Devotional:

1 Corinthians 1.9

God is faithful; by him you were called into the fellowship of his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord.

On any given day when I hear about faithfulness, it is often attributed to people. When a family is in church every Sunday for months in a row, I’ll overhear someone describe them as a truly “faithful” family. When a wife shares about her husband’s infidelity, she describes him having broken his “faithfulness.” When a family shares the story about Santa Claus with a questioning child they ask him/her to keep the “faith.”

Even from the pulpit, I am apt to use language about faithfulness primarily in regards to us. On any given Sunday I can wax lyrical about faithful giving, and faithful praying, and faithful yearning. I can quote the parables describing faith like a mustard seed, I can debate different uses of faith by Jesus across the gospels, and I can encourage people to have the type of faith that can move mountains.

But the faith I hear about the least, and sadly the faith I talk about the least, is the faith of God.

Paul begins his first letter to the church in Corinth with a declaration not about who they are, but about who God is: “God is faithful; by him you were called into the fellowship of his Son, Jesus the Christ.” However, there are many moments in the realm of “doing Church” where we make it all about us and what we do. We say things like, “Let us now go and do likewise,” or “Accept Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior,” and it’s like God isn’t even in the room.

But the bible, and what it means to be the church, is always primarily about God, and only secondarily about us.

At the heart of following Jesus is the recognition that God (in Christ) is faithful. God is faithful to the promises of scripture. God is faithful in receiving our prayers. God is faithful in delivering us out of captivity to sin and death. God calls us into fellowship with the Son. God reveals God’s self in the breaking of bread and the sharing of the cup. God destroys us and resurrects us to new life in baptism. God is faithful.

At the beginning of the liturgical year, it is good and right for us to remember that God is God and we are not, that God moves in and through us, and that God is faithful even when we are not.