Faithfulness can be practiced and developed with your words. Do you keep your word? When you say you'll do something, do you do it? You establish a character of faithfulness.
It means keeping confidences. Do you keep confidences? If someone shares a secret, a faithful man will keep the secret. An unfaithful man will then share it and gossip it around.
Do you keep God's word in your heart? That's another aspect of being faithful - God's words, holding onto them.
Time - you can demonstrate faithfulness with time. Time is just like money, you steward it. You give God the first portion of your time, so there's blessing; and the rest of time is set apart. Are you faithful in the use of your time? Do you consider time your asset to invest, and then plan and prioritise your life? If you just drift through days, you're not being faithful with time. You're not thinking: how I can use it well? I only have a limited amount of time - I can never get any more.
Finances, we can development faithfulness in our finances, firstly by bringing our finance to the Lord, and declaring that they're His property, not ours. Then I'm called to administer it, so if I'm going to administer it, I need to think about budget. I need to think about wisdom with saving. I need to think about and learn how to invest. I need to then learn how to honour God with a portion of the finances.
All of that's about faithfulness. It's not just to do with the tithe. Faithfulness has to do with your whole attitude, and approach, and stewardship of money. If we steward our money well, then we're in a position to bless others. Part of your stewardship and faithfulness with money is learning how to manage it, and how to grow it.
Church family is another area where we develop faithfulness, which many people don't understand. God puts you in a family, and that's where you learn faithfulness; it means remaining loyal to leaders, and to the church family, especially when it's going through a hard time, instead of taking a walk.
It means being reliable - you turn up, you attend, you participate. It means you're faithful in praying for the church, praying for its ministries. If you've got a responsibility there, which everyone should have, that you fulfil it. You do it and can be relied on to fulfil it.
Another aspect of faithfulness in church is when people are offended, when there are difficulties going on - you remain steadfast in the face of those things; instead of becoming offended, and feeding on gossip, and then becoming literally out of the race.
Relationships - you demonstrate faithfulness is in relationships. God gives us friends, gives us people, and those people are divine connections, so remain faithful to them. Remain loyal to the people. Support them. Be there for them when they need you. These are quite simple things. If someone is being talked about, refuse to participate in gossip. All of these are just simple ways of demonstrating and growing faithfulness.
Another way you grow faithfulness is persevering, just perseverance. You stay true to God, even when it's very difficult, even when it seems like you're alone, even when it seems like there's overwhelming pressures and difficulties - you just refuse to quit and turn away from what God said to do. You complete your assignment.
Those are very practical ways that we can develop faithfulness - it just can be developed everywhere. So basically, if someone walks with God consistently, and they humbly serve Him, you can say they're faithful - they're a faithful servant, and they will be qualified to rule over many things.
Revelations 3:21 - “Be zealous and repent”.
In other words, if you haven't been doing these things… be zealous, be passionate, be fervent, repent!
“To him who overcomes (and the context is lukewarmness and spiritual passivity and unfaithfulness), I will grant to sit with Me on My throne and reign with Me, as I also overcame and sat down with My Father”.
The reward for faithfulness is assignments in the coming kingdom; and the loss of sharing in the kingdom will produce profound sorrow, and regret at our loss. Some believers don't understand what's at stake, and minimise it - they think: well, if I don't reign with Christ, it’s no big deal, at least I'm saved.