Title: Faithful God
Contents
Subject: Faithful God
Main text: Deuteronomy 7:9-11
“Know therefore that the LORD your God is God and is the faithful God; he keeps his covenant with a thousand generations of those who love him and keep his commandments, and show kindness to a thousand generations; and to those who hate him, he takes immediate retribution and destroys them. He does not delay with the one who hates him, but he repays him immediately./ Therefore, you shall observe and do the commandments and ordinances and ordinances I am giving you today.”
Today, I will testify of God's Word under the title of Faithful God. These days, the whole world, mainly the United States, is suffering from the economic deterioration. In the aftermath, international oil prices also continue to fall due to slowing consumption. OPEC, an organization of oil exporting countries, gathered on October 24 to prevent such a drop in international oil prices and announced that they would cut oil production by 1.5 million barrels a day.
Nevertheless, countries that actually import and use crude oil are not benefiting from the drop in oil prices. This is because of the exchange rate fluctuations. As a result, Korea, which lacks resources, has to revive its economy through exports, but he says that the real economy is getting more difficult due to the bad news of a surge in the exchange rate and the slowdown in consumption in the world market.
To make matters worse, stocks that are considered developed-style investments are now plummeting without knowing the bottom. And providing the cause is also subprime mortgages originating in the United States.
In this way, the sub-prime mortgages originating from the United States, which have driven the world economy into extreme anxiety and fear, show how important and valuable the object of trust is to those who have taken the value of credit lightly and are focused on pursuing only visible profits. to make you realize deeply.
In the words we read today, God Himself reveals His attributes to the people of Israel. The God we meet today through the text is a faithful God.
what it means to be faithful
To be faithful is to always be constant and the same in essence. The displayed phenomenon may be different, but the essence remains the same. Let me give you an example.
God shows two aspects in today's text. One is the image of giving blessings and showing mercy to those who love God and keeping the word of God's covenant to fulfill the covenant. The other is the image of destroying those who do not love and hate God immediately in retribution. you show
The appearance of God who blesses and the image of God who judges seem to be different, but in essence, God is a faithful God who does not change.
One of the biggest problems faced by churches and believers throughout history is to overemphasize or take precedence over other attributes of God, thereby making the mistake of excluding or damaging other attributes.
For example, God is love. Clearly, God is love. However, if we emphasize only that, the church will surely regard God's love as truly precious, but if we ignore or exclude God's justice because of it, we do not know that God is truly faithful in its essence.
On the other hand, what if we emphasized only the holiness and righteousness of God? God must be holy and righteous, but if we only emphasize God's holiness and righteousness, there will be no place for God's mercy and mercy. In the end, a church that emphasizes only God's holiness and righteousness will become legal in their religious life and fall into the dilemma of revealing their own righteousness by criticizing and judging each other.
The faithful God we meet in today's text revealed to the people of Israel in the covenant relationship. In it we discover what the faithful God really wants for his chosen people, for Christians who today profess to be Lord Jesus Christ. What is that? It is to love God and keep his commandments.
God wants me and you to truly love Him. And he wants us to become listeners of God's word through the feet of that sincere love, and to see faithfulness as God's people by willingly obeying His word.
All those who lived a life of faithfulness before God lived a life of faithfulness to the covenant with God. Abraham, the father of faith, also became God's people by making a covenant with God, and through his life faithful to the covenant, he testified that he was a faithful man who truly loved God. By obeying God's word, I left my hometown, my relatives, and my father's house and went to the land of Canaan, which God had commanded.
When the faithful God gave him the promise to make a great nation, Abraham truly believed in that God. He truly believed in the promises of God. The climax of faith that blossoms the flowers of Abraham's faithful faith is the event of offering Isaac to God.
“Abraham hoped and believed in hope, so that he might become the father of many nations, just as he said, ‘Your descendants will be like you. He was not weakened, nor did he doubt the promises of God through lack of faith, but was strengthened in faith, giving glory to God, and being convinced that he was also able to accomplish what he had promised; therefore it was reckoned to him as righteousness.”
This faith was possible for Abraham because of his confidence in God's faithfulness. Abraham had hope through faith even in an environment he could not hope for because he was sure that he was a faithful God who always kept and fulfilled what he promised. And there was no wavering in that belief, and more importantly, that belief was strengthened with the passage of time. How is Abraham's faith finally revealed before God? Faithfulness. It was demonstrated by faithfulness before God.
Dear saints, God wants us to do something. God wants us to be faithful in order to bless us, to guide and use us, and to ultimately establish ourselves as people of faith and families of faith in this age that reveals the glory of God.
What shows our faithfulness to God? It is revealed through concrete actions. It is revealed that we truly love God, and it is revealed through a life of faith that trusts and trusts only God, stands firm on God's promises, and obeys.
Whether or not to live this faithful life of faith seems to depend on the surrounding circumstances and conditions, but in reality, it is determined by my faith in God. No matter how much the world changes, those who hold on to the word of the covenant God has given, trust it, and obey it will always stand faithful before God. Even today, God blesses such faithful people of the Lord, is with them, and grants them the grace of fulfilling God's work through them. This grace will come to the Lord's people who are sanctifying themselves in this age to hear the word today and to live a life of faithful faith before God. I pray in the name of the Lord that the blessing of standing there may be with you and me.