Faithfulness to the Skies!

     "I will sing of the Lord’s great love forever; with my mouth I will make your faithfulness known through all generations. I will declare that your love stands firm forever, that you established your faithfulness in heaven itself." (Psalm 89:1-2)
     "For great is your love, higher than the heavens; your faithfulness reaches to the skies." (Psalm 108:4)
     I have been rather overwhelmed by God's faithfulness of late. In fact, if I am honest, I pretty much remain overwhelmed by His faithfulness. Like Ethan (the author of Psalm 89), I am compelled to make God's faithfulness known, and like David describes in Psalm 108, my experience is that God's love and faithfulness stretch to the skies and beyond. (Interesting, isn't it, how God's love and faithfulness often appear together--I'm sure you can guess why!).
     It is God's faithfulness which is an expression of His love, that invites us into a truly biblical understanding of faith. As you may know, biblical faith is relational to its very core. It is the growing trust that develops as persons get to know one another better and better.
     This is very important for us to grasp. It's particularly important for those of us in the Western World. We need to redefine faith from something that is mostly a head thing into the beautifully relational expression of trust in God that He invites us into. Much of what people have described as faith is more a reactionary attempt to believe God's promises than a heart-response of trust in an infinitely loving and faithful (trustworthy!) God. Thus when sickness or other distress comes to someone, we often find people "trying to build their faith" rather than responding with confident expectancy from a place of deep trust that was already in them because of their knowledge of God in all His love and power. When we truly understand that this whole God journey is a relationship then "building my faith" becomes irrelevant--indeed, counterproductive--because our trust is growing deeper and stronger as we get to know the One whose faithfulness stretches to the skies. Just a thought...
     Wow, I wish I could fully express what is in my heart right now! I so sense Papa God inviting us to allow Him to express His faithfulness to us so that we can walk with Him in confident expectancy all the time (like a trusting little child. Does that sound familiar?).
     I ran across a quote by Andrew Murray recently that expresses what I am saying in a few sentences. It's from his book, Divine Healing: “Remember that faith is not a logical reasoning that obliges God to act according to His promises. It is, rather, the confident attitude of a child who honors his Father and counts on his love. He knows His Father fulfills His promises and is faithful to communicate the new strength that flows from redemption to the body as well as to the soul, until the moment of departure comes.” Wow, there is so much there! Faith is not something that I "use to get God to behave," but is instead the trusting expectancy of a child who really knows his/her Father!
     And then there's this amazing conversation in The Shack (p. 127): "The real underlying flaw in your life, Mackenzie, is that you don't think that I am good. If you knew that I was good and that everything--the means, the ends, and all the processes of individual lives--is all covered by my goodness, then while you might not always understand what I am doing, you would trust me..."
     "Mackenzie, you cannot produce trust just like you cannot 'do' humility. It either is or is not. Trust is the fruit of a relationship in which you know you are loved. Because you do not know that I love you, you cannot trust me."
     Hmmm, so that brings us back to Ethan's and David's declarations that link God's love and faithfulness: God's faithfulness means that He is always, always good and always, always loving! 
     So what now? We cannot, of course, create trust by wishing it into existence. Rather, as the conversation in The Shack goes on to point out, we can only go on living our life in an increasingly surrendered relationship with Papa, Jesus and Holy Spirit, learning to depend on love and faithfulness that reach to the skies!
     Now here's a couple of suggestions for you, if you want to try them. First, do a search on faithfulness in the Bible and ponder what you discover. Second, to help combat the westernized version of "faith," take every place in the NT where you read "believe" and translate it "trust." You will be amazed at how this one little adjustment changes things for you.

Marveling at His faithfulness, trusting in His love...

Tom, Abba's little boy