|
Texts: Hebrews 11:17-40, Matthew 25:14-30 The Fruit
of the Spirit: Faithfulness In the name of him who is our Rock
and Fortress, dear friends in Christ: We
have so far in this series of meditations on the nine fruit of the Spirit from
Galatians chapter five considered the first six, namely love, joy, peace,
patience, kindness, and goodness. And
before we go on to the seventh this evening, I want to stress that all of the
spiritual fruit we have been considering are aptitudes and virtues that are
worked in us by God’s Holy Spirit. We
don’t produce them naturally. We
can’t. Though in each case – and this is
what I want to highlight – in each case we can
produce an outwardly passable imitation.
Take peace for example, a part of which we saw was the ability to freely
forgive sins that people commit against us.
We can fake that. I daresay we
often do fake that, pretending to let
things go, smiling and saying, “I forgive you” – even while harboring deep
resentment in our hearts, and who knows?
In some cases perhaps even while plotting some secret revenge. Obviously in such cases we’re as far from the
godly fruit of patience as we can be.
But I hasten to add that there’s another way to fake it; and this is
even more dangerous. It’s when you say
to yourself, “I know that I ought to be patient and forgiving to this person
who did this terrible thing to me. The
Lord requires it of me.” And so then you
try to work the fruit of patience in yourself using your own natural abilities. Once again, to a certain extent you can
succeed – at least in a superficial sort of way. The danger is that you can easily deceive
yourself into thinking you’ve accomplished it. A telltale sign that you’re forgiving patience
isn’t the real article would be revealed in your thinking what a good person
you are for being so patient. “The Lord
must really be pleased with me on account of the way I just let that awful
thing he did to me go”. You see, if you
really had the spiritual fruit of patience, you wouldn’t have to consciously
force yourself to forgive the offense.
If you really had it, you wouldn’t have got all worked up about the
offense to begin with. The true fruit of
patience grows when we recognize that we can’t produce it, and that our inbred
impatience and unwillingness to forgive is evil. We then repent of it, confess it, and receive
God’s forgiveness through which the Spirit works to grow in us the genuine
article. This is true of all of the fruit of
the Spirit we’ve discussed thus far, love, joy, peace, and so on; but it’s
probably with the next one, faithfulness, that we’re most likely to fool
ourselves into believing that the worthless imitation we produce on our own is
the real thing. The reason for this is
we tend to think that faith is our sole contribution to God’s great plan of
salvation. “By grace are you saved
through faith”, we dutifully memorize.
“The Lord does it all. Christ
died for my sins. There’s nothing left
for me to do. My only job is to believe
it. Right?” No, wrong! Well, I mean yes,
you’re to believe it – but that’s not
your job. Rather, the faith you have is a gift of God. It’s not something we generate within
ourselves, instead it is something that’s grown in us by God’s Holy Spirit as
the Lord Jesus reveals himself to us through his Word and Sacraments. This is why unlike so many other groups
associated with the Christian Church we don’t preach faith. I don’t stand here waving a floppy Bible over
my head and say, “You’ve got to believe!”
No. We preach Christ
crucified. And through that message, the
message of the cross, the Holy Spirit creates, grows, and increasingly brings
to maturity true faith in those who hear. But what is true faith? We heard as one of our readings an excerpt
from Hebrews chapter eleven. It’s what is
often called the great chapter on faith.
That chapter begins with these remarkable words: “Faith is the substance of things hoped for,
the evidence of things not seen.” There’re
a couple of very apparent contradictions there.
How can what I’ve only been promised will come one day have any
existence now? And what good is evidence
that can’t be seen? And that, of course,
is more or less the point. Faith is
trusting so confidently in what you don’t yet have that as far as you’re
concerned, you’ve got it already. It’s
believing so firmly in what you can’t see that you don’t need to see. You know. You know with such certainty that even if
everything you see and experience denies it, your certainty remains unshakable. And we’re given a long list of biblical
examples of people who had that kind of faithfulness. Like Abraham.
Can you imagine being told by the Lord to sacrifice your own beloved
son? And in particular the son through
whom the Lord promised to fulfill all the other promises he made to you? It was in total opposition to everything he
knew – not to mention the horror he must have felt at having to do such a thing
to his own child. And yet Abraham was
absolutely sure that the Word and Promises of God cannot be broken. He knew that even if he did sacrifice his son
as the Lord had directed, still, somehow, through this son the Lord would keep
his Word to make of him a great nation – even if it meant raising Isaac from
the dead. Or how would you have liked to have been
Moses leading the children of Israel out of Egypt? You’ve got the sea on one side of you and an
army of heavily armed and very angry Egyptians barreling down on you on the
other. You’re the guy in charge. All the people are blaming you for the impending
disaster that’s coming upon them. And mind you, the Lord hasn’t yet told you
how he’s going to get you out of this fix.
And yet Moses tells the people, “Stand by to see the salvation of the
Lord!” He has no idea what’s coming,
only that the Lord must have a plan.
Then he holds up his staff and whoosh, sploosh, the sea opens up and the
water is standing like a wall on both sides of a long corridor. Friends, water isn’t supposed to stand up
like that. Would you want to be the
first one to step on in and start crossing? Or how’d you like to have been with Gideon
and his ragtag force of a mere three hundred that went up against an army of
somewhere in the neighborhood of two hundred thousand soldiers – and do it fully
expecting to win the battle simply because the Lord told you that you would? I think you get the point. These people and the others mentioned
throughout the reading displayed great faithfulness to the Lord’s Word despite
what they saw – and in many cases, despite what they suffered. “They were tortured … faced jeers and
flogging … chained and put in prison … some were stoned, sawed in two, killed
by the sword … They went about … destitute, persecuted, mistreated” all by
their great faithfulness to the Lord’s Word.
And it was through such periods of abuse and fiery trial that their
faith was tested and refined. It was
precisely by not seeing any evidence and having the opposite of what they were
hoping for that sent them back to the Word and Promises of God by which their
faith was made strong. And it’s easy to think, “Sure, those are some
impressive cases; but then you’re talking about the Bible’s great champions,
the heroes of faith; not regular people like me.” But that’s the whole point of the
passage: they were exactly like you and
me. They were weak, pathetic sinners who
failed and fell time and time again; but by God’s grace and the gift of faith
worked in them by the Holy Spirit they endured.
They hung on to the end and died still hoping for what the Lord promised,
and by faith they saw what they would one day inherit. The point of the passage is that the Lord is
working to produce in us the same level of mature faithfulness – which he does as
we apply ourselves to his Word, namely the Word of Christ, the Word of his
cross and suffering, and the salvation God achieved for us through Jesus. In fact, the passage suggests that we have
more than they did because the fullness of God’s salvation in Christ had not
yet been revealed. Having more for the
Holy Spirit to build with, we have the potential to be even more faithful than
the Bible’s great heroes. But there’s another aspect to the fruit of
faithfulness that we need to explore.
It’s one thing to trust completely in the Promises of God. That’s faithfulness to the Lord and his Word.
The other end of it is being faithful for the Lord and his Word.
The idea is this: here we are looking forward in faith to the Lord’s
return, knowing that this present age is passing away and that a new age is
about to dawn. The question is: how are we being faithful for the Lord with what he’s entrusted to our care until that day
comes? This aspect of faithfulness is
shown in the second reading we had this evening: the Parable of the Talents. And the meaning of the parable is quite
simple. To each one of us the Lord
assigns a certain amount of resources: time, wealth, natural talents and
abilities, brainpower and reasoning, position and place in life, education,
opportunities to hear his Word, and opportunities to serve his church and other
people in countless different ways. Because we are faithful to the Lord’s Word and know for certain what’s coming, the Holy
Spirit works in us to be faithful for
the Lord by employing these resources in ways that will maximize benefits for
the kingdom of God. And note what it is
that prevents the unfaithful servant from producing anything with what he was
given: it’s fear, fear of his master;
and likely too fear of not having enough for himself, fear of reaching out and investing
with what he was given and taking a risk of losing. It’s fear that shows he really doesn’t know
or trust his master. So let me suggest
that faithfulness for the Lord grows
directly from faithfulness to the
Lord and his Word by which the Lord’s true character and his love for us in
Christ Jesus is made known. Let us therefore seek to know him all the
more where he reveals himself to us: in his Holy Word and Sacraments, by which
we walk with Jesus in this life, and through which the Holy Spirit increases in
us the fruit of true faithfulness. In
Jesus’ name. Amen. Soli Deo Gloria! |
