“Great is Thy faithfulness, O God my Father

There is no shadow of turning with Thee

Thou changest not, Thy compassions, they fail not

As Thou hast been Thou forever wilt be

Great is Thy faithfulness, great is Thy faithfulness

Morning by morning new mercies I see

All I have needed Thy hand hath provided

Great is Thy faithfulness, Lord, unto me” 

~Thomas Obediah Chisholm

The words to this song have always touched something deep down in my soul, but never so much as after losing my mother to a horse accident almost six years ago. Since that day of immense loss and pain, whenever I hear this song, I am undone and can’t stop the flow of tears. 

It was after mom’s death that I realized that it is one thing to sing about God’s faithfulness when walking in life’s beautiful valleys where there is goodness & freedom from pain, but it’s a completely different song when stuck in the pit of sorrow and suffering. 

“Strength for today and bright hope for tomorrow” is not something that spoke to my heart until I desperately needed those words.

I have discovered that to experience the faithfulness of God, we have to walk in those places where His faithfulness is all we have to hold on to. 

We are at the aspect of “Faithfulness” in The Fruit Of The Spirit Series. This is the character quality of God that I am most grateful He pours into my life. Faithfulness is always a gift from God, and never something that is produced by me. It’s something I don’t have to strive to supply, but is given to me spontaneously by the Holy Spirit’s working in my life. On my own, my faith is weak and fickle. It can shift with every changing wind, one day up and strong, the next gone, and I’m left face down in dispair. Faith in myself, faith in others, or faith in circumstances will reveal itself to be weak and counterfeit at the first sign of testing and trials. 

Faithfulness can be like a kite. When the breeze is just right, we float and soar high above our circumstances, carefree and joyful. A calm current will carry us along and not a lot of faith is required. But, then, along comes a strong wind, and all of a sudden, we aren’t soaring, we’re whipping and tearing and hanging on for dear life to the string that tethers us. Sometimes we’re bashed up against or stuck in trees and power lines. Some days there isn’t a breath of air or any kind of draft to lift us up off the ground and we lay there stagnant and useless.

Those rough days are the ones where faith needs to remain steadfast and secure, where we remain tethered to the source of power that will once again lift us up and carry us to greater heights. 

But if discouragement from pain and disappointment keeps us from putting wings to our faith, if fear and uncertainty makes us reluctant to fly again, then we will remain immobile and weak in terms of our faithfulness.

I need the faithfulness of God and His Word, given to me through His Spirit, to stand up under the adversities in life. Faith is not just the basis for my belief, it also must be the basis for my behavior. 

Like the other traits of the Spirit’s Fruit, the more faith we live out, the more it grows. If we don’t actively practice faith, we allow it to become stale, it won’t grow and develop in our lives. But begin taking little steps of faith, and pretty soon you are running marathons and endurance races that faith is enabling you to run!

When I think of faithfulness, I think of the Spirit working it in us, both towards God and other people. We all know faithless and fickle people who let us down because they can’t be counted on; people whose words we can’t trust, whose loyalty seems sure one day but disappears at the first sign of trouble. We look for faithful people to include into our circle of closest friends and family, men and women who are reliable and steadfast in their love and care for us. 

I’m sure that every one of us has faced a time of betrayal from another person or maybe a time when we have betrayed someone we love. Without Christ, our motivation to live lives of faithfulness will shift and fade according to our selfish desires. 

The word “faithfulness” comes from the Greek word “pistis” and is used as “faith, belief, trust, confidence, and fidelity.” It’s the “conviction of the truth of anything, belief, in the New Testament of a conviction or belief respecting man’s relationship to God and divine things, generally with the included idea of trust and holy fervor born of faith and joined with it.” (Strong’s Concordance).

Faithfulness comes from a place of trust and loyalty. We see this in Hebrews 11:1, “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” This is the most solid conviction we can have, the God-given present assurance of a future reality. 

Faith is having a belief in something we can’t see or tangibly touch. “Faith extends beyond what we learn from our senses.” (Morris.) It isn’t a “blind faith”, it does have substance and a foundation. Faith isn’t based on fantasy or fiction, it is based on reason. However it can’t be measured or seen but has to be understood in our spirit. Faith is substantiated in things we don’t see or feel, it is found in a place of expectant hope and confident assurance.  

Faithfulness requires us to submit our ways to God and His trustworthiness, not to our current circumstances or based on how we feel at any given moment. The stories of faithfulness lived out in some of the Old Testament Saints found in Hebrews 11give us a sense of what it looks like to wait in trustful expectation. These men and women all demonstrate the value of living by faith. 

I see so many other examples of men and women whose lives have been defined by a deep faithfulness. One was the writer of the hymn I mentioned earlier. Thomas Obediah Chisholm was born in a small log cabin in Franklin, Kentucky in 1866. Chisholm became a Christian at age 27 and a Methodist minister at 36. He was only able to serve in ministry for one year before ill health forced him to quit. He was a poet at heart and wrote hundreds of poems over his lifetime. In 1923 Thomas was inspired by Lamentations 3:22-23 and wrote “Great Is Thy Faithfulness.” Suffering from ill-health most of his adult life, which resulted in poverty, he said, “God has given me many wonderful displays of His providing care, which have filled me with astonishing gratefulness.” Thomas Chisholm didn’t allow his sufferings to rob him of his faith, but instead based it on God’s faithfulness, and not his circumstances.

“Through the Lord’s mercies we are not consumed, because His compassions fail not. They are new every morning; great is Your faithfulness.” (Lamentations 3:22-23). The bedrock of our faith is that no matter what difficulties we face in life, the reality is that God keeps all of His promises according to who He is. God’s character is faithful and true, and we can depend on Him. That dependence is what upholds our faithfulness. A day-to-day trusting of the Lord will produce a steadfast faithfulness in our lives that will grow and develop into an enduring confidence in what He has promised us for the future.

It’s God who has called us to be faithful because HE is faithful (1 Thessalonians 5:24). God is faithful to do what He says He will do. EVERY TIME WITHOUT FAIL. He has called us to live lives of faithfulness, despite what hard things we face in life. 

Our faithfulness will endure when we put our trust in Him and not in ourselves, in others, or circumstances. Being a faithful follower of Jesus doesn’t mean that we are exempt from hardship, trials, pain, and sorrow. It means that we don’t go down those paths of affliction alone; we have a faithful Father going with us every step of the way. 

Living a life of steadfast faithfulness should be a mark of every Believer. We aren’t ruled by our circumstances or those things that Satan would love to use to destroy our faith in God. We are to be recognized by a faithfulness that doesn’t waver or fade or prove to be an imitation of true faith. Because we belong to One whose dedication will never falter or fail. 

His faithfulness is great, where my own faith might be weak. But all He requires from me is faith as small as a mustard seed. It’s not a matter of how much faith I have, God can do much with what faith I bring to Him. What is important is where I place my faith. If I put my faith in a great and mighty God, He will make me a woman of a great and mighty faith.