FAITHFUL TO THE FAITHLESS

Transcription

1 FAITHFUL TO THE FAITHLESS FEBRUARY 26, 2018 We are in our Fruit of the Spirit series. Today we are looking at faithfulness. I took a week off because I was so terribly sick, and I am probably going to have to stop halfway through here and take a swig of tea. I am recovering from a terrible cold, the worst I think I ve ever had. I have frequent travel I m traveling every week and being in the planes has made it worse. I don t know if it s the pressure in the cabin or what, but my ears were completely stopped up. I couldn t hear anything. My whole family was making fun of me because everything they would say I would just look at them and say Huh? I am recovering. I m not better yet but I am recovering. I thank you for your prayers and your patience. I just could not do the show. I have barely been able to hold my head up. We are going to look at faithfulness today. It is one of the characteristics of God s moral or ethical nature, meaning that it is the difference between right and wrong. Faithfulness denotes the firmness or the constancy of God in his relations with people, especially his own people; not just humanity and mankind, but his own people. Faithfulness is one aspect of God s truth and of his unchangeableness. As such, it is part of the fruit of the spirit. What that means is God is true, not only because he is really God in contrast to everything that is not God or not even true, and because he is I AM, but also because he is constant and faithful in keeping his promises; therefore, he is worthy of trust. That s really what that unchangeableness means. He is I AM and he does not change. As such, he keeps his promises and he is worthy of trust. Not just one promise, but forever. That s really where the show is going to park today. When we talk about faithfulness, that s really what the Bible means. God is unchangeable in his moral nature. That unchangeableness in the Scripture almost always connects with God s goodness and his mercy -- we just looked at goodness the week before last and also with his constancy in reference to his covenant promises. That s what the Bible means by faithfulness. It always pairs his faithfulness to his covenant. Faithfulness, then, equals covenant in a loose kind of way, not literally. I m just tying the two together in your head so that you can see that in the Bible when it talks about faithfulness it means almost always that God is faithful to his covenant. Faithful, and the noun faithfulness, come from the verbal stem which means to be secure or firm. In the Old Testament, faithfulness is implied in his covenant name, Yahweh, or I AM. We looked at that in our last fruit of the spirit. I have said this several times and it is true, but I hope you know what I mean when I say faithfulness as a fruit of the spirit, but really it s all one fruit. We re looking at different aspects in the same way that you might turn a diamond and look at it from one angle or the other, but it is still one diamond in the same way the fruit of the spirit is one fruit. We are looking at faithfulness as an aspect of that one fruit. His covenant name is the name God used to establish covenant with Moses and from him the rest of the Israelite people. It expresses God s self-existence and his unchangeableness, but his name also puts that unchangeableness or immutability, as it is sometimes called in a special relationship to his promises. The I AM will be with his people. That is what that whole section in Exodus 3 when God gives Moses his name and he ties the name I AM WHO AM with what he is going to do. I will be with and rescue my people. If you look in that section, he is basically saying that part of his name is to be with and rescue his people. Faithfulness is consistency, constancy, firmness, especially in the fulfilment of all obligations. When we talk about God those obligations would be covenant or promises. 1 P a g e

2 Interestingly, the words promise, word, testament, and covenant come from similar roots. When you hear a word of God or a promise of God, those are interchangeable. If you get a word from God say you re reading in your Love The Word practice and something jumps out at you you have gotten a word from God. When you get that word, that s a promise. God s word itself is a promise. When you talk about the 10 Commandments the word Commandment is a promise. Sometimes you hear them called the 10 Words, the 10 Commandments, or the 10 Promises. They all mean the same thing because God is constant and consistent and firm. He fulfils his obligations, especially his word, his promises, his covenant. All of this is wrapped up in the prevalent Old Testament idea of God as a rock, because he is the secure object of trust. The Old Testament calls God a rock all over the place, and we ll come back to that later when we look at the New Testament too. Covenant faithfulness is implied where God is revealing himself to Moses and Israel as the god of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and their father s god (Exodus 3:2). It s not just that God had a special relationship to the patriarchs, but that he is faithful to his gracious promise meaning a promise of grace to their fathers, and what he was to them he will continue to be to Israel through Moses. That s the fundamental idea in the Old Testament concerning the faithfulness of God. He actually states that purpose, his promise, in offering his name to the people. He gives that covenant in his name. Isn t that cool? Even when Israel incurred God s judgment it may have appeared like his promise had failed or he had taken it back, but he is faithful to his word of promise because it stands forever. The scriptures are full of that, like Isaiah 40 and 43. It s not because of Israel s faithfulness that God is faithful but it s because of his own sake that God forgives their sins, he says in Isaiah 43, and blots out their transgressions. God is faithful even when men aren t. Men really can t be, but God is. He IS faithfulness. That covenant faithfulness is the basis of the confidence that God is going to hear our prayer. We trust him because he is faithful to his promises. We can look through the Old Testament to see all the ways that is true. My newest book, Fulfilled, actually goes through the covenants in that way and it gives a big birds-eye view to the covenants of God through the Old Testament. What you see is that constancy, that consistency, that God takes the first covenant and wraps it up in the next one. The second covenant has included in it the first, and the third is the same way. The third has both the second and the first covenants contained in it, and so on and so forth. There are seven of those. The final covenant, the new heavens and new earth, will encompass all that has gone before. That is how faithful God is. He builds on the promises that he gave first. He keeps that promise and then he builds on it. He continues to build on those promises until they are all completely fulfilled. I know I m kind of harping on the constancy point, but that is one of the most important things that brought me into the Catholic Church. I saw the consistency of God in retaining the worship structure of the Old Testament. It didn t make any sense to me at all if God had specified so clearly how he wanted to be worshipped in the Old Testament that he would just change his mind so completely in the new. Forget about the ritual, forget about the ceremony, forget about the beautiful trappings, forget about the feast days. We re not going to do any of that, all we re going to do is show up for preaching and have some singing. It just seemed very disconnected from the Old Testament. The consistency of the Catholic Church is part of what drew me into it. I understood then that God is consistent, and so worship should also be consistent. That consistency, as I said, is the basis of our confidence that God is going to hear our prayers, especially when you re praying the scriptures back to God. I can t tell you how many times in my prayer, and David does this too, I have said to God, Well you said so-and-so! because I understand that his word is promise, so I say it back to him in order to make him keep it. Like I think he s not keeping it. It s usually just because I m impatient, but you get my gist. We pray 2 P a g e

3 because we re confident that God is going to hear us, and we pray the word back to God because it is his promise to us. It is the security, then, of the religious person and it is source of God s help to us, and we have our confidence in it. Throughout the scriptures it stresses that the salvation of God s covenant people is not based on their own merit but solely on God s mercy, grace, and faithfulness. That s the gist of faithfulness as a fruit of the spirit. God is faithful because he IS faithfulness and goodness. He is God. Those are the bases that he keeps his promises: He just can t do otherwise. That s our confidence and our hope as his people. I like what 2 Timothy 2:13 says If we are faithless he remains faithful, for he cannot deny himself. I like a lot because we know on a regular basis how we fail in faithfulness, but God s faithfulness never fails. Amen. To continue with our exploration of faithfulness as an aspect of the fruit of the spirit, I d like to do a few little cross references that you may have in your bible because they sort of shed light on why God is said to be faithful. In Numbers 23:19 it says, God is not a man that he should lie, not a son of man that he should repent. Has he said, and will he not do it? Or has he spoken, and will he not make it good? I have to tell you that this was one that I clung to as an older child, middle school and high school and even as I got married. I would hear people say things like God loves you and I just didn t believe it. But then I would remember this verse. God does not lie. He cannot lie. I had to kind of believe it with my head until my heart could catch up with it. Sometimes that happens. God cannot lie. He is faithful. Deuteronomy 7:9 says Know therefore that the Lord your God is God, the faithful God who keeps his covenant and his loving kindness to a thousand generations with those who love him and keep his commandments. We looked at that a little bit when we looked at healing the father wound and generational sin. Here again God is faithful. He keeps his covenant through generation upon generation. Romans 3:3 says What if some did not have faith? Will their lack of faith nullify God s faithfulness? We re going to look at that in a few moments in some more depth. St. Paul is talking about the fact that our faithless, just like Timothy (who learned from Paul) said, cannot change the fact that God is faithful. He can t be otherwise. 1 Corinthians 1:9 says, God, who has called you into fellowship with his son Jesus Christ our Lord, is faithful. Titus 1:2 says, In the hope of eternal life which God, who cannot lie, promised before time began. Again, he cannot lie. He promises. When we talk about fruit of the spirit and we talk about faithfulness, God is faithful in regard to his covenant promises. He will surely fulfill them. In the Old Testament, that is basically what faithfulness meant. God is faithful to his covenant with his people. In a nutshell, that just meant that God would save his people. He would send a messiah, a savior, to save his people from their sins. I would actually say that any attempt to understand the Bible more deeply or more thoroughly really requires at least an overview of these covenants, and even deeper if you can do that. Scott Hahn has great teaching on these covenants. He actually is the first who introduced me to the fact that the Bible is the span of God s covenants with his people, and the consistency that lends to your understanding of history is invaluable, I think, to understanding the Bible. Otherwise it just seems very unrelated. It s all about covenant. Covenant is an exchange of people. God gives himself to his people and they give themselves back to God. God does that through larger and larger groups. He begins with Adam and Eve, two people; then there is a family in Noah, then there is a tribe in Abraham, then you have nation under Moses, then a kingdom under David, then a universal people meaning Jews and Gentiles, so it s not just a single kingdom but the kingdom is everywhere. That s 3 P a g e

4 actually what the word Catholic means. It means universal. God s covenant keeping spans all of history. The final covenant will be the new heavens and the new earth and that will encompass all of the previous covenants as well. God begins with two people and then he builds. He consistently offers himself to a greater group. He is giving himself to us more and more, and he expects us to do the same and to give ourselves to him more and more thoroughly. At this point I d like to take a moment to thank my newest friends of the show: Rowena, Erin, Shelly, Muriel, Kristine, Elizabeth, and Lisa. Thank you for loving and lifting me. I appreciate it more than you will ever know. It is about time for me to send out another batch of thank-you gifts, so look for those in the next few weeks. I d like to turn now to faithfulness in the New Testament. Jesus is called a faithful high priest, we see in the book of Hebrews. We see in that book that the emphasis is on his faithfulness to his obligations to God and then to his saving work. Remember that was part of what the term in the Old Testament meant. It meant faithfulness to your obligations, faithfulness to your covenant, your promises. Jesus, then, is the faithful high priest because he is faithful to the obligations that God gave him but also to that saving work to which he was called and promised. He is the fulfillment. He is an extension, or we might even say the image, of God s faithfulness. Isn t that beautiful? In the book of Revelation, Jesus is called the faithful witness or the Faithful and True. It s actually capitalized. I had a reader point out that those are additions made my translators and that s absolutely true, they are; but, they are important. The fact that he is called Faithful and True there is meant as a proper name. Jesus is the personification of faithfulness and truth. He said himself I am the way, the truth, and the life. In the same way, he is faithful and he is faithfulness. It is clear that Jesus has God s quality of faithfulness. He IS God s faithfulness in the most absolute sense, especially in contrast with human faithlessness. All throughout the book of Revelation it shows Jesus in that final kingship role where he is the final faithfulness. Jesus is faithfulness all the way until the end of time. It s interesting. We looked at the fact that because of that security and that firmness of faithfulness, God is called in the Old Testament a rock. He is the secure object of trust, faithfulness. If God is the rock of faithfulness, Jesus is the cornerstone, it says in the New Testament. What I thought was very interesting, the readings this week we had the Feast of the Chair of Peter. Peter was called by Christ the rock. This is incredible. Jesus gives Peter his own name. Peter is the new rock. Whereas God was the rock in the Old Testament, Jesus tells Peter he is the rock of the New Testament. Isn t that crazy? Jesus is the cornerstone but he names Peter the rock. I bet that absolutely flabbergasted him, because that is a designation, and sometimes it is used in the Old Testament as a name, for God himself. To them designate Peter as the rock is amazing. As one of our listeners pointed out in our Love The Word takeaway, there was a sermon by Pope Leo in the Office for that day, and he says about Peter You have not been deceived by earthly opinion but have been enlightened by inspiration from heaven. I say to you, Jesus says, in other words, as my Father has revealed to you my godhead so I in my turn make known to you your preeminence. You are Peter. Though I am the inviolable rock, the cornerstone that makes both one, the foundation apart from which no one can lay any other, yet you also are a rock, he says of Peter. You are given solidity by my strength so that which is my very own because of my power is common between us through your participation. Upon this rock, I will build my church and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. On this strong foundation, he says, I will build an everlasting temple. The great height of my church, which is to penetrate the heavens, shall rise on the firm foundation of this faith. 4 P a g e

5 It is absolutely remarkable, given the way God was understood in the Old Testament to be the rock of salvation and Jesus then saying he is the cornerstone, and the New Testament calls him that, for Peter to be designated by Christ himself as the rock. What s even more interesting is while the Old Testament talks about their being a stone that will come, it is Peter himself in his epistle in the New Testament that says that Jesus is the cornerstone. You know that he had to have been informed by that relationship that he had with Christ. It s just amazing to me. I imagine his eyes probably bugged out when Jesus said to him You are the rock, and on this rock I will build my church. Let s move forward past just those writings of the New Testament and look at faithfulness as covenant. We saw it in the Old Testament that the word faithfulness is actually tied to the fact that God always keeps his covenant. Well, he keeps his covenant in the New Testament too but for us it s a little bit different. Romans 15:8 talks about vindication of God s covenant faithfulness because there is this realization of his promises to the patriarchs, the Old Testament fathers. That is declared to have been the whole purpose and ministry of Jesus to the Jews. St. Paul, then, is arguing that the unbelief of the Jews, which is what allowed the Gentiles (us) to be saved, does not nullify God s faithfulness. This is a weird section of scripture that confuses people sometimes. We talked about it some when we looked at eschatology and end times prophesy. He does this section there in the book of Romans where he talks about how God blinded the Jews. When he talks about that he s really meaning that the Jews as a whole, as a nation, did not recognize Jesus as their messiah. They still don t. In essence it was that blindness in not recognizing Jesus as their messiah that caused Paul to then turn to the Gentiles and preach to the Gentiles who did accept Jesus as the messiah. It s because of the blindness of the Jews, Paul says, that we are allowed to be saved. There are individual Jews who have been saved; the Apostles, Mary, all of those first Christians were Jewish to begin with. At some point, though, that blindness is what allowed the Gentiles to be saved. It seemed, because there is this long interval between the death of Christ and his crucifixion and the time when the Jews will recognize him as their messiah, and it seems as though God has not been faithful to his promises. That is what he is saying in Romans 15:8. He s arguing that the unbelief of the Jews cannot nullify God s faithfulness. Both Jew and Gentile, he says, are on the same footing regarding justification, but the Jews had one great advantage in that they are the people to whom the revelation of God s promises had been given. Those promises will certainly be fulfilled, he stresses over and over throughout that section. If you want to look at it it s in Romans 11 through about 15. Those promises will be fulfilled even though some of the Jews were unfaithful, because the fulfilment of those promises does not depend on them but on the faithfulness of God, which cannot be made void by our faithlessness and unbelief. He reiterates in this big example, in an example that spans thousands of years, he is giving us a clear example of how our behavior never nullifies God s faithfulness. The promises are intact, they just haven t been fulfilled yet. In essence he s sort of saying You just wait and see. God s faithfulness, again, is this unchangeable constancy and fidelity to his covenant promises. It is that fidelity to his promises, or the fact that God s gift and election are unchangeable on his part or in his mind, that give Paul the assurance that all Israel will finally one day be saved. That is a prophecy, and we know that is one of the things that has to happen before the second coming of Christ. We know it because Paul tells us. Isn t that fascinating? Let s turn, then, to how the New Testament talks about faithfulness in terms of covenant. You re going to love this if you ve not seen this before (and even if you have!) Jesus, when he instituted the Eucharist, he actually instituted the Eucharist and the sacrament of holy orders at the same time. When he took the bread and broke it and said the blessing and gave it to them saying This is my body 5 P a g e

6 which will be given for you. Do this in memory of me. Then the cup: This is the new covenant in my blood which will be shed for you. He institutes the Eucharist and the sacrament of holy orders at the same time, and he links the sacraments to the new covenant. The new covenant includes sacraments. You kind of have to ask what s the relationship between these two words: sacrament and covenant? I m so glad you asked, because it s fascinating. When you look at covenant you understand the deeper meaning of sacrament and why we call it a sacrament. Covenants, as we mentioned earlier, is how God fathers his family throughout salvation history. He began with Adam and Eve. On the seventh day, God covenants himself to Adam and Eve. We see in the Gospel of Luke that Adam is the son of God, so there is this family relationship that God establishes through that covenant. Then he continues to father the family through covenant with Noah, and then Moses and Abraham and David and finally Jesus. All of these successive covenants we see God expanding the covenant family until there is one holy, Catholic (meaning universal), and apostolic church. There is one element of covenant making, and it is an oath-swearing. If you look in Zechariah you see very clearly that God has promised to be mindful of his holy covenant and of the oath he swore to Abraham our father. God swears himself in an oath. That s what a covenant is. He binds himself in this self-donation to his children forever. When you swear an oath in the Old Testament there are a few things that are involved: first, you invoke God s name, like I swear to God, and then there is an exchange, not of goods and services but of people. I am yours and you are mine, God said. I will be your God and you will be my people. We saw that in his name. He covenants himself to his people in his name, though his oath, a swear. Third, covenants are permanent. They also invoke blessings and curses. If you keep this, you get this blessing; and if you break it, you will be cursed or damned. The Hebrew word for swearing an oath is sheba. Sheba literally means to seven oneself. If you remember back in the Genesis account, God rested on the seventh day. He is covenanting himself to all of creation. He is swearing an oath. He is sevening. Seven is the number of covenant. You ll see that in the book Fulfilled. If you haven t gotten it, you should get it, because we re talking about all of this in context even of the church. We see how God has prepared all of these ways to show us what we re going to look at here in a minute. God sevens himself by swearing an oath, a covenant, that is faithful. God is faithful to the covenants. God covenants himself to humanity when he rests, and then he blesses it and makes it holy that seventh day. By that he enters into a covenant with Adam and Eve. It s actually interesting that in the Hebrew the three sentences that make up that passage in Genesis 2:1-3 are made up of seven Hebrew words. Isn t that interesting? You ll get the significance of seven and numbers and stuff in the book Fulfilled. What connection does this have with the sacraments, though?, you re probably asking. The answer lies in knowing that the Latin word for oath is sacramentum. That s where we get the word sacrament. Jesus instituted seven of these sacramentum. He is covenant making. Sacraments are covenant making and covenant renewing promises. They are oaths. The Romans even knew this. Back in 112 when Pliny the Younger filed a report to the emperor he said about the Christians they were in the habit of meeting on a certain fixed day before it was light and they sang in alternate verses a hymn to Christ as to a God and bond themselves by a solemn oath (sacramentum) not to any wicked deeds but not to ever commit any fraud, theft, or adultery; never to falsify their word nor deny trust when they should be called upon to deliver it up. Afterward it was their custom to partake of food but food of an ordinary and innocent kind. He s describing the mass there. However ordinary this food seemed to Pliny the Younger, it is the bread of life, the flesh and blood of Christ, the sacrament of the Eucharist. 6 P a g e

7 Like the other oaths, sacraments involve invoking God s name, an exchange of persons, permanency, and blessings or curses. For instance, if you look at the Eucharist, at the beginning of the mass we invoke God s name: In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. We have put ourselves under oath to fulfil the terms of the covenant that we are about to receive in the mass. That s big. Then there is an exchange of persons. The priest says The body of Christ and The blood of Christ and we say Amen, and then we receive the Lord into our very bodies. He gives himself to us and through our Amen and receiving of him through the Eucharist we are called to do the exact same thing. Not just there in Mass in the Eucharist, but in our whole lives. We look at that specifically when we look at the altar in the Old Testament tabernacle and how that altar and the fire on the altar designate that your entire life is meant to be a sacrifice. Not just your Eucharistic reception and not just your Sunday obligation at Mass, but your entire life is meant to be a self-donation to God through your neighbor. That is because this is an oath. We are receiving an oath. We are making a covenant with God. We are receiving him, he gives himself to us, we give ourselves to him. We are giving ourselves in self-donation as completely as he has given himself to us. He gave himself up to death so that we could receive him, and so we are called to do the exact same thing. That is an exchange of the divine person of Christ and ourselves, and it is supposed to be permanent. It is a faithfulness. God is faithful to us and we are supposed to be faithful to him. That is what the Holy Spirit does in us. When we talk about the fruit of the spirit, the Holy Spirit makes us faithful to the covenant that we have made with Christ in the Eucharist at that Mass. We left off talking about how the sacraments of the Church are a matter of oath-taking. We are covenanting ourselves back to God after he has covenanted himself to us in Christ. Christ instituted those seven covenants, those seven sacraments. God is faithful to those because the sacraments are a promise, first of all, of the thing that they impart. Baptism is a promise of a cleansing from original sin and an implantation into the family of God. It is the seed of salvation. That is a promise. When we receive baptism we are receiving that promise from God that we will be incorporated into his family (or that we were as children). I actually was baptized older and came into the Catholic Church after that baptism. It doesn t matter when you were baptized. It is a promise all the same of being incorporated into God s family and having that original sin completely removed. It is the promise of the seed of salvation. It is not salvation in and of itself, because salvation in the Scriptures, all verbs in the Scriptures, in the Greek especially, have motion. It s not complete at baptism, it goes on and on until the end our lives, salvation does. It is the seed of salvation but not the completion of it. It is the promise of it. We have the promise and hope of salvation in our baptism. In Confession we receive the promise of absolution. When we confess our sins, John says, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. Look how the use of the word faithful occurs in that verse. That is 1 John 1:9. If you confess your sin, he is faithful and just. Just means fair. Somehow it is fair for God to forgive us our sins and also cleanse us from all unrighteousness. It is an oath, a promise, a covenant from God that he will forgive our sins out of fairness if we confess them. Dear One, that is a huge promise. Not only that he will forgive them but that he will cleanse us from unrighteousness, meaning not just for that one time but if we continue to go to him he will get rid of that habit for us. That is an amazing promise from God. At Confirmation we enter more fully into the mission that God has called us to, which is a mission of evangelization. More than that, the graces and promises of confirmation actually enable us to be martyred. We are to be witnesses to our faith, even to martyrdom if necessary. The promise is that God will help us to do that. We have a promise of the graces necessary to do that if required. Even if it is not an actual literal martyrdom, life is a martyrdom. It is a purification that detaches you and 7 P a g e

8 purifies you and makes you decrease so that he can increase. That is a very slow martyrdom. The intention there is not to destroy us but so that God can increase in us so that we are made the most full expression of who God made us to be. That the promise and grace of confirmation. Then we have marriage or holy orders. The graces and promises of marriage are that you have the grace necessary to make it all the way and that marriage will help sanctify you and make you holy so that you can reach heaven. That is the promise of marriage. Holy orders are a different vocation, but the graces of holy orders in themselves are also a promise, an oath. God gives himself to those who accept holy orders and they give themselves completely back to God in the service of the Church. Notice there that the promises that are made in both marriage and holy orders it is a complete self-donation. We give ourselves to the other person, but we give ourselves to God through them. Again, you need the graces and promises of confirmation to be able to do that, but then marriage and holy orders have their own covenant inherent in them. To make a marriage vow itself is permanent. It s a covenant. It s not a contract. The world likes to tell us it is, but is a covenant. It is inviolable. You must be faithful. There are blessings and curses related to those. In all of those ways, then, the covenant that we are making is a self-donation and we are giving ourselves, really, to God through that other person, or in the case of holy orders through the Church. Even to the disposal of that other person or that parish or whatever. Those who are ordained are called to serve wherever they are put to serve. Then you have the anointing of the sick, or last rites. Those are actually two different things. The anointing of the sick is illustrated in the book of James where there is a promise that says if you pray for those who are sick they will get well, meaning the prayers of the Church will help save them. WE see that in James, and that is the anointing of the sick. Last rites is that covenant coming to fulfilment- the covenant between the person and God. God promises throughout the graces of the Sacraments to do what it takes to get you to heaven in the final hours. In all of those ways you give yourself to God. In the last rites you are giving yourself. Finally, in the end, you are making your entire life, the entire history of your life, a self-donation to God. He promises to receive that selfdonation. Isn t that beautiful? When we talk about covenants and being faithful to covenants in the New Testament, we are talking about sacraments. In all of those ways we are illustrating and re-covenanting ourselves to God. We are accepting the covenant that he has made with us and we are giving ourselves back to him in covenant. God cannot break the covenant but we can. That is where the blessing and the curses of covenant making come to bear. Throughout our whole lives we are supposed to call upon the blessings of the Lord to help us in fulfilling our part of the covenant, but when we don t keep the covenant, when we are not living a life that is worthy of that calling to which we have been called in Christ, then we could say that covenant curses come to bear on us. St. Paul talks about that when he says that whoever eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord unworthily will have to answer for the body and blood of the Lord. A person should examine himself and so eat the bread and drink the cup, for anyone who eats and drinks without discerning the body eats and drinks judgement on himself. We are talking about the Eucharist here. He says that in 1 Corinthians 11: In the sacraments, we swear that we believe and that we will live a faithful life to God. We give ourselves completely to him. That means every aspect of our lives. Sundays and Monday through Saturday, in the board room, in the family room, in the bedroom. There is no picking and choosing what we are going to give to God. We give it all to him. He didn t pick and choose which parts he was going to give to us. He gave it all on the cross, and he continues to do that in the sacraments. That is 8 P a g e

9 actually one of the scandals, I think, for a non-catholic with the Eucharist that Jesus would be so humble that he would give himself to us in food. We ve talked about that together before. That humility is what shows us that it is God. Only God would do that. It is a matchless humility. People don t do that. Only God in his divinity can humble himself in that way and not lose a single bit of his majesty in doing so. In summary, after looking at both the Old Testament and the New Testament, what we see is that faithfulness is related to unchangeableness. I AM, God says. We saw last week that he is goodness, that all things come from that goodness that he is, and it doesn t change. He is faithful to his promises and his covenants. The faithfulness of God in the Bible is connected with those promises of salvation. It is those attributes that make God the firm and secure aspect of trust, the rock. God was faithful to the Old Testament covenants and he is and always will be faithful to the sacraments of the Church, all the way to the end of time. Isn t that fabulous?? If you haven t gotten it yet I hope you ll get my newest book Fulfilled because it shows how the Old Testament tabernacle is the foundation of the Catholic Church. God is consistent. He is faithful. He is unchangeable. If it s true of the Old Testament it must be true of the New Testament. That is what I just showed you. The covenants of the Old Testament continue forward, it s just a different word: sacramentum. We use Latin in the Church because it s a universal language. Whether you are African and you speak Zimbabwe or you re French and speak French or whatever, ecclesial language is Latin so that we all understand it. It is not to hide it from us, it is to bring us all together in one. You can see just through faithfulness, looking at it as a fruit of the spirit, that God is faithful. That is what the Holy Spirit does in us. He makes us faithful to our part of the covenant, the sacraments. Next week we are going to look at gentleness and then self-control. 9 P a g e

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