Faithfulness week2

  Fear the LORD your God and serve him. Hold fast to him and take your oaths in his name. He is the one you praise; he is your God, who performed for you those great and awesome wonders you saw with your own eyes. Your ancestors who went down into Egypt were seventy in all, and now the LORD your God has made you as numerous as the stars in the sky.   Deuteronomy 10.20-22

Moses reminds the Israelites that God took Israel into Egypt as a group of some 70 souls. Four hundred years later they emerged as a nation. Many of us never live long enough to see God’s promises to us completely fulfilled. God made this promise of nationhood to Abram and Sarai in Genesis 12. Even at the end of Abraham’s life. Israel was a very small nation, numbering only three people. But in a day long after his death, the nation numbered in the millions.

Faithfulness always serves the purposes of God in our lives, but often the mills of God grind slowly. Only from a vantage point far down the years can we really see the intentions of God come to pass. Faithfulness is the character trait Abraham exhibited to the very end of his life. But even as he died, he could not measure the extent of the promise that was to come from his faithfulness. That finished vision was perhaps a score of lifetimes away.

Still, the promises of God never sleep.

In past days, a stonecutter often hands down the work of a cathedral to his son, and he to his son, and so on down the line, until long after the original stonecutter himself slept in the churchyard, his dreams towered above his sleeping confidence. Faithfulness instructs us on how to live with purpose, but even better than that, it is something that we can hand off to our children until, as Abraham discovered, the world is blessed because of that simple discipline called obedience.

Faithfulness is something that any of us can offer to God. And when we give it, He gives us a purpose for every morning’s sunrise. We live and have a great reason to live.