Faithfulness

She sat in my office with tears running down her cheeks. The pain was written in her face. Her marriage of 24 years was in tatters. She had just told her daughters why she was moving out. The conversation had ended badly. It was hard to feel sympathy, however, because the decision to end her marriage was her own. Too many years without joy she said. The constant battles and unresolved issues. Besides, she had met somebody new.

This was not a casual, uninvolved church member. This was someone who had been part of the church her entire life. She had served willingly, taught and been a role model to others for years. She regretted that I could not support her decision to tear her family apart. "But, I am confident in my relationship with God. I know God wants me to be happy." As I sat there and listened I wondered which book of the Bible had taught her that timeless truth? What hero in the Bible could she look to who could justify one's pursuit of happiness over God's obedience? I could not think of one. Yet in our modern American new age culture, the "pursuit of happiness" has trumped faithfulness.

When we mix in the human heart with faithfulness, there is a tendency to dilute its call for purity and commitment. The secular world with its lure of wealth and security makes our lives luke-warm. The church at Laodicea was warned of this result (Rev. 3). God's first command is to love him with all of one's heart, soul, strength and mind. Seeking one's own road to private happiness is a contradiction to faithfulness. It is not about "us"; it is about the Lord. This is the same battle that the church fought in Corinth. When we import the worship of anything else besides Jesus Christ and him crucified, we engage in idolatry. It is no wonder that we deceive ourselves with the delusion of a few sentiments about a loving God, mixed in with a constant bombardment of commercials lauding personal happiness as the ultimate good. After all, we just want to be discovered like everyone else on American Idol! [Ironic name for a show, isn't it?] This rational gives license to do whatever one wants and yet justify it as somehow as one's own self piety.

Every person who claims Jesus as Lord is influenced by culture, family, friends, books, Internet, schools, workplace and world events. We prescribe out of our own history. God is one small voice that sometimes is but a whisper. However, the battle of faithfulness is not allowing the world to crowd out the call of the Messiah to the narrow road. Faithfulness is giving priority to the voice of God. It responds by one's obedience to the urging of the Spirit of God that is planted in the heart of the believer by God's Holy Spirit. Scripture teaches us that the Spirit can be quenched. God's truth sets us free. The world's call is to make the revelation of God more palatable by assimilating and accommodating the truth from God with some other source of "truth". The world is ruled by one whom is deceitful. The half-lie and innuendo kill spirituality faster than a sword. When we lose our ability to distinguish between God's voice and that of the world, we are blind and lost.