Concord Church’s pastors led the congregation through a summer sermon series on the Fruit of the Spirit this year. I closed the series last Sunday with a message on faithfulness—consistently doing what we are supposed to do.
To illustrate, I shared the story of Pioneer 10. The tiny NASA craft, just 9 feet wide and 9 ½ feet long, weighed only 570 pounds but was designed to travel 550 million miles to Jupiter and return images of the planet to Earth.
Launched on March 3, 1972, Pioneer 10 began photographing Jupiter on November 6, 1973, sending back about 500 images. But it didn’t stop there. After completing its Jupiter mission, the craft kept going: past Saturn at 1 billion miles, Uranus at 2 billion, Neptune at 3 billion, and Pluto at nearly 4 billion. Even then, it continued operating.
Pioneer 10 made its final radio contact on January 23, 2003— nearly 31 years after launch— by then almost 7.5 billion miles from Earth. Pioneer 10 was more faithful to its mission than anyone had a right to expect. It simply kept doing what it was designed to do, longer than any NASA engineer ever imagined. That is faithfulness.
Scripture gives us a similar picture. In Ephesians 6:21, Paul describes his coworker Tychicus as “a beloved brother and faithful helper in the Lord’s work” (NLT). Tychicus was reliable— someone Paul could completely trust to do God’s work. God calls us to the same kind of faithfulness.
Spouses are to be loyal to one another, parents committed to their children, friends steady in their support, and employees dependable in their work. Like Tychicus—and even like Pioneer 10—we are called to keep doing what we are supposed to do. Faithfulness strengthens relationships, blesses those around us, and shapes us into better people.
