What is faithfulness?

What does it mean to be faithful? How would you describe it?

If we could go back in time and interview Saul of Tarsus before his Damascus Road experience and ask him, as he is persecuting Christians, “Saul, are you being faithful to God and His covenant with Israel?”—what do you think he would have said?

Can people be faithful to something other than God and God’s cause?

Would faithfulness include loyalty, reliability, and consistency? Would it also include integrity, faithfully fulfilling one’s duties, meaning to the standard or best of one’s abilities, and not cutting corners?

Doesn’t God want our faithfulness—people who are both reliable as people, but who will also stay true to and stick with the cause, the mission?

And what is necessary for people to be faithful to God? Are we naturally faithful? Can we be faithful by simply saying, “I will be faithful”? 

Isn’t faithfulness on our part the fruit of our first trusting God and being reborn with a new heart and right spirit? Isn’t it God living in us by His Holy Spirit that heals, renews, enlightens, and empowers us to be faithful?

And what wins us to trusting God? His faithfulness, as the apostle Paul wrote,

God trusted his message to the Jews. But what if some of them were not faithful? Does this mean that God will not be faithful? Certainly not! God must be true, even though every human being is a liar. As the scripture says, “You must be shown to be right when you speak; you must win your case when you are being tried” (Romans 3:2–4 GNT).

What undermines trust in God? Lies about Him. And what establishes trust in God? The truth about Him, His faithfulness and reliability, which is an outworking of His character, His being. He never changes; He is the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow. And His laws, the protocols He, as our never-changing Creator God, built into the operations of reality, are the design laws of life—therefore, they are also constant and reliable.

What undermines trust in God is the lie that He is not reliable, that He is not trustworthy, and this lie is promoted most effectively under the lie that God’s laws function like human law, made-up rules enforced through inflicted punishment.

Thus, our faithfulness requires our rebirth, and that requires that we are won back to trust, which requires we understand, believe, that God is truly trustworthy, and that requires we are won back to worshiping God as Creator, which requires we reject the penal/legal lies about God and understand His laws are design laws.

Paul, in our passage above, references the unfaithfulness of some of the Jews. Consider the object lesson of the ancient Israelites—after their 40 years of wandering, about to enter Canaan, and the 12 spies return. Joshua and Caleb gave an encouraging report, but 10 spies gave a discouraging one.

The people had two good reports, but the majority report was that the opposition was too great, the walls too high, the enemy too strong—and the people listened to that fear-inducing, negative, faith-undermining report that focused on the enemy, the obstacles, the problems, and not upon God and His promises, and they were defeated before even trying to occupy the land.

Do we ever hear leaders today tell us that sin is too great, the walls of wickedness too high, we are too sinful, that we can never overcome, that we will continue to live defeated in sin until Jesus comes and that our only hope is to claim the legal payment for our sins while we continue to live sinfully?

Does faithfulness mean faithfully claiming Jesus’ blood payment to protect us from the Father while we live defeated in sin? Is that the gospel message, that we cannot experience, through faith, God’s victory over sinful living here and now, that the enemy is too strong?

Being Transformed

Let’s explore two paragraphs from the Bible commentary The Desire of Ages that address this topic; what do you think of these? Do you agree or disagree?

The Comforter is called “the Spirit of truth.” His work is to define and maintain the truth. He first dwells in the heart as the Spirit of truth, and thus He becomes the Comforter. There is comfort and peace in the truth, but no real peace or comfort can be found in falsehood. It is through false theories and traditions that Satan gains his power over the mind. By directing men to false standards, he misshapes the character. Through the Scriptures the Holy Spirit speaks to the mind, and impresses truth upon the heart. Thus He exposes error, and expels it from the soul. It is by the Spirit of truth, working through the word of God, that Christ subdues His chosen people to Himself (The Desire of Ages, p. 671.1).

Before we consider the paragraph that immediately follows this—what do you think of this one? Take a moment and think deeply about what is being described.

How is an individual changed or transformed? It is not by truth cognitively comprehended (remember that the demons cognitively know the truth and are afraid, Luke 8:26–28; James 2:19), but by truth taken into the heart as building blocks to the individual, applied to the life. And as we choose truth, say yes, and take it into our hearts as truths we identify with, cherish, prefer, and make part of our values, priorities, and standards, our brains change. When we have an epiphany, an internalization and application of truth to ourselves, there is an immediate change in the substructure of our neurons. The tubulin molecules that make up the microtubules within neurons and where memories are stored, change their polarity, encoding the truth we choose to embrace. This changes the resonant frequency, the harmonic quantum vibrations, of our consciousness, our spirit, and we, by the internalization of truth, come into ever-closer harmony, unity, resonance with the Holy Spirit.

And this saving truth is brought to us by the working of the Holy Spirit; it is not conjured, discovered, or created by our fallen human ingenuity or imagination. In fact, our fallen hearts and minds cannot appreciate God’s truth without the aid of the Holy Spirit. Reading the Bible, which is God’s Word, without the enlightening of the Holy Spirit will not result in comprehension of truth. Many people have read the Bible without the enlightenment of the Holy Spirit and used it to promote falsehood. The Spirit of truth brings truth to our hearts and minds in ways we can understand and then leaves us free to choose. Will we accept the truth and choose it for ourselves, or reject the truth and cling to the lie?

As we choose the truth, our brains change, and truth by truth, we are transformed and our spirits are cleansed; we become ever more in harmony with the Holy Spirit, and our consciences become more sensitive to His movements. When we embrace the truth and say yes, we not only experience a real-time change in our brains that transforms our spirits (we have all experienced this, the immediate peace, joy, presence of God in our hearts), we also receive divine power to succeed in living out that truth in our lives. The truth comes from God, the conviction comes from God, the power to succeed comes from God—but the choice to accept or reject the truth comes from us.

Then, as we make choices to live out the truth over time, our brain circuits rewire—old circuits are pruned back and bad habits lose power, and new circuits are wired in and godly habits become easier to carry out. We are actually, in reality, being transformed into the image of Christ.

But the converse is true. If we choose the lie, the ugly, the false, the perverse, it gets encoded in the substructure of our brains and our spirit resonates ever more closely with the demonic, the evil, and as we live and act out the evil, we wire that into our brains and, if we do not repent and choose truth, love, and trust, we eventually cut ourselves off from the Holy Spirit by destroying within ourselves the faculties that respond to the Spirit of truth. This is what Pharaoh did to himself when Moses brought truth upon truth, through the ten plagues, demonstrating that Pharaoh’s gods were false. Every time he chose to reject the truth, he changed himself, taking himself further out of harmony with the Holy Spirit until he destroyed his conscience and no further amount of truth had any impact upon him.

What is described in this first paragraph is exactly how I understand reality works, how the Spirit of truth frees people and conforms them to Christ. Now let’s consider the next paragraph from the commentary:

In describing to His disciples the office work of the Holy Spirit, Jesus sought to inspire them with the joy and hope that inspired His own heart. He rejoiced because of the abundant help He had provided for His church. The Holy Spirit was the highest of all gifts that He could solicit from His Father for the exaltation of His people. The Spirit was to be given as a regenerating agent, and without this the sacrifice of Christ would have been of no avail. The power of evil had been strengthening for centuries, and the submission of men to this satanic captivity was amazing. Sin could be resisted and overcome only through the mighty agency of the Third Person of the Godhead, who would come with no modified energy, but in the fullness of divine power. It is the Spirit that makes effectual what has been wrought out by the world’s Redeemer. It is by the Spirit that the heart is made pure. Through the Spirit the believer becomes a partaker of the divine nature. Christ has given His Spirit as a divine power to overcome all hereditary and cultivated tendencies to evil, and to impress His own character upon His church (The Desire of Ages, p. 671.2, emphasis mine).

Do you agree or disagree?

Do you realize that if this is true, this paragraph alone destroys the penal-substitutionary model of salvation?

The penal model is built upon the lie that God’s law functions like human law, made-up rules that require external enforcement through inflicted punishments. And in that false understanding, it teaches that all our sin-crimes were legally placed upon Jesus and punished by the Father, who, it is claimed, killed Jesus for our sins. And then it is claimed that salvation is experienced when we claim Jesus’ blood as our legal payment and the Father, in the legal court system of heaven, then makes a verbal and legal declaration that we are considered or reckoned or accounted to be righteous, even though we, in reality, in heart, mind, and function remain unrighteous. This model teaches that the effect of Jesus’ substitutionary sacrifice does not require the work of the Holy Spirit to make it effectual in you or me; instead, it teaches that the effect of Jesus’ sacrifice is legal and is applied in the heavenly courts to affect or impact the Father so He won’t kill us.

This model, in function, rather than leading people to trust the Father, actually causes people to trust in the blood, the robe of righteousness, to cover and hide them from the Father, the intercessory pleas of Jesus to His Father (or for some the added pleas of Mary and the saints) because they really do not trust the Father, believing falsely that He will have to kill them if these legal interventions are not done.

But the truth, the reality, about salvation is what Jesus told Nicodemus—that we must be reborn with a new heart and right spirit (John 3:3). Just as Paul later taught,

God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God (2 Corinthians 5:21 NIV84, emphasis mine).

God is the God of reality, not legal fiction. And He has provided, through Jesus, the means for human sinners to become righteous, not merely be declared legally righteous while they remain unrighteous. And we become the righteousness of God when we surrender our old life of fear and selfishness and are reborn with the life of Christ; just as the commentary quoted 2 Peter 1:4, we become partakers of the divine nature. This is the work of the Holy Spirit, who brings us the life of Jesus and shares that life with us. As Paul wrote,

But you do not live as your human nature tells you to; instead, you live as the Spirit tells you to—if, in fact, God’s Spirit lives in you. Whoever does not have the Spirit of Christ does not belong to him. But if Christ lives in you, the Spirit is life for you because you have been put right with God, even though your bodies are going to die because of sin (Romans 8:9, 10 GNT, emphasis mine).

Being put right with God is becoming the righteousness of God, which is reality; we are right in heart with God again.

Jesus is the vine, we are the branches, and the Holy Spirit is the connecting link that infuses us with the animating energy, life, Spirit of Jesus, and when we are reborn with new motives, desires, drives, and choose to live out that new life, we are transformed.

Thus, as the author wrote, without the Holy Spirit coming into our hearts and minds and transfusing us with the life of Christ, His death on the cross does us no individual good, because salvation is not achieved through external legal pardon; it is achieved only by actual, reality-based, healing, transformation, recreation of the heart and mind by receiving a new life, the life of Christ.

The only way we can be faithful to God is by being reborn through the Holy Spirit, who first brings us the truth, which we choose to say yes to, and then, as we choose to open our hearts in trust, the Holy Spirit indwells us, bringing us the life of Christ. We are empowered, motivated, and inspired with new desires, motives, wisdom, and power. We are transformed into the image of Christ in reality; we live His life, as Paul wrote,

I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me (Galatians 2:20 NIV84).

This is the only way we can be faithful to God, by trusting Him and being restored to harmony with Him through the indwelling Holy Spirit. This is reality. I encourage you, if you haven’t already done so, choose truth, choose Jesus, choose to say yes to the truth the Holy Spirit has brought into your life and be reborn into a faithful son or daughter of our King!