What Is the Fruit of Faithfulness?
The gospel is the good news that the perfect life of Jesus and His substitutionary death on the cross can be ours for the trusting, not ours for the working. God has promised to reckon the work of Christ to our account, though we ourselves are sinners and will be sinners to the day we die.
It is not good that we are sinners. None of us who come to Christ in faith do so believing that we have nothing to be saved from. We know that our evil deeds must be forgiven if we are to enjoy the eternal favor of God. In that sense, our salvation depends on what God has done for us in Christ, not on what we have done for ourselves. Indeed, even our sanctification is a work done primarily by God rather than a work done by us with an “assist” from God. To that extent, our growth in Christlikeness is affected by what we do but not determined by what we do, since God Himself drives forward the sanctifying process by His Spirit and we are His happy captives. But in Paul’s day, adversaries of the gospel slipped into Galatia and preached a different gospel, which was, as Paul says, no gospel at all.
Today, the false teachers of Galatia are often called “Judaizers” because they argued that gentile believers must submit to Jewish practices in addition to faith in Christ for salvation. In short, they argued that Jesus is not enough. His perfect life credited to our account is not enough, they said, and neither was his substitutionary death on the cross. Instead, the Judaizers argued that God requires a synergistic (“working together”) hybrid of faith in Christ and works of the law, the latter to include especially circumcision, dietary laws, and holy days. However, as Paul argues, the logic of their false gospel was such that it engaged the entire Old Testament law. All efforts to “do the right thing” or “measure up,” would have this effect, Paul implies, if those efforts are undertaken for the purpose of self-justification.
To the untrained Christian eye, the Judaizing argument sounds plausible. Why not keep the Old Testament law just to be on the safe side? But it is a sham. One tincture of human effort dropped in for sake of justification always pollutes the whole. It is always good that we obey, that we love God and neighbor. It is never good that we strive to do either one for the purpose of seeking to be justified by the works of the law, since that kind of striving diminishes the sufficiency of Christ and his work
But now comes the obvious question: If we do not and cannot obey for the sake of justification, why would anyone bother to obey at all? Paul’s paradoxical answer is that freedom from the law, and thus from our efforts to be justified by works, is the only way that anyone ever obeys in a sense that pleases God. Assurance of salvation is not the end of moral seriousness but rather its only possible basis. Only when safely hidden in Christ can we “walk by the Spirit” and avoid gratifying the “desires of the flesh” (Gal. 5:16). The works of the flesh produce the worthless fruit itemized by Paul in Galatians 5:19–21. The fruit of the Spirit, which honors the law by definition, is “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control” (Gal. 5:22). Thus, we come to the focus this article, the aspect of fruitfulness called “faithfulness.”
When the Apostle Paul introduces the word pistis, which is translated as “faithfulness” in our text, we tend to assume that he means something like “trust” or “confidence”—that is, a resting in what God has promised—and we are right to do so. Who can deny how important this idea is to Paul’s entire theological system? Nevertheless, sometimes he uses this word pistis with a different (but recognizable) emphasis. Here, pistis does not signify a state of mind or heart, but rather a virtue or tendency to respond and behave in a reliable, trustworthy, or conscientious way. In the ancient world, this quality of character was in short supply. Authors like Juvenal, Seneca, and Josephus complained expressly about the corruption of their own societies. The absence of faithfulness goes a long way toward explaining that corruption.
Faithfulness is the effort to love our neighbors in the ordinary business of life.
To define faithfulness, as Paul intends it here, we might think of it as combining conscientiousness and trustworthiness. So then, with this hybrid notion in mind, we could say that faithful people stay on the job until the job is done. They show up on time and follow through with details. Faithful people keep their hands off other people’s money and honor their prior commitments. Their “yes” and their “no” mean something, such that oaths from them become superfluous (Matt. 5:33–37). In effect, we could say that faithfulness is the effort to love our neighbors in the ordinary business of life, where transactions need to occur, and those transactions presuppose mutual trust and trustworthiness on all sides.
One might think of faithfulness as reducible to honesty, but the two ideas differ in some respects. Faithfulness carries with the idea of being proactive. A faithful person can be counted on to serve when not seen and to behave consistently well over the long haul. A faithful servant would not say, as a wicked one does in a familiar parable, “My master is delayed,” and live like there is no tomorrow and no duties to honor (Matt. 24:48). Faithfulness goes beyond what Paul calls “eye-service” and serves as well when unseen as seen (Eph. 6:6; Col. 3:22).
For many of us faithfulness shows itself in our work because it must do so, lest we find ourselves unemployed. Cultures of excellence, formed in our workplaces, tend to weed out the unfaithful because the latter simply cannot keep up. But some occupations lend themselves more easily to laziness, especially when they operate on high levels of implied trust. One obvious example is Christian ministry, where one may seem to get away with unfaithfulness simply because everyone trusts each other and because no one can watch everyone else all of the time. But as the parables of Jesus sometimes emphasize, our duties do not end when no one is watching. The duty of faithfulness, the need to bear this kind of fruit never ends, nor should we hope that it would. Faithfulness in any task is one of the major ways that we can love God and love our neighbor as we ought to do.
Behavior of this kind does not come naturally to us as sinners. We find it much easier to be faithless than faithful, because faithfulness takes effort and planning. It takes self-discipline and sometimes personal sacrifice for the good of others. However, the good news is that the fruit of the Spirit does include faithfulness; and we trust in Christ, the Spirit will bring this fruit out of us for the sake of His glory.
