Practical Faithfulness

Okay. Let’s get down to it then. How do we begin to demonstrate God’s type of faithfulness in our own lives? What practical steps can we take to begin to develop this fruit in our lives? After all, that is what this project is all about, right?

I have a few thoughts (of course!). I think that for us, faithfulness can be divided into two parts: faithfulness to God and faithfulness to others. They do go hand in hand, but practical development of each part can be different. We are first called to be faithful to God. We as humans tend to be faithful to what we consider important or most valuable. We internalize that and then commit to be responsible to that person or thing. We need to work on making that commitment to God every single day. Emotions have nothing to do with it. We are called to be faithful regardless of how we feel on any given day. So, we need to decide consciously to give God that place of importance in our lives. He is the most important person; He is the most valuable.

Faithfulness is being true to God and not serving other “gods” or putting anything else in the place of God in our lives. We are to save ourselves mentally and emotionally for God first. We are not to stray and put other things, good or bad, in God’s place or in a higher place of importance in our lives. You can tell you are doing this when other things come before things that will further our commitment to or relationship with God. Look at the choices you make throughout your day. Is something else consistently getting in the way of time with God? It can be good things, too!

Anything that comes between me and my relationship with God is an idol. Idols can be bad things or good things. It is not necessarily building a statue to some other “god” in the backyard and bowing down to it. Of course, negative things can be idols, like drugs, drinking, gambling, other harmful habits. But good things can be idols too, and are often harder to spot. Even the best things in our lives can be idols if we allow them to come before our commitment to God. Service to others can be an idol if the needs of the people we are helping or certain projects take a higher position of priority in our lives than our relationship with God. Or even learning more about God can be a sort of idol if we aren’t focused on the right things. For example, I like to read books about faith and about God. But sometimes I find myself more interested in books about God than in the Bible or God himself. It is at that point that learning and those other books become idols to me because my allegiance and interest is focused more on what others have to say about God than on what God Himself is saying to me through His Word. Service projects and reading books about God aren’t bad things at all and can be incredibly valuable in growing spiritually and doing God’s work here on earth, but when we choose things like that over God’s Word. If we begin to trust something or someone more than we trust God, that thing or person becomes an idol to us. This all is not to say to stay away from those things, but we should be constantly analyzing the things in our lives to ensure that they remain in their proper places and we don’t fall into this trap that will ruin our faithfulness to God.

The second part of faithfulness is faithfulness to others in speech and action. We are called to be truthful, dependable, and honorable in our dealings with others. After all, we as Christians, are the faces of God to the world. We need to reflect God’s faithfulness to others by being faithful ourselves. Practical steps might seem obvious, but I’ll state them anyway. Always tell the truth. Always follow through on your commitments and, to help with this, be careful what commitments you take on in the first place through prayerful consideration of each one.

Try to put this into practice into your life and let me know how you are doing. Or, if you have some tips of your own on how to be more faithful, please share!