Knowing a Faithful God (Pt. 1)

If you ever start to take God’s faithfulness for granted, consider how He faithfully
holds all of creation in His hands, and what would happen if He didnt. Dr. David
Jeremiah celebrates God’s steadfast faithfulness and how it affects the lives of His
children every day, in big ways and small.

And I wanna thank you for joining us today. We are studying the character of God.
We’re basing this whole approach on the idea that the better, you know, someone, the more you will want to know them and the more you’ll want to worship them, especially if that person that you’re getting to know is God himself.
And this is based on a book I wrote called the God.
You may not know, take the journey from knowing about God to knowing God.
And uh today, we’re going to talk about God’s faithfulness yesterday and the day before we talked about his holiness, but God is not just holy.
He’s also faithful. And uh when you understand the faithfulness of God, especially if you happen to be a Christian, it is such a blessing because unfaithfulness seems to be the coin of the day, God never fails.
I remember growing up in my house, we used to have uh a little plaque in the dining room and the plaque said Jesus never fails.
And that was always such an encouragement to me.
I failed a lot, but Jesus never did and he never does.
And we’re going to talk about the faithfulness of God as we open our Bibles in just a few moments, friends.
We’re going to be in Boise Idaho in just a few days on the 20th of April.
And we’d like you to come and be with us for a night of fellowship and celebration at the Extra Mile Arena in Boise, Idaho.
And it is a ticketed event, but the tickets are free and you get your tickets from David Jeremiah dot org.
And when you go there, you will find a place where you can go to tours or rallies.
You can order your tickets online, have them sent right to your home and they will be there for you so that you can come and be with us on the 20th of April.
I, I need to just say this to all of our friends in Boise and Boise is not a place we have ever been before.
Everybody we know tells us what a beautiful place it is.
We have a lot of uh friends from Shadow Mountain Church who moved to Idaho and live there and we’re excited to see all of them, including an old friend of mine by the name of Ben Harris, who’s the pastor of a church there.
But we need you all to help us get people to this event.
We are on a radio in Boise and only on television through the network.
So we don’t have the same amount of presence that we have other places and we’re going to need everyone to help us make this night a night to remember to encourage us in our walk with the Lord.
As we continue to face the challenges of the culture in which we’re practicing our faith.
We hope you will come and be with us.
It’ll be a night of encouragement and blessing and motivation to keep us going right now.
Here’s part one of knowing a faithful God.
Jim and Carol Simla are good friends of ours don.
And I have known them for many years and almost every year we go to New York City to speak at the Brooklyn Tabernacle.
Some of you remember when I was sick, Jim took off a Sunday from his great church in New York and came here and spoke at this church in my absence, Jim and Carol know something about the faithfulness of God.
They prayed and praised and preached their way through a personal two year nightmare.
Their teenage daughter, Chrissy had gotten involved with some unhealthy influences and turned her back on the God.
They loved and served so faithfully.
Although their hearts were breaking, they continued ministering to the people of the Brooklyn Tabernacle in New York City.
During that time, Carol wrote a song that has become one of my favorite songs.
Some people think that she wrote her song.
He’s been faithful after her daughter returned, but she didn’t, she wrote it before she returned and she wrote it as she was laying in a hospital bed, recovering from surgery to remove cancer from her body.
The chorus goes like this. He’s been faithful, faithful to me.
Looking back his loving mercy.
I see though in my heart, I have questioned, even failed to believe he’s been faithful. Faithful to me.
Carol refers to that time in her life and says that song was a song of hope born in the midst of pain while hurting deeply.
She said that her song became like a bomb to her heart, strengthening her once again and the words she wrote during that time helped her move forward.
Although her daughter had not yet come back to the Lord, she could still praise him for his loving faithfulness in her own life.
And later, when Chrissy showed up at home and fell to her knees begging forgiveness.
The truth of Psalm 119 verse 90 became real to Carol.
God is faithful, not just to our generation, but to all generations.
Carol experienced in a new way, a line of her own song that has blessed so many people.
What I thought was impossible. I’ve seen my God do faithfulness isn’t just a quaint morality or an old fashioned virtue.
It’s the core of integrity.
It’s the glue that holds our culture together without faithfulness, relationships can’t survive and society can’t function.
It is essential to life on this earth.
In other words, without the faithfulness of God for example, the universe would be erratic and unpredictable.
The planets would wobble in their orbits and the laws of nature would be unreliable and the sun would shine when it felt like it.
And when it didn’t, it wouldn’t, without the faithfulness of God, there would be no stability in the universe at all.
Did you know the Bible says in Colossians 1 17 that through Jesus Christ, he is before all things and in Him, all things hold together.
The faithfulness of God is the glue that holds this world together.
If God should for one moment, withdraw his hand from this earth, it would fly into chaos and be forever gone.
Psalm 89 2 actually says that God’s faithfulness is established in the very heavens.
And in Genesis, we have one of the great promises that to me is the great illustration of the faithfulness of God.
God promised after the flood.
While the earth remains seed, time and harvest cold and heat, winter and summer and day and night shall not cease.
Do you know what? Since He made that promise, we’ve had seed time and harvest every year, cold and heat, every day, winter and summer, every year and day and night.
Never once has it failed. Behind the stability of nature is the consistency of God.
And it’s a source of great thanksgiving for all of us.
In the hymn that’s written about the faithfulness of God.
There’s a verse that goes like this summer and winter and spring time and harvest sun, moon and stars in their courses above join with all nature in manifold witness to thy great faithfulness, mercy and love.
I came here to tell you that our God can be trusted, always trusted, eternally trusted.
He never forgets he never falters. He never fails.
He always keeps his word and there is no possibility that he will ever change.
The Bible says that faithfulness is the very clothing that God wears Isaiah 11 5, righteousness shall be the belt of his loins and faithfulness, the belt of his waist when you stop and think about it.
It’s interesting why so many people are unfaithful these days.
In my research for this message, I came up with all kinds of statistics about the unfaithfulness in marriage and all of that.
But it’s depressing and I didn’t want to tell you about it. It’s just not good.
Some people today are unfaithful because they’re just too lazy, too lazy to do what they promised to do.
Some people are unfaithful because their resolve gives out and they don’t have the stamina for the long haul.
Sometimes their unfaithfulness is the result of desire or fear or weakness or of the loss of interest or outside influence.
But none of these things, none of these things affect God in the Old Testament scriptures.
We read these words, God is not a man that he should lie, nor a son of man that he should repent.
Has he said? And will he not do or has he spoken? And will he not make it good?
Psalm 119 verse nine says, your faithfulness endures to all generations, you establish the earth and it abides no wonder the prophet Jeremiah wrote.
His compassion. Fail not. They are new every morning. Great. Is your faithfulness?
Did you know that the Hebrew word for faithfulness that Jeremiah uses in this text is the word Aman.
Yeah, it’s the word from which we get the word amen.
It is a word which means so be it.
So when you say amen in church to what I’m preaching on, you’re just saying so be it pastor, so be it.
God is the amen of every one of His promises.
In fact, there’s an interesting verse in Second Corinthians that says for all the promises of God in Him are yes and in Him, amen to the glory of God through us.
God’s faithfulness stands at the very center of his creation and it resides in the core of His revelation, the scripture because faithfulness means keeping one’s word.
There’s a great line about this in Joshua’s farewell speech to his people.
He gave this speech just before he was to die.
It’s in the 23rd chapter of the book that has his name on the front of it.
And here’s what he said. Listen to these words. He’s speaking to the people of Israel.
He says, behold this day, I’m going the way of all the earth and you know, in all your hearts and in all your souls that not one thing has failed.
Of all the good things which the Lord your God spoke concerning. You all have come to pass.
Not one word of them has failed.
The faithfulness of God is his determination to do what he has said, to always do what he says without variant.
The Bible says, therefore, know that the Lord, your God, he is God. He is the faithful God.
I woke up thinking how blessed I am to come here and brag on the faithfulness of God.
He’s a faithful God. But let’s bring this down to California and New York and Florida to your house and to my house.
Let’s bring this teaching down to earth because I want you to see how it affects you.
The attributes of God are great subjects to study, but they are not abstract concepts.
They have immediate profound life changing effect on us right here.
And now there is no subject in the law of God or in the libraries of men more relevant to you and to me today than the faithfulness of God.
And I want to suggest five ways His faithfulness affects us.
Number one, God’s faithfulness precludes, worry could ask the question. You got any worriers here today.
Don’t raise your hand, you’ll worry about raising your hand. All the rest of the day.
So don’t raise your hand. But we all have a tendency to worry, don’t we?
And it’s more so now than ever before because there’s so many more things to worry about than we’ve ever had.
But God’s faithfulness allows us to have total confidence in every promise he has written it frees us from the grip of anxious worry.
The Bible says in Hebrews 10 23. He who promised is faithful.
In other words, he’s going to keep his promise.
All his promises which cover every moment of our lives are as certain as his character.
The Bible speaks of Jesus as the faithful witness, the first born from the dead and his resurrection is the sign and seal of God’s power to guarantee to us his word.
He said he would come back from the grave. And what did he do?
He came back from the dead and the Bible ends with ringing declaration.
It says in revelation 22 verse six, these words are faithful and true.
It’s almost as if a postscript to the Bible looking back over all the pages.
One of the last verses in the scripture says, you can count on it. Friends.
These words are faithful and true.
Many years ago, there was a Bible scholar in London who developed an incredible interest in the subject of the promises of God in the Bible.
So he went through the scripture and he listed his favorite promises and there were a lot of them, he copied them into a manuscript and put some commentary along with them an application and he sent them all to a publisher.
And when his book came out, it was simply titled The Promises of God.
Well, time went on and other books came along and the market changed.
And one day this man’s book went through its last edition.
It was no longer reprinted copies were hard to find.
Some time later, there was an elderly woman in England who remembered the book and she decided she wanted a copy.
So she wrote the publisher saying, I’m looking for a copy of the book. The Promises of God.
Do you have any in stock? And the publisher wrote back a brief reply. I’m sorry.
He said, but the promises of God are out of print. Aren’t you glad?
The promises of God are not out of print. I have a copy right here.
They will never be out of print. They will never be out of date.
They will never be out of reach. They are as enduring as his inspired word.
They’re as trustworthy as his unchanging nature. The writer of the book of Psalms put it this way forever.
Oh Lord, your word is settled in heaven. Your faithfulness endures to all generations.
There’s a promise in the Bible for every situation you will ever face and none of God’s promises will ever fail.
Not even the slightest jot or tittle that dispels worry gives you a basis for freeing yourself from the grip of anxiety when you can step back from it all, no matter how intense it gets and look up and know the God who created this universe, the God who causes the sun to come up every day and to go down at night and the seasons to come and go and the heat and the cold and all the other things he promised of which we can now look and say they have never failed.
He’s the God who is in control of your life and in control of mine.
I’ll never forget a funeral we had at this church some years ago when a terrible tragedy had happened here and the husband of the woman who died stood on this platform and said, this.
People ask me all the time. Now during these days, how are you handling this?
How do you manage this? And he just said, I trust God, I trust God.
God’s faithfulness precludes worry. God’s faithfulness promises answers because God is faithful. We have confidence.
When we pray through prayer, we can touch him immediately.
Psalm 143 1 says, Lord, hear my prayer, listen to my cry for mercy in your faithfulness and righteousness.
Come to my relief. How can I know that God hears my prayers because it’s the nature of God to be faithful, to be constant and consistent and to come to our relief.
Jeremiah says, it this way. Call to me and I will answer you and show you great and mighty things which you do not know.
Jason Meyer was taking studies in the doctoral program and he was working very hard, not getting much sleep.
One day, he was driving home very early around 4 30 in the morning and falling asleep at the wheel and he tried everything to stay awake.
He turned up the radio, he tried to sing real loud. He even slapped himself in the face.
And the next thing he knew he woke up in his driveway more than a little shaken because he had no idea how he got there as he walked into the house.
Now eerily awake, he entered his bedroom and noticed the strangest thing. His wife was wide awake.
She would normally be asleep. But instead she was sitting up in bed waiting for him.
She said hi, honey. How was your drive?
Myers said it’s funny you should ask, I really struggle to stay awake on the drive home.
In fact, I don’t know how I got here.
Yeah, I figured she said, what do you mean? You figured?
Well, she said I woke at 4 30 very suddenly and felt this intense prompting to pray.
So I figured you must be struggling on the road since that’s around the time you normally come home.
So I prayed for you. Looking back on this event, Meyer concludes, I think I’m still alive.
Today because my wife obeyed the spirit’s prompting to pray.
I hope this story gives you a greater sense of what’s at stake in prayer.
Every time you awake to pray, don’t go back to sleep, whatever it is you’re supposed to pray for, pray for it.
Because God woke you up to pray and God woke her up to pray and heard her prayer.
God’s faithfulness protects us from evil.
God is faithful in keeping us from evil and from the evil one, we often underestimate the spiritual danger.
That’s all around us. Jesus told us to request protection.
He said, do not lead us into a temptation but deliver us from the evil one.
Till I began working on this message.
I had never connected the attribute of God’s faithfulness with my protection.
And then I read second Thessalonians chapter three and verse three, the Lord is faithful who will establish you and guard you from the evil one.
Paul wrote that in second Thessalonians chapter three and it had an impact on me the next morning after I read that I heard myself saying, I don’t know what’s going to happen in my life today, but God’s protecting me.
God’s got a hedge around me. He’s guarding me.
Let me ask you a question when you think of the faithfulness of God, what comes to your mind first?
I bet if we could all be honest, we’d probably say, I think of how unfaithful I’ve been when I think of how faithful he’s been.
It makes me feel kind of bad because I know I’ve not always been faithful to him, but I got some good news for you today that maybe you haven’t heard before.
I want you to know that when we come to face God’s faithfulness and contrast it with our own, we don’t have to worry because second Timothy 2 13 is in the Bible and this is what it says.
If we are faithless, he remains faithful because he cannot deny himself.
Ladies and gentlemen, aren’t you glad that God’s faithfulness to you is not conditioned upon your faithfulness to Him.
Oh my goodness, that sends horror through your mind, doesn’t it?
But the Bible says it is God who is faithful.
He cannot be unfaithful to us because we’re unfaithful to Him because He is never unfaithful.
So even when we fail, even when we look back and we come to the Lord and we say, Lord, it’s me again.
It’s the same thing we talked about yesterday. He never stops being faithful to us.
If you’re a Jesus follower and you feel defeated by your failures, join the club.
But let me remind you of something God’s faithfulness to you is not conditioned by your faithfulness to Him.
He is faithful to you no matter what.
And then here’s something all of us who love music resonate with God’s faithfulness promotes praise.
The writer of Psalm 89 said it this way, I will sing of the mercies of the Lord forever with my mouth.
Will I make known your faithfulness to all generations and the heavens will praise your wonders.
Oh Lord, your faithfulness also in the assembly of the saints.
Oh Lord God of hose, who is mighty like you?
Oh Lord, your faithfulness also surrounds you because God is faithful. We can’t help but praise Him.
We want to praise Him. We hear a message like this.
We read scriptures like this and we want to stand up with our hands up high and say, Lord, thank you for being so faithful to me.
Psalms 71 22 says with the loot, I will praise you and your faithfulness.
Oh my God to you, I will sing with the harp. Oh Holy one of Israel.
Let me tell you what I know until we praise God.
We have not truly enjoyed God until we learn how to worship God.
We are leaving a lot of the blessings of God on the table.
If you know how faithful He is my friend, you cannot help but praise Him.
It is a good thing to give thanks to the Lord and to sing praises to your name almost high to declare your loving kindness in the morning and your faithfulness every night.
Isn’t it interesting that we declare His loving kindness in the morning?
And then we go through the day and when we get through the day we look back and we declare His faithfulness because his loving kindness was faithful all day long.
God’s faithfulness precludes worry, his faithfulness promises, answers His faithfulness protects us from evil and his faithfulness promotes praise.
But there’s one more God’s faithfulness provides encouragement.
I hope that’s been true.
As you’ve listened to this, God’s faithfulness provides encouragement.
We’ll have some more about that tomorrow when we get together for the Thursday edition of Turning Point.
But before we say our final goodbye, I’m still telling everybody about our tour to Alaska, uh July 15th to the 22nd.
Uh We want you to come with us.
We’re going to have two special guests with us during that week, James Brown and Tony Dungy from CBS and NBC Sports.
These two men are going to share with us about what it means to be a Christian in the NFL.
We’re gonna have a night when my son Daniel, who is from the NFL network will interview these two men.
And then we’re gonna have some just times when we can sit around and talk football.
If we want, this will be a great week. I hope you’re gonna come.
We are going to have a huge number of people on this event.
It may be the largest cruise event we have ever done and little by little every day we’re running out of room.
So I’m not making this up. I’m telling you if you want to go to Alaska with us.
You should make your reservation as soon as possible and don’t forget to join us tomorrow for part two of knowing a faithful God.