Question: "Doesn't God call us to be faithful, not successful?"

Faithfulness is so needed today.  Hypocrisy, a person saying one thing and doing another, typifies too many relationships inside and outside the church. We need people who act congruent with their testimony.  We need Christians to live consistent and faithful lives. A minimal requirement for Christians should be reliability.  God grants this characteristic by the Holy Spirit who brings self-discipline to our lives.

There are two drawbacks, however, to merely being faithful:

Just being faithful can cause us to become irrelevant.  We can be faithful to an ideal, while losing touch with the needs around us.  Faithfulness should lead to fruitfulness.  When we refuse to evaluate our ministries by acceptable criteria for success, we can hide behind the virtue of faithfulness.  We know our hearts and believe our positive motivation should be enough. 

The tendency is to judge ourselves by our intent rather than productivity.  We are apt to become elitists or arrogant.  We mock standards of success as being below us. We argue that spiritual things cannot be measured.  The conclusion: we are above the numbers game.

John 15 combines faithfulness with fruitfulness. Those who remain (faithful) in Christ will bear fruit (success).  Fruitfulness is not an automatic result of faithfulness.  Faithfulness moves us toward productive behavior.  The direction and purpose of our lives should be to accomplish God’s mission on earth.  We Christians embrace both love for God with concern for the lost.  We obey both the Great Commandment and the Great Commission.

--Dr. Lyle Pointer, pastor and Professor of Evangelism at Nazarene Theological Seminary, will answer your questions about personal and local church evangelism. Questions and answers will be posted on the website and One-on-One. Send your questions to evangelism@nazarene.org.

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