whATTRIBUTES: Attributes of a Loving God
FAITHFUL ONE
February 7th, 2022
Hebrew 6:10. ‘For God, the Faithful One, is not unfair. How can He forget the beautiful work you have done for Him? He remembers the love you demonstrate as you continually serve His beloved ones for the glory of His name.’
I’m not gonna lie. It has been a difficult season. I am out-of-sorts. I have been for a minute. I blame it on my dad passing away, trying to get used to life without him in it. But I’m not the only one caught adrift on a stormy sea in a devastated shanty with a deflated heart. Many others seem to be struggling, swimming upstream, hurting, plugged holes that refuse to let the confusion and explosion out. It remains turbulent, tumultuous; the life raft buoyed on whitecaps as we cling to its surface, an S.O.S. rising like a sentinel into the sky. Life has changed. We’d be foolish to not admit it aloud so it can be dealt with.
But we have a promise that I believe we only recall in the midst of the very worst of times. It is tenacious and bears a stick-to-itiveness uncommon today. That is Jesus. He is unchanging and unrelenting. He is the Faithful One. Herein lies the problem: we live in a world where faithfulness and being faithful is eccentric and rare, highly uncommon. We don’t know what to expect when we are told about Someone whose greatest attribute is His faithfulness because it is abnormal and distrusted anyway. We shy from it and run from it; it can’t be true anyway. It’s too good to be true.
God’s faithfulness is epic, and only perhaps at the very end of life, if someone has lived in a relationship that has walked daily, moment by moment with a Holy God, can someone really model His faithfulness. It is a commodity not common to man, not everyday to life. However, if you have ever been touched by His faithfulness; if He has EVER COME THROUGH FOR YOU when you didn’t expect anyone would; if He has a track record with you because of long nights spent in the trenches, relying on His faithful presence fighting alongside you…then you know. Then you understand with the depth of someone who has been there, what it means to refer to Him as God, the Faithful One.
Beautiful You, if you have been let down once, or ten times, or have never known the honor of someone toward you, let alone ever understood what faithfulness truly means, or if you have never chosen safeguarding faithfulness to someone else, you need to know my God. One of His greatest attributes is His faithfulness to a thousand generations, to you—where He comes through for you when the door slammed shut, when His presence is thick in the midst of your error or denial of Him, when you turned your back on Him but when you twirled back around you found Him still standing there, arms wide open, where everyone else you thought you could rely upon has disappeared but the God remained, the One you shunned or shut out or walked away from. You need to know Him. Because I promise you this: He, the Faithful One, wants, no, yearns, to know you. Intimately.
Deuteronomy 7:9, ‘Know therefore that the Lord your God is God; he is the faithful God, keeping his covenant of love to a thousand generations of those who love him and keep his commandments.’
Ex 3:13-14, ‘Moses said to God, “Suppose I go to the Israelites and say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ Then what shall I tell them?” God said to Moses, “I am who I am. This is what you are to say to the Israelites: ‘I am has sent me to you.’” (NIV)
