“Let us hold unswervingly to the hope we profess, for he who promised is faithful.” Hebrews 10:23 NIV
Have you ever made a promise and then either chose not to keep it or were unable to keep it? I know I have, and unfortunately the person I promised probably remembers it more than I do. Whether I chose to not keep it or I was unable to keep it, the fact that I didn’t is one of the many things that makes me and you different from God.
God doesn’t choose to not follow through with a promise. God isn’t unable to keep a promise. When He promises something, He is faithful and follows through with what He promised. There are 2 types of promises that God has made with us, conditional and unconditional. Understanding which type of promise God has made to us helps us to realize why a promise may appear to have not been kept.
Conditional promises involve both parties having responsibilities. The first party has responsibilities to fulfill before the second party is able to fulfill their part of the promise. For example, from the life of a parent, it would look like this. A parent promises their child dessert after they have eaten their supper. The child needs to eat all of their supper before the parent will give them the dessert. In our spiritual life, it looks like this, God promises to answer prayers with either Yes, No or wait. However, this promise is conditional in that if we don’t pray and ask for anything of God then there is no prayer for God to answer. He won’t answer a prayer He has not received.
Unconditional promises involve both parties but only one of them has responsibilities in it. The responsibility is held by the party who made the promise. The party who bears the responsibility does not need the other party to do or say anything, their part in this type of promise is to simply accept that the promise is being kept. For example, God promised Noah that He would never again destroy everything on the earth with a flood. He has kept that promise to this day and I believe will continue to keep that promise. Our job as His children is to accept that He is keeping that promise.
God has promised us, His children, many things and some of those promises are solely His responsibility to keep, but some of them require us to do things. We need to make sure that we know which type of promise we are holding on to before we decide that we believe God isn’t keeping a promise. We may be surprised when we think about it that either God has not kept His part of the promise yet because we haven’t done our part yet or God has kept the promise and we don’t like the result.
When we hold onto the promises God has made, it helps us to walk through life on this earth with faith. We are able to walk in faith even when our circumstances are not as we would like them to be. That does not mean that God is not fulfilling His promise, it simply means that we would like the promise to have been different.
We know that God is faithful, that He is going to keep His promises, He always does. Any promise between us and God that is not kept occurs when we don’t keep our promises to God.
Have you made God any promises lately?
Have you kept those promises or have you walked away from them? Remember, God doesn’t walk away from us or His promises.