Message summary: The Bible lists many qualities of a good person but today let us consider the blessing of every day faithfulness with Hananiah as a Biblical example.

Listen to our message on your audio player.

"I put Hanani my brother, and Hananiah the commander of the fortress, in charge of Jerusalem, for he was a faithful man and feared God more than many" (Nehemiah 7:2).  "A faithful man who can find?" (Proverbs 20:6b).

Yesterday after church I stopped by Trillium Place, a local nursing home, to visit with my longtime friend Grover Devault. Grover is a long retired Army chaplain with a boatload of ministry stories. Back in the mid-sixties he was serving on a remote base in Greenland above the Arctic Circle when he flew with a group of military personnel to the North Pole. He briefly preached a sermon at the Pole fulfilling Christ's commission to preach to the remotest parts of the earth.

At age 97 Grover continues to let his light shine for Christ. His wife, Nancy, whom he was married to for 62 years, died in 2016 at 84 years of age. This month marked the 20th anniversary of the horrific Amish school shootings here in Lancaster County. At that time Grover served as chaplain with the Pennsylvania State Police and had a vital comforting role to both the police force and the Amish community.

He shared with me that earlier this month he was invited by the Amish to share in a memorial service with over 100 of the survivors and their families. He is highly esteemed. He has a desire to finish the race faithfully and fruitfully until God calls him home.

The small steadiness of everyday life is the basic foundation of faithfulness that is quietly demonstrated day after day, month after month, year after year in the long course of life.

If you stop and think about it, you can think of many who are faithful in the small steadiness of every day yet few of them are famous as the world deems fame. I have referred to this as quiet faithfulness.

In our first daily text Nehemiah refers to an obscure man named Hananiah. His sole Biblical distinctive in this verse is that he was "a faithful man and feared God more than many".* In considering this text I observe that being a faithful man and having a fear of God are so inter-related. The massive breakdown in faithfulness we see in our own age is related to the loss of having a healthy, holy fear of God.

In previous generations families commonly imprinted portions of Scripture as an epitaph on tombstones and it's still practiced by some today. For instance on my parent's tombstone we inscribed, "For Me To Live Is Christ, To Die Is Gain". Today's text has these words, "he was a faithful man and feared God more than many" which makes a fitting tombstone inscription. The photo is the tombstone of Deacon Samuel Peck in Greenwich, Connecticut who died in 1793. Such an epitaph makes us want to hear his story.

The road to being faithful is a long, steady, lifelong slog, the accumulation of many small decisions made throughout life, "the small steadiness of every day". You decide each day that you will live faithfully but the characteristic of being faithful takes time. Hopefully you are building on many years of faithfulness but if you've not been faithful you can begin building faithfulness today! Let us follow the example of men like Grover DeVault and Hananiah.

Be encouraged today, Hebrews 3:13.

Stephen & Brooksyne Weber

Daily prayer: Father, may my life be marked by faithfulness and integrity. I know that these character traits are not developed over a short period of time but over the duration of my life, most especially during the challenging times. Obedience does bring blessing and it also brings eternal reward. Help me not to become weary in doing good, for at the proper time that You have ordained, I will reap a harvest if I do not give up. Help me to practice the small steadiness of every day. Amen.

* Hananiah is a name used several times in the Bible and was also the Hebrew name of one of the three young men who went though the fire in Daniel 3. Most know him as Shadrach which was the Babylonian name given to him.