Hi, and welcome to Five Word Prayers Daily, a five-day-a-week daily devotional where we share the word prayers in our heart.

I'm Lisa Whittle, and I welcome you to just five minutes with me, which I trust and pray will be five minutes well spent.

Today's conversation is about faithfulness, a spiritual principle of great importance. Let's dive right in.

So talking about this important idea of faithfulness, this is something the Lord has been

driving home in my heart for several years, so much so that I wrote

about it in my book, Put Your Warrior Boots on, in something I call the Ministry of Sameness.

And it's something I believe Jesus followers will need to be committed to more than ever in

2018 and well beyond. Jesus deeply desires for us to be faithful to him, but not only does he desire it,

he requires it. When we commit our lives to Jesus Christ, we commit our life to a life of faithful

service, faithful love, faithful walking our relationship out in good and hard times when it's

convenient and when it's definitely not.

Because Jesus will always keep up his end of the deal, right?

He will be completely committed and faithful to us.

And so he asks the same of us, though in our flesh we often will fall short.

But of course, flesh is no excuse. I love the books of first and

second Timothy, and I find them to be so important for believers right now in this very tough

world. The truth is the world has always been tough and imperfect, and the evidence of that is in

these books where Paul, the mentor of

Timothy, is writing to him, knowing that he's not going to be around much longer. And so he's

getting all the sage equipping counsel in, especially in Second Timothy, which are literally

his last words as he is in prison dying after faithfully serving the Lord. So to say we might want to pay

close attention to especially those chapters three and four is an understatement. He is giving

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