God’s Faithfulness, Not Mine

God’s Faithfulness, Not Mine
Psalm 143

Contrary to the resolve she had announced a few days ago, first thing this morning my wife sat at her computer checking the news. Eventually I asked her what had happened to her resolve to begin the day with her time of devotion, and in horror she admitted she had forgotten her resolve. She then went off to make breakfast. (She has carried on with her devotions since I wrote this commentary, and you can work out from the acknowledgments section that I would not be including this information without her cooperation, and that she thus did not perceive me as being passive-aggressive.) It is just as well that the relationship between God and us does not depend on our faithfulness as much as it depends on God’s, and my wife knows that fact and trusts in it, in a good way. It would be possible for us to take God’s faithfulness for granted and not feel compelled to be faithful. In contemporary Western Christianity as I experience it, our more prevalent danger is the assumption that our faithfulness determines whether God is faithful, that God relates to us in response to our relating to him...