Faithfulness is a deep and profound concept in my mind .The concept is of course built around the faithfulness of God. That means that I need to think about what I mean when I say God is faithful.
I have sometimes asked a group of people in a Bible class I was teaching to tell me how God has been faithful to them. That gendered remarks like God is reliable, loving, supporting, enabling, always on our side, interested in our welfare, teaching without judging, always there, meeting our needs.
For me faithfulness reminds me of the name of God given to us. God is named the great I Am. In the teaching of Jesus I think of Jesus saying I AM the bread of life or I AM the thirst quenching water we all need.
A woman once suggested to me I should draw an outline of my hand on paper to help me understand faithfulness. Then I should imagine faithfulness being long where my fingers are short and completing my fingers where they are long. God’s faithfulness completely meets my need in a way that is defined by my needs and completes your needs differently from me in the way that is defined by your needs.
Now I want to move on to faithfulness in marriage and the faithfulness we need to offer each other. We are called to be faithful in all human relationships in the way that each relationship needs us to be faithful.
Unfortunately in our marriages faithfulness is often restricted to sexual faithfulness. I think God so values marriage that God commands us to be faithful in the broad way we expect and experience in God’s faithfulness to us. We are be to our mates following the example of faithfulness of Christ to his church.
Our faithfulness to each other needs to be reliable, loving, supporting, enabling, always on our side, interested in our welfare, teaching without judging, always there, meeting our needs just like God’s faithfulness is experienced by all of us.
Many a marriage relationships where the partner has been faithful sexually the partner has been unfaithful because the partner has fallen woefully short in terms of what faithfulness actually required because of God’s example. In our day the faithfulness 0f God has been amplified by the fully human example of the incarnation of Jesus
I have known that faithfulness in all 81 years of my life. I want to be faithful to you in the complete way I have known from God for all my decades.
George Caywood 