5 – Keeping Your Promise

God Leads Forward – If you get hopelessly lost in the forest, there is still a way to get from where you are to where you need to be. If someone who knows every path in the forest came to your side to help you, they would be able to show you the best way. God knows the best way forward from where you are now. If you’ll obey Him, He will show you that path. He has no interest in ridiculing you for getting lost, and He’s not ready to give up on you. He’s ready to put the past in the past.
If you hurt a friend or a relative, they may forgive you, but continue to remind you of what you did. They may use your past wrongs as leverage in the future. God not only forgives sin, He forgets it, and develops a new plan to get you from where you are to where He wants you to be. Here are some great Scriptures that show God’s heart.
As far as the east is from the west, so far has He removed our transgressions from us. (Psalm 103:12)
My offenses will be sealed up in a bag; you will cover over my sin. (Job 14:17)
You will again have compassion on us; you will tread our sins underfoot and hurl all our iniquities into the depths of the sea. (Micah 7:19)
In your love you kept me from the pit of destruction; you have put all my sins behind your back. (Isaiah 38:17)
Does it sound like God has any further interest in your sin after He forgives you? Does He want to remind you of them? He has truly put them in the past.
God has a great future for you. If you have made a bad decision in the past, God doesn’t want to dwell on it or remind you of it. He wants you to confess it, be forgiven, learn from it, and let Him lead you in the right direction from here.
Maybe you did make poor decisions at the time you were married. Maybe you weren’t listening to God or anyone else. God’s plan now, though, is to make a good marriage out of the mess you may have created.
God Expects Us to Keep Our Vows – Joshua, when he was Israel’s leader, made a covenant that he never would have made if he had asked God first. The Gibeonites wanted to make a peace treaty with him, agreeing to protect each other from enemies. Joshua had been told not to make treaties with the people who had been living in the Promised Land, so the Gibeonites lied about where they were from. They said that they lived far away. They put on old shoes and said they were new when they left home. They took old moldy bread and said it was hot out of the oven when they started their journey from home.
The men of Israel sampled their provisions but did not inquire of the LORD. Then Joshua made a treaty of peace with them… (Joshua 9:14-15)
Joshua made a treaty without praying and with people who had lied to him. Surely this treaty wasn’t God’s will. But, did God want Joshua to keep his word? It’s amazing to learn that God not only expected Joshua to keep it, but He expected the leaders of Israel for hundreds of years to continue to keep that treaty.
When neighboring kings heard about the treaty, they attacked Gibeon. Joshua and his entire army came to the aid of Gibeon and God helped them to defeat five kings that had joined forces against them. God was so involved in this battle that He threw hailstones on the enemy and made the sun stand still to give Joshua time to finish the battle. Joshua summarizes:
There has never been a day like it before or since, a day when the LORD listened to a man. Surely the LORD was fighting for Israel! (Joshua 10:14)
About 400 years later David didn’t understand why times were hard:
During the reign of David, there was a famine for three successive years; so David sought the face of the LORD. The LORD said, "It is on account of Saul and his blood-stained house; it is because he put the Gibeonites to death." (2 Samuel 21:1)
It looks like the covenant that Joshua made was serious business to God. Saul was king before David and had broken the covenant, killing some of the Gibeonites. During David’s time God sent a famine to force Israel to make things right with the Gibeonites.
If you have made a vow, even one you shouldn’t have made, God wants you to keep it. He may do something as drastic as making the sun stand still to help you keep it.
Our point is that God wants you to commit yourself to your marriage. He wants you to work hard at your marriage, and He wants to bring good out of it. Even if I made a mistake getting on a ship when it sailed, jumping overboard would be a bad decision. Staying on the ship and making the most of the trip will be my wisest choice.
Talk About It – Since you married, have you reinforced the commitment you made to each other? Or, have you questioned your commitment and talked about divorce? Discuss what you can do to strengthen the confidence you each have in the commitment of the other.