By Pastor Don Schatz

Faithful to the End

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“Be strong and very courageous.  Be careful to obey all the law my servant Moses gave you; do not turn from it to the right or to the left, that you may be successful wherever you go.”
Joshua 1:7. The New International Version

God spoke these words to Joshua after the death of Moses.  Joshua was in command of Israel.  He saw them across the Jordan River, to finally lay claim to the Promised Land.  The word that jumps out at me today is “successful.”  Boy, howdy, that word looms large in culture.  Being successful is so successfully ingrained into us that we can be our own worst judge of how successful we are in life.

All Saints Day yesterday, coinciding with a sister and brother-in-law just returned from Italy with stories and pictures of the Coliseum, turned my thoughts to the Christians that were martyred in Rome.  Were they successful?  Were their lives of faith successful?  Was their witness to Jesus successful?  Were their deaths successful?  What manner of criteria do we use to answer those questions?  A very different set than our culture uses to judge whether we are successful or not!

Books such as “Foxe’s Book of Martyrs” contain vivid accounts of imprisonment and death of Christian martyrs in the early centuries of the Church.  Perpetua, an early third-century African martyr in Carthage, along with her servant Felicity, wrote with macabre precision about the arrest and torture that she and other Christians endured.  The stories of their faithfulness under such terror are powerful.

I suggest using faithfulness and successful as synonyms.  The successful Christian life is a life of faithfulness.  Faithfulness to the end, regardless of the specifics of that end (death) that in the end (pun intended) is not an end at all.  Rather, it is success.  Precious in the sight of the Lord, in fact.

Christ was faithful unto death for us.  Not for himself.  By the Holy Spirit’s grace, we too are faithful unto death.  For the honor and glory of Father, Son and Holy Spirit.  Our success is not self-serving.  We do not need it to be.  Christ’s successful faithfulness was not self-serving.  It was for us.  And we are for him.

Copyright, Holy Cross Lutheran Church, Colorado Springs, Colorado