God Keeps His Promise

I have a number of photos of me and my wife in front of her pastor in August of 1994. That was the day of our wedding, and I am as white as a sheet. I apparently was terrified. The fact is, the life I am living today is predicated to some extent on that day. It is built on a promise I made to my wife and my wife made to me. For that reason we share a house, a bank account, children, and in our case, a life’s work. In other words, we have one life because we made an agreement. We made a promise in marriage.

Your life is built on agreements. You go in a room, flip on the switch, and you expect the lights to come on. Meanwhile, the electric company expects you to pay your bill. Now, that is invisible and there are thousands of such things that you don’t even think about, but there is a trust there that things will work because you keep your word and they keep their word.

I have been in countries that even to go into a restaurant you had to go past an armed guard. Why is that? It is because that country has a low-trust society. I don’t know how high-trust our society is today. I think it is not as high-trust as it used to be, but the reason people have high-trust societies is because they have a common ethic, a common nation, a common authority, and have made a promise one to another. Your life will be no better than the promises on which it is built, whether we are talking about marriage or a constitution.

In II Chronicles 6 we are reminded that God keeps His promises. He keeps His word. Solomon, at the opening of the temple, says, “Blessed be the LORD God of Israel, who hath with his hands fulfilled that which he spake with his mouth.” God said something with His mouth and He fulfilled that promise with His hand. Solomon continues in verse 10, “The LORD therefore hath performed his word that he hath spoken: for I am risen up in the room of David my father, and am set on the throne of Israel, as the LORD promised, and have built the house for the name of the LORD God of Israel.” You find this over and again.

He says in verse 14, “O LORD God of Israel, there is no God like thee in the heaven, nor in the earth: which keepest covenant, and showest mercy unto thy servants, that walk before thee with all their hearts.” Again, in verse 15 he talks about the promise which God had promised him and “spakest with thy mouth, and hast fulfilled it with thine hand, as it is this day.” So, God keeps His word. Why?

First, God knows what He says. God doesn’t beat the air with empty words. God knows what He is saying. Sometimes I have made promises and forgot to keep them. Do you know what promises I forgot? No? Well, neither do I because I have forgotten them. I am frail, am not the man I want to be, and do not have the memory I want to have. God never has that problem. God knows what He said. God is aware of every word He has placed in His Word, and God keeps His word and covenants. Solomon said God had made a promise with His mouth and kept that promise with His hand. He knows what He says.

God performs what He says. Some people make big promises, but it is just because they have a big mouth, not a strong hand. It is one thing to make a big promise, that just requires a big mouth, but to keep a promise requires integrity, honesty, and power. God has those things.

In verse 18 Solomon basically says, “Are we going to confine God, the boundless God of the universe, into this magnificent temple? There is no way! The heavens can’t even contain God. How much less this house that I have built?” Well, a God that transcends anything we might make to His name is surely a God that has the power to perform what He has said. With His mouth He made the promise, with His hand He kept the promise.

Now, God is the foundation to any high-trust society, at least the kind we ought to have. Now, that is true in a nation, but it is also true in a church, a family, a home, and a business. The less trust there is, the more laws, rules, and lawsuits you must have. If people have less trust in each other, it kind of compounds upon itself.

I have been reading The Federalist Papers, which is a collection of essays by three of the Founding Fathers. It is shocking. A lot of us would be offended at what they said because it is so foreign to the modern sensibilities of the average American, yet one of the things that is obvious is that they had a common God, a common ethic, and a common way of thinking.

I am thankful that we have freedoms in this country, that is what the founders intended, but I must tell you that the less agreement there is on the most basic things that govern and undergird a nation, the more we are just a country and less a nation. A country is simply a piece of ground that people have in common. A nation is an ethic, a way of thinking that people have in common. What you want in high trust is not just a piece of ground you have with everyone else, but a way of thinking, convictions, and truth you have in common with everyone else.

In II Chronicles 6, they had a common God. This one God chose Jerusalem and David. So, they had a common ethic. In verse 14 Solomon says, “There is no God like thee in the heaven, nor in the earth: which keepeth covenant, and shewest mercy unto thy servants, that walk before thee with all their hearts.” God is the foundation to a high-trust society, church, family, business, or even nation. I know that none of us have the perfect society, but low trust is what comes when we have a bunch of people who have no commitment to each other, no common authority, and are just seeking to get their own way at the expense of everybody else.

I was recently in a large city, one of the founding cities of this country, and I stayed in a three-story row house that belonged to the assistant pastor of the church in which I was preaching. It was a very different area from rural Tennessee where I am from. A car was stolen from in front of the church on the Sunday I was privileged to preach; a man who was a believer but who was struggling with a drug problem, died of an overdose while I was there; and I remember doing my pushups before bed one night and noticing a shotgun under the bed in which I slept. The point is that this city which had been so magnificent in 1776 and would have had people with a common covenant who trusted each other, now is a city with a low-trust society.

God keeps His word and we ought to copy Him. In verse 16 Solomon says, “O LORD God of Israel, keep with thy servant David my father that which thou hast promised him saying, There shall not fail thee a man in my sight to sit upon the throne of Israel; yet so that thy children take heed to their way to walk in my law, as thou hast walked before me.” Did Solomon walk in God’s law? In the long run, no. He did not live up to his end of the bargain, and that was the beginning of the dissolution of the family of David and the nation of Israel at that time. There was a divided kingdom.

What we need today is a life of health, vitality, and one built on promises we make, keep, receive, and can trust because your life will be no better than the promises upon which it is built. God keeps His word.