Love and Faithfulness

Introduction

It seems cliche to talk about God’s love and faithfulness as we celebrate this significant milestone in the life of our church. 10 years has felt both long and short, easy and hard, and so much has changed but much as also stayed the same. 10 years is a long time in the course of anyone’s life but especially for those who are young. In these 10 years, I’ve seen new grads come to our church, get married, have children, and become adults. I’ve seen my children go from 1st grade to high school to now a senior in college. There have been ups and downs, good times and bad, and everything in between. Somehow, we have managed to survive a pandemic together and the church is still here. As Charles Dickens so famously wrote, “It was the best of times and the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom and it was the age of foolishness…” Dickens was describing a period of history where it felt like humanity was literally being pulled by the polar extremes of good and evil, progress and decline, prosperity and poverty and it would seem that we are in one of those periods of time currently. But despite all these uncertainties and the winds of change swirling around us, our God never changes. He remains our fortress and those who find refuge under His wings, not only are able to survive these difficult seasons of life but they are able to flourish not because of our own resilience but because of God’s love expressed through his faithfulness to us. These past few days, I’ve been reflecting on Psalm 85, which even among all the other Psalms, stood out to me as being one of the most poetic and beautiful in the way it describes the faithfulness of God.

Passage

Psalm 85:4–11 ESV

Restore us again, O God of our salvation, and put away your indignation toward us! Will you be angry with us forever? Will you prolong your anger to all generations? Will you not revive us again, that your people may rejoice in you? Show us your steadfast love, O Lord, and grant us your salvation. Let me hear what God the Lord will speak, for he will speak peace to his people, to his saints; but let them not turn back to folly. Surely his salvation is near to those who fear him, that glory may dwell in our land. Steadfast love and faithfulness meet; righteousness and peace kiss each other. Faithfulness springs up from the ground, and righteousness looks down from the sky.

When we think about the faithfulness of God, we see that it is often tied to his enduring love for us. In this Psalm, we see that faithfulness is an important part of God’s love for us. It’s a natural extension of it. In fact, properly understood, God’s faithfulness is tied to all of his attributes and it’s what guarantees that God will always be true to himself, he will never act inconsistently, and he will always fulfill his promises. AW Tozer summarizes this thought perfectly and teaches us that, “Everything that God says or does must be in accord with His faithfulness. He will always be true to Himself, to His works, and to His creation.”

Body

As we remember the past 10 years, there are two lessons we can take from this great psalm on the faithfulness of God.

God’s faithfulness gives us hope

The desire for restoration and revival are prayers of hope. To be restored means to return something back to its former condition or position. To be revived means to bring back to life that which is dying. Both of these prayers are dependent on some degree of self-awareness, that we are not what we once were and only God can restore and revive His people. Restoration and revival are wholly dependent on the love and faithfulness of God as an answer to our prayers. (Regathering strategy: remain, remember, return, rebuild, rejoice) Solomon built the temple but until God filled it with His glory, the people had no reason to rejoice. The ideas of restoration and revival implies that there will be periods of loss and destruction in our lives.

We know that God binds himself to us through a covenant of love but God’s love and faithfulness doesn’t mean we will be protected from the suffering of this world. It is sometimes hard to believe that no matter what happens in life, all of these difficulties are still a result of God’s love for us. This love may come in the form of discipline, or correction, or being pruned but the underlying motivation for all of God’s actions toward us is love. And just as a child sometimes doubts a parent’s love for them, it is expected that we will have seasons of life, where we will doubt God’s love for us. I’ve realized that it takes years of experiencing the faithfulness of God in order to completely trust in who He is, to trust in his goodness, love, and mercy and even to trust in his judgment. Until we have experienced and acknowledged His faithfulness, we tend to be suspicious about God’s intentions. We are not certain about His plans for our lives and so we go off on our own agenda and then when things go wrong, we wonder why we are not happy or fulfilled and sometimes we even lay the blame at God’s feet. If we see God as being unfaithful, then we will become faithless towards Him. This the root source of our faithlessness but God always remains faithful to us.

I’m sure we all have experiences with people who didn’t come through on their words or who hurt us with inconsistent behavior or who may have betrayed us. The faithfulness of God guarantees us that this will never be the case in our relationship with Him. Most often when people break faith with us, we end up reciprocating and breaking faith with them. But this is contrary to the very nature of God. God alone is completely trustworthy and therefore we can trust the words of the apostle Paul in:

2 Timothy 2:13, “Even if we are faithless, he will remain faithful, for He cannot deny himself.”

Over and over again in the past 10 years, we have seen God’s faithfulness at work in our church even when we didn’t have a whole lot of faith.

When we first started gathering, we didn’t know where we would meet. We went from our living room, to a library in Vis Valley, to a conference room at UCSF, to our location here in the Fillmore.

On a personal note, God has provided a place for my family to live every step of the way in this journey. We had no idea how we would be able to afford to live in such an expensive city off of a pastor’s salary.

When we decided to move up to this big room from gallery A downstairs, I had my doubts of whether or not we could actually fill this room but God

Over the past two years, God has restored us, He has saved us, and I can see Him answering the prayers for revival in our hearts.

When we learn to trust in the faithfulness of God, it brings us confidence because just as He has come through countless times, we know that He will do it again. That brings us to the second lesson from Psalm 85.

God’s faithfulness bring us peace

Psalm 85:8–9 ESV

Let me hear what God the Lord will speak, for he will speak peace to his people, to his saints; but let them not turn back to folly. Surely his salvation is near to those who fear him, that glory may dwell in our land.

As we look at verse 8, we can see that an experience of God’s faithfulness gives us the patience to wait for God to speak and when He does, it is often a word of peace that He leaves with us. For many of us our hearts are deeply unsettled because even though we might not realize it, we have doubts about God’s faithfulness and that is what gets us into trouble.

An understanding of God’s faithfulness is particularly important in correctly dealing with the temptation to turn away from God. The sin that remains in our lives always tempts us to move away from God but paradoxically, through Christ, it was meant to draw us closer to God.

1 Corinthians 10:13 ESV

No temptation has overtaken you that is not common to man. God is faithful, and he will not let you be tempted beyond your ability, but with the temptation he will also provide the way of escape, that you may be able to endure it.

In our attempts to overcome sin, we tend to trust in ourselves, to lean on our own discipline and usually this leads to feelings of self-condemnation and guilt. Rarely do we place our sin into God’s hands and trust that in time, he will give us the grace to overcome. There was a particular sin that I struggled with for years but like the Philadelphia 76ers, I trusted in the process of repentance and forgiveness and I remember distinctly, God telling me that my struggle against that sin was over. And amazingly it was done and it’s been that way with every area of sin in my life. Somehow, someway, my desire for that temptation is taken away, not because of anything I do but because God is faithful and just to forgive our sins. And so at a very personal level, God’s faithfulness brings us peace. But it also extends beyond our own personal sense of peace.

The OT scholar, Derrick Kidner describes the end of Psalm 85 as “...one of the most satisfying descriptions of harmony—spiritual, moral and material—to be found anywhere in Scripture.”

Psalm 85:10–11 ESV

Steadfast love and faithfulness meet; righteousness and peace kiss each other. Faithfulness springs up from the ground, and righteousness looks down from the sky.

These verses describe the divine harmony that is found within God. Love without faithfulness is fickle, faithfulness without love is just duty. Righteousness without peace brings judgment. Peace without righteousness is false, there is no true basis for that peace. However unlike us, we know that God is never conflicted internally. He is never torn in different emotional directions but is always at one with Himself. And just as the attributes of love and faithfulness, righteousness and peace create harmony within God, these same attributes when they are found in us creates the same oneness in our own lives, harmony with God, with one another, and within ourselves.

And on this 10th anniversary of our church, more than celebrating the fact that God has restored the number of people at the church or allowed us to expand our square footage in this building, we should be celebrating the fact that out of his love and faithfulness, He has restored and revived us as His people!

Conclusion

Lamentations 3:21–23 ESV

But this I call to mind, and therefore I have hope: The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases; his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness.