Faithfulness

When you and I first turned to God, whether it be brand new in the church, or you go back to maybe you grew up in the church, and just one day it began to make sense. You began to move towards baptism, and you began to study the Bible, and it made more sense to you. And suddenly you were excited about this. You wanted to obey God. You wanted to have a relationship with God. And when you prayed, you had an experience that God was somehow connecting with you, and you had a faith. You had this almost increase of faith that happens when God really starts working with you. And a lot of times when people, God starts working with people, they see some miracles in their lives. They see some healings in their lives. Things are happening in their lives. And you come along, and you go through that period, and then you get to a point where you're sort of going through life, and life becomes the regular, normal sort of grind. I mean, you have marriage problems, and you have health problems, you have job problems, and you have financial problems, and you have problems from bad decisions you've made, and you have problems with work, and you have problems between other people, and you have conflict, and those things pile up and pile up. And then sometimes it seems like when you pray, God isn't answering your prayers anymore. Well, God, I was anointed. I didn't get healed. God, I keep praying about this, and you don't seem to be interacting with me. And then tragedies happen, problems happen in our lives that are so big, God wouldn't allow that. And what can happen is we begin to, we still believe in God, but our faith is eroded so that we get to the place where we begin to compromise with our trust in God.

And because we don't trust God, we begin to not truly follow God in every way. Oh, we don't work on the Sabbath, and we might show up at Sabbath services. It doesn't mean we're really keeping the Sabbath properly. Or we might not openly lie, but we're sort of dishonest. On the fringes of our lives, we begin to deteriorate, and we deteriorate, and we're not remaining faithful to God. Our decisions a lot of times don't reflect what we know, really, what God would want. Now, this doesn't mean we don't believe in God. We believe in God. But the question is, are we remaining faithful to God?

The word faithful literally means to be devoted or dependable, trustworthy. It means that you have a long-term history of being faithful. I mean, if you say, well, oh yeah, I am a very faithful wife. I've been married 50 years, and she's never committed adultery. She's faithful.

In this journey, this person has been faithful. They have done what they were supposed to do. They have fulfilled their covenant. So you and I can have faith, and we can have belief, but are we remaining faithful, or is that deteriorating? Our faithfulness to God. Let's go to Galatians 5 as we're going through the fruits of the Spirit. Galatians 5.

And let's look at the next of the fruits.

Verse 22, But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, long-suffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. Now, we've talked about self-control, how God, through His Spirit, helps us, because it's self-control, learn to control. It's not something we learn by ourselves. Spiritual self-control is taught to us by God. So it's the fruit of the Spirit, but we have to participate, or it wouldn't be self-control, it would be God control. So God doesn't possess us and make us do it, but God does influence us and give us the power to do it where we couldn't do it ourselves. So this kind of self-control is a fruit of God's Spirit. It's something that God develops in us and that He has to give us the power to do. Then we talked about this gentleness, which really means meekness. It means having such humility before God that because of this humility before God, we have a quietness of spirit, a calmness of spirit that allows us to be patient, more patient and gentle with other people. So it's our humility before God, and in that humility, God's Spirit works in us, we receive this calmness of spirit, and that calmness of spirit now affects the way we treat other people. Now we get to faithfulness. It's translated faithfulness in almost every English translation. The word there is the basic Greek word for faith, but they don't translate it faith. And the reason why is when you look through the Scripture, we bring a certain faith to God, right? When God calls us, we must have faith in what He's doing. But human faith will only go so far.

Our faith may cause us to submit to God, but you and I do not and cannot of our own have enough faith to stay faithful to God on this journey to the end. Remember, these are fruits of God's Spirit. Faithfulness, the ability to stay faithful to God throughout this journey takes God in us. She can say, well, I just have enough faith. No, we don't.

Or this wouldn't be a fruit of the Spirit, it'd just be a fruit of what you and I do ourselves. Oh yeah, I bring enough faith through the table. I bring all this faith through the table, and that's what God's happy with. And what God says, no, it's not. You cannot remain faithful. And remember, we're talking about faithful here. We're not talking about belief.

We're not talking about belief, because belief, you can believe that God exists. You can even say that I believe that God has called me. You can even say, I believe in all these doctrines and still not remain faithful in a relationship with God. Let me give an example on the book of Exodus, and then we'll break this down. When we go to the book of Exodus 20, God gives the Ten Commandments. And of course, all the Israelites were there. They saw a mountain on fire. They felt the earthquake. They heard a voice come out of this cloud. At that point, all Israelites had faith. All Israelites believed in God. And they all said, we will obey the Ten Commandments. And at that point, they all meant it. It was an act of faith. Well, they said, we will keep the Ten Commandments. They meant it. This is an act of faith. God was right there. Now Moses and Aaron and some of their elders went through another experience. Let's go to Exodus 24. Exodus 24. Verse 9. So this is God's up there at the top of Mount Sinai. Verse 9 says, The Moses went up, and also Aaron and Nadab and Abihu and seventy of the elders of Israel, and they saw the God of Israel. Now they probably didn't see Him directly, or they would have died. As it even says here, they saw a vision of Him. They saw Him in some way that God allowed them to see Him without killing them. And they saw the God of Israel, and there was under His feet, as it were, a paved work of sapphire stone. It was like the very heavens in its clarity. But on the nobles of the children of Israel, He did not lay His hand. So they saw God, and they ate and drank. Now what do you think about this? Moses, Aaron, his two sons, seventy elders, they go up on the Mount, they leave Israel, they enter probably into the sort of the edge of this dark cloud, and there they have a vision of God. And in that presence of God, they have a big feast. Aaron and Moses, all these people are filled with faith.

And this is a faith-building experience. How could you not have faith? Can you imagine going home, Aaron, saying, honey, you can't believe what I did yesterday? Why, why did you open that mountain a long time? I ate lunch with God. And it's better than the man that we get. It's good! I mean, it was lunch. It was great! Really? What did you talk about? We just listened. Yeah, we didn't say much. We just listened. Probably didn't sleep much for a week, right? I just went up and had a meal with God. He was there in His presence as we ate and celebrated. Now this, they had faith. This is a faith experience. They believed and they trusted God. But something broke down as time went on. They all go back. Moses is called up to the mountain again, and he's up there for days, and then he's up there for weeks. And after a while, people come to the conclusion that Moses must have died. He's not coming back down off that mountain. Now Joshua went with him, but Joshua couldn't go to the top of the mountain. He could only go partway up, and then he was told, you stay here. Now we've got two comparisons here. A man who was all alone, and we have two men whose faith is tested. Joshua, who happens to be all alone on the side of a mountain, he wouldn't have taken much food with him, and weeks go by.

Is he going to starve to death? What's going to happen to me on the side of the mountain here? He's up there on the side of the mountain. Moses is up there. He's not allowed to go up, but he told Moses he would wait. So he has to believe God wants me to wait. Aaron, on the other hand, he's down here taking care of the people. So we go to Exodus 32. You know the story, but let's review it here, because there's a very important point to make. Exodus 32, verse 1. Exodus 32, And when the people saw that Moses delayed coming down from the mountain, people gathered together to Aaron and said to him, Come, make us gods that shall go before us. For as for this Moses, the man who brought us out of the land of Egypt, we do not not know what has become of him. He's died. He's disappeared. Where are we supposed to go? We can't stay here around Sinai. Now remember, they all see God every day. I mean, the cloud and the lightning, they see that. They see the presence of God. They don't see Him, but they see the presence of God on the top of that mountain every day. They believe God exists. But they do not trust that God is going to help them. They believe God exists. They do not trust that God is going to help them. Aaron says that He'll break off the golden earrings. So they make a golden calf. Verse 5 says, So when Aaron saw it, he built an altar before it, after he makes this golden calf. And Aaron made a proclamation and said, now listen to what he says, tomorrow is a feast to the Lord. The word there is Yahweh. They were not denying the existence of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. They were not denying the existence of the God who brought them out of Egypt. They knew who He was. They knew He was at the top of the mountain. They just didn't trust Him anymore. So they needed some help here in their worship. They needed to add something to their worship that would give them a better, more fulfilling experience in their worship. So they made idols. They still believed in God. But they didn't trust Him anymore.

This is where we have to understand when it comes to faithfulness. Faithfulness doesn't mean you give up belief in God.

It means we start to lose trust in God so that we are no longer faithful. We no longer do what we're supposed to do. We are no longer fulfilling the relationship that we're supposed to have between us and God. How can you remain faithful? Let me ask you another question, and then we can use this to start working through this. Have you ever really thought about what is the opposite of faith?

Most people say the opposite of faith is unbelief. That's partly true, but it's not complete. It's partly true, but it's not complete. Unbelief is the opposite of belief.

A belief is part of faith, but it's not all that there is to faith, is it? I mean, the Israelites believed in God. He was there. But they're creating idols, which He had just commanded them not to do because they didn't trust Him anymore. Faith not only involves belief, it involves trust.

In fact, there are some translations of the New Testament that translate the word faith as trust.

It involves trust. I believe in Him, but I also trust Him. So the opposite of faith, in the most complete sense, is a lack of trust. You still believe God exists. You may even still believe the basic doctrines. You may believe and know this Bible very well. It doesn't mean we trust Him.

So why is it so hard for us to trust? It is very interesting when we look through faith in the Bible. Abraham is the father of the faithful. He is the shining example of faith in the entire Scripture. But when we read through the life of Abraham, we find lots of stories where he wasn't faithful to God. We read part of the story as he is not faithful. One of the most obvious ones is in Genesis 20.

And this begins to help us understand why we are not faithful. When we look at Abraham, we find out why he had periods where he wasn't faithful and why eventually he is shown as a man who was faithful. When you look at all his life, the times when he was not faithful are few. You see a pattern of growing in faith, so his lifestyle is faithful to God. He is faithful.

But in Genesis 20, we have a story where he wasn't. And the reason why is because Abraham is moving around. Remember, he is the leader of a nomadic tribe that numbered hundreds, probably thousands of people. He had hundreds of servants alone that were warriors. So we are talking about a tribe, thousands of people, and maybe tens of thousands of animals. Let's just say when his tribe was on the move and you were a city and they were coming up to visit your city, you saw them a long ways off because you could see the dust cloud. And as they got closer, since there are a lot of goats involved, you could smell them. It's not like this little group of Abraham and Sarah and a couple of servants sort of sneaking around from place to place. This is a huge group of people. It's a tribe. Now, that is not unusual in the Middle East at the time. There are all kinds of tribes crossing all over the land of Canaan. What is now Syria and Israel and Jordan. There were just tribes moving all over the place. And there were these huge city-states. That's why they had walls to get the tribes out as they moved around. And then you have huge empires like Egypt. But remember, even when Abraham went to Egypt, Pharaoh noticed. Why did Pharaoh notice? Because someone came to him, one of his advisors, and said, one of the nomadic sire, one of the nomadic tribes has just come into the city. They probably knew they were coming a long time ago because Egyptians' army outposts would have sent back. There's a tribe on the move, and it's headed right towards the Nile.

They would have seen it coming across the Sinai because they had outposts all across the Sinai. So when Abraham's on the move, this is a big thing. It's like the Amorites or the Malagans, or anybody else that happened to be on the move. So his tribe is moving. And Abraham had told Sarah, you are the most beautiful woman anybody's ever seen, and this is going to cause us problems. So they had figured out a way to fix the problem. It's not what God wanted. What we have to look at is why. So let's go to verse 10 of Genesis 20. Genesis 20. Because when we look at the father of the faithful, and we see when he failed in his faith, there's a number of reasons, but this one in particular is at the core of why many times we become unfaithful. Because here's the point. He's not faithful to God. He doesn't do what God wants him to do. Why would he do that?

So a bimoulek, he goes into this city state, and a bimoulek says, whoa, is that one beautiful woman? Find out who she is. And they come back and say, oh, it's Abraham, the king of that little tribe there that came in. It's his sister. He says, go get that woman, bring her into the palace, and let's really treat her nice, and I want to marry her. So Sarah finds herself carted off to the palace, and Abraham's saying, oh my, what have I done? So God appears to a bimoulek and says, I'm going to kill you for this. How dare you take that man's wife? Now, because a bimoulek says, I didn't know it was his wife, so now he calls Abraham in front of him. And verse 10 says, then a bimoulek said to Abraham, what did you have in view that you have done this thing? What did you have? In other words, that'd be us saying, what in the world was going through your mind? What were you thinking when you did this? God was about to kill me. And Abraham said, because I thought surely the fear of God is not in this place, and they will kill me on account of my wife. They will kill me. He was afraid. His motivation here was fear. God has presented me with a problem that I've got to figure out a solution to. But indeed, she truly is my sister. She is the daughter of my father, but not the daughter of my mother, but she became my wife. It's only half a lie. It's still a lie.

It came to pass when God caused me to wonder from my father's house that I said to her, this is your kindness that you should do for me. And every place where we go, save them, he is my brother. And the bimoulek said, I'm going to go sacrifice to God. You have to go pray now for me. And Abraham did, and God did not kill a bimoulek. But why did the father of the faithful fail on this test? Now, there's lots of tests he didn't fail. Sacrificing his son, he did not fail. But remember, God did not ask him to sacrifice his son at the beginning of the story. At the beginning of the story, he told Abraham, I want you to move. Where, Canaan? Where's that? Ask one of the merchants, the traveling merchants to get a map from them, but head off to Canaan. The first request was minor compared to the request that kept coming on. In other words, faithfulness is developed in us. In fact, faithfulness is only developed in us when we're in those situations where there is a crisis. When everything's good, when you're sitting down with the other elders in front of a vision of God eating the best meal you ever had, that's the easy time.

When you're listening to God shout out the Ten Commandments from the top of Mount Sinai, I believe no crisis of faith. It's when the times get tough that faithfulness, the ability to stay on the journey, the ability to keep on this journey. It's when you have a health problem. It's when you can't seem to solve some problem in your marriage or your family. It's when you have some passage of Scripture you don't understand. It's when you have some kind of conflict with someone in church and you think, oh, I'm not going to go back to that church anymore. It's all these things. That's when faithfulness becomes real. You can't develop faithfulness without the crisis it takes to build faithfulness. So faithfulness is developed in us by God's Spirit.

Yes, you and I bring this little bit of faith to the table. Right? God, I want to repent. I have faith in Jesus Christ as my Savior. God, I'm here and I want to give my life to you and you have this faith. And God says, it's not much, but it's enough. We say, wow, look at my faith. And God says, oh, you have no idea what you're going to have to face.

But it's enough because if you respond to my Spirit, I will build the rest in you. Remember, self-control is God building self-control in us. So itself, there's a component that you can't do without. That meekness, God has to help develop that in us. And remember how we've showed that self-control and meekness are both character traits of God. If He didn't have self-control, we're doomed. And even Jesus said, I am meek. Same word that's used to your English. Because of that, we can be shackled together and I can pull your load.

Only God can develop this in us. So don't think, oh, I've got to work up more faith. No, what we have to do is go to God and let God develop in us faithfulness, the ability to stay loyal, even in the difficulties we face. Let's look at a few situations in the Bible where faith and fear are connected. Okay? Faith and fear are connected because this is one of the great motivations that strips us of the ability to be faithful. We fear. As human beings, getting through life is a fearful thing.

So what are some of the reasons why we have fear? One, we fear that God will not fulfill His promises because what we want is His promises without difficulties or sacrifice.

So we want His promises, but we don't want any difficulties or sacrifice on our part. So we are afraid. Yes, God, I want you to have me in the resurrection. Okay. Well, then I'll have to develop and use the fruits of the Spirit. Oh, but that's painful. Can't we just go there? Can't we just end up in the resurrection? I don't have to do all this stuff. So what we want is God's promises, but we fear the sacrifice and the difficulties that will happen in our lives for God's promises to be fulfilled. Let me give an example. Deuteronomy 1. Deuteronomy 1. And this will help explain what I mean. Deuteronomy 1. The Israelites are standing about to go into the Promised Land, and Moses says, I want to remind you of something. I want to remind you how 40 years ago, we were in the same place. And many of you that were there, you were children at the time. Your parents have all died. But remember what happened then. I sent spies into the land. The spies came back. Two of them said, God is going to save us. God has given us this land. It is incredible. Ten of them said, oh, the Promised Land is there, but the sacrifice we're going to have to pay is so great we can't do it. We can't do and receive what God wants us to do. It's impossible. And you know, it was impossible, which is exactly what Caleb and Joshua told them. Oh, we know it's not possible. This is about, okay, all of us in this room, we're about to go out and fight, okay? We're going to go fight an NFL team and an NBA team, and they all have clubs, and we're all going to go fight with our bare hands. The average age here being 65. Yeah, that's what we're going to do. And that's what they were faced with. They were terribly overmatched here. Huge cities, chariots, it'd be like, you know, we're going to go against tanks with rocks, okay? Huge cities, big armies, chariots, and we're supposed to go fight these people. And Caleb and Joshua said, no, we're supposed to go and God will fight them. It'll just be His instruments. And ten of the spies said, well, there's promises here, but the difficulties and sacrifices are too great. And they were afraid. Look at verse 26.

Nevertheless, this is Moses telling you this story, you would not go up, but rebelled against the command of the Lord your God, and you continued in your tents and said, because the Lord hates us. For God to give me this kind of difficulty, He must hate me. God has abandoned us. See, they did not deny God existed. Their lack of faith isn't God doesn't exist. Their lack of faith was, I can't trust Him. Nobody would treat me this bad unless He hates me. Now, I've had that conversation with a lot of people throughout life. God must hate me to let this bad thing happen to me. I can remember I had a conversation with someone that was visiting here one time, and they were talking about how that tragedy had happened in their lives. And someone had literally said, God, God must, you must have done some evil for God to do this to you. Say, God must hate you. Their conclusion was, God's there, but there's the Promised Land, but we had no idea some of us may die taking the Promised Land.

But since we're all so over matched, we're all going to die taking the Promised Land. We can't do that, which was the point. And so of course you can't do it. You couldn't get yourself out of Egypt either. But the fear drove them. They believed in God, but they no longer trusted Him. And so they turned back. As it says in verse 28, where can we go up? Our brethren have discouraged our hearts, saying the people are greater and taller than we are. The cities are great and fortified up to heaven. Or over, we have seen the sons of Anekem there. Moses says, then I said to you, do not be terrified or afraid of them. The Lord your God goes before you. He will fight for you, according to all He did for you in Egypt before your eyes. God is going to save you. They saw the promises of God. Understand they believe the land was God's promise. They believed God existed. They knew God existed. They were still eating manna every day. But they didn't trust, this problem is too big. This problem is too big.

It's too difficult. I did not know the promises had this kind of difficulties. And their fear drove them to turn away. Remember this. We will always have fear when we measure life by the size of the obstacles. We will always have fear when we measure life by the size of the obstacles. We will only find faith and be faithful when we measure life by the size of God. That's it. You can only be faithful when you measure life by the size of God. This is why this is so hard. This is why it's so hard for us to be faithful, because much of the time we are afraid.

Lack of trust breeds fear. Fear is the opposite of faithfulness.

A third or second way that this happens in life that we see in the Scripture is when we read Matthew 25 and the parable of the talents.

In the parable of the talents, remember the talents are given out, and this one person receives one, and he goes and he buries his talent. And when the person who gave him the talents, the employer shows up and he says, okay, what did you do with what I gave you? He says, I buried it, because I knew you were unfair.

I knew I wouldn't get what I want. I knew that whatever I did, I had to give back to you. I knew I was never going to get really what I deserved out of this. And it even says in there, I was afraid. In the parable, the man says, the man said, I was afraid because you're unfair. Another problem that we have is that we fear that God won't give us what we really want. How many times have you seen a young person, and they look at other young people in the church and they say, well, there's nobody here that God, that I would like to marry. No one here that meets who I would like to marry. But there's this person, this guy next door, this girl next door, and everybody says, oh no, don't marry her. Everybody says it. That's not the person for you. Oh no, no, that's because God's not going to supply anybody in my life. I mean, I'm 21, and He hasn't supplied anybody. So this is the person. And so they get married, and three years later they're divorced, and their lives are destroyed. Not destroyed, but I mean, they're going to have a lot of suffering for a long time.

Why? Because the fear, God's not going to give me what I want.

And if God's not going to give me what I want, I guess I better get it myself. And that's a hard thing. We struggle with this more than we like to admit it. We think we figured out what we want in life, and then God sometimes doesn't give us what we want in life. I mean, I could say, wow, when I was 19, I wanted a five foot three blonde haired, blue eyed cheerleader. God didn't give me a five foot three blonde haired, blue eyed cheerleader, and I thank Him every day. He gave me what I needed. It was a whole lot better when I was in love. It was a whole lot better when I thought I wanted.

He gave me what I needed, not what I wanted.

I'll tell you this. My wife, my mother when she first met my wife, looked at me and said, I mean, she'd only talked to her for a short period of time. She said, oh, that woman right there is the answer to God's, my prayers. I said, what? She said, you were so bad at picking women. I went to God and said, help this boy not to destroy his life. Bring the right woman into his life before he just destroys his own life. And that's God's gift to you.

Looking back, yes, I believe she's absolutely right.

I think of what I wanted, but I thank God every day for that. I got what was best for me. But see, that's a hard thing to do. That's a hard thing to believe. But God, that's not what I want. And we fear that. We fear that.

A third reason, and this one is, these are all sort of related, but they are different. We fear stepping out on faith because we don't trust God's purpose or his plan. In other words, have you really thought this out, God? Have you really planned this out? Do you know what you're doing here?

I don't know. This makes no sense to me because a lot of what God does in our lives, in the short run, makes no sense.

There's a lot of things that God does in our lives, and there's a lot of things people's lives in the Bible that in the short run doesn't make any sense. I want you to leave your country and move to Canaan. Okay. Abraham goes. And he has all kinds of problems. Then I'm going to give you a son, and here's a goodbye, and he doesn't get it. He figures out the problem. Ah, the problem is me. I just need to have Hagar. Well, that's what Sarah decides. That doesn't work out. And then at the end, God says, now kill the son. And then the last great test was Sarah died, and in the land that God given him, he owned nothing, and he had to go barter for a cave to bury her in. Now you talk about difficult. I'm in the land that God has given me, and I own none of it, and I have to go barter with a guy to find a place to bury my wife. But by that time, he was faithful.

He's got a son that doesn't. And you see no remorse. You see no blaming God. You see nothing. Oh, I get all this someday. God's promises will happen. He's now being faithful. Faith doesn't mean we don't experience fear. Faithfulness that we're talking about is one of the fruits of God's Spirit, is that God gives us the ability to deal with the fear. Would you understand that? We still experience the fear. God gives us the ability to deal with it. You know, fear is a very powerful emotion, isn't it?

When you're afraid, I mean truly afraid, you're capable of almost anything. You can be the most mild-manned person around, and you're really afraid you could kill somebody.

Fear drives us. Fear is part of what God's developed in us to survive, for one thing. But we are to live our lives in fear, and when we have fear, we have to go to God to receive help. Let me give you an example of this that I find so fascinating. It's in the Nehemiah 2.

I do appreciate everyone. I know having earlier services might have been a little problem, but they need to come in here and set up for Christmas. They have two different Christmas ceremonies tonight, and I didn't think we wanted to be here while they were doing all the trees and everything. So this way we can get out before they should be in here about four o'clock. So we have a little bit of time in the fellowship, and then we can take off.

Nehemiah 2. Now, Nehemiah is a Jewish captive in the Persian Empire. Nehemiah has become the cupbearer of the king. King Artaxerxes is a very famous king in history. Now, you have to understand what the cupbearer does. The cupbearer has a great trust of the emperor of the king. The cupbearer brings whatever the king is going to drink. He brings it to him and serves it. Now, one of the easiest ways to kill a king is to poison him. So guess what the cupbearer has to do every time he serves something to the king?

The king watches him, he takes a drink, and they watch to see if he dies. And if he doesn't die, the king drinks it. So all day long, this is what Nehemiah does. Here's your orange juice, sire. Okay, taste it. Taste it. He didn't die. He drinks the orange juice. Thanks, Nehemiah. Now, he trusts that Nehemiah won't poison him. See, if you can get the guy who's going to poison the king willing to commit suicide, you've got a real problem. He'll poison himself and then he'll poison the king. So you have to trust this man with your life multiple times every day.

The cupbearer then became—and he was there in all kinds of meetings. He was there when the king had private meetings. I mean, the cupbearer could come in and out in every kind of situation imaginable. So the cupbearer could become—and in this case, it's obvious—became sort of a confidant of the king. The king trusted him. He would say things. You know, everybody leave. Not you, Nehemiah. We need some wine. So Nehemiah is there, and here he is. He is a trusted person in the life of this great king, in fact, the greatest king on the earth at the time. Most powerful. So let's pick it up in verse 1.

It came to pass in the month of Nisan, in the twentieth year of King Artaxerxes, when wine was before him, that he took the wine and gave it to the king. He doesn't say, well, he tasted it first. Now, I had never been sad in his presence before. Now, this shows you that a relationship had formed between Nehemiah and the king, because God has a purpose here.

Now, what's interesting is, okay, we know what Nehemiah's purpose is, but then it reaches a point where, okay, what is it God wants me to do? See, we fear God's purpose instead of simply saying, if that's what you want me to do, I'll do it. But God, I can't do that. That's not what I want to do. No, God, I am too small a person to do that. No, God, that's not what I would like to do.

What is God's purpose? And then we make that our purpose, but we fear that. Because if we do God's purpose, I may have to give up something. I may not be able to be what I wanted to be in my career in order to do what God wants me to do. So what is God's purpose here? And we have to make God's purpose ours, and we fear that. He says, so he had never been sad before the king. Therefore the king said to me, verse 2, why is your face sad since you're not sick? This is nothing but sorrow of heart. So the king looks at him and he says, you know, you've been here a long time, Nehemiah.

You are a very good servant. You're jovial. You're a man in good disposition. I've seen you sick before. This is just depression. I mean, you are sick at heart here. Tell me. Now he's actually asking him to tell him what's bothering him. Now Nehemiah has an interesting problem now because to tell him what's bothering him could get him killed. You know, these aren't buddy buddies. This is the king of the Persian Empire and a slave.

And his answer is, the second part of verse 2 here, so I became dreadfully afraid. Why was he afraid? He knew God's purpose. And it was like, he'll kill me if I say this.

If I do God's purpose, he will kill me. Being afraid is human. What God's spirit can do through us is help us deal with fear at a level that we can't normally do. God's spirit can help us be faithful in the face of fear, which would not be normal for us. You can't do this on your own. I can't do this on my own. This kind of faithfulness comes from us submitting to God working in us. So Nehemiah is dreadfully afraid. And he says, He says, He said, That's what's wrong with me. He just slapped the Persian king in the face. The problem is, is the way you have treated my people. That's what's wrong with me. I'm sure at that point, anybody that was in the court, you heard this murmur like, Oh, he's a dead man. Oh boy. Oh, this is going to be fun. He'll torture him for two days before he, I mean, he just said this to the king. That's why he was afraid. God's purpose was, he knew he was there to do the will of God, to help rebuild the temple. And now God gave him the opportunity and he's scared to death saying, You know, we do this another way.

Okay. Okay. I didn't know that your purpose meant I had to do this. Okay. What's amazing is the next thing is that the king says in verse four, Well, what do you want? What will make that happen? How do I help you? Now, this is the king saying this to a slave. But he's a man he trusts because he tastes his drinks every day, probably for years, after years, after years. No, Lord, that wine tastes funny. I don't know. You wonder how many times someone tried to kill him. And since God wasn't going to let Nehemiah die, he drank the poison. And everybody said, how's that happen? Nehemiah just keeps living. We never get it to the... No, that tastes funny. Don't use that. Bring the king different wine. You just wonder what went on to him all this time. And now he's about to fulfill God's purpose for him, and he's afraid. Do you ever do that? Do you ever be at work and suddenly you have to ask for the feast days off and you're sick of your stomach? Because why? I may lose my job. I know God's purpose is I go to the feast, but I am afraid. Well, Nehemiah was afraid. The fear isn't wrong. It's God's spirit that gives us the power to deal with the fear. We are now faithful. We will do what's right. Because notice what Nehemiah does with the king. Well, what do you want me to do? And the last part of verse 4 says, so I prayed to the God of heaven. This doesn't mean he fell down in prayer. This is going on in his head. Remember, he's talking to the ruler of the biggest empire in the face of the earth. There's one in China that might have been big at this time, but in the western world. And he says, what do you want me to do? And what's he doing in his head? Because remember, he's scared to death. He prays, God, please help me say what I have to say. Please help me to do your will. Please help me to do your purpose. You want us to rebuild the temple? Here I am before the king. You put me here. What am I supposed to say? And what he says next is so bizarre, but it's God's purpose. So I prayed to the God of heaven, and I said to the king, if it pleases the king, and if your servant has found favor in your sight, I ask that you send me to Judah, to the city of my father's tombs, then I may rebuild it. He says it's very simple. He says, I want to rebuild the temple in the city of Jerusalem, and I want you to put me in charge of it. Oh, yeah, you're the guy that every day, the most expendable person in Persia, every day, eight times a day, you get to die. You face death constantly.

The most expendable person, the person with probably the least life expectancy in the entire, you know, Persian empire, I want to go back, rebuild the city, rebuild the temple, and I want you to put me in charge. And under Xerxes he says, I'm going to miss you. You've been a good servant, but go. And here, I have to sign the papers to put you in charge. He made him governor of a province of the empire. He was the cup bearer. That was God's purpose. Nehemiah knew he had a purpose, but when he faced what that purpose really meant, he was afraid. There will be times in all of our lives when we face the purpose God has for us, and we will be afraid. But that's where God's Spirit works through us. That's where God's Spirit does what we cannot do.

A fourth, in our last issue here, where fear can play a part, we fear because stepping out of faith means that we must be willing to accept immediate suffering for a greater blessing. We fear stepping out of faith because it means being willing to accept immediate suffering for a greater blessing. You and I know sometimes being honest costs you the job. It costs you an account. Sometimes you and I not keeping Christmas costs us a family. And we fear that. We fear the immediate suffering, and we don't see the greater blessing that God will give us. That's a difficult thing. But see, all these—and they're all related issues—these are all related issues in which we fear. You know, I think of this as Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. They were told to worship these idols, and they refused to. Now, I could have come up with a lot of reasons why it is okay to worship the idols. I'll just kneel down and pretend I'm worshiping.

If they kill us, then the Jewish people will have no representatives before the king, and they'll be persecuted. So for the sake of the people, I should do this for their sake. I get to come up with a hundred reasons. I'm pretty good at it. Not to remain faithful to God. Oh, I would have believed in God. But there's a difference. I figured God would have figured, oh, what I'll do is do it and repent later. I'll do this and repent later, and God will understand. How many times have we done that? I'll do this, repent later, and God will understand. See, there's a lot of things they could have done, and they did not. What they said was, if God lets us die, it's okay.

We'll get something better from this. God will give us a better blessing. Boy, that's a lot of faith. The issue is that faithfulness requires that we do that in these crises, and the thing is, the crisis has come. It's not like you're ever going to get to a place in life, oh, good. I've gone ten years without a crisis of faith.

If you have, either you're greatly blessed or two, you're mishandling them so poorly you don't even know you're having them. If you're greatly blessed, that's great. But we all struggle with, why did God do this? Why isn't He doing this? Why is He abandoning me? God must hate me. And I hear that a lot in counseling. God does not love me. So why does God hate you? He doesn't hate me. He just doesn't love me. And we have to work through it. It's fear. Lack of trust breeds fear, and fear breeds lack of trust. It doesn't breed necessarily disbelief. You can believe in the Sabbath, the Holy Days, and you don't have an immortal soul, you don't believe in the Trinity. You can believe all those things and still not be faithful to God in how you live your life. It is the fruit of God's Spirit working in us. We've looked at four situations where the lack of trust in God produces fear. Fear erodes faith and then causes us to be unfaithful. We fear that God won't fulfill His promises because we fear the difficulties and sacrifices of those promises. We fear that God won't give us what we really want. We fear stepping out on faith because we don't trust God's purpose. We really don't trust it. And there's a price to be paid for that. We haven't made His purpose our purpose. So we're at odds with God. We fear because stepping out on faith means being willing to accept immediate suffering for a greater blessing. And these are all fear issues that keep us from actually being faithful. And I guess this battle with being faithful can sort of be discouraging. But remember something. Faithfulness is a product of God's Spirit, and it is developed in us. And guess how it's developed in us? Through crises of faith. Joshua had to face being alone on the mountain, not knowing what God was going to do. Aaron had to face being with a group of people without knowing what God was going to do. It was the same crisis, just different situations.

They believed God existed. One was faithful, one was not. In that particular circumstance. Now Aaron would become more faithful as life went on. But he failed that one miserably.

Remember, he must work this in us to work out our lives. When you and I are in these issues of stress where we're struggling with our faithfulness to God, being loyal to God, remember faithfulness is a character trait of God, just like self-control, just like meekness. It's a character trait of God, which means He will be faithful to us.

It's amazing if you read through the Old Testament how many times God says, I will bring you back to the land. He tells Israel and He tells Judah, I will resurrect you at the end, not because of you, but because we made a covenant and because I am faithful. In other words, I'm doing my part even when you don't do yours. The faithfulness of God is what...if it wasn't for the faithfulness of God, we'd all be doomed. Here He makes faithful to us when we're not even faithful to Him. First Thessalonians, in conclusion, let's go to First Thessalonians 5.

Verse 23 begins a blessing. We call it a blessing when we ask for food, or ask God to bless food, to make it nourishing, and we thank Him for it. A blessing, in the way it was done in the biblical times, a blessing is asking for God to give you and thanking God, and asking for God to give you a blessing. So many times in Jewish prayers, they bless God. We give you a blessing for giving us these things. In other words, with their thanking, there's a thankfulness to it. So what we have here is a blessing where Paul says to the Church of Thessalonica, I want to give you this blessing from God. It's like a prayer. I'm praying that this will happen in your lives. Now may the God of peace Himself sanctify you completely. That's a remarkable statement. The God of peace, we're going to get into peace as one of the fruits of the Spirit. God is the God of peace. He reconciles us to Him. He brings peace between us, His enemies, and Him. And we are then to bring peace between each other. And peace is a fruit of God's Spirit. And peace is one of the things that's most lacking many times in our lives. Here the God of peace sanctify you completely. Sanctify means set apart or make holy. May God make you completely holy. That's what the fruits of the Spirit are. It's God's bearing fruit in us, making us completely holy.

All these fruits being developed in us is holiness. We are now taking on His character traits. So may God do this. This is a blessing, a prayer. May God do this with you. Make you completely holy. And may your whole spirit, soul, and body be preserved blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ so that you may be resurrected a complete, whole person, a spiritual person at the resurrection. That was a blessing He gave on them. But the next verse is so fascinating. He who calls you is faithful. He says, I'm asking this blessing that God, the God of peace, make you completely holy. And remember, He is faithful, even when you and I stumble and fall, even when you and I fail. As long as we don't rebel, He is faithful to do His part. He is faithful to complete the work He started in us, which was read in the sermonette. And the last part of this sentence, He who calls you is faithful, who also will do it.

Isn't that an amazing statement?

He's so faithful. As long as we keep submitting, He will do it, in spite of us. As long as we just keep submitting, we keep going to Him. We keep asking Him. We keep trying to obey. We keep trying to be faithful. We keep trying to do these things, begging Him for what we don't have, asking Him to give us what we don't have, asking Him to develop in us self-control, meekness, humility before Him, and faithfulness. And as He develops those things in us, we become more and more His children. We take on His character traits.

It's through prayer, it's through constant meditation of God's way, and the only way that we become faithful is through the experience of stepping out on faith.

In other words, facing the crisis. And learning sometimes when we're not faithful, why we weren't, and being able to repent before God and having Him work in us and change that. So as life goes on, we become more and more faithful. And being encouraged, being encouraged, as we just read in 1 Thessalonians, because we know He has called us, He is faithful, and He will do it.