A Question

What does it mean to be "faithful"? I wrestle with this question in various contexts pretty regularly - mostly because God has been so ridiculously stupid good to me that I feel compelled to ask daily "am I being faithful with the gifts God has given me?"

There's a lot of places to go from this starting point, but there's some events happening in my life that are giving me perspective on Jesus' faithfulness to the Father's will and what it implies for my own life of faithfulness and steadfastness to the Lord.

Faithfulness

How do I be more like Jesus (as a human), and how do I more or less copy his faithfulness to God in the wake of trial. I've certainly given some amount of thought to my own ability to be faithful in the worst potential circumstance of straight up physical execution: martyrdom... In Fox's Book of Martyrs there's accounts of Christians through the ages singing hymns while being burned alive for their faith... What leads to that kind of faithfulness? What gave these heros of the faith the peace to face death with a song? Would I, today right now, if I was going to be executed for my faith (real reality in many parts of the world) would I sing "Amazing Grace" while my physical body was tortured to death... I can't say I know the answer to this, but the accounts of these martyrs is at least encouraging that God has developed the faith of others to such a degree that physical torture cannot break them from their communion with God.

Knowledge

Back to Jesus for a second... A confession of mine is that I've lowkey felt like Jesus, as truly human, had a leg up on us when it comes to remaining faithful to the Father's will....

As a human he walked through life in deep communion with the Father, and he knows his place as the Author of creation, the one who holds all things together. So I've often struggled with the thought "of course Jesus is calm in X or isn't worried about Y... He knows he's God, he knows the plan, and that knowledge must do something for enabling the kind of calm faith we see in the person, in the human, Jesus Christ."

Almost There

I think he had both, and part of living a life of faith is remembering all the things that are true about Jesus... If I only say he's faithful and good to me because the Bible says so, well that's not a lot for me as a real physical person to live my life on... I live my life based on experience like anyone else, and experience gives anyone a unique kind of knowledge - it's more than reading something in a book, when you learn something by living through it the message is deeply engrained, it passes through your brain and into your being... ya know what I'm saying? There's things we know and then there's things we KNOW.

But for this to happen we have to acknowledge God through it all... whatever "it all" is certainly affects what "acknowledge God" means, but for Jesus he certainly gave God the Father every ounce of glory and credit during his life, and that acknowledgement I believe is a part of Jesus' life of Faith... so too in my life do I try to practice this perspective - giving thanks to God for all things given and taken away... This acknowledgement presses the truth about God's goodness and faithfulness to me deeper and deeper into my being. It is Jesus being tender to my heart and shepherding me into being more like him

Jesus knew everything true about his power because of his experience and identity. I would certainly claim to know it as well - but my knowledge of Jesus' power is not his knowledge of his own power. So does any knowledge I have or lack affect the reality of Jesus' faithfulness?

The Point

This is finally my point... I'm going through a trial, losing something important to me that's valuable and a source of provision for my family in many ways. But at the same time... God has been so good to me, and I have so much experience and knowledge of that goodness... I've been complimented by a few people in this situation about how I'm handling it - cause anyone would be pretty justified in being angry in what I'm walking through... And I'm struggling with many emotions:

and losing a massive source of that provision isn't the end of the world because not only do I know that God provides for me, but he already has provided in such a way that this trial isn't devastating. It's annoying of course, but his goodness to me so outshines the crappiness of this situation that I can't help but overflow with "this sucks but God's stil good, and has been and will be".

The thing is that the people around me do not have all the same knowledge as me that I've gained through experience and acknowledgment of God's goodness... Few people see all the details of how God has and is protecting me and my family that to the outsider of my life, witnessing what's happening, I might look like that martyr being burned alive.... Of course that's a little hyperbolic, but I don't know the lives of all those martyrs - God probably worked in them for so long and in such deep ways that not only the reality of a trial, but the reality of physical pain, just washes over them...

It might look miraculous to them, and it doesn't mean it's not, because it's God who provided for me in the first place, but my place of serenity in the wake of trial comes from Jesus pressing the reality of his faithfulness into my life, and now that I have a backdrop of years of goodness from him - how can any one silly trial in this life send me anywhere but closer to my Heavenly Father as I trust him for provision.