The Real God - The Faithfulness Of God, Part 1

Are you down today, discouraged, maybe even really, really depressed? Has a relationship turned so sour, so difficult that you never thought you could feel the way that you feel? Has a job, a health issue, something happened to your life that you just feel like, I can't go on and I don't know where to go from here?

If that's you, stay with me. God has a word of encouragement for you today. Welcome to this Edition of Living on the Edge with Chip Ingram. Chip's our Bible teacher on this international discipleship program, and I'm Dave Drew. Chip's in a series called The Real God, talking about seven key characteristics that describe who God really is.

The first six characteristics we studied were God's goodness, His sovereignty and holiness, His wisdom, justice and love. To hear those messages, you can catch up anytime with the Chip Ingram app. In this program, Chip reveals the multifaceted attribute of God's faithfulness. And after the teaching, he's going to give us some practical ways to begin experiencing God's faithfulness, even today. You know, you may have a friend who needs to hear this message.

If you do, just tell them about the Chip Ingram app, where they can listen anytime. Okay, let's get going. Here's Chip with his message, The Faithfulness of God. If you would come into my home, we have a foyer. And at the very end, before you go anywhere, there is a picture that hangs. And as you get a close up, we happen to take a good one.

It's about a year old. The pastor's family, everyone looks nice and happy. And, you know, each one of my sons and daughter, they've married well and they're all walking with God and they're raising these kids. And you would just kind of think that, you know, that stereotypical, you know, God must bless pastors and their lives are kind of pretty easy and wonderful and things just turn out right. That's not why it's at the hall.

It's not so much for other people, but every day I have to walk past it. And this picture for me is a reminder of the greatest trophy of God's grace is what he did in that group of people. My wife and I neither grew up knowing God. We both came to Christ as adults. Both of us came from alcoholic families with fathers that were deeply wounded from World War II.

And it produced some very unhealthy things. We came to Christ and by God's faithfulness, some people came into our life and helped us get into the Scriptures and gave us good counseling. And we did life in community and little by little we changed and we grew and then we got married and we thought, wow, this is going to be great.

I love God, you love God, first generation. And then after about six months, we realized that we couldn't communicate. We didn't know how to resolve conflict and we both had boatloads of baggage from alcoholic families.

By God's grace, he brought a professor and a counselor into our life and we started going to marriage counseling and he began to heal us. Well, Teresa had been married before, before she was a Christian. And when he found out that she was pregnant, he left with another woman that he'd been seeing. And I just couldn't figure out how to love my wife because it was like BBs off of a tank. The way she saw herself from her background and being rejected and abandoned is that she saw herself so negatively.

And I saw her as beautiful and godly and then I saw God's faithfulness where, again, we got some help and we dug into some books together and I watched God begin to heal her. And well, then these poor, you know, these were these were twin boys, you know, I got to adopt them, great privilege when they were five and a half. And so they had this overachieving, workaholic, over the top dad who was way too hard on them. And my one son was just because of his early background, very fearful. I had to make him learn to ride a bike. The other had a four year rebellion that was the biggest heartbreak of our life. And the one that was afraid of people is now a physical therapist and has the best people skills in our family of loving people.

And the one that we thought, will he ever come back to the Lord is now writing music that the world sings. My other son, his senior year, he had a pornography problem. And it happened, quote, by accident.

It really did. And it was hidden for a year. And he took some major steps and still all the passwords his wife keeps.

He's a pastor now. My daughter was a lot younger. She's six years younger than my youngest son is six years younger than the older boys. And she kind of grew up with these sort of, you know, psycho dad who's really intense and a very loving mom. And so she got a little bit perfectionistic. And so my one son didn't like school and then he lied about it most of the time.

And does this ring true? Anybody else has family like this? He's a pastor now. And my daughter somehow got thinking that she probably needed to do really, really well. So when my one son got a B, I took him out to dinner to celebrate. And when my daughter got a B, I took her out to celebrate for a different reason. It was like the first one in like nine years, all A's.

I said, you need to lighten up. In a word, our family and our family picture are nothing more or nothing less than the faithfulness of God. This is what God does with people who have messed up backgrounds, who make big mistakes, who struggled with sin, who had problems in their marriage, who really wanted to do it right but often found they didn't do it right, but had one passion in the midst of it all to say, Lord, we don't know how life works, but we want to break the cycle of our backgrounds and we want to pursue you with all of our heart. And we experience forgiveness and healing and restoration and often three steps forward and two steps backward because God is faithful. The Lord's mercies, His kindness never ceases. His compassion, His heart, His tenderness never fails.

Great is His faithfulness. Three observations that you already know, but because I like to be logical, I wanted to give them to you. Observation number one is all of us depend on something or someone to hold us up inside.

We all do. For some, it's your mate or relationship, a job. For some, it's how you look or how much money you make or how successful your kids are. But we all have something or someone, can be money, can be fame, that hold us up inside. Then what we know is when that something or someone is coming through for us, we have a sense of satisfaction and optimism and things are going well. When that something or someone doesn't come through for us, we have anxiety.

We have no peace. We have fear and often despair. And all I want you to know is that there is no one and there is nothing that can come through for you 100% of the time except the Lord Jesus Christ. So if you put your hope in a job or in a mate or in kids or in money or how you look or whatever it is, I mean you're a blink away from that completely changing.

And so your life goes up and down with circumstances and relationships. And so the key or the secret to life is to find someone who will come through for you 100% of the time in any and every circumstance. And I just want to tell you the real God, His faithfulness is, that's what He'll do. His mercies are new.

His loyal love for you. In the midst of your hurt, your pain, your weakness, your sin, your failure, if you would out of this study say, I'm going to pursue, I want to make knowing God the most important thing. I want to get close to Christ. I want my life to revolve around what His word says. I want to be wise and do life His way. I will tell you there is a friend with supernatural power who is fully God and fully man who rose from the dead who'll never ever let you down.

Open your notes. Let's define faithfulness so we're all on the same page. Dictionary says it's steadfast in affection.

I like that. Steadfast in affection. He's in love with you. Allegiance, loyalty. When we say God is faithful, we mean He's dependable, trustworthy, staunch, resolute, constant, reliable, true to one's word, keeps His promises, always comes through. And then you ask yourself, well, how can God be faithful all the time?

And it kind of allows us to do something that's really important because if you're not careful you can think of, okay, we talked about His holiness and we've talked about His love and we've talked about His justice, but those things operate all together in unity simultaneously in harmony with one another. God can come through for you and me 100% of the time because He's all powerful. He never encounters anything that can thwart His plan or His purpose. He can come through because He's holy. He's pure. He's full of integrity. He's unable to lie.

He's absolutely unapproachable light. He always does the right thing. He can come through because He's eternal. He's not affected by space or time.

He sees the end from the beginning and the beginning from the end. He can come through because He's omnipresent. Nothing can ever happen outside this sphere of His influence and finally He can come through for you because He's immutable. He never changes. He's consistent. God never has a bad day. You never go to Him and pray and He goes, you know, maybe later.

I'm having a really rough day. He's love, He's justice, He's kindness, He's compassion 100% of the time. A.W. Tozer writes in his book, The Knowledge of the Holy, All of God's acts are consistent with all of His attributes. And then I put in bold because this is one of those sentences that it's so profound it hurts my head.

No attribute contradicts any other. But all harmonize and blend into each other in the infinite abyss of the Godhead. I mean, the infinite abyss. His love, His majesty, His power, His goodness, His holiness. In the infinite abyss, this God who spoke in galaxies, billions of them come into existence. And yet says to you and me, I want to be your friend and I will never ever leave you and I'll never let you down. And anything that I have ever said, any promise I've ever made, I will guarantee based on my character and my track record that I'll be with you.

It's absolutely amazing. So what I want to do in our time is talk a little bit about intellectually and biblically, well, how has God revealed that? But I want to spend the great majority of our time on how that faithfulness impacts the deepest struggles and challenges of our life. So let's talk about how has He revealed His faithfulness first? By creation. Psalm 119, 89 and 90 says, forever, O Lord, your word is settled in the heavens.

Your faithfulness continues throughout all generations. You establish the earth and it stands. My dad was a science teacher and I had many majors in college and science was one of them. And I like the physical sciences and, you know, you learn about the planets and you realize this planet of ours is going around the sun. I mean, I think it's like 24, 25,000 miles an hour. It's crazy and we're spinning around very fast. And yet, year after year, thousands of years after thousands of years, we go around the sun within a fraction of a few seconds, exactly the same. Exactly the same. When our atomic submarines, because of the magnetic pools of the earth, want to come up and they've got those really powerful rockets inside of them and they can't be off, they have to surface every 90 days.

And they put up an antenna and what do they do? Lock onto the North Star because the North Star is more accurate. We call it science because what we have learned is these things are predictable.

They're the same. And so we say, oh, that's mother nature. That's the first or second law of thermodynamics. And we observe all this consistency and God would say, well, you can observe it. But it's there and it's consistent because I hold it together by the word of my power. I am the creator and the sustainer of all life.

Second, it's through people. God shows his faithfulness through. He made promises to Abraham and the patriarchs. Abraham, he said, I'm going to make you a great nation. Now, can you imagine this one little nomad guy running around in a tent 4,000 plus years later, the nation of Israel, it's endured. Jesus said, I'll build my church and the gates of hell can't prevent against it. And so you've got 12 little followers and one betrays you and you start this big movement with 120 people and you're going to change the world.

You never travel 40, 50 miles beyond where you were born. And you're living in a world where there's two billion followers of Christ and law and culture and all of history is defined by the God-man, the Lord Jesus Christ. I could tell you of a time when I prayed for one of my sons in the ICU just before he went into surgery and God healed him.

I could tell you about times in my marriage when I thought there's no way this isn't going to work and crying out to God and the lights coming on. God's faithful to his people. Third, he's faithful by virtue of his character. I mean, if you want to know what the Father's like, the Son is like, the Scripture is absolutely clear.

The Old Testament picture of God the Father, classic verse number 2319. God is not a man that he should lie or the Son of man that he should repent or change his mind. Has he spoken and will he not do it or has he said it and will he not bring it to pass? In other words, God is always consistent and faithful.

If he speaks, if he promises 100 percent, he does it. The Spirit, we talk about the fruit of the Spirit in Galatians 5, love, joy, peace, patience, goodness, kindness, faithfulness, self-control. The character, the Holy Spirit develops faithfulness because it's the very character, it's the fruit of God the Spirit.

Or Jesus, you could read the entire New Testament and you get to the end and he came as the Savior, but the whole book of Revelation, the theme is he's going to come back and judge righteously. He's going to make things right and at the very end of history we have the conqueror, the righteous judge on a white horse and he has a robe and on his robe has two words and on his thigh. You ready for the words? Faithful and true.

He could have chosen any words. He wants you to know, you can depend on me. And finally, I don't know about you, but I did not grow up ever reading the Bible, I didn't understand it, but his word is true. You can depend on the promises in Scripture. On the last night Jesus prayed in John 17, Father, sanctify them or set them apart or make them holy. These followers now and followers in the future, make them holy by your truth, your word is truth. In Deuteronomy it says God keeps or is faithful to the covenants that he makes with us to a thousand generations. In Hebrews it says let us not sway or swerve or fall away for he who promised is faithful to us. And then we have in Christ's first coming hundreds of very specific predictions. I mean 700 years before Christ was born, he'll be born Bethlehem of a virgin.

This is what will happen. I mean hundreds of specific prophecies all for you to say and to learn God's faithful to his word. So that's the intellectual biblical basis for trusting God's faithfulness. What I want to do now is talk about when it really matters.

I mean I've got to have that because I'm not going to throw my brains in the trash. But the fact of the matter, the final one I think is most important to digest and to apply. God shows us his faithfulness in the way that he shapes our life. The way he intervenes in our life when we're weak, when we're tempted, when we sin and when we utterly, utterly fail. It's when you feel like you don't deserve it. I feel like I could go back to this picture and I could go through seasons where my wife and I just sat up in bed and cried over one of our kids and thought this was never going to work.

I've had seasons where I've been so mad at her and thought this marriage will never work and all I'm going to hang on to your promise because I don't have any other option and God worked in our life. The apostle Paul was having a conversation with God in a moment of weakness. He had some physical issue that God allowed him to have, a thorn in his flesh he called it. Some people think malaria, some people think an eye disease, personally I think it was a bad back.

Constant pain. And God speaks to Paul after Paul asks God says no, Paul asks God says no, third time God says my grace is sufficient for you. For power is perfected in weakness, most gladly therefore I'll rather boast about my weakness so that the power of Christ may dwell in me. And then look at this crazy application, therefore I am well content, literally the word is I will delight in, it's a choice, with weaknesses, plural, with insults, plural, with distresses, plural, with persecutions and difficulties. Why?

For Christ's sake. For when I'm weak then I'm strong. What you need to know and the reason I showed you that picture is this is a testimony not of a family or of a marriage or of a man, this is a testimony of struggling people that didn't know anything. God was faithful in our weakness. In my weakness I wanted to bail out of my marriage. In my weakness I wanted to like knock one of my kids heads off because he made me so crazy. In my weakness as I struggled with lust, there wasn't even the internet back then, praise God, praise God.

But there were four girls to every guy and I struggled and struggled and struggled. In my weakness God met me. See when we're weak we tend to run and we want a silver bullet or we'll find that person or we go eat or we open the refrigerator and put something into us that we know is not good for us.

In our weakness we try and fill the holes. And here's the deal, God is faithful if in your weakness rather than running to shopping or to work or to prescription drugs or to focusing on your kids or focusing on your work defining who you're going to be. In your weakness, say God, here's his promise, I'll sustain you, my power is perfected in weakness and your prayers are I can't do this.

I remember a little rhyme that my wife learned from some lady. It goes something like when you say I can't do this, God says I never said you could. And then he says but by my strength I promise you always can. And God wants to meet you in your weakness. He wants to shape you. He wants to change you. Your character gets changed in weakness. You've been listening to the first part of Chip's message, The Faithfulness of God, from his series, The Real God.

He'll be back with his application but before he is, let me give you a quick sketch of this series overall. In The Real God, Chip looks at seven key attributes of God's character and explains that none of them is ever diminished or overshadowed by the others, which means that God is 100% love, 100% just, and 100% merciful. Kind of mind-bending when you think about it that way and why it becomes a lifelong adventure to get to know him for who he really is. A great way to learn how these attributes of God work together is to do this study with a small group of friends. So for a limited time, the small group resources for The Real God are discounted because we want to do everything we can to help you get a clear, accurate view of God. To place your order or to get more information on The Real God, go to livingontheedge.org, tap Special Offers on the Chip Ingram app, or give us a call at 888-333-6003.

Well now here's Chip with a quick reminder. If you've been listening to Living on the Edge for a while, you may have heard me talk about BIO. The B is for Before God, the I for In Community, and the O for On Mission. And here at Living on the Edge, we have about a million folks who listen each week like you are right now. We've got hundreds of thousands who use our small group studies, read the books, listen to the app, and go to the website every year. And for many, the teaching and the resources we provide through Living on the Edge, it helps them understand what it really means to come before God and to meet Him and experience Him. For others, it's kind of their lifeline to doing life in community. But there's a relatively smaller group of people who step up and say, I'm all in, we want to be on mission with you, and we want to make this ministry happen.

So here's what I'm asking. Nearly all that we do at Living on the Edge is only possible through the financial partnerships of folks like you. Will you help? Will you pray about becoming a partner with Living on the Edge financially? Would you stand in agreement with us on our mission as we pursue in this day and age to help Christians really live like Christians?

Thank you for doing whatever God leads you to do. Okay, Chip, let's get to your application. We began today's program by making three observations about the human species, you know, regular people like you and me. We said, number one, that we all depend on something or someone to hold us up inside.

Now think about that and then ask yourself, what is that for you? Second, we said that when that something or someone is coming through for us, we experience a sense of peace, satisfaction, and optimism about the future. Third, we said that when that something or someone fails to come through for us, we experience a sense of anxiety, dissatisfaction, and ultimately despair. And I walk through this rather quickly, but I want you to process it now in light of what you've just heard. And my conclusion in the introduction was that it seems, and I think this is accurate, that the secret to a life of unending joy and genuine peace is to find something or someone who will come through for you 100% of the time in every situation. And what we learn today is that's who God is. Often we think that God is a lot like us, that he has mood swings, and he has good days and bad days, and we get this feeling that when we're good, God will be there and come through, and when we're bad, well, you know, we're on our own.

Did you listen to the teaching today? Did you hear the definition that God in and of himself, his innate essence, his character, he's faithful. He's faithful to his people. He's faithful to his word. He's loving 100% of the time. He's just 100% of the time. He's holy 100% of the time.

He's compassionate 100% of the time. And God has revealed this faithfulness through creation and through his people, and I'd like to suggest that he's also revealed it to you in your life. And so what I would like you to do is to literally, out loud before God, recall in the last week or two or even the last month, two or three or four specific things where you can say, God came through for me. He loves me. He's for me.

And then as you do that, here's what I want you to do this day, this hour. Then I want you to think of the most difficult thing you're facing and then say to the Lord, Lord, if you came through in those areas because you're faithful, I'm going to choose to trust you in what seems so hard and so difficult to face today. He is faithful. He is for you.

He loves you, and he will see you through. You know, a great way to get more out of every message is to use Chip's message notes while you listen. You'll get his outline, all of his scripture references, and lots of fill-ins to help you remember what you're learning. Use them personally or even with your small group. Chip's message notes are a quick download at livingontheedge.org under the broadcasts tab. App listeners, tap fill-in notes, and you're set. Well, be sure to join us next time. Until then, this is Dave Druey saying thanks for listening to this Edition of Living on the Edge.