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Living Inside Out

12/02/2007 - Faithful Love, Galatians 5:22-23

A few years ago the brother of Rose Brewer under went heart transplant surgery out in Minnesota. And Rose asked us as a church to pray for him. And so we did. And just prior to his surgery he sent out an email to his praying friends that was so inspiring to me that I printed out a hard copy and saved it in a file.

He wrote, "I have to thank you for your incredibly strong support in every way. Your sincere concern and faithfulness in prayer keep me going day after day as I wait for the heart transplant. Overall, my condition is stable, with some days better than others. I am still at the top of the waiting list, and I'm getting more and more eager to have the surgery over with. I know the recovery will not be a picnic, I had open heart surgery once before, but I can't begin recovering until I receive my new heart.

"All of this is in God's hands, and his hands are more sure and steady then those of any thoracic surgeon. Because of your prayers, my wife and I are not worried, even though I am eager and even restless to get through the surgery.

"I need to say that no matter what the outcome God is completely wise, good, strong, and faithful. Even if I have a rough time with the recovery, or even if I do not survive, God is love. His ways are not our ways, and his overall purposes are not always discernable. I know, however, both cognitively and experientially with absolute confidence, that he is always working all things, including disappointment and even death, for the good of those who love him. His timing and his ways are beyond understanding, but they always come from his loving hand. He is always shaping and preparing us for better things.

"Thank you again for your friendship, kindness, and prayers. I wish for each of you an ever-increasing experience of God's moment by moment presence that translates into the practical dimensions of living and serving. May God's abundant peace and joy be with you and those closest to you."

When I finished reading that email I thought to myself, "Wow! That's incredible! What an attitude! He sounds a lot better off than I do! What a perspective to have on God and on life from a man who's about to have a heart transplant." It was such an inspiration to me and still is to trust God in the midst of whatever life throws at us.

Did you hear what he said? "I need to say that no matter what the outcome God is completely wise, good, strong, and faithful." God is good all the time and all the time God is good. God is also faithful all the time and all the time God is faithful.

This morning we continue our series called Living Inside Out with a teaching I've called faithful love because faithfulness is a fruit of the Spirit. It's a characteristic of the life of Jesus that lives inside each one of his followers. And when we express faithfulness we are living life inside out.

The passage we've been unpacking for this series is Galatians 5:22-23, But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness,²³gentleness and self-control.

Our God is a faithful God. He's the kind of God that we can rely on to keep his word. He's the kind of God that we can depend on to fulfill his promises. He's the kind of God we can lean on when life gets tough and he won't let us down.

In Deuteronomy 32:1-4 Moses writes, Listen, O heavens, and I will speak. Hear, O earth, the words of my mouth. ²Let my teaching fall like rain and my words descend like dew, like showers on new grass, like abundant rain on tender plants. ³

I will proclaim the name of the Lord. Oh, praise the greatness of our God! ⁴He is the Rock, his works are perfect, and all his ways are just, a faithful God who does no wrong, upright and just is he.

God can be counted on to fulfill his promises to us. Where we get in trouble is when we put words into God's mouth and hold him to things that he never said. Did you ever have that experience as a parent? Have your kids ever put words in your mouth? "But you promised me. You told me you'd buy me this or get me that." "Wait a minute, I never said that!" Those conversations often seem to surface around Christmas time.

Be careful what you expect from God. For instance, God never promised that we would have a life of ease and comfort on this earth. Instead, he promised just the opposite. "In this world you will have trouble," Jesus said, "but take heart! I have overcome the world."

So we all need to be careful about what we expect from God. Let's not put words in his mouth. But we can trust the words he has spoken. We can trust him to come through on the things he has promised. And what are some of those promises? Well, one of them is in 1 Corinthians 10:13, No test has overtaken you except what is common to us all. And God is faithful. He will not let you be tested beyond what you can bear. But when you are tested, he will also provide a way out so that you can endure it.

Has your faith been tested lately? Tests are part of life. We all face them in one form or another. For Rose's brother it was a heart transplant that tested his faith. I can think of two or three tests in my own life right now. But God has given us his word that he will not allow us to be tested beyond what we can handle. Instead, he'll provide a way out so that we can endure the test whatever it may be.

Remember what we said last week. God is not the source of the test or the temptation, the Greek word is the same here. Instead, he puts parameters around the extent of the tests to protect us from caving in if we take the way out that he promises to provide.

Someone I read this week said, "I know God won't give me more than I can handle, I just wish that he didn't trust me so much." Do ever feel that way? "God how much more do you think I can take?" I wonder that sometimes, especially for those suffering in our church community. But God knows our limits and can be trusted to help us endure if we follow his path.

God is faithful to protect us. God is faithful to forgive us. One of my favorite passages of Scripture is 1 John 1:9, If we confess our sins, God is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness.

I don't think there's a more liberating passage in the entire Bible. When I blow it and think something or say something or do something that displeases a holy God, he's always ready to forgive me if I simply confess my sin to him. The word confess means "to agree with." That's the condition for forgiveness, agreeing with God that what I thought or said or did was wrong. And when I do he is faithful and just and will forgive my foul-up and all the other junk in my life as well. That's an amazing promise from an amazing God!

But how can he do that and still be just because in his justice sin needs to be punished? Shouldn't I have to pay a price for my mistakes? He can only do that because Jesus paid the price for my sins and for your sins, all of them, when he died on the cross. The justice of a holy God was completely satisfied by the sacrifice of Christ. He took the full weight of our punishment for us.

He is the atoning sacrifice for our sins, and not only for ours but also for the sins of the whole world. It's because of what Jesus did on the cross, the event we're going to remember around this table, that enables a holy God to be faithful and just when he forgives our sin.

God is faithful. We can depend on him. We can rely on him. We can trust what he says to be true. And he wants us to be faithful as well. The fruit of the Spirit is faithfulness. Faithfulness is an expression of the life of God that's in us.

God wants us to be men and women of our word. He wants us to be trustworthy people because trustworthy people are the kind of people who will make a difference in this world. He wants us to be people that others can lean on and depend on too. The life of Jesus inside us wants to bring that out.

Don't you love dealing with people you can trust? I know I do. It makes all the difference in the world in our relationships with people to know that we can rely on somebody. When they say they're going to do something they do it. When they take on a job they see it through. I guess one thing I've learned in almost twenty five years of full time church ministry is that I'd much rather work with reliable people than with gifted people. Sometimes you get both, people who are gifted and reliable as well. That's a dynamite combination. But if I'd have to choose one or the other, I'd choose faithfulness over giftedness any day of the week.

When I was a swim coach I discovered that there was nothing more tragic or more common than wasted talent. I coached a number of swimmers over the years at various levels and there would always be those that were never going to be great, but they showed up every day for practice at 5:30 in the morning and then again at 3:30 in the afternoon because they loved the sport and they gave it their all. They were faithful, dependable, reliable and I would take a team full of them.

And then there were always those who were incredibly talented, some with Olympic potential, who for one reason or another couldn't or wouldn't stick with it. And they were the ones that drove you crazy as a coach and made the other swimmers jealous. "If only I had their talent. What a waste!"

Faithfulness. Being a person of your word, following through, being someone people can trust and depend on is a huge a value to God and his great kingdom work. It gets done by faithful people. And that's because every strong relationship, whether it's a friendship or a marriage, is built on trust. And when trust goes often the marriage or the relationship goes with it.

That's why marriage vows include the promise of faithfulness. I, Bruce, take you, Jennifer, to be my wedded wife. And I do promise and covenant, before God and these witnesses, to be your loving and faithful husband, in plenty and in want, in joy and in sorrow, in sickness and in health, as long as we both shall live.

Jesus put a premium on the value of faithfulness when he told the story about how he and his dad are looking for faithful people to help run his kingdom some day. It's found in Matthew 25 and is often referred to as the parable of the talents.

In the story a wealthy man goes away on a long journey, but before he leaves he gives a large sum of money to three of his servants. To the first servant he gives five talents, to the second servant he gives two talents, and to the third servant he gives one talent. A talent was a unit of currency in Jesus' day. It could weigh between 60 and 80 pounds and one talent was what a laborer would earn in fifteen years. So it was literally a chunk of change that was given to each of these servants. And they were all told to invest it wisely.

And when the man returned from his journey, Jesus said, he settled his accounts with them. And two out of the three servants invested their talents wisely. And to each of them the master said in Mathew 25:21 & 23, Well done, good and faithful servant! Because you have been faithful with a few things I will put you in charge of many things. Come and share your master's happiness!

"Well done, good and faithful servant!" Notice Jesus doesn't say, "Well done, good and gifted servant." All of us have different gifts, just like each servant in the story had a different amount of talents to work with. We don't choose our gifts. They're chosen for us and they're not all the same. We don't determine our level of giftedness.

Notice Jesus doesn't say "Well done, good and successful servant." All of us will have different measures of success in this life and often that's out of our control as well. But faithfulness is a choice. We can all choose to be faithful no matter how many talents we have and that's ultimately what Jesus is looking for in each of us as his servants. That's a part of Jesus that is longing to live inside out of us. The fruit of the Spirit is faithfulness.

I love what Randy Alcorn writes about this passage in his book Heaven, "God is grooming us for leadership. He's watching to see how we demonstrate our faithfulness. He does that through his apprenticeship program, one that prepares us for the coming of his kingdom. Christ is not simply preparing a place for us, he is preparing us for that place.

"All of us will have some responsibility in which we serve God. Our service for him now on earth will be evaluated to help determine how much we'll serve him on the new earth. The Owner has his eye on us - if we prove faithful, he'll be pleased to entrust more to us.

"Imagine responsibility, service, and leadership that's pure joy. The responsibility that God will entrust to us as a reward can only be good for us, and we'll find delight in it. If God wants us to do something, we'll be wired and equipped to do it. Our service will not only bring him glory but also bring us joy. On the new earth, we'll do what we want, but we'll want what God wants, and that will bring us our greatest joy."

Faithfulness is what God is looking for in all of us. It was Mother Teresa who said, "I do not pray for success, I simply ask for faithfulness." And we would do well to ask the same.

Rose's brother did have that heart transplant surgery four years ago last month and it has been a long, tough battle ever since. The doctors told him before he had the surgery, "When you get a heart transplant, you trade one disease for another." And that's been the case.

And in one of his recent email updates he writes these words, "God is good and life is tough! The longer I live the more I find both parts of this statement to be true. But I also find God's presence to be very special, very real, and very comforting. Not one of the promises in his Word, as I understand them, has ever failed me. While I have frequently failed God and others, he has never been unfaithful to me."

We all need encouragement to keep running the race to the finish line, to be faithful to the end because life is tough. And I thank God for the examples in my life of men and women who are running hard to finish well, because that's what I want to do. And I believe that deep down inside that's what all of us want to do. We all long to hear those words of Jesus one day, "Well done, good and faithful servant! Because you have been faithful with a few things I will put you in charge of many things. Come now and share your master's happiness!" And we will if we let Jesus live his life inside out.

FOR MORE INFORMATION about Valley View Community Church, feel free to contact us at info@valleyviewseek.org or call 610.631.2707.