There’s no promise like a campaign promise.

In 1964, days before the presidential election that year, President Lyndon Johnson in a campaign speech to Akron University promised, “We are not about to send American boys nine or ten thousand miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves.” That didn’t work out so well for Johnson, as the Vietnam War can attest.

Two decades later, then Vice President George H. W. Bush, promised the 1988 Republican National Convention that further taxation was a no-go:

“My opponent won’t rule out raising taxes. But I will. And the Congress will push me to raise taxes and I’ll say no. And they’ll push, and I’ll say no, and they’ll push again, and I’ll say, to them, ‘Read my lips: no new taxes.’”

Just two years later, President Bush signed congressional tax increases into law.

Our politicians’ frequent inability to do what they said they would do — to keep faithful to their promises — is also the cause of their frequent downfall. Exorbitant campaign promises have become so commonplace that nearly everyone takes them with a grain of salt. It’s not without good reason that our faith in our leaders is imbued with cynicism and a wink and a nod rather than true belief.

Christians, on the other hand, are to exhibit the “fruit of the Spirit,” of which the Apostle Paul lists “faithfulness” as seventh in his list of fruits in Galatians 5:16-24. But in a season that’s lacking in so much faithfulness, how are we to display faithfulness during election season?

The author of the book of Hebrews defines faith as, “…the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” Just before that, he observes, “But we are not of those who shrink back and are destroyed, but of those who have faith and preserve their souls.” Faith is not merely mentally registering something — it involves conviction that fuels action. Lack of faith is shrinking back, and faith produces perseverance.

Imprisoned in 1944 for his part in an attempt to assassinate Hitler, German pastor and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s expression of “Action” in the poem “Stations on the Way to Freedom” is one of the strongest depictions of faith I’ve come across:

“Do and dare what is right, not swayed by the whim of the moment.
Bravely take hold of the real, not dallying now with what might be.
Not in the flight of ideas but only in action is freedom.
Make up your mind and come out into the tempest of living.
God’s command is enough and your faith in him to sustain you.
Then at last freedom will welcome your spirit amid great rejoicing.”

For Bonhoeffer, God’s command was enough to secure faith. It is through God’s covenant with his people that we can have faith which is solid. God, the great covenant keeper, is the embodiment of faithfulness even when ours is lacking. Christ, the true and perfect man, succeeded at keeping God’s covenant where we in our sin failed. Faith, then, as a fruit of the Holy Spirit working in the lives of his redeemed people, is something that both originates and is inseparable from Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith.

Therefore, for Christians, our foundation of faith is rock-solid. But what about for Americans? In the United States, the Constitution acts as our covenantal document. It too is strong, but its foundations, while based on solid principles, are under constant threat of succumbing to the reinterpretation of the age. Any faith Christian Americans put in our political system or its agents must be undergirded by the faith that no matter whatever — or whomever — befalls us, we serve a kingdom not of this world.

However much faithfulness we have, in order to walk by the Spirit, we need more. Even the apostles urged Jesus, “Increase our faith!” Jesus’s answer must have surprised them. He told them, “If you had faith like a grain of mustard seed, you could say to this mulberry tree, ‘Be uprooted and planted in the sea,’ and it would obey you.”

That kind of faith will not leave us to stand idly by. Such faithfulness amidst the rampant unfaithfulness of the day will be a contrast to a world that too often doesn’t know its own need. That kind of faith will move us swiftly, as Bonhoeffer observed, out into the tempest of living. The question that remains is: Are we ready for the storm?

[Editor’s note: This is part seven of the “Fruits in Season” series, exploring the impact of the biblical “fruit of the Spirit” (Galatians 5:16–24) on Christians during election season. Find the full series here.]