What Would Jesus Do? (Part 6) – Be Faithful

I am a dog person. My wife and I have had at least one dog (and often more than one) through most of our 33 years of marriage. Our family never seems quite right without a dog in the home. And one of the things that makes dogs so special to us is their own brand of faithfulness. It seems like you can always count on being well-received by your dog when you get home and that you will always be the center of their devoted attention to you when you’re with them. In the ways that dogs are faithful, they are stunningly consistent!

In Matthew 6:9-10, in teaching His disciples how to pray, Jesus prayed “Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” In the Lord’s prayer, the first things Jesus taught us pray for is that the Father’s name be honored as holy (“hallowed”) and that His kingdom would come. And as an expression of both of those longings in our own lives, we pray that the Father would move in us, His kingdom citizens, to do His will on earth as it is done in heaven…to be faithful. This is the essence of faithfulness: doing the Father’s will by His grace and to His glory. In a fascinating passage in Hebrews 10, the scripture captures our Lord Jesus’ response to the Father sending Him into the world to take on our human form. Hebrews 10:5-7 reads “Consequently, when Christ came into the world, he said, “Sacrifices and offerings you have not desired, but a body have you prepared for me; in burnt offerings and sin offerings you have taken no pleasure. Then I said, ‘Behold, I have come to do your will, O God, as it is written of me in the scroll of the book.’” Jesus came into this world, taking on our human form, for the express purpose of doing the Father’s will on earth as it is done in heaven. And as in everything Jesus did in this world as one who is like us in every way, yet without sin, He serves as an example that we should follow. And what does that example look like?

John’s gospel gives us a series of pictures of Jesus’ faithfulness to the Father, beginning in John 5:19 where Jesus says “Truly, truly, I say to you, the Son can do nothing of his own accord, but only what he sees the Father doing. For whatever the Father does, that the Son does likewise.” And then, in John 5:30, Jesus says “I can do nothing on my own. As I hear, I judge, and my judgment is just, because I seek not my own will but the will of him who sent me.” Lastly, Jesus reiterates in a summary fashion “For I have come down from heaven, not to do my own will but the will of him who sent me” (John 6:38). Jesus was (and is) consummately faithful to do the Father’s will, and His calling to His disciples is to do likewise as Jesus makes clear in the great commission when He commands the church to make disciples, “teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you” with the great promise that we don’t undertake this task of faithfulness alone, for “surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age” (Matthew 28:20).

What would Jesus do? He would be faithful to do the Father’s will on earth as it is done in heaven, and so should His followers. But the great blessing for His followers is that He is still faithful, just as Paul teaches when he writes “if we are faithless, he remains faithful— for he cannot deny himself” (2nd Timothy 2:13). And this faithfulness of Christ is manifest in our lives by His determination to impart to believers the likeness of His character until His work in us is finished. This great blessing of grace is expressed by Paul in one of my favorite passages that I leave you with today as a blessing to you as you seek to be faithful as He is faithful. Paul tells the church at Corinth that “you are not lacking in any gift, as you wait for the revealing of our Lord Jesus Christ, who will sustain you to the end, guiltless in the day of our Lord Jesus Christ. God is faithful, by whom you were called into the fellowship of his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord” (1st Corinthians 1:7-9).