Since we live in a complex, highly charged, contentious historical moment, when cultural and political issues stretch and tear not only the social fabric of a nation, but also the unity between Christians in many of our churches, I’ve been giving a lot of thought to this two-sentence statement by Jesus:

A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another. By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another. (John 13:34–35)

It’s an important statement to meditate upon because Jesus spoke it in a complex, highly charged, contentious historical moment. Moreover, he spoke it to his small band of closest disciples the night before he died, knowing his death and resurrection would only increase the complexity and contention of their world.

Along with these disciples, nearly every new disciple after them would live in a wide variety of complex, highly charged, contentious historical moments. In fact, it would be a rare exception when a disciple wouldn’t live in such a moment. Therefore, all disciples who would hear or read Jesus’s two-sentence statement would need to ask themselves these two questions:

What does it mean to love one another as Jesus has loved us?
Do outside observers actually recognize us as Jesus’s disciples because of the distinctly Jesus-like ways we love one another?

And so, these are the questions for us to ask ourselves.

Serious About Obeying Jesus

As soon as we ask these questions, however, we realize that, though they are generally the right questions, they aren’t quite sufficient.

Asking, How do we love one another in ways that are recognizably Jesus-like? is like asking, How do we love our neighbor as ourselves? The answer is, “It depends.” There are endless possible answers. A specific answer to the question requires a specific context for the question. That’s why when a lawyer queried Jesus on neighbor-love, he answered with the Good Samaritan story to illustrate what it looks like in a specific situation (Luke 10:25–37).

This is the genius of Jesus’s two-sentence love command: it’s endlessly applicable. But it requires us to be serious enough about obeying it to press these two questions into our specific contexts.

So, what is our context? What’s causing the fabric of Christian unity in some places to stretch and tear much like the social fabric of the wider culture? Here, each disciple or local-church family of disciples must do the hard work of pressing these questions into their unique contexts, since each will have unique differences.

But still, like Jesus, who provided the lawyer an example in the Good Samaritan, it’s helpful to look at an example. One good example is Richard Sibbes.

Another Contentious Age

Richard Sibbes (1577–1635) was a prominent Puritan pastor who ministered during a time when, in England (as in all of Europe), the ecclesiastical and political ramifications of the Protestant Reformation were being worked out in tragically bloody ways. There was no separation of church and state. For reasons of mutual conviction or convenience, monarchs allied themselves with powerful Christian institutions.

This meant Anglicans, Roman Catholics, and Nonconformist Protestants were, willingly or not, entangled in high-stakes struggles for political and religious power. Especially toward the end of Sibbes’s life, how one spoke of the Lord’s Supper, the Book of Common Prayer, or apostolic succession could get one imprisoned or killed. Suffice it to say, it was a complex, culturally contentious, frequently brutal historical moment. Strife was rife. Professing Christians said and did horribly offensive things to each other.

Yet in this environment, Richard Sibbes became renowned for his compassionate care of anguishing souls and his ability to help his hearers (and readers) encounter in Scripture the tender love of Jesus, the beloved Servant who would not break “a bruised reed” (Isaiah 42:1–4; Matthew 12:18–21). Not surprisingly, that phrase became the title of his best-known book: The Bruised Reed.

And in that book, Sibbes proposed one specific way Christians living in contentious times could love one another in a recognizably Jesus-like way.

The Christian’s ‘Good Strife’

Sibbes wrote,

It were a good strife amongst Christians, one to labor to give no offense, and the other to labor to take none. The best men are severe to themselves, tender over others. (The Bruised Reed, 47)

Having witnessed much evil strife between Christians, Sibbes proposed that, if Christians are going to strive with one another, then let them strive, let them labor, let them exert great effort, let them do everything in their power to not give or take offense. Let them strive to cultivate the spiritual discipline of being hard on themselves and tender toward others — or as Jesus put it, let them address the logs in their own eyes before addressing the specks in others’ (Matthew 7:3–5).

Now, even though we live in a different day, doesn’t Sibbes’s pastoral counsel sound remarkably relevant? What sanctifying, joy-producing good would it work in our souls, what would it do for the health of our local churches, what would it say to a watching world about Jesus, if we Christians today engaged in this good strife of doing everything in our power to not give or take offense?

Put It to the Test

Sibbes’s “good strife” proposal is an example of just one specific way Christians in conflict can obey Jesus’s love command in John 13:34–35. But it is a good one. We can test it out with our two application questions from Jesus’s love command, each of us filling in the blanks with our contextual specifics.

Question 1

What does it mean for us to love one another as Jesus has loved us given our context?

Sibbes’s (and the apostle Paul’s) answer: it means we labor to give no offense and take none by doing everything in our power

to not think more highly of ourselves than we ought to think (Romans 12:3),
to outdo one another in showing honor (Romans 12:10),
to never be wise in our own sight (Romans 12:16),
to give thought to do what is honorable in the sight of all (Romans 12:17),
to never repay evil for evil (Romans 12:17),
to bear with one another and, if one has a complaint against another, forgive each other, as the Lord has forgiven us (Colossians 3:13), and
to let no corrupting talk come out of our mouths, but only such as is good for building up, as fits the occasion, that it may give grace to those who hear (Ephesians 4:29).

Is this the expression of Jesus-like love most called for in our specific situation? If so, we have a roadmap for what obedience looks like. If not, we need to keep prayerfully pressing the question until we get a specific answer.

Question 2

Do outside observers recognize us as Jesus’s disciples because of the distinctly Jesus-like ways we love one another?

Since this second question is really an evaluation of how well we’re obeying the first, we can’t answer it until we’ve been walking in obedience for a while. But using Sibbes’s “good strife” example, there’s no question that if we as individuals and as churches become characterized by the conduct described in the bullet statements listed above, most outside observers will recognize that we really do follow Jesus’s teaching.

Which means, regardless of whether the “good strife” is the best application of Jesus’s love command in our complex, culturally contentious historical moment, it is a strife we are nonetheless called to engage in as Christians. It is part of our call to follow in the footsteps of our great Servant-Lord, the Son of God, who also lived in brutally contentious times and knew when to hold his peace that he might not break bruised reeds.

How “good and pleasant” it would be for brothers and sisters to pursue this dimension of unity (Psalm 133:1) and share together in the blessing given to the sons of God, who learn how to make peace (Matthew 5:9) by counting it a glory to overlook an offense (Proverbs 19:11).

In 587 BC, after an agonizing two-and-half-year siege, the great pagan king Nebuchadnezzar finally breached the walls of Jerusalem. Babylon’s chokehold on Jerusalem for those couple of years had devastated the city, driving its starvation-crazed inhabitants to the unimaginable point of cannibalism.

But now, the foreign military unleashed its full fury, reducing to ruins much of the holy city, “the perfection of beauty” and “the joy of all the earth” (Psalm 50:2; 48:2). And it thrust a spear into its spiritual heart by destroying the great temple Solomon had built nearly four centuries earlier (Jeremiah 52:4–14). The conquest is still felt among observant Jews, who commemorate it annually with fasting and laments on the ninth of Av, the fifth month of the Hebrew calendar (Jeremiah, Lamentations, 441).

The Bible preserves the inspired record of one saint who managed to survive the carnage. We know it in our English Bibles as Lamentations, a collection of five beautifully composed, honest, raw poems, in which the anonymous poet gives an inspired collective voice to the grieving nation of Israel.

He captures in verse the devastating and disorienting psychological, emotional, and spiritual distress suffered by those who lived and died during the darkest, most tragic chapter in Israel’s old-covenant history, when the Lord, in judgment, had “become like an enemy” to his own people (Lamentations 2:5). It is the saddest book in all of Scripture.

Which is why it is remarkable that smack-dab in the middle of this book of tears is, arguably, the Bible’s most well-known, most beloved declaration of God’s love, mercy, and faithfulness:

The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases;     his mercies never come to an end;they are new every morning;     great is your faithfulness. (Lamentations 3:22–23)

Driven into Darkness

To truly appreciate this beautiful, beloved declaration, we need to keep in mind the kinds of shock this author and his people had experienced.

They had seen Jerusalem’s beloved walls, strongholds, and palaces — the structures that for centuries had been symbols of God’s strength and protection for the Jewish people (Psalm 48:12–14) — turned to rubble (Lamentations 2:5, 8–9). They had seen priests massacred in the temple and the sacred building burned to the ground (Lamentations 2:6–7, 20). They had seen infants die of starvation in the arms of their mothers (Lamentations 2:11–12), parents eat the remains of their children (Lamentations 4:10), young women brutally raped, and once-free men enslaved and humiliated (Lamentations 5:11–13). They had seen bodies of young and old, common and noble, lying in the streets where they had been slaughtered, left to become shriveled horrors (Lamentations 2:21, 4:7–8).

And they knew this was God’s doing: “The Lord has done what he has purposed; he has carried out his word, which he commanded long ago” (Lamentations 2:17). After centuries of prophetic warnings issued to his stiff-necked, disobedient people (Isaiah 1:7–9; Amos 2:4–5), God at last brought upon Israel the dreadful covenant curses Moses described in Deuteronomy 28:47–57.

The sovereignty of God over this human anguish pours out through the poet’s pen as he writes,

[The Lord] has driven and brought me     into darkness without any light;surely against me he turns his hand     again and again the whole day long.

He has made my flesh and my skin waste away;     he has broken my bones;he has besieged and enveloped me     with bitterness and tribulation;he has made me dwell in darkness     like the dead of long ago.

He has walled me about so that I cannot escape;     he has made my chains heavy;though I call and cry for help,     he shuts out my prayer;he has blocked my ways with blocks of stones;     he has made my paths crooked. (Lamentations 3:2–9)

Therefore,

my soul is bereft of peace;     I have forgotten what happiness is;so I say, “My endurance has perished;     so has my hope from the Lord.” (Lamentations 3:17–18)

We can barely fathom such multilayered darkness and suffering: afflicted by God, decimated by man, alone, with no light, no peace, no happiness, no hope.

And then.

Light in Deep Despair

Suddenly, we come to one of the most unexpected, jarring literary pivots in all of Scripture — one might even call it a resurrection of one who had been “like the dead” (Lamentations 3:6).

“Into this darkness of destruction, death, and despair comes light, and in this light hope revives.”

Nothing about the horrific circumstances of the city, the nation, or the author gives any reason for hope. By all appearances, all has been lost. God, in his righteous wrath, administered through a foreign superpower, has slain his “firstborn son” (Exodus 4:22). The tomb has effectively been sealed. All one can do now is weep beside the grave — or hide from those who had done the killing.

Then into this darkness of destruction, death, and despair comes light, and in this light hope revives. For suddenly, unexpectedly, the lamenting author breaks into this beautiful, and now beloved, declaration:

But this I call to mind,     and therefore I have hope:

The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases;     his mercies never come to an end;they are new every morning;     great is your faithfulness.“The Lord is my portion,” says my soul,     “therefore I will hope in him.” . . .

For the Lord will not     cast off forever,but, though he cause grief, he will have compassion     according to the abundance of his steadfast love. (Lamentations 3:21–24, 31–32)

What revives the author’s dead hope? Answer: not what, but who. The very sovereign God who had brought the darkness and anguish.

‘This I Call to Mind’

Specifically, his hope revives by the word of this sovereign God that the author has stored in his heart (Psalm 119:11). And he has stored a lot of it in his heart. Read Lamentations carefully and you’ll notice many allusions to passages found throughout the Law, the Prophets, and the Psalms — especially the Psalms. For example, read these excerpts from Psalm 103 and listen for their echoes in that beloved Lamentations text:

Bless the Lord, O my soul,     and forget not all his benefits,who forgives all your iniquity,     who heals all your diseases,who redeems your life from the pit,     who crowns you with steadfast love and mercy. . . .

The Lord is merciful and gracious,     slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.He will not always chide,     nor will he keep his anger forever.He does not deal with us according to our sins,     nor repay us according to our iniquities.For as high as the heavens are above the earth,     so great is his steadfast love toward those who fear him;as far as the east is from the west,     so far does he remove our transgressions from us.As a father shows compassion to his children,     so the Lord shows compassion to those who fear him. . . .

The steadfast love of the Lord is from everlasting to everlasting on those who fear him,     and his righteousness to children’s children (Psalm 103:2–4, 8–13, 17)

God’s word revives this grieving author’s hope. He calls Scripture to mind in this dark, desperate moment. He recalls the Lord’s promises that his steadfast love will never cease toward those who fear him, and neither will his mercies. And he remembers that God’s great faithfulness is inextricably connected to his unceasing steadfast love (Psalm 57:10).

For the author (and the saints he speaks for), passages like this become “a lamp to [his] feet and a light to [his] path” (Psalm 119:105). Even here in the darkest pit, even now when all seems lost, as he and his nation suffer the terrible consequences of sin, in God’s light, he sees light (Psalm 36:9). And this light resurrects his hope.

Darkness Will Not Overcome the Light

The anguished poet of Lamentations, recording his hope amidst grief, reminds us of God’s power to unexpectedly resurrect dead hope. And the horrific nature of his circumstances, as an expression of God’s righteous judgment on Israel, remains a potent reminder that we are never in a pit so deep, and we never endure tragedies so severe, that God cannot, with a word, bring light to our path that overcomes our darkness with hope.

“Jesus knows tragic carnage and destruction, and all the darkness we experience, from the inside.”

I doubt this poet realized that these words — the words of “a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief” (Isaiah 53:3) — would so powerfully foreshadow Christ. Jesus knows tragic carnage and destruction, and all the darkness we experience, from the inside. That’s why he is for us the “light that shines in the darkness” (John 1:5).

It’s also why, when we are in our most hopeless pits, when our “soul is bereft of peace,” when we “have forgotten what happiness is,” when it feels like our “endurance has perished” and “so has [our] hope from the Lord” (Lamentations 3:17–18), Jesus, through his Spirit, loves to resurrect our hope by helping us call to mind God’s “living and active” word (Hebrews 4:12). And when his light shines in our darkness, “the darkness [will] not overcome it” (John 1:5).

The most morally beautiful, winsomely attractive command Jesus ever uttered also happens to be the most difficult to obey:

You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets. (Matthew 22:37–40)

It’s a breathtaking statement. All that God requires of us, everything Scripture contains regarding “life and godliness” (2 Peter 1:3), summed up in two simple commands.

“In their simplicity, these two commands encompass everything. Obeying them, however, is anything but simple.”

In that simplicity, these two commands encompass everything. Obeying them, however, is anything but simple. And there’s the rub. Because these commands are so sweeping, they can feel overwhelming — in fact, impossible. As a result, we can assume that we’re not required to take them all that seriously. This is a serious mistake.

Is Love Even Possible?

We might wrongly assume that while obeying these commands was once humanly possible in Eden, and will once again be humanly possible in our glorified state, they are humanly impossible now in our fallen state. And so they’re really more like lofty ideals, ones we don’t need to think hard about. We might even assume their purpose is to merely reveal our inability to fulfill them and our need for Christ (Romans 7:22–25), and that as part of Christ’s righteousness imputed to us, Jesus obeyed these commands perfectly on our behalf (Romans 8:3–4). Therefore, Jesus doesn’t really expect us to obey them now.

While it’s true that Jesus purchased our justification through his perfect obedience, what Paul wrote in Romans 13:9 and Galatians 5:14, and what James wrote in James 2:8, make it clear that the apostles believed Jesus expects us to seriously seek to love God with our whole being and love our neighbor as ourselves — now, in this age, even today.

Who Models Discipleship for You?

The community around us either confirms or confronts our faulty assumptions about love. We often allow our peers to inordinately determine for us what discipleship looks like. If many Christians around us assent to but don’t rigorously apply these two great commands, their example can influence us to implicitly assume Jesus wants us to affirm his commands’ ideal rightness, but doesn’t really expect us to work hard in consistently living them out.

But as Paul’s rebuke of Peter in Galatians 2 illustrates, peer influence can lead us into serious disobedience. The whole New Testament witness bears out that it’s precisely the radical way we live out Jesus’s love commands, all of which are essentially expositions of these Great Commandments, that demonstrate we are his disciples (John 13:35).

“The most morally beautiful, winsomely attractive command Jesus ever uttered also happens to be the most difficult to obey.”

No, we must not allow these facts — that these commands are difficult to obey, that we aren’t ultimately justified by our obedience, or that others around us fail to obey them — to form our assumption that Jesus doesn’t expect us to seriously obey them. Because he does. In fact, he expects us to structure our lives around obeying them.

How in the World?

This brings us back to how overwhelming these commandments can feel. If we take them seriously, they force us to ask, How in the world am I supposed to obey them? That’s exactly the right question to ask ourselves.

Have you ever spent serious time meditating on these commands to love?

I don’t mean merely listening to sermons, lectures, and podcasts about them, or reading numerous books and articles about them, and forming the right theological answers. For Christian teachers who produce such resources (I’m preaching to myself as I write this), I don’t mean merely putting in the arduous work of historical-grammatical and hermeneutical research and developing effective homiletical or literary communication skills in order to accurately understand and teach this text within your systematic theological framework. Don’t misunderstand me: these are important. But they don’t necessarily result in rigorous real-life obedience.

I mean, have you ever spent hours seriously pondering and working out specifically what it means for you to intentionally pursue loving God with your whole being in the tiny part of the world where God has placed you, and loving your neighbor as yourself among the eternally significant souls whom God has placed there too — especially needy ones, perhaps even an “enemy” (Matthew 5:44), maybe one you come upon along the road, so to speak (Luke 10:25–37)? Jesus doesn’t mean for us to be paralyzed by these all-encompassing commandments; he means for them to form our fundamental approach to life. He means for each of us to seriously ask how in the world we are to obey them and put in the rigorous effort of prayerfully discerning what obedience might specifically mean for us.

And he has by no means left us without help. He has given us the gift of the Holy Spirit to guide us (John 16:13), the gift of the New Testament to provide plenty of examples of breaking down these sweeping commands into specific applications, and the gift of one another in the church to assist us in pursuing this “more excellent way” of life (1 Corinthians 12:31).

Count the Cost

It isn’t until we have pondered what these commandments truly demand of us that we can determine if we’re truly willing to pay what it costs. Jesus says as much:

Which of you, desiring to build a tower, does not first sit down and count the cost, whether he has enough to complete it? (Luke 14:28)

Jesus said this after declaring what his commandments cost his disciples: they must renounce everything. It’s a high cost.

But the cost itself is an expression of love. Our renunciation isn’t primarily about how much asceticism we’re willing to endure for Jesus’s sake; it’s about where our treasure is and how much we love it (Matthew 6:21). Which is why Paul wrote, “If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing” (1 Corinthians 13:3). Jesus’s call, to paraphrase Jim Elliott, is for us to give up what we cannot keep, to gain what we cannot lose.

If You Love Me

Jesus’s commands to love — these most morally beautiful, winsome imperatives — are the most difficult, most costly words to obey.

That’s why at the end of his Sermon on the Mount, after giving specific examples of what a life of love looks like, Jesus says, “The way is hard that leads to life” (Matthew 7:14). And it’s why one of the last things Jesus said to his disciples before his crucifixion was John 15:12–13:

This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends.

When we read that statement, especially in the light of something he said just minutes before — “If you love me, you will keep my commandments” (John 14:15) — we can hear both the echo of Jesus’s two great commandments and his expectation that we take them with the utmost, life-shaping seriousness.

For those of us aspiring to pursue “radical discipleship,” it really doesn’t get more radical than Christlike love.

Most people do not want to be thought of as lazy — as a person averse to hard work. We all know laziness is a vice — a corrupting and addicting use of a good gift: rest. Leisure in proper doses is a wonderful, refreshing gift of God. But habitual indulgence in leisure to the neglect of God-given responsibilities brings destruction, both to ourselves and to others.

But it’s destructive for a deeper reason than the obvious detrimental impact of work done negligently, or not done at all. At the deeper levels, laziness robs us of happiness by decreasing our capacity to enjoy the deepest delights. And on top of this, it leaves us failing to love as we ought.

“Laziness robs us of happiness by decreasing our capacity to enjoy the deepest delights.”

Since all of us are tempted in different ways to the sin of laziness, it’s helpful to keep in mind all that’s at stake — and why, over and over throughout the Bible, God commands us to pursue the virtue of diligence.

Virtues and Vices

For Christians, a virtue is moral excellence that, if cultivated into a habit, becomes a morally excellent character trait. We become more conformed to the image of Christ (Romans 8:29) and experience an increased capacity to delight in what God has made good, true, and beautiful. We see scriptural examples in 2 Peter 1:5–8:

Make every effort to supplement your faith with virtue [aretē in Greek, referring to all the virtues] and virtue with knowledge, and knowledge with self-control, and self-control with steadfastness, and steadfastness with godliness, and godliness with brotherly affection, and brotherly affection with love. For if these qualities are yours and are increasing, they keep you from being ineffective or unfruitful in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Conversely, a vice is moral corruption that, if cultivated into a habit, becomes a morally corrupt character trait. We become more conformed to the pattern of this fallen world (Romans 12:2) and experience a decreased capacity to delight in what God has made good, true, and beautiful. We see scriptural examples in Galatians 5:19–21:

Now the works of the flesh are evident: sexual immorality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, fits of anger, rivalries, dissensions, divisions, envy, drunkenness, orgies, and things like these. I warn you, as I warned you before, that those who do [prassontes in Greek, meaning “make a practice of doing”] such things will not inherit the kingdom of God.

Why Diligence Is a ‘Heavenly Virtue’

In the fifth or sixth century, many in the church included diligence on the list of the seven heavenly virtues to counter sloth (the old English word for laziness), which it had on its list of seven deadly sins. But saints throughout redemptive history have always considered diligence a necessary virtue. Both the Old and New Testaments consistently command saints to be diligent, and warn against the dangers of being slothful.

Here’s a sampling:

Only take care, and keep your soul diligently, lest you forget the things that your eyes have seen, and lest they depart from your heart all the days of your life. (Deuteronomy 4:9)

The soul of the sluggard craves and gets nothing,     while the soul of the diligent is richly supplied. (Proverbs 13:4)

You have commanded your precepts     to be kept diligently. (Psalm 119:4)

Do not be slothful in zeal, be fervent in spirit, serve the Lord. (Romans 12:11)

If anyone is not willing to work, let him not eat. For we hear that some among you walk in idleness, not busy at work, but busybodies. (2 Thessalonians 3:10–11)

Therefore, brothers, be all the more diligent to confirm your calling and election, for if you practice these qualities you will never fall. (2 Peter 1:10)

As these passages show, diligence is a “heavenly virtue” because it is a means of cultivating godliness — increased capacities to deeply delight in God and his gifts. Cultivating the “deadly sin” (or vice) of sloth, on the other hand, is a means of cultivating ungodliness — decreased capacities to deeply delight in God and his gifts.

Wearing Our Love on Our Sleeve

But when we speak of pursuing diligence as a way of cultivating godliness, there’s an additional dimension besides developing a strong work ethic for the sake of experiencing greater joys. Since “God is love” (1 John 4:8), and since love fulfills his law (Romans 13:10; Galatians 5:14), growing in godliness means we grow in some aspect of what it means to love. What makes the virtue of diligence distinctly Christian is that it is one of the ways we love God supremely and love our neighbors as ourselves (Matthew 22:37–39).

“How we behave reflects what we believe; what we do reflects what we desire; our labors reflect our loves.”

God designed us such that our actions bring into view the real affections of our inner being. To put it very simply (and admittedly simplistically): how we behave, over time, reflects what we believe; what we do reflects what we desire; our labors reflect our loves.

Now, I realize I’m touching on a complex issue. Our motivating beliefs, desires, and loves are not simple, nor are the contexts in which we behave, do, and labor. Nor are the neurological disorders and diseases that sometimes throw wrenches into these already complex gears.

That said, it remains true that our consistent behaviors over time reveal what we really believe, desire, and love. This is what Jesus meant by saying we can distinguish between a healthy (virtuous) tree and a diseased (corrupt) tree by its fruit (Matthew 7:17–20).

And of course, the “fruit” is seen not only in what we do, but in how we do it. And here is where our diligence or laziness often reveals what or whom we truly love. Since we seek to take care of what we value greatly, it’s usually apparent when others put their heart into what they’re doing and when they don’t. Or as Paul said of some who were “lazy gluttons” in Crete, “They profess to know God, but they deny him by their works” (Titus 1:12, 16).

In what we do and how we do it, in our diligence or laziness, we come to wear our loves on our sleeves — whether we love God (John 14:15) and our neighbor (1 John 3:18), or selfishly love ourselves (2 Timothy 3:2).

Be All the More Diligent

So, there’s more at stake in our diligence or laziness than we might have previously thought.

Yes, diligence is important for the sake of doing high-quality work, which is beneficial in many ways. But hard work, by itself, does not equal the virtue of diligence. As Tony Reinke points out, “Workaholism is slothful because it uses labor in a self-centered way to focus on personal advancement or accumulated accolades” (Killjoys, 50).

When Scripture commands us to “be all the more diligent” (2 Peter 1:10), God is calling us to work hard toward the right ends (growing in godliness), in the right ways (what God commands), for the right reasons (love). The more this kind of diligence becomes characteristic of us, the more we become like Jesus: we increasingly delight in what gives him delight, and increasingly love as he loves — which is true virtue.

For many Christians, the term Scripture memory means rote memorization of Bible verses. And this conjures up feelings of past failure (over how often they’ve tried and given up), or futility (over how little they recall of what they once memorized), or fear (over memories of having to publicly recite verses).

Who wants to pursue Bible memory if it means more failure, futility, or fear?

No one, if that’s what Bible memory means. But that’s not what it means. It means so much more than rote memorization. And it’s crucial that we see the bigger picture of Bible memory so we understand why it’s so important to the Christian life — why God repeatedly commands us to remember.

Here’s how I describe it:

Bible memory means stockpiling your God-given memory with God-breathed truth (2 Timothy 3:16) so that your God-given imagination can draw from it to construct a more accurate understanding of God-created reality, enabling you to live in “a manner worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to him: bearing fruit in every good work and increasing in the knowledge of God” (Colossians 1:10).

Let me try to briefly unpack this.

Your Amazing Memory

Your memory is amazing. If you’re thinking, “No, it’s not,” you’re probably overly aware of your memory weaknesses. And you probably measure yourself against people with extraordinary memories, like Charles Spurgeon, who, as J.I. Packer described, had “a photographic memory, virtually total recall, and as he put it ‘a shelf in my mind’ for storing every fact with a view to its future use” (Psalms, 4).

“Bible memory means so much more than rote memorization.”

But don’t let phenomenal memories blind you to the marvelous gift of God that is your own memory. Your ability to recall information to your conscious mind is just one function your memory performs. But it does far more than that.

Your memory is a vast library, far more sophisticated than the Library of Congress, where you’ve been collecting information since before your birth. In that three-pound lump of wet grey tissue inside your skull, in ways that remain largely mysterious despite wonderful recent advances in neuroscience, you have stored enormous amounts of information in the form of impressions, sensations, sights, sounds, smells, cause-and-effect observations, propositional statements, stories, and dreams, as well as real, unreal, or anticipated experiences that produce joy, sorrow, pleasure, anger, delight, horror, desire, fear, and on and on. And you draw from this mental library all the time, every day, consciously and unconsciously, to do everything you do.

And more marvelous still is how your memory works with all levels of your consciousness to allow you to imagine.

Why You Understand Anything

By imagination, I’m not talking about our ability to create fantasy worlds in our minds. I’m talking about our ability to draw from our vast store of information and construct an image (or model) of reality, and then draw implications for what it means. That is the primary function of our imagination. It allows us to conceptualize things we learn are true, but cannot see. Which is crucial for those of us called to “look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen” (2 Corinthians 4:18), to “walk by faith, not by sight” (2 Corinthians 5:7).

And what empowers our ability to imagine is our memory.

Augustine, in his jaw-dropping meditations on the human memory in book 10 of his Confessions, explained it this way:

From [my memory] I can picture to myself all kinds of different images based either upon my own experience or upon what I find credible because it tallies with my own experience. I can fit them into the general picture of the past; from them I can make a surmise of actions and events and hopes for the future; and I can contemplate them all over again as if they were actually present. If I say to myself in the vast cache of my mind, where all those images of great things are stored, “I shall do this or that,” the picture of this or that particular thing comes into my mind at once. Or I may say to myself “If only this or that would happen!” or “God forbid that this or that should be!” No sooner do I say this than the images of all the things of which I speak spring forward from the same great treasure-house of the memory. And, in fact, I could not even mention them at all if the images were lacking. (215–16)

It’s our immense memory that provides our creative imagination the information from which to make sense of reality and draw the correct implications. And we can’t imagine anything that isn’t meaningfully present in our memory.

This is why Bible memory so important.

‘You Shall Remember’

Have you ever noticed how often the Holy Spirit inspired biblical authors to stress the importance of memory? Over and over God commands us to remember his word (for example, Numbers 15:40; Psalm 103:17–18; Isaiah 48:8–11; Luke 22:19; 2 Timothy 2:8). In fact, it would be worth a week of your devotional Bible reading to look up all the texts that mention these words as they relate to what God has revealed to us: memory, memorial, remember, remembrance, remind, call to mind, recall, forget, forgot, and forgotten.

To re-member is to call to mind something we’ve previously learned, something that exists in our memory. We can see such remembering in Lamentations 3:21–23, written while the author was experiencing terrible distress and suffering:

But this I call to mind,     and therefore I have hope:The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases;     his mercies never come to an end;they are new every morning;     great is your faithfulness.

The truth that the author called up from his memory, which sustained him in great need, was something he learned prior to his need. And it was something he was learning in more profound ways at that very moment.

That’s Bible memory: calling to mind and keeping in mind biblical truth we’ve learned, so that it expands and deepens our understanding over time, and continues to shape the way we live.

Meditation’s Servant

That’s perhaps why the Bible doesn’t say much about rote memorization, but it says a lot about meditation, because meditation is the way we both learn and remember. If you take that week of devotional exploration, it will add to your understanding of how meditation relates to remembering if you look up all the texts that mention these words: meditate, meditation, understand, understanding, know, knowledge, wise, and wisdom.

Biblical meditation (or reflection, rumination, contemplation) takes place when our God-given imagination processes the God-breathed information we store in our God-given memory in an effort to understand, or further understand, God-revealed reality, so that we might live wisely. We can see this process at work in Psalm 119:97–99:

Oh how I love your law!     It is my meditation all the day.Your commandment makes me wiser than my enemies,     for it is ever with me.I have more understanding than all my teachers,     for your testimonies are my meditation.

Implicit in this text on meditation (and most others in Scripture) is repetition. We all know from experience that repetition is what drives most information into our long-term memory. And this is the great value of memorization — it is a servant of meditation.

That’s certainly been my experience. Few practices have helped me meditate on Scripture more than memorization. The method I’ve found most effective has me repeating the same section of text over many days. This repetition not only has driven these texts into my long-term memory, but it has given my imagination the opportunity to ruminate on them.

As a result, I’ve gained a deeper, richer understanding of these texts and how they relate to other Scriptures and the world. That’s been the greatest benefit for me. Even though I don’t retain perfect conscious recall of many Scriptures I’ve memorized, meditating on them has woven their meaning and application into the fabric of my understanding. And they do come to mind much more readily, especially in times of need.

Keep the Goal in Mind

If Scripture memory has negative connotations for you, don’t think of it as memorizing Bible verses. Rather, think of it as

stockpiling your God-given memory with God-breathed truth (2 Timothy 3:16) so that your God-given imagination can draw from it to construct a more accurate understanding of God-created reality, enabling you to live in “a manner worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to him: bearing fruit in every good work and increasing in the knowledge of God” (Colossians 1:10).

“You won’t regret employing this very effective servant of meditation.”

It is a gift of God, a means of grace, to help you meditate on God’s word and bring reality to life.

As someone who struggles with memory weaknesses and who used to believe that Bible memorization wasn’t for me, I strongly recommend memorizing Scripture, especially larger sections. This is something you can do — you really can. You won’t regret employing this very effective servant of meditation.

For accurate understanding comes from careful meditation on true information. And accurate understanding results in our discerning right implications for what true information means. And when we live according to this understanding, the Bible calls it wisdom (Psalm 111:10).

This is the goal of Bible memory.

Right now, the example of a small band of twentysomething Christian women is helping me resist the many temptations I feel toward cynicism. Let me explain why.

I have been disheartened by the amount of politically/ideologically/culturally driven acrimony, leadership failures, church divisions, ethnic tensions, and relational breakdowns among American evangelicals over the past few years. I wish I could say it’s all exaggerated by media algorithms and irresponsible Christian clickbaiting. But I’ve seen too much up close.

I see evidence of Christian disunity almost everywhere I turn. The three beloved churches where I’ve spent most of my life have in the past few years all experienced significant to devastating internal conflict. Christians who are remarkably aligned theologically, and who have worshiped together for years, no longer bear with each other. Relationships that took years to bond are torn. And the resulting wounds leave a scar tissue of distrust that doesn’t seem to relationally adhere as it did before.

What is going on? A lot. Complex historical, social, cultural, political, leadership, and spiritual-warfare issues factor into this epidemic of Christian disunity. We can’t ignore them. They’re real and seriously affect real people.

But we must be careful. In our analysis and discussions and debates of the problem, we can, ironically, miss or evade the fundamental issue. For when it comes to cultivating priceless Christian harmony, or wreaking destructive Christian dissonance, the greatest causal factor, the one the New Testament far and away addresses more than any other, is love.

Jesus’s Radically Simple Solution

Try not to roll your eyes. I know when there’s a strenuous debate among Christians over something complex, there’s always a guy in the room that says something like, “We just need to love each other!” And it’s usually not very helpful.

“New Testament love is not simplistic, as in reductionistic; it’s simple, as in fundamental.”

This kind of statement comes across as naive, simplistic idealism, because we don’t just need to love each other. We need to fundamentally love each other. We need to know what loving each other means and looks like when we’re faced with a complex issue, when we view matters from different perspectives, when we have no simple solutions, and when the only way forward requires bearing with one another during the extended tension of disagreement.

And in this way, New Testament love is not simplistic, as in reductionistic; it’s simple, as in fundamental. There’s a big difference.

Neighbor as Self

The Beatles’ song-slogan “all you need is love” is naive, simplistic idealism. It sounds right because we all intuitively know love is the supreme virtue. But the statement is conceptually hollow and incoherent. It doesn’t tell anyone what love means, what it looks like when practiced, or what it costs. Consequently, this sentence hasn’t transformed anything, much less conflicts over complex issues.

Contrast that with Jesus’s great command to “love your neighbor as yourself” (Matthew 22:39). Do you see the difference? Jesus’s command is fundamentally simple, but not at all simplistic. It’s simple in that everyone immediately grasps the fundamental principle: love ought to be our most core value, shaping all our motives in relation to others. It’s not simplistic, because it is a one-sentence summary of an all-encompassing orientation to all our relationships, and its applications are endless.

“Love your neighbor as yourself” is functionally powerful because, in any specific situation, it helps us gain at least some clarity on what love ought to look like, as well as what it will cost. It doesn’t remove complexities from relationships, situations, and issues, but if earnestly pursued, it is effective at dousing the flame of sin that turns our conflicts into wildfires — fires surrounding us in American evangelicalism.

The power of Jesus’s love command (and the many examples and expositions of it in the New Testament) has been lived out by countless saints over the past two thousand years and has transformed the world in countless ways. Which brings me to that small band of twentysomething women I mentioned at the beginning. For me, they are a picture of Jesus’s love command in action.

Taking Love to the Streets

I know most of these young ladies. Through a wonderful story of God’s providential work in their lives, they developed a deep concern over the plight of the thousands of street children in a major city of a Latin American country.

A few years ago, having gained a modicum of experience and raised enough financial support to live simply, they moved to this city and just began walking the streets and ministering to the kids and young adults they came across. These are children who, due to abuse, abandonment, excessive poverty, addiction, or the death of their parents, are forced to fend for themselves.

They sleep in culverts, under bridges, and in doorways, and they do whatever they must to find food. The streets are brutal, ruthless places for vulnerable children. Terrible things happen to many of them. Tender hearts harden and become distrustful. Danger and desperation exacerbate depravity.

But these women just began loving these kids — each one as a precious soul. They sought to love them as they loved themselves (imperfectly, they’d want me to emphasize). And they’re down there loving them right now.

They feed them, clothe them, take them to doctors when they’re sick or injured, and help many of them dealing with chemical addiction get into (or return to) treatment centers. They walk with young pregnant girls through the frightening journey of childbirth and beyond. They play Uno with kids in the parks and celebrate their birthdays with cakes and parties — something many of these kids have never experienced before. And as the Lord gives them opportunity, they share Jesus with them, pray with them, study the Bible with them, and connect them with good churches. As a result, an increasing number are coming to faith in Christ and getting baptized.

‘Because They Love Us’

Having won the trust of these hardened street kids through loving them with the tenacious, steadfast, faithful, self-sacrificial love of Jesus, now hundreds of hardened street kids have grown tender, loving these women back and genuinely caring for them in various ways. And of course, word on the street spreads fast, so more and more kids are seeking these women out and the modest ministry center the Lord has provided them.

Government officials are also now seeking them out to discover what they’re doing that’s so effective. These officials are also asking the street kids why they go to these women first when the government centers have more resources and programs. The kids’ answer: “Because they love us.”

Let that sink in. These women aren’t recognized experts, and they don’t have long experience, abundant resources, or PhD-designed programs. Neither do they have formal theological training. And yet they are proving remarkably effective at reaching these kids and helping them transition toward a more hopeful, productive future. From a kingdom standpoint, they are bearing more fruit in transformed lives and making more disciples than just about anyone else I know — even among a very neglected and historically difficult-to-reach group. Why? Ask the kids. They know why: “Because they love us” — each one as a precious soul.

Living Sacrifices of Love

So, what do these women have to do with the epidemic of Christian disunity in America? Answer: they are examples of taking Christian love seriously. But isn’t it apples and oranges to compare them to us? Contextually, yes, but not fundamentally.

My report of these women’s story, due to brevity, sounds more ideal than it really is. It’s hard. At times heartbreakingly hard — literal blood-sweat-and-tears hard. And it’s messy. Kids turn away. Kids disappear. Kids relapse into addiction. Kids are raped. Kids are killed. And the women make mistakes. They are misunderstood, sometimes maligned, and sometimes in bodily danger. They regularly feel inadequate, lonely, confused, grieved, bewildered, homesick, and like failures. They wonder if they’re doing it wrong. And they’re all too aware of their own sin.

“Living out Jesus’s love command seriously and intentionally will be hard, and the cost in numerous ways will be high.”

No matter the context, living out Jesus’s love command seriously and intentionally will be hard, and the cost in numerous ways will be high. We will feel the same ways in our context as these women do in theirs. That’s part of what it means to be a “living sacrifice” (Romans 12:1).

But this kind of love is transformational in ways that nothing else is. In our divisive and conflicted times, we urgently need to examine whether we’re seriously seeking to obey Jesus’s love command in our complex context. Our rancor, bitterness, division, and relational breakdown does not look like Romans 12–15, 1 Corinthians 13, Ephesians 4, or 1 John 3. We also should examine whether we’re paying any meaningful attention to our contextual equivalent of our wounded neighbor in the street.

As He Has Loved Us

The stakes are high. A deficit of love creates relational wreckage and distorts people’s perception of Jesus. For he said, “By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another” (John 13:35). And he raised the “love your neighbor” bar even higher than we would have thought when he said, “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you” (John 15:12).

Sometimes, when the muck is flying and the disunifying din is blaring, it helps to focus on saints who are simply (not simplistically) loving like Jesus in their difficult contexts. They can help us gain perspective on ours and remind us what, fundamentally, is most important. And they can be a blessed antidote to cynicism. That’s what these remarkable young women are for me right now.

And as I see them trying to love their broken neighbors as themselves, I hear Jesus say, “You go, and do likewise” (Luke 10:37).

In ancient rabbinic literature, the Psalms were referred to as tehillîm, which is Hebrew for “praises.” One of the most remarkable features of this sacred collection of praise songs is that at least one-third of them are laments. These are songs that passionately express some kind of emotional distress, such as grief, sorrow, confusion, anguish, penitence, fear, depression, loneliness, or doubt.

This is remarkable because the presence of so many praise laments implies that God knew his people would frequently be called to worship him in agonizing circumstances. The Holy Spirit inspired poets to craft “praises” that would provide us worshipful expressions of our diverse experiences of pain.

“Lament psalms teach us what acceptable worship can sound like in our suffering.”

If lament psalms are Spirit-inspired praise songs for our painful seasons, we should look at them carefully, because they teach us important lessons about the kinds of worship God receives. Some of the ways these inspired poets worshiped God in their agony might make us uncomfortable. Psalm 89 is a good example.

Leader in Lament

Psalm 89 is attributed to Ethan the Ezrahite. According to 1 Chronicles 6:31–48, Ethan was one of three clan chiefs of the tribe of Levi — the other two being Heman (Psalm 88) and Asaph (Psalms 50, 73–82) — “whom David put in charge of the service of song in the house of the Lord.” He was a high-profile leader to whom thousands looked for social and spiritual instruction and counsel. His words had gravitas.

And in this psalm, Ethan led the people in lament. Over what? Over God’s apparent unfaithfulness to his covenant with David — apparent being the operative word here.

In 2 Samuel 7, the prophet Nathan delivered a stunning promise from the Lord to David about how long his descendants would sit on Israel’s throne: “Your house and your kingdom shall be made sure forever before me. Your throne shall be established forever” (2 Samuel 7:16). This became a crucial part of Israel’s self-understanding: God had planted them in the Promised Land and had given them a promised governance that would last forever.

However, something terrible happened (perhaps Absalom’s rebellion of 2 Samuel 15–18), which made it appear as if God had “renounced” his covenant and “defiled [David’s] crown in the dust” (Psalm 89:39). And in this moment of crisis, Ethan composed a psalm that gave worshipful voice to the confusion and grief that all who trusted in God’s faithfulness were experiencing.

Famous Faithfulness

In the first eighteen verses, Ethan exults in how bound up God’s steadfast love and faithfulness are with his very character.

God’s steadfast love and faithfulness are part of the glory and might for which he is loved and praised and feared in the divine council and the great angelic host (Psalm 89:5–8).
It is through God’s steadfast love and faithfulness that he exercises his sovereign rule over all creation: the heavens and the earth and all that fills them, the “raging sea” and its most fearsome creature, Rahab, and the great mountains, like Tabor and Hermon (Psalm 89:9–12).
God’s steadfast love and faithfulness are part of the “foundation of [his] throne,” most clearly manifest (at that time) in the Davidic kingdom he had established in Israel. They are why his people shout for joy and “exult in [his] name all the day” (Psalm 89:13–16).

Ethan reminds God,

You are the glory of [Israel’s] strength;     by your favor our horn is exalted.For our shield belongs to the Lord,     our king to the Holy One of Israel. (Psalm 89:17–18)

The stakes were high. If God’s people could not hope in his steadfast love and faithfulness, how could they continue to exult in him like this?

‘You Promised’

Then in verses 19–37, Ethan at length beautifully reminds God of the promise he made to David, on which the hope of his people rested:

God had delivered this promise “in a vision to your godly one” (presumably the prophet Nathan, Psalm 89:19).
God had chosen David from the people and anointed him king, established him, and promised that his foes would not overcome him (Psalm 89:20–24).
God promised to be a Father to him and make him “the highest of the kings of the earth” (Psalm 89:25–27).
God promised to “establish [David’s] offspring forever,” and if they strayed from God’s ways, he would discipline them but would “not remove from [David God’s] steadfast love or be false to [his] faithfulness.” God would “not lie to David” (Psalm 89:28–37).

I don’t know how much Ethan discerned the Messianic dimensions of the Davidic covenant, but this section is full of prophetic pointers to Jesus, each worthy of our lingering meditation. But during this moment of crisis, it looked like God’s promise had come to an abrupt end.

Broken Promise?

Had the promise of God really failed? In verses 38–45, that’s exactly what Ethan described — to God. And he did so in no uncertain terms.

He told God, “But now you have cast off and rejected; you are full of wrath against your anointed,” and “you have renounced the covenant with your servant; you have defiled his crown in the dust” (Psalm 89:38–39).
He told God how he had exalted David’s foes by causing them to defeat Israel in battle, and how David’s walls had been breached and his kingdom plundered, making him an object of scorn (Psalm 89:40–44).
He told God how he had “cut short the days of [David’s] youth [and] covered him with shame” (Psalm 89:45).

“God hears, and receives as worship, real faith expressed in a cry of pain.”

It’s this section that might make us feel most uncomfortable. Can we really speak to God like this?

The answer is yes — and no. It’s yes if we, like Ethan, take God’s faithfulness with utmost seriousness and truly love his glory. The answer is no if we, like Israelites after the Red Sea crossing, are just “grumbling against the Lord” (Exodus 16:7).

Ethan is not shaking his fist at God in rebellion. Rather, he’s setting forth his case that God must act for the sake of his name. Ethan is interceding, not accusing. He has not lost faith in God; he’s exercising bold faith in God by calling on him to do what he promised. He still believes in God’s steadfast love and faithfulness.

‘Remember, O Lord’

That’s precisely why Ethan doesn’t end his psalm with a poetic “Forget you, God!” but with a passionate plea: “Remember, O Lord!” He devotes verses 46–52 to pouring out his heart’s desire. It’s worth reading them in full. And as you do, listen (as God does) for the heart’s desire behind the anguished words.

How long, O Lord? Will you hide yourself forever?     How long will your wrath burn like fire?Remember how short my time is!     For what vanity you have created all the children of man!What man can live and never see death?     Who can deliver his soul from the power of Sheol? Selah

Lord, where is your steadfast love of old,     which by your faithfulness you swore to David?
Remember, O Lord, how your servants are mocked,     and how I bear in my heart the insults of all the many nations,with which your enemies mock, O Lord,     with which they mock the footsteps of your anointed.

Blessed be the Lord forever!     Amen and Amen. (Psalm 89:46–52)

Do you hear his heart? Ethan longs, for himself and his people, to experience the joy of the glory of God’s steadfast love and faithfulness. He knows how short life is, and does not want himself or his people to die before experiencing it again. This man is jealous for God’s fame. He does not want God’s good name, or the faithful who trust in him, to be mocked. That is what drives Ethan’s lament.

Lament Boldly, and Faithfully

As we read Psalm 89 now through the lens of the new covenant, we no doubt see clearer than Ethan did how broad the scope of God’s faithfulness to David has been. For in Jesus, this promise to David found its incredible yes (2 Corinthians 1:20).

Like Ethan the Ezrahite, however, we too experience crisis moments when it appears to us as if God is not being faithful to some promise. And it’s in such moments when we discover just how precious lament psalms like this are. Not only do they give us inspired language to pray in our pain, but they teach us what acceptable worship can sound like in our suffering.

In Psalm 89, God invites us to be bold in our prayerful laments. If our heart’s desire is God; if we long, for ourselves and our people, to experience the joy of God’s steadfast love and faithfulness; if our words are not the grumbling of unbelief but the expression of grieved faith, then it’s good to be direct with God. He hears, and receives as worship, real faith expressed in a cry of pain.

And we can trust that, at the same time, “the Spirit helps us in our weakness. For we do not know what to pray for as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words” (Romans 8:26).

If you’re a Christian, no doubt you highly value God’s faithfulness, the precious reality “that what God [has] promised, he [is] able to perform” (Romans 4:21 NASB). You believe that Christ upholds the entire cosmos “by the word of his power” (Hebrews 1:3). Therefore, all of reality, not to mention your eternal future, literally depends on God being true to his word.

True to your word. That is a concise, clear definition of what it means to be a faithful person. There is consistency between what you say and what you do, between what you believe and how you behave, between what you promise and what you perform.

“A faithful person keeps the faith of those who put their trust in him.”

When we (and the Bible) describe someone as “faithful,” we’re almost never referring to how much faith that person possesses, but to how much faith others can place in that person — how much others can trust him to perform what he promises. A faithful person keeps (cherishes, maintains, guards) the faith of those who put their trust in him.

We all want to think of ourselves as faithful, but we all fail at different times and in different ways. As a character quality, as a fruit of the Spirit (Galatians 5:22), faithfulness is all too often in short supply. It always has been, which is why this proverb is in the Bible: “Many a man proclaims his own steadfast love, but a faithful man who can find?” (Proverbs 20:6).

So, beginning with ourselves, how might we resolve to become more faithful disciples of Jesus? One way we can do so is by meditating on this crucial verse:

Trust in the Lord, and do good; dwell in the land and befriend faithfulness. (Psalm 37:3)

Graze on Faithfulness

Psalm 37 was written by David, whom God “took from the sheepfolds . . . to shepherd Jacob his people” (Psalm 78:70–71). David’s experience as a shepherd might explain his choice of the phrase translated “befriend faithfulness,” although the English Standard Version doesn’t convey to us modern readers the full meaning of what the Hebrew words rə‘êh and ’ĕmūnāh meant to David and his original readers. No translation does. Here’s why:

The word rə‘êh, which the ESV translates as “befriend,” can mean “feed, graze; drive out to pasture; shepherd, protect, nourish” (ESV OT RI).
The word ’ĕmūnāh, which the ESV translates as “faithfulness,” can “steadfastness; trustworthiness, faithfulness; firmness, security; honesty” (Ibid.).

This phrase is a translation challenge because David used a nuanced pastoral allusion — an allusion that his original readers would have intuitively understood (given how familiar they were with sheep), but one that is lost on the majority of us today. So, translators work hard to interpret and convey his meaning in a way we understand. Which explains the variety of different attempts (besides “befriend faithfulness”):

“Verily [truly] thou shalt be fed” (King James Version).
“Feed on His faithfulness” (New King James Version).
“Enjoy security” (Revised Standard Version).
“Cultivate faithfulness” (New American Standard Bible).
“Enjoy safe pasture” (New International Version).

Perhaps we’d get closest to what David meant if we could somehow infuse the NASB’s “cultivate” with the NKJV’s “feed,” such that we’d come away with a sense of “diligently cultivate [by grazing on] the virtue of faithfulness” (Keil & Delitzsch, 5:283).

But “cultivate,” “feed on,” and “befriend” all give us some sense of what David wants us to do: devote ourselves to developing faithfulness until it becomes part of us.

How to Grow Your Faithfulness

David’s command fits with how the Bible instructs us to pursue all aspects of godliness. We are called to build ourselves up in our most holy faith (Jude 20). And the way we build ourselves up spiritually is similar to the way we build our capacities for anything: we exercise what we want to grow.

Bodily strength is increased through the exercise of bodily strength. If we want to grow strong in our muscles or our minds, we must exercise them. We must push against internal and external resistance. We must endure the discomfort and persevere with the limitations of our current capacities until the discomfort decreases and our capacities increase. And we must not give in to the part of us that offers all kinds of reasons for why we should give up.

We all like the idea of stronger, trimmer bodies, but we all find it hard to work out and eat healthier. We all like the idea of growing more proficient in our skills, but we all find it hard to keep practicing and studying. We all like the idea of building new, healthy, fruitful habits, but we all find it hard to consistently perform the habit until it becomes part of how we function.

“The only way to become more faithful is to practice faithfulness, to cultivate faithfulness, to feed on faithfulness.”

Likewise, we all like the idea of becoming more faithful with our talents and more trustworthy to those we are called to serve and serve with, but we all find it hard to “discipline [ourselves] for the purpose of godliness” in this area (1 Timothy 4:7 NASB). But the only way to become more faithful is to practice faithfulness, to cultivate faithfulness, to feed on faithfulness, to befriend (make a companion of) faithfulness, to devote ourselves to developing faithfulness until it becomes part of us.

Begin with What You’ve Been Given

The wonderful thing is that we don’t need some special faithfulness gym membership to begin growing our capacity for faithfulness. We have everything we need right now, right where we find ourselves. Jesus tells us, “One who is faithful in a very little is also faithful in much” (Luke 16:10). And so, if we draw strength from Jesus to be faithful with a little, he will entrust us with much (Matthew 25:23).

The best place for us to start is by identifying the people and responsibilities that Jesus has entrusted to us. And then remember David’s exhortation:

Trust in the Lord, and do good; dwell in the land and befriend faithfulness. (Psalm 37:3)

The people and responsibilities in front of us are where God wants us to trust him. This is the “land” where he wants us to dwell, at least for now. These are the people to whom he wants us to do good. This is where he calls us to practice, cultivate, graze on, and befriend faithfulness.

If we are ever going to be men and women who are more consistently true to our word, for whom there is less discontinuity between what we say and what we do, between what we believe and how we behave, between what we promise and what we perform, we will become so here, in the land where God has placed us.

And if we devote ourselves to faithfulness here, someday we will hear our Master say to us, “Well done, good and faithful servant. You have been faithful over a little; I will set you over much. Enter into the joy of your master” (Matthew 25:23).