Hi ginnyrose,
Here is a very good sermon on loyalty; though much longer than what you are looking for, is well worth the read. Simple and matter of fact, kind of like some older folks we know. 8-)
In His Love
pastorfrin
The Marks of Loyalty
Rev. John Newton
Proverbs 19:20-29
"What matters most is loyalty. It's better to be poor than to be a liar." That is how the Contemporary English Version of the Bible renders Proverbs 19:22. If there is one theme that binds this chapter together, it is of loyalty. The subject of loyalty is not limited to the book of Proverbs, however. The Bible is full of stories of loyalty. One has only to turn to the first pages of Genesis, to the creation of the first man and woman, to hear Adam declare to Eve as he first set his eyes upon her, "This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh..." And the author comments, "For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh."1
Or think of the touching story of the young widow Ruth. When her mother-in-law Naomi decided to return to her homeland to live out her own widowhood, Ruth would not let her go alone, but declared, "Don't urge me to leave you or to turn back from you. Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay. Your people will be my people and your God my God. Where you die I will die, and there I will be buried. May the Lord deal with me, be it ever so severely, if anything but death separates you and me."2
In the New Testament we have the moving account of Peter's failure to be loyal to Jesus in his final hours. At the supper in the upper room Peter had vowed to lay down his life for Jesus. Jesus, however, knew better; and later that night outside the temple court Peter denied not once but three times that he even knew Jesus. When he realized what he had done, he wept bitterly. The story has a happy ending, however. For, although Peter failed in his loyalty to Jesus, Jesus continued loyal to him and after his resurrection entrusted his mission to him once again.3
This morning's verses from Proverbs focus on two areas where loyalty comes into play: in the way we handle truth and in our relationships with our family and friends. This morning I want us to look together at each of these two important facets of loyalty, and then to go on to look what the Bible says about it in a more general fashion.
Loyalty to the truth
What, then, does it mean to be loyal to the truth? We've all heard the old saw, "My mind is made up, so don't confuse me with the facts." Let me suggest that loyalty to the truth involves exactly the opposite point of view. It means a willingness to accept the truth even when it may not fit comfortably with my own preconceived notions. Here is one way in which the book of Proverbs puts it: Listen to advice and accept instruction, and in the end you will be wise.
This emphatically does not mean that we allow ourselves to be subject to every wacko notion that comes our way, or that we grant equal credence to every idea that we hear. If that were the case, we might become like weather vanes, changing our minds with each new whim that comes into fashion. The letter to the Ephesians warns us not to be "infants, tossed back and forth by the waves, and blown here and there by every wind of teaching".4
On the other hand it does mean that our commitment to the truth is such that we are prepared to change our minds when the facts demand it. I confess with shame that this is an area where we Christians have not excelled. What happened to Galileo in the seventeenth century is a case in point. As a leading astronomer Galileo had come to accept Copernicus' theory that the earth revolved around the sun, and not vice versa. This led him into trouble with church authorities, who held that the only view consistent with Christian doctrine was that the earth stood at the centre of the universe. As a result Galileo and his teachings were condemned and he was forced to live under house arrest for the last ten years of his life.
Jesus promised his disciples, "You shall know the truth, and the truth will set you free."5
Proverbs teaches us,
Those who get wisdom love their own souls;
those who cherish understanding prosper.
Loyalty to the truth means allowing our minds, our thoughts and our attitudes to be shaped by it-even in those circumstances when the truth may be inconvenient or downright uncomfortable.
It also means speaking the truth, doing the truth, living it out in the course of our daily lives.
Better the poor whose walk is blameless
than a fool whose lips are perverse.
What we are talking about here, in a word, is integrity: that commitment to truth that is such that it is reflected in all our words and actions. One of the most marvelous pictures of what that brand of loyalty means is found in the little vignette of the early church that Luke gives us in Acts 2:42:
They devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and to the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer.
Here was a group of men and women who had not only been persuaded by the truth, but who lived it. And that transparent loyalty was such that people were immediately attracted to it. Luke tells us that "they enjoyed the favour of all the people. And the Lord added daily to their number..."6 Would that we in the church today could display the same loyalty, the same unqualified devotion to the truth. We might be a different place.
Loyalty to family and friends
It is clear too that the loyalty of those first Christians was not merely to a set of abstract doctrines, but to one another. Luke tells us that they devoted themselves not only to the apostles' teaching, but also to the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer. I cannot but believe that the latter three loyalties were every bit as important as the first. This brings us to a second aspect of loyalty: loyalty to family and friends.
Chapter 19 of Proverbs has even more to say about that kind of loyalty than it does about loyalty to the truth:
Those who rob their father and drive out their mother
are children who bring shame and disgrace.
Houses and wealth are inherited from parents,
but a prudent wife is from the Lord.
Discipline your children, for in that there is hope;
do not be a willing party to their death.
God has created us as social beings. Our relationships are fundamental to our being. We cannot be truly human without them. Being in relationship with others is basic to what it means to be made in the image of God. And without loyalty those relationships cannot survive. So it is that the Bible (and Proverbs specifically) has a great deal to say about loyalty in relationships.
That loyalty is enshrined in the ten commandments: Honour your mother and your father, that your days may be long in the land which the Lord your God is giving to you. That is, healthy family loyalties are the bond which holds the whole of a society together. Do not kill; do not commit adultery; do not steal; do not lie; do not covet. That is, do not allow anything to become more important or to have greater prominence than the people in your lives. The New Testament goes even farther when it teaches us that the loyalty shared by husband and wife is so sacred that it may be seen as a model of the relationship between Christ and the church. "Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself for her..."7
In his book Married for Good Paul Stevens outlines six kinds of loyalty that ought to characterize a healthy marriage. Let me share four that ought to characterize not just marriage but any healthy relationship. First there is attitudinal loyalty, which seeks to see the other person from Christ's perspective, concentrating on their qualities rather than their faults. Secondly there is verbal loyalty, choosing both how we address other people and how we speak about them when they are not around. Thirdly there is spiritual loyalty, which very often amounts to nothing more complicated than respect, releasing people to be themselves rather than having our own agendas for them, loving them for who they are, rather than for what we think they might become. And fourthly there is heart loyalty, a commitment to stay in relationship with another person no matter what, a willingness to work together on difficulties and to work out differences together.
The pattern of loyalty
Where does this pattern of loyalty come from? I believe that its origin is in the Lord himself. The word which the Bible translates "loyalty" in Proverbs 19:22 is in the Hebrew of the Old Testament chesed. We find it used in the dramatic revelation of God to Moses in the book of Exodus: "And he passed in front of Moses, proclaiming, "The LORD, the LORD, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in chesed and faithfulness, maintaining chesed to thousands, and forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin..." Or again in the elegant beauty of Psalm 103:
The Lord is compassionate and gracious,
slow to anger, abounding in chesed....
For as high as the heavens are above the earth,
so great is his chesed for those who fear him...
... from everlasting to everlasting
the Lord's chesed is with those who fear him,
and his righteousness with their children's children...8
The word is used more than 250 times and really has no single precise English equivalent. Perhaps the closest is something like "covenant love". One translator defines it as "the mutual liability of those ... belonging together", another as "a free act of kindness". Yet another can describe it only in terms of a situation: Someone is in a position to offer vital help and does so in his or her own freedom.9
Surely the picture we are being given here is the one that our Lord Jesus gave when he told the story of the man who was travelling from Jerusalem to Jericho when he fell among thieves. What the Samaritan showed to that wounded Jew as he lay naked and half dead by the side of the road was chesed, loyalty-a loyalty which reached above the distinctions of race and class and which cut through the barriers of prejudice and preconceptions. It is a human reflection of the divine loyalty which has reached out to sinful, wayward, rebellious humanity and embraced us as his children and adopted us as his heirs.
"Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous person," comments the apostle Paul in his letter to the Romans, "though for a good person someone might possibly dare to die. But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us."10 Such is the loyalty that God has to the likes of you and me. Like Jesus' parable the wisdom of Proverbs is calling us to go and do likewise.
Gracious Father,
we cannot fathom the loyalty you have shown to us
in sending your Son to die for us
and adopting us as your own:
by the power of your Holy Spirit
help us to show the same loyalty to you
and to those whom you have placed in our lives;
for we ask it in Jesus' name.
1 Genesis 2:23,24
2 Ruth 1:16,17
3 See Matthew 26:31-35;69-75; John 21:15-19
4 Ephesians 4:14
5 John 8:32
6 Acts 2:47
7 Exodus 20:12-17; Ephesians 5:25
8 Exodus 34:6,7; Psalm 103:8,11,17
9 Harris, Archer & Waltke, eds, Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament, volume 1, pages 305-307, article on "hsd"
10 Romans 5:7,8
