Well, let's go ahead and begin our second series of time together with the word of prayer. So if you would bow your hearts with me before the Lord. Heavenly Father, we thank you so much for giving us this time, Lord, for each one of the spheres of leadership that we have, we are grateful knowing that those are just from you. And we pray that we would be able to do those things that you would ask us to, and that this day of sessions, and indeed this weekend of sessions would be something that would better equip us to do the task that you ask of us. Lord, we are so thankful for your grace and for your goodness, Lord, for the way that you love us and that you love the church and that you have allowed us opportunity to serve you through the church.

I pray that you would bless the churches in this area, particularly the ones that are represented in this room, but Lord, for all of the ones that go to your word to get the bread of life, to nourish their souls, I pray that you would work in the leadership of each one of those churches, that they would be faithful to you and to your things, and Lord, that you would protect us from the world and the things that destroy and harm the name of Christ. Lord, I pray for each one of our hearts that you would guide us and guard us, that we would be useful for you. We pray these things in Jesus' name, amen. Right, so my session is called Robust Faithfulness. And when my wife looked over the order for today and saw that it was going to be in the home, in the church, and in the street, she said, how are you ever going to do that in 10 minutes?

And I was glad to see that the 10 minute, maybe I was the only one Scott told 10 minutes to, but I was like, wait a second, that's a little bit of bait and switch. Maybe I'm the guy that pulled the short straw. I don't know how that worked, But that was hope springing eternal. He told me 40 minutes, and he told you 40 minutes, right? Yeah, that's right.

Anyhow, and so I don't know how that's supposed to work, but I. You can go longer. I know, and the problem is, and Scott has actually said this, is these family-integrated churches tend to have hour-long sermons, and I was like, ooh, guilty. And then you ask an hour-long guy to preach for 10 minutes. That's pretty rough.

So we'll do what we can. The good news is that when I talk about robust faithfulness, I believe this is a very important concept. And I'm not really talking about robust faithfulness in the home, robust faithfulness in the church, and robust faithfulness in the world. I'm talking about robust faithfulness in you. And then you're going to go home and you'll create that in your home.

You're going to go to your church and you're going to have that in your church. And as you go out into the world, as people particularly as leaders see you as a follower of Christ, hopefully they will also see that faithfulness. Faithfulness is very important. Faith is important. Without faith, it's impossible to please God.

Faith is the beginning of it all. Without faith, we are none of His. So that is super important and I don't think anybody here would downplay the importance of faith. But today, I want to talk about faithfulness, which is a little bit different than faith. We need faith, but especially for leaders, we need faithfulness.

Faithfulness is faith when your life hits the wall. Faithfulness is faith as things are stretched over time. Faithfulness is faith in the good times and in the bad times. And let's just be honest, particularly in the bad times, because faith is easy in the good times. Faithfulness in the home will look like a father who continues to lead when a child goes off the rails.

Faithfulness in the church will look like a pastor who continues to be faithful after either leaders in his own church or leaders in the national church that a lot of people in his congregation look up to go off the rails. And I don't know about you all, but I'm guessing that if you're linked in with the NCFIC in one way or another, you probably have been sucker punched a couple times in the last couple years by people who've gone off the rails. And if your church has looked up to those people, they need you to be faithful because there are many who are not. And then faithfulness in the street looks like a biblically clear morality that continues when popular opinion turns against it. And we have seen those things happen in surprising ways.

Surprising ways. Most Christian leaders, and I get to do the the session on homosexuality tomorrow But most Christian leaders saw it coming They've just been blown away by how quickly it happened and and faithfulness is continuing continuing on when the world rises up and calls you wicked for clinging to the truth against their opinion. Why is it important to be faithful? How can we be faithful? Well, as I'm sure you know since you are leaders in churches, faith comes by hearing and hearing through the word of Christ.

Faithfulness begins with faith and faith begins with scripture. And so scripture is incredibly, incredibly important. And I think you've already heard that already. That is the foundation stone. And that is so important.

Don't ever, ever find yourself a part of a home or a church or a testimony that is drifting away from scripture. You can't be faithful and unscriptural simultaneously. Those are opposites of one another. Hebrews 11 one, again speaking of faith, but extended into faithfulness, Says faith is the assurance of things hoped for the conviction of things not seen I'm not going to give you a lesson on faith We could get Quincy up here to give you the proper definition, no doubt. But we know what this is.

Faith is leaning into something that you have to trust rather than know because you've tested it in a test tube. How do we become faithful and how do people around us become faithful? Well, the way that works is twofold Number one is it begins with God's Word. That is the picture of faithfulness and by the way Hebrews 11 one begins with this definition of faith but it continues with pictures from scripture. People that lived their lives through scripture that showed faith by how they acted.

They lived not like Pharaoh was everything, but God's promise was everything. They lived not like the land of Canaan was everything, but God's promise was everything. They lived like the kings and sometimes queens of Israel were everything, but like God was everything. They lived in the face often of experiences knowing that what they had experienced in God was a greater experience. Well, as leaders in the church, we bring those things to our people.

We bring God's word. I hope you all have opportunities in some way in your church to bring God's word to God's people because that's what will make people faithful. But also, in the light of Hebrews 11 one, we become part of that great cloud of witnesses that say the way God works is true. I've seen it. I've lived it.

I've experienced it. We're all going to be facing things, whether it's in the home or in the church or in our culture, that are going to be rough. I wanna give you five ways of understanding robust faithfulness, so faith over time that is hard to be moved away from faithfulness that I hope will help us as we live, perhaps the good times where it's easy to be faithful, or perhaps difficult times where it is difficult to be faithful. And I have just five statements about robust faithfulness that makes it different and important, and we could say true faithfulness, but I want to just give the idea of this is when we need faithfulness, this is what happens, that I hope will be helpful to you. There are things that I've experienced in my own life, they're probably things that you already know.

But you need to be reminded because when it becomes difficult, those reminders over time help us to be robustly faithful. So here's number one out of the five. And I'm going to try to keep it quick. Number one, robust faithfulness isn't easily shaken. The world is blown about by every wind of opinion.

The church is often two steps behind the world. Those who are robustly faithful aren't shaken by the winds of change, the winds of doubt, the fads, and the cultural shifts. James 1.6, James implores the believing reader to ask God for wisdom But to ask in faith and What does this ask in faith supposed to look like? It is with no doubting. For, says James, the one who doubts is like a wave of the sea that is driven and tossed by the wind.

When you are in a storm, what you really want is something solid. The more solid, the better. You don't want a twig. You don't want a rubber raft. A nice big ocean liner would be just about right after you've been bobbing around out there being thrown under and out of and through waves for a period of time.

But let me tell you what's best is Jesus Christ, because he's the one that can not only get you out of the waves, but he can stop the storm. Second, robust faithfulness is willing to stand alone. It's nice to have friends who agree with you, But it is important to realize that if God agrees with you, it doesn't matter how many others are on your side of the room. Most of us who have gone the family integrated route, understand how this works. Because it's not normal.

And it is something that sometimes you have to stand alone in. You stand alone in church. If you've experienced going to other churches, churches have amazing ways of pressuring people into getting on board with their way of doing programmatic family dissolution. Being churches, sometimes they do it well and sometimes they do it poorly. I remember visiting a church on the coast of Oregon one time and we had a young lady with very dark mascara and a choker collar with spikes coming out of it, asking to take our child off to children's church.

We had already said no. We're not doing that. We're just here, we like to have our family together. We may have had six, seven, eight. I forget where we are, we're out in the process.

But the idea was, how can you pay attention to a sermon with all of those little kids in your row? Let us take them off of your hands. It's not only going to be better for you, but it's going to be better for everybody else in the room. Okay? Well, I had a young person come up to me three weeks ago, three weeks, maybe four weeks ago, said, I have a friend who's decided that she's gay.

And I'm trying to understand why that's wrong. We're gonna be dealing with stuff like that all the time. There's, robust faithfulness is willing to do what we do because it's what's right no matter what. And the verse that I have for that is Daniel 6, a great illustration for someone who is willing to stand alone. And I love what this verse says.

It says, when the high officials and satraps sought to find a ground for complaint against Daniel with regard to the kingdom, but they could find no ground for complaint or any fault because he was faithful and no error or fault was found in him. Can people look through your life with that fine-toothed comb and see living for God written on every page? Most people can't. Most people can't. We need to be willing to be different.

Third, and not being easily shaken and standing alone, if you have those, you don't need this one, but unfortunately we're human. And the third is that robust faithfulness recovers. Robust faithfulness occasionally is shaken, and robust faithfulness occasionally follows the crowd. Because we're not all perfectly faithful, that's why we all need Jesus. The question is, and this is truly what robust faithfulness looks like it's the person who begins going the wrong direction begins going the wrong direction And shakes themselves as F out of sleep and says, what was I thinking?

What am I doing? I've got to get back where God wants me to be. And again, a verse. If Daniel is a great picture of the ability to stand alone, Peter is a great picture of a faithful man who could recover from, Well, going with the world, going with the government, going with the other disciples, going as I'm sure you know from, though all flee, I will stay to, because he was faithful enough to stay he got the opportunity to deny Jesus three times before this happened Jesus said to him Simon Simon behold Satan demanded to have you that he might sift you like wheat. And listen to what Jesus said next.

But I have prayed for you that your faith may not fail. Isn't that interesting? He had the power of God behind his faith and by the way, so do you. You're like, wait, his faith totally failed. No, his attitude, his actions, and his words failed.

But his faith didn't fail. And here's what Jesus said to Peter. When you have turned again, strengthen your brothers. Tested, tried, strengthen your brothers. Tested, tried, and sometimes even recovered robust faithfulness speaks to people who are in the struggle.

They need to see people, like Hebrews 11, that are witnesses are a testimony to God at work in the life of people who go through struggles and say, you know what? God was sovereign over that struggle, and he was victor over it too. Fourth, robust faithfulness embraces the small. How do you have success in the big calamities of life? Well, the way you do is you have success in the small pressures of life.

Robust faithfulness looks like getting up in the morning and reading your Bible even though you don't want to. Robust faithfulness is meeting with someone who you know is not going to listen to you to tell them the truth from scripture, whether they want to hear it or not. Jesus said in Luke 16 10, one who is faithful in a very little is also faithful in much. And I just want to say, as leaders, that's important. Every now and then, you will see someone who, as far as anybody can tell, is just like a rocket to fame and being well-known as someone who's following the Lord well, who then crashes and burns their testimony.

How did they get there? Nobody falls into terrible, ministry-destroying immorality after a life of small faithfulness. It is always after a period of small unfaithfulnesses. And then, Last but not least, if you're a spiritual leader, faithfulness is job one. Faithfulness is job one.

First Corinthians 4, two says, moreover, it is required of stewards that they be found faithful. Moreover, it is required of stewards that they be found faithful. I assume if you're in this room this morning, you see something that the Lord has placed you as a steward over. Perhaps it's senior pastor of a church. Perhaps it's a weekly Bible study.

Perhaps it's a few young men that you spend time counseling and encouraging. You know, the next couple of days, those are for those who maybe don't know what the Lord has given them to be stewards of yet. But we're all given stewardships of something. And if you're here today, certainly you know you've got a stewardship of something. You need to be faithful.

So those are my five things. And I just have one more thing that I want to say that is related but is kind of an addition that I think is important. While you're being faithful Make sure you're not being faithful to faithfulness, but faithful to Christ. Okay? And what I mean by that is, sometimes the way it comes across is, I've got this system that I've figured out.

I've got this book that I've written or this catechism that I've signed on with or whatever the thing is, I've got this thing, you may fail. And other people may fail. And I've seen a lot of Christians that have been totally, their commitment to living differently for the Lord. And I'm just, this is what I've seen. And I've seen this in the last five years particularly in churches like our churches Where people have had their commitment to do things differently?

Shaken by by non-faithful men. If that becomes you, Somehow, I hope when you said to people around you, follow me, which they need, you said to them, follow me as I follow Christ. Believe as I believe, but believe as I believe as scripture teaches. Do you know what I'm saying, what I'm saying those things? Because if we fail, Christ will never fail.

Because all men are liars. But God is true. We will be faithless in some way. But Christ is never faithless. He is always faithful.

Be faithful, be robustly faithful. Don't let it be shaken. Stand alone when you need to. Recover if you have to. Embrace the small in order to be ready for the large.

And remember as a leader, as a steward, it is the thing that God asks of you particularly. But as you're faithful, be faithful to Christ. Make sure that it's His direction that you're pointing people, not your direction that you're pointing people. I had a man come up to me just two Sundays ago actually. And he said, I'd like a book for my young daughter who's getting around junior high age and she's just questioning the whole, save your heart for marriage thing.

You know, maybe in your church, you're trying to encourage people to save their hearts for marriage. Not a bad idea, right? But is there a book out there? Well, A year ago, I would have recommended Josh Harris' book. Now, that book could be subtitled I Kissed Kissing, Dating, Goodbye, Goodbye.

Well, he kissed the whole thing goodbye. I hope the people that were impressed and helped and guided by that book were guided not by Josh but by Jesus. Kissing dating goodbye is not a good idea because Josh Harris came up with it. It's a good idea because the way the world goes about relationships is broken and lost and wrong. And if Josh says homosexuality is okay, which he is now, he's not right.

Because it's God's word that is our foundation. And it is Christ that is our Lord. Brothers, we need faithful men. The church needs faithful men And if God gives you a ministry that is significant, make it be a faithful ministry. Because there's a lot of people that are hurting from unfaithful ministries.

Because there was faith, but it wasn't a robust faith. And people ended up leaning on broken reeds instead of the Lord Jesus Christ.