April 14, 2012
Let love and faithfulness never leave you; bind them around your neck, write them on the tablet of your heart. Then you will win favor and a good name in the sight of God and man. -- Proverbs 3: 3-4 (NIV)
We can get so weighted down in the grind of everyday life in this world. Careers, bills, families, friends, illness, aging, struggles -- there are certainly enough things to distract and burden us. Even our religion can add to the weightiness we feel between ministry responsibilities and church politics. In the midst of our walks there should always be a desire to be viewed positively by God and man. This is not to say that we seek the approval of man but as Christians we are to be salt and light to a dying world. We are to seek to have a good name as the verse above implores us.
The first thing these verses teach us is that love and faithfulness should never leave us. Love unfortunately has been so distorted by the world system and logic that it no longer represents what God intended. The world preaches a conditional love. A love that says if you do enough things right by me, then I will return love unto you. But the Bible teaches that it is too easy to merely love the lovable. We must strive to love the unlovable, as that will be what separates us from the everyday person. When the world seeks revenge, God expects us to love. When the world preaches hate, God expects us to love. It is not a love that is easy to accomplish because it grates against our flesh nature. But remember, that when we were yet sinners -- living in complete rebellion to God -- He sent His only Son to die for us. The most famous Bible verse, John 3:16 says that God did this because He so loved us. That is the type of love we are to try and represent as followers of Jesus Christ.
Faithfulness has the same problem. The world teaches faithfulness only as a response not as a way of life. The Bible teaches us that even when we are faithless, God remains faithful. God can never contradict His character. We seemingly trade in our faithfulness to God based upon our feelings or upon our desires to stray from what God teaches us. We can make excuses for sin and hide behind church masks. We can tend to look unto the lost world as being so sinful in an attempt to avoid having to look in the mirror. The word is sinful because they are walking in darkness. We are sinful because we do not strive to see our own faithlessness and correct it.
The key verses direct us to bind love and
faithfulness around our neck. This is so when we drop our eyes from looking up
to see God; we will see what we are supposed to be like when our gaze falls
downward. Love and faithfulness. We write them on the tablet of our heart
because out of the heart all things flow. What makes us clean or unclean flows
from what is in our heart. We are to guard our heart above all things. We
should be constantly trying to win the favor of God and to have a good name
before Him. It is also important that man sees us as believers first and
foremost. As people who will love and be faithful based upon belief and not how
we are treated. There are many theological discussions we can have regarding
how to accomplish a good name and favor before God and man but it always must
start with love and faithfulness.
Rev. Anthony
