Faithfulness (Men's Edition)

Have you seen this song, "Great Is Thy Faithfulness." What a wonderful song. The words come from the book of Lamentations 3:22-23. Jeremiah had an achy-breaky-prophetic-heart. He was singing the blues. But I am gong to tell you something. Jeremiah, in the midst of mourning over Israel, says these words. “His compassions fail not. They are new every morning; great is thy faithfulness.” Jeremiah said that. If you study the life of David, he had some hair-raising adventures early in his life. As he got older, he began to write the book of Psalms.

One of the major themes of the book of Psalms is the faithfulness of God. The people who would really sing this with passion were the elderly in the church. They would sing from the depths of their souls, “Great is thy faithfulness, thy hand hath provided.” I wondered why they would sing so loud and with such conviction. These elderly saints had experienced thousands and thousands of answers to prayer. They had experienced the Holy Spirit comforting them and loving them in times of divorce, in times of struggle, in times of trial. So they had a lot of God’s trustworthiness under their belts, so to speak. They could sing it with real unction because they knew God was someone they could trust.

Frankly, that is one of the reasons that I am so optimistic and fired up about the church at Fairfax! Do you realize that most of us here only have a year, two or three of God’s trustworthiness under our belts? We have traced God’s faithfulness for only a couple of months, but give us ten years and we will be able to sing that with such power that we could blow the roof off the top of the building and its walls with our hands! That fires me up! I cannot wait to see what God is going to do in my life and your lives. The Holy Spirit is faithful. We will experience a new supernatural power to be faithful.

It is tempting to stop right here and to just shut it down. But I can’t do that because I would leave us hanging. We have got to understand the take home, the application, and the relevancy. Now let’s see how faithfulness plays out.

Faithfulness is becoming a man of your word! You say something, you keep it! You give a promise, you keep that promise. That is what the Holy Spirit will do. He will keep telling you and me to become a man of our word of our word, especially in the area of relationships. The Holy Spirit will help me to become a man and help you to become a man of your word in your relational world.

I want to say a word to the husbands here. If you are a husband, please slip your hand up right quick. Years ago or maybe just months ago, you stood in a shiny polyester suit before God, a preacher and a group of family and friends and you made a vow. You gave your word, men, to honor, to love, to cherish, to submit, to hold your spouse in high esteem. Yes, you might have been mouthing the words just to get to the honeymoon in Jamaica, but you said the words. Guess what. Guess what. God holds you to your word. You can’t mess around with vows and covenants especially in the marital domain with a holy God. And if we cooperate with the Holy Spirit of God, we will find a supernatural infusion of faithfulness to love. We will experience a new desire to cherish, a new desire to court and to romance and to love and to pray with our wives.

Are you a man of your word in marriage? Ain't faithfulness a great feeling?!!