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Love and faithfulness are first and foremost characteristics of God. While we might mean many things by love from I love chocolate to I love my country, this idea of love goes far beyond the sentimentality of Valentine's Day-it's much more like the commitment part of a good marriage. God shows it in His covenant faithfulness toward His people. Though they sin against Him again and again, God has compassion on them, He pities them in their weakness, He provides for them and protects them. He is committed to their good; He desires to be with them as an integral and intimate part of their lives. This love is the basic motive for God's great saving deeds for humanity: "For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son." From our movie on Friday night, this kind of love was reflected a little bit in how Nemo's father Marlin totally ignored the fact that before Nemo was taken away Nemo's last words to him were that he hated him and Nemo's last actions were disobedient. The relationship was broken and rejected as far as Nemo was concerned, but Marlin would not let that be the end. The relationship would stand even if he had to hold the whole thing together himself, with all his own strength and power, all at his own loss. He wouldn't even notice his own sacrifices. Marlin would do all he could to get Nemo back. God also demonstrates the meaning of faithfulness by keeping His promises and keeping them no matter what. He said He would send a Savior and down came His Son. He said He would forge a new covenant based on the forgiveness of sins and up went Christ to the cross to pour out His blood to pay for our guilt. He promised to take away the pall of death which covered humanity, and so He did, though it meant that Jesus Himself would be wrapped in a shroud. Faithfulness is constancy and perseverance in doing what you'd say you'd do and being what you said you would be. It makes a person reliable, trustworthy, even knowable-because someone who remains true to themselves and true to their word can be truly known and doesn't just shift like sand with circumstances around them. It's this kind of faithfulness in St. Bartholomew which our Lord notes when He greets him with the praise, "Here is a true Israelite in whom there is nothing false." He's true through and through. Back to our movie Finding Nemo, we saw how Marlin faithfully sought his son through all dangers and trials. He went to the depths of the ocean, battled sharks, escaped jellyfish, and got swallowed by a whale his courage often faltered yet his goal remained constant. That father fish had told his son when he was but an egg that he would never leave him and this promise would never let him forget his son. Back in proverbs, we are given three images of how we should relate to these two Christian virtues. The first is the image of friends and companions or perhaps housemates or family members. Those who dwell together as family have strong bonds which hold them together through hard times, even through their periods of not getting along so well when others would just give up and walk away. But there is one time when a family breaks up or at least opens up and spreads out by the design of God: in Genesis we learn that the natural order of things is that a boy grows to become a man and then leaves his father and mother to cling to his wife. The man is ready for new relationships, for independence, for making his own way. Let this never happen to us with respect to love and faithfulness. May we never outgrow them and move out on our own and away from them. May they accompany all our words and actions and ever dwell in our homes. May we never say, "Love and faithfulness are nice ideals perhaps, pretty ideas for children or adolescents-but they're not for me. They just don't work in my day to day life." No, make friends with these virtues, invite them in, give them a place to stay, put them at your kitchen table and offer them a bedroom in your home. If you run into a situation, fall into a temptation, and it looks like love and faithfulness are heading for the door, then bar the way. Call out to God in prayer and do whatever you must to keep them comfortably in the center of your life so they might stay put-and you too will grow in character that conforms to God's wisdom and goodness. The next image we have is of a necklace "bind love and faithfulness around your neck." They are like a beautiful piece of jewelry to beautify life and beautify the people who have them. Those well practiced in them brighten rooms with their presence and brighten lives with their humble, self-sacrificing Christian care. Love and faithfulness make the kind of people who are easy to befriend and a delight to be around. As jewelry, though, love and faithfulness are less like a dainty necklace and more like an Olympic medal. It's rare to find anyone who is truly a master of these arts it takes years of training and discipline, like Olympic athletes who begin in childhood and then dedicate multiple hours a day to their sport and year after year, through pain and perseverance, progress toward excellence. The best athletes in these virtues also have had the benefit of good coaches-godly parents or wise mentors who have stuck with them, modeled the right path, and offered regular doses of good counsel along the way. As much as Olympic athletes were first compared to the Olympian gods, love and faithfulness make a person godly like the true God they are spiritual qualities which reflect His divine character. Your heavenly Father hasn't signed you up for soccer or t-ball, after all. He has enrolled you in the love and faithfulness league these are the primary Christian virtues which He would train in you by His Spirit. And like an Olympic gold medal athletes, the champions in love and faithfulness are noticed by others-though not always in positive ways. Our Lord Jesus, the only true Olympian in this field, got the world's attention. At first He was praised by the crowds and thronged by mobs of followers and hangers-on. But the religious leaders only grew jealous of His popularity and suspicious of teachings they had never heard before. In the end, they turned the Romans against Him. But in so doing, they provided Him the greatest opportunity to show the true meaning of love and faithfulness as He went to the cross to hang there for us. Christ never left love and faithfulness and He never let them out of His life. They were bound around His neck, and they bound Him to the cross in faithful love for us and all lost sinners. We will not be surprised that in our Father's training courses there are training crosses and as crosses come our way they discipline us and shape us to be more like our Lord Jesus. The last phrase from our verse tells us to write love and faithfulness on the tablet of our heart. Maybe you're like me and you have to write things down so you don't forget them. Sometimes it feels like I forget everything and lately it seems the most important task of my day is to remember to check my notes about what I should be remembering. It's almost to the point, but not quite so bad, that I have to leave my driver's license next to my bed at night so I can recall my identity when I wake every morning. Actually, that's what Luther recommends in a way and in a way its what we all really need to do that we wake every morning with the sign of the cross traced over us to remember who we are and whose we are to recall the identity given us in baptism and not forget that we are children of God by the grace of Christ. He has written His name on our lives. Remembering who we are includes remembering God's love and faithfulness toward us. It includes remembering Christ's call to live in love and faithfulness toward others. "This is My command," our Savior says, "Love each other as I have loved you." In Revelation, He is given the title of "Faithful and True." And about us it is written, "Now it is required that those who have been given a trust must prove faithful." (1 Cor 4:2) God promises that with the gift of salvation He gives us the gift of His Holy Spirit who writes His law upon our hearts. The ways of love and faithfulness are to become ingrown, engraved, inscribed in our very character. But for the inner writing to happen, we must dedicate ourselves to learning those ways as they are written in the Book of Holy Scripture. By Holy Scripture we will see how love and faithfulness play out in real life and by Holy Scripture we will receive the Spirit of God to actually put them into practice. The writing on the page seen by the eyes or heard through our ears becomes the writing on our heart then lived in our lives. To love humble self-sacrificial love and be faithful to faithfulness these are rare traits in our self-serving, flighty, and fickle world. God desires to make them the hallmark of our lives constant companions for us, a necklace to adore our words and our deeds, and an inscription on the very heart of who we are. |
