a difference would it make if if you could be like this place could be the bedrock of where you live, that your declaration, if those of you who were baptized at your baptism, no turning back would in fact be true? We are rootless people, transient.
We become tourists more than citizens. But what would what would it look like for you to be a faithful person? A faithful person to God’s kingdom for the rest of your life, not for the few, not for a few months or maybe a year before a lifetime? The other day, I was selling a pair of golf clubs to someone that had been, this thought has been on my mind for a long time about trying to be faithful to the very end,
And so I’m selling a pair of golf clubs to a guy on Facebook marketplace. And I meet this guy. You know, we’re haggling back and forth over Facebook and and he talks me down from two fifty, let’s say, to two hundred and get all the way down to two hundred dollars. And I’m like, OK, I’m going to go sell, I’m going to meet him at this place. I drive like 40 minutes to meet him, which is so stupid.
I’m like, I should just like give it them to somebody but anyway. So I’m like drive 40 minutes to meet him in traffic and I’m there and and I connect with him. And when I get out the car he’s like and I said you know, two hundred dollars is how much I’m going to do it for. And I get out of the car and he’s like, oh, you know, they’re a little this and their a little that and I had shown him all these pictures before and and he was like, how about 180?
And at the time like I mean just give me one eighty and get away. And then I thought to myself and am I faithful. Now I know it’s not really faithfulness, but I’m trying to be a man of my word. That’s the whole idea. You know, the first song we sang God is a man of his word. If he says it, it’s going to happen. So I’m like I said, two hundred dollars. And so I tell the guy, hey, it’s two hundred dollars is the best I can do.
He’s like, how about one ninety. I’m like, it’s two hundred dollars. The best I can do. He said, honestly I don’t think I have one hundred and ninety five dollars in my car. And I go, it’s two hundred dollars. That’s best I can do. He’s like, let me see what I can, I can do. So he goes in this car, pulls out one hundred and ninety five dollars and he says, I really only had one hundred ninety five dollars.
And I said, OK, well then you can’t have the golf clubs. I started to get into the car and and the guy said, you’re really going to let this go for five dollars. And I looked at him and I said, I’m trying to be a faithful man.
He was very confused, but he actually didn’t have the five dollars. So I gave him the clubs. He gave me the one ninety five. But I told him, I said, if you’re a man of your word, you’re going to send me five dollars on cash app when we leave this place. And you know what? I thought he wasn’t going to send it, but he sent it. And the in the in the text on Facebook marketplace, he said, thanks for your example.
And I said, come on, I was fired up because the idea is simply this.
How much of your word actually means something? Does it actually mean anything? When you say you’re going to be somewhere, does it mean something? When you say you’re faithful to somebody, does it mean anything at all? You know, so much of the series has been built to show you that we’re fragile people. But that we’re in the hands of a God who makes things beautiful. And the thing that we often forget is that our part is to practice being more like Him.
To learn through our pain, to be faithful, to grow through adversity, being faithful, to allow ourselves to put down roots that really hold our life together, our job is to be faithful and to continue in the work, to be a faithful man. Be a faithful man, if you say you’re going to do something, you do it, be a faithful woman. If you say you’re going to do something, you do it, be a faithful spouse.
That means whatever happens, you’re in the marriage unless the person abandons you. And walks away, and even in that point, you keep your heart connected to them. Be a faithful child, it means you obey your parents and maybe this stuff is hard for you, but read to the Bible and see the faithfulness of God. It had no end. Be a faithful disciple of Jesus. If you say you’re a Christian, be a Christian, don’t be a phony baloney.
Be true to your word in our efforts. View the long road and let us realize that God has been faithful all the while, exposing our brokenness and being faithful not to put all the pieces back together.