Loyalty
Meditation for the week of April 26, 2009
Acts 13:21-22
"And afterward they asked for a king; so God gave them Saul the son of Kish, a man of the tribe of Benjamin, for forty years.
"And when He had removed him, He raised up for them David as king, to whom also He gave testimony and said, ‘I have found David the son of Jesse, a man after My own heart, who will do all My will.’
Loyalty to the LORD is probably what these verses are all about. There are very few people in the Bible or in real life of whom it could be said that they were and are always loyal to the Lord. David, Moses, Joseph and Daniel all come to mind as people on whom the Lord could always depend. Moses and David made mistakes, but they never turned from the faithful worship of Jehovah. Aaron, Moses’ brother, is an example of one who was not always loyal.
Aaron is much like many of us today. He helped make a golden calf and encouraged idolatrous worship by the nation of Israel, a people that had only recently been redeemed from bondage. In Exodus 32:4-5 we read, “And he received the gold from their hand, and he fashioned it with an engraving tool, and made a molded calf. Then they said, "This is your god, O Israel, that brought you out of the land of Egypt!" So when Aaron saw it, he built an altar before it. And Aaron made a proclamation and said, "Tomorrow is a feast to the LORD." The people called it a god, but Aaron seemed to think it only represented Jehovah, their personal God. But God called it idolatry. As far as God was concerned, the golden calf was not Him nor something that represented Him, and it divided the loyalties of the Israelites.
I am convinced that when we worship the Lord we must worship Him the way He asks us to worship Him if we are going to be people who are “after God’s own heart.†Most Christians are pretty clear about the moral law of God and we stand firm on the fact that a true believer will want to adhere to it. We know we can’t force unbelievers to adhere to it, but we can and should order our own lives by the moral law. But we also must be clear that there is only one Bible telling us how congregations of believers should worship as well. And we cannot change the principles associated with the Gospel, with baptism, with separation and sanctification, with the priesthood of all believers, with the differing roles of men and women in the local church, and with the doctrines connected with leadership, stewardship and service and still claim to be loyal to the Lord.
In Matthew 18:20 we read, "For where two or three are gathered together in My name, I am there in the midst of them." We have heard it taught that this is the principle which convinces us that the Lord is in the presence of a gathering of Christians. But what does it really mean to be gathered “in his nameâ€? This verse really deals with an offense in a local congregation and probably could be paraphrased, “When you do what I, the Lord, have asked you to do, the way I have asked you to do it, I will approve what you do.†I think King David walked according to this principle and it was because of this that he was seen as loyal to the Lord, or a man after God’s own heart.
I too would like to be known as one who is loyal to the Lord. I am sure that all of us who are saved would. But that may require us to get back to the Bible for our instructions. Aaron took things into his own hands and made the people into idolaters. David was known for inquiring of the Lord and doing the Lord’s will. He was the man after God’s own heart.
Bruce Collins