The Fruit of the Spirit is Faithfulness

Gal 5: 22-23

In His book, Improving Your Serve, Chuck Swindoll paints a picture of the importance of faithfulness.

Let’s say you work for me. One day I come in and tell you that I have to go start a new office in Japan and I am going to be gone for several months. You are in charge during that time. While I am gone, I am going to write and tell you what you need to do to keep the business going well here in the states.

Months pass and a regular flow of letters come to you, detailing what needs to be done and when. I spell out my expectations and give you directions and instructions.

Finally, I come back...I am stunned. I look around and grass and weeds have grown up all over, some of the windows along the street are broken. AS I walk into he receptionist office, she is sitting there doing her nails, listening to a rock station and chewing gum. I look around and see the waste baskets are overflowing, the office hasn’t been cleaned in who knows how long and still no one seems to care that I have returned.

I ask where you are and someone shouts above the music in the lounge that they think you are down the hall somewhere. I run into you just as you wrap up a chess game with the sales manager. Shooing some people out of my office who were watching soaps I tell you to follow me.

What’s going on?

What do you mean Jim?

Look at this place. Didn’t you get my letters?

Oh yeah, we got them. In fact we have a letter study every Friday night. We even break the personnel into small groups to discuss the things you wrote in your letters. You’ll be pleased to know that many of them have memorized several sentences that were really good and a few have even memorized whole letters.

Okay, you got my letters, you studied them and even meditated on them. Discussed and memorized them. But what did you DO about them?

Do? -- uh, we didn’t do anything about them.

Unfortunately, this is a scenario that is played out too often in the church. We have been given everything we need to be faithful, yet for some reason we still manage to be unfaithful.

Being faithful is far more than believing in God, it means that we need to follow His commandments. To help us be faithful to God’s teachings we need to look at 2 areas of faithfulness.

PRAYER

I. Faithfulness to God

A. English is a strange language

1. You would think that full of faith and faithful would be the same thing, but they are not.

a) They are related but not the same thing.

b) To be full of faith is to have faith; to be faithful is keeping the faith.

c) It is being true to the trust placed in us by others and God.

2. Lyle shared a story with me a couple of years ago that reflects on what faithful means. One lady told him, I know you will do things right, you have the reputation of being a good Christian.

3. That is faithfulness

B. God has called us to be faithful to Him

1. We need to faithful in prayer

a) Rom 12:12 says be joyful in hope, patient in affliction, faithful in prayer.

b) In the model prayer, 3 times Jesus says and when you pray.

c) Notice he didn’t say if you pray, but WHEN.

d) God expects us to be faithful in communicating to him in prayer.

2. We must be faithful to God’s word

a) Imagine having a conversation with someone who doesn’t pay a bit of attention to you.

b) You step in front of them and their eyes just glaze over.

c) It would be extremely frustrating wouldn’t it?

d) Why are all the wives nodding their heads right now?

e) The Bible is God’s way of speaking to us.

f) Yet many of us tune God out all the time when we ignore our Bibles and let them collect dust on some shelf in the house.

II. Faithful to God’s Church

A. God wants us to be faithful in church attendance

1. The prevailing thought in our society today is that we don’t need to go to church to have a good relationship with God.

a) They have been disgusted with the hypocrisy of the church and rightly so.

b) But as disgusted as you may get, we not only have a responsibility, but a command to come together and worship God.

c) Over 66 times the phrase one another is used in the New Testament and it’s alluded to many other times.

d) As you have heard me say many times, you can one another all by yourself.

2. READ Heb 10:24-25

3. When we neglect the services of the church we give up opportunities to grow and learn.

4. We also lose the opportunity to encourage and build up others who may need us.

a) There have been many times when I have come to church discouraged. There have been times when the only reason I came to church was because I was the preacher. Almost without fail, during those times, someone has made a comment, often offhanded that was exactly what I needed to hear.

b) Accident or God purposed?

5. You may never know if you’re here today with just the right thing someone needs to hear.

B. Ask yourself these questions to determine if you are being faithful to God’s Church or not.

1. If everyone had the same level of faithfulness as I do, what kind of church would this be?

2. If everyone had the same level of faithfulness as I do, would anyone be here, other than for Sunday morning worship?

3. If everyone had the same level of faithfulness as I do, would there be any teachers in our classes?

4. If everyone had the same level of faithfulness as I do, would the church be growing numerically and spiritually?

5. If everyone had the same level of faithfulness as I do, would the church even exist?

6. Hopefully most of you could answer these questions positively, but for others, their answers would cause this church to quit existing.

7. I’m not trying to be negative, but we need to understand a couple of things.

8. We cannot function as the church God intended without a greater commitment from each one of us.

9. We need each and every one of us to be faithful in all our services, all our outreach, and everything we do in the church.

10. I did a funeral a couple years back for a woman who was in the hospital while I was chaplain. I had an impact on her enough during that week that the children asked me to do the funeral when she passed away. I asked if she was a member of any church and they emphatically said yes. So I said, wouldn’t it be better for her preacher to do the funeral? Well, even though she’s a member of x,y,z church she hadn’t actually attended in 45 years.