Steadfast Love and Faithfulness

Proverbs 3:3-6

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The text I’d like to meditate on at this time is from Proverbs chapter three, verses three through six.

Let not steadfast love and faithfulness forsake you;
bind them around your neck;
write them on the tablet of your heart.
So you will find favor and good success
in the sight of God and man.
Trust in the Lord with all your heart,
and do not lean on your own understanding.
In all your ways acknowledge him,
and he will make straight your paths. (Proverbs 3:3-6)

After God has taught us what he would have us believe, and do we see what’s required of us. Jesus said in his sermon on the Mount, (Matthew 5:48) you must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect. And if we see that what’s required of us is perfection, that can quite frequently lead us to despair. Why even try? And perhaps even disappointment that well, I thought this was supposed to be easy, but there’s a great deal of difficulty that I have to accomplish.

We need then, to be perfected in holiness. And so this passage contains one of the most famous Bible passages, and one that’s well worth memorizing in verse five of Proverbs chapter three.

Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding. (Proverbs 3:5)

And that’s a motto that we can come back to day after day, because this perfection that God requires of us is not possible for us to accomplish. We can’t do it. We won’t ever get even close. And so we come to the passage here that starts: Let not steadfast love and faithfulness forsake you. That could be a command. Remain steadfast in your love. Remain in your faithfulness. Show that perfection before God. But really, what it’s saying is, let not God’s steadfast love and God’s faithfulness forsake you. Bind them around your neck. The perfection that God demands of us, he gives to us. He gave that ultimately in Jesus who died on the cross, for all of our imperfections, we call them sins, trespasses, transgressions, iniquities. All different words for the same thing. Failure to live up to the perfection that God requires. Jesus paid the punishment for that. He died with that, so that our sin, our iniquity, our imperfection is gone. It died. And as a result, Jesus also then gives us his perfect record. He was not sinful in any regard. He never committed a single trespass. And that record is counted as ours because of God’s promise. And that’s what this summarizes. God’s steadfast love and faithfulness is his love for you and his faithfulness to his promise to you that he would give you life in His Son, that he would give you His Son’s perfection and holiness.

So when we come to the heaven that God has promised to us, we won’t come as stained and filthy people, but we’ll be clothed in the white robes that John saw in his revelation, (Revelation 7:9) the people clothed in white robes, because their robes are washed in the blood of the lamb. That’s how we get our perfection. It’s given to us by Christ through His Word. Each time that word comes to us, declaring our sins forgiven and strengthening us with the Holy Spirit, it comes with his purposes so that we have the perfection of Jesus in us right now.

Even though we see in our daily lives how often we are imperfect, how often we fail, we have that perfection from Jesus, given to us, and we’ll see it in eternity, that perfection in the most glorious way. But all because we’re looking at not ourselves, but God. We don’t trust in our own wisdom, our own understanding, but we lean on God. We trust in the Lord with all our heart because he gives us everything.