I don’t know about you but I have had a lot of people break a lot of promises to me in my lifetime. And to be fair, I definitely do not always keep my word as well. I can be careless with the words I throw around, with the commitments I make. Most of the time I am either just lazy or forgetful, but there are times that in my darkness I intentionally don’t do what I’ve said.
Because of my experience on the receiving and giving end of being a promise breaker, I tend to flinch just a bit when someone tells me they are promising something.Even God.
The difference, of course, is that God not only has never broken a promise to me, He is incapable of doing so. He speaks plainly about himself in Psalm 145 when He promises to do what He says He’ll do.
And what amazes me is that His Word is filled with so many promises that I either act as if aren’t there, act as if aren’t true, or have no idea they even exist.
But it’s the ones that I doubt that I want to sit with today. Here are just a few that I have run across in the past few days…
Psalm 145: I will do what is best for you.
God tells me that He will always have my best interest in mind, that every single detail of my life is being untangled and reworked together to make a thing of beauty.I think it’s because the untangling and reworking are painful sometimes that we doubt there is a good hand of God behind it all.But there is.
Jeremiah 29: I will show up and take care of you as I promised. I know what I’m doing.
He tells me that He will be there, that He is always here, and that He will provide for me and shelter me and care for me. He reminds me plain as day that He’s got my back and knows what He’s doing far beyond what I can see.
Psalm 144: I am your rescuing knight.
I am one of those women who used to be one of those little girls who dreamed of my wedding and longed for a big romance, a grand love story, so this language resonates with me down deep.I want and need a rescue, pretty much on any given day from about a thousand big and little messes.And I want a knight, someone to swoop in, and carry me off, and in the Bible I am told that I have that in the form of my Creator and Father.
Now here’s the thing.These promises aren’t things that God just tossed out there.He wasn’t just filling up a book and needed a few more words to complete the manuscript.He didn’t have to say these things.He didn’t have to leave us with reassurance.He didn’t have to use words that would fit inside our empty places, but He did.
And His promises aren’t like our human, empty promises.His promises are actions that match words.He speaks it and then He does it.
I have a feeling that when any one of His promises is not coming to fruition in my life, I either don’t have the eyes to see it, or I’m walking in disbelief and therefore He’s not wasting His time showing up in a life that doesn’t believe in what He says.
So today, I’m choosing to believe. I’m saying out loud that I believe God. That He does keep His every single promise, that He wants to what is best for me (if I’ll just let Him), that He is caring for me and He does know what He’s doing, and that – thank goodness – He really and truly is my rescuing knight, just waiting for me to believe.
