Episode 369: I’m Talkin…Faithful

I’m Talkin, episode 369 for May 11th, 2025.

This is Joel from the I’m Talkin microcast, where I share my thoughts on a topic that has piqued my interest this past week.

This week, we’re talking faithful.

I was trying to decide if faithful was a common word.

I’m still not 100% sure, but it is a word that we use fairly regularly.

And then I was thinking about what do we use it to describe?

And I think one of the things, maybe the first thing that jumped into my mind was to talk about marriage, where a marriage partner has been faithful to each other.

We hear so much about ones being unfaithful, so it carries some meaning there.

We might talk about a friend who has been a faithful friend, one who has stood beside us through thick and thin challenges and successes.

It’s interesting, you might talk about physical things, like maybe a car, where you say, that car has been super faithful.

Maybe we use the word reliable there.

And then I also thought about a geyser.

We talk about the geyser that’s old faithful.

And what does that mean?

Well, it means that it, on the regular, will spout out of the ground on a given time schedule.

And when we think about faithful, we think about that being a regular event in time.

And therein lies the challenge for those of us who call ourselves Christians.

So today’s word comes from my verses this week in Revelations.

It’s Revelations 19, verses 11 through 16.

I am doing my best to memorize all these verses that I’ve been using this year to do these microcasts.

But this is a long section of scripture, and I have it mostly memorized, but I’m going to read it today.

And then next week, I’m going to be in this passage for some time.

And so at some point, I will be doing it from memory, hopefully next week, and I think maybe even the week after.

So Revelations 19, 11 through 16 says, Then I saw heaven opened and a white horse standing there.

Its rider was named Faithful and True, for he judges fairly and wages a righteous war.

His eyes are like flames of fire, and on his head are many crowns.

And a name is written on him that no one understands except himself.

He wore a robe dipped in blood, and his title was the Word of God.

The armies of heaven followed him.

Sorry.

The armies of heaven, dressed in the finest of pure white linen, followed him on white horses.

From his mouth came a sharp sword to strike down the nations.

He will rule them with an iron rod.

He will release the fierce wrath of God the Almighty, like juice flowing from a winepress.

On his robe, at his thigh, was written this title, King of all kings and Lord of all lords.

So you can see why I may be spending a few weeks pulling words out of this section of Scripture.

It’s so full of things.

But the first thing you see, one of the first things is the rider’s name is Faithful and True.

And so when we think of things being faithful, this word holds a lot of meaning.

And it makes me think of the surface-level faithfulness of maybe a good friend or maybe a physical object versus a deep faithfulness that is a covenant relationship.

It doesn’t matter what happens on one side of the equation.

The rider who is faithful and true, his name doesn’t change.

He’s constant.

The faithfulness that God shows, that Jesus shows towards his followers, is unchanging based on their performance.

And that is something that is very difficult for us to do as humans.

And it’s one of the joys of being a Christian that we get to share with other people.

It’s not what we do that matters.

It’s what God does that matters.

It’s what Jesus did on the cross that matters.

It’s the fact that God remains faithful even when I do not, that our relationship does not change.

I may lose some feeling for God because of my unfaithfulness, but he is always faithful waiting for me to return.

And we get to share that with the world.

Very few, in fact, no other relationship holds this level of faithfulness from a king who’s given a name that only he understands.

No other ruler of the universe, the sovereign God himself, who is faithful to his followers, is worthy of worship.

Until next week, this is Joel from the I’m Talking Microcast.