Covenant Weekly
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This past Sunday we talked about Jesus’ exhortation to “let your yes be yes and your no be no.” Watching a TV show last night got me thinking about another aspect of honesty . . . promises.
On the show, I watched yesterday one person was helping another who was overwhelmed by challenges. In the midst of the conversation, the one offering assistance looked at the other person and said, “It will be okay. I promise.” They were doing a good thing in trying to put the struggling person at ease. But the promise they made reminded me of some child protection policy training I’ve done. In the training I received, they emphasized never to make promises when trying to comfort a child. A promise that they’ll be back with their parents soon is something that I could never make sure happens. A promise that “everything will be okay” will create images in their mind about what “okay” is. And I could never guarantee that those images will be their future reality. Promises that are beyond our scope of control can be catalysts for even more letdown and disappointment.
It is interesting how few promises Jesus and his early followers make. They don’t promise that everything will be okay. In fact, if you read the New Testament, they actually suggest that more often than not, the opposite reality will be true. They seem to guarantee struggles. There is no promise that all will be well with our kids if we just raise them up well. (There is an Old Testament proverb that offers us the principle that if we model and work to instill the right practices and behaviours in our kids that they will follow those things as they mature through adulthood. But we need to remember that it is a proverb, a generally true principle, not a guarantee or a promise.)
The things that are promised are things like the presence of God. The offer of divine love. The ultimate victory of a God who is love over the powers of sin and death. This includes the promise of resurrection for those who are in Jesus. There isn’t a lot of promise about exactly what that resurrection will be like and how that victory will manifest itself, but they are still promised.
I can’t help but wonder if many who have fallen away from faith or from the church have done so because they have been promised things that God never promised and are beyond our control. Perhaps they’ve even been promised things that are contrary to the promises of God. I can tell you that God longs for us to be a family of believers together. But I can’t promise that we will always function as a healthy family that meets all the familial needs you have. I can tell you that God will always be with you, but I can’t promise that you will always feel that presence. I can tell you that it breaks God’s heart when his world experiences pain and struggle and sickness and death. But I can’t promise that if you draw close to God’s heart that you will be freed from pain and struggle and sickness and death. And it would be wrong for me to promise that if you commit your life to Jesus everything will be okay. In fact, a huge part of the Christian life is about what we believe and hold on to when things are absolutely not okay. And in those times, holding on to promises that God never made could be the recipe for long-term disappointment.
This thought about promises may not be the uplifting assurance that we want, but keeping things in perspective might be exactly what we need to stay on this journey for a long time. Because we can know that God will be with us on the journey. We can be assured that the pain and sorrow we experience are not the end of the story even when we cannot see a way out of it in this life. We can know these things because they are promised. And staying rooted in those things can help us be wise and cautious with the words we say and the temptation to make promises that we may not be able to keep.