A promise made, a promise kept

Editor’s note: Look for a sermon or lesson from Houston’s diverse faiths every week in Belief. To submit a sermon, email robert.morast@chron.com.

We often think of promises when we think of God. After all, the Bible is full of promises. But right now, during this Advent Season, I want us to think about God’s promise in Jesus.

All of us have made or received promises. Those promises range all the way from promising to call somebody, to promising to be faithful in marriage to your spouse, or to promising to give your employer a full day’s work for a fair wage.

Stores and products make promises to us. A few years ago, I took a store up on its promise on Thanksgiving Day. An online electronics store offered a pretty good size HDTV for a very low price. So, I ordered one. Later that day, I got a confirmation email. That evening I got another confirmation email. The next morning, I received an email stating that the item had been deleted from my order because none were available. They couldn’t keep their promise. We make promises all the time. We also break promises all too frequently. As we study God’s word, we find that He has made all kinds of promises. The wonderful thing about God is: He never breaks a promise! He may delay fulfilling a promise for a time, but He has never broken one. Throughout the Old Testament, we find numerous promises about the Messiah that God said would someday come to save His people.

In speaking through Isaiah, the prophet, God said, “The Lord himself will give you a sign. Behold, a young woman shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel.” (Isaiah 7:14 RSV) Through a different prophet, but in the same time frame, God spoke another word about the Messiah that was to come. It was the prophet Micah who recorded these words of God, “But you, Bethlehem Ephrathah, though you are small among the clans of Judah, out of you will come for me one who will be ruler over Israel, whose origins are from of

old, from ancient times.” (Micah 5:2 NIV)

You see, just two of the many promises God made can begin to show the pattern of His will being worked out long before they were fulfilled.

Companies make promises all the time. They promise you will love their product. They promise that their product will meet all your needs, even all your expectations. They promise to refund your money, if not completely satisfied. Most of the time, they even keep those promises. Sometimes they try to renege on them.

Sometimes you will hear someone or some company make a promise that is too good to be true. The old saying, of course, goes, “If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.” But you know something, with God, that saying certainly does not hold true. All of God’s promises are guaranteed. He will fulfill them. It probably won’t be on our time schedule, but we can count on Him to come through for us.

God spoke through the prophets about many things. The Messiah, who was to come and save the people, was but one of the many things He spoke about.

Two years ago, the Pew Research Co. published the results of a survey that said 73 percent of Americans believe in the Virgin birth of Jesus. That’s down 10 percentage points from a similar poll taken seven years earlier. Ninety-one percent of evangelical Christians say they believe in the Virgin birth, but sadly only 30 percent of those who call themselves religiously unaffiliated believe it. Clearly, there are a lot of people out there who need to hear the Gospel in a compelling way.

At the same time, however, it seems we are moving more and more toward a secular society. Even though a vast majority does believe in the Virgin birth, most really don’t want to deal with it. Most want to keep the warm fuzzy things of Christmas, but don’t want to deal with the fact of Jesus as the Messiah, the Savior, the King of kings and Lord of lords.

We are seeing and hearing much to do with Christmas on the radio and TV. Each year, it seems more and more merchants are changing their Christmas theme to something a little more “politically correct.”

I believe the important thing for us to remember is that God keeps His promises. And when we accept Christ as our Lord and Savior, we are making a promise to God that He expects us to keep. We are promising Him that we will try our best to live the kind of life He wants us to live. We are telling Him that we will seek to do His will, instead of our own, that we will serve others rather than ourselves, that we will give Him first place in our lives.

Each of us must answer the question: Have I kept that promise? And if you have not yet accepted Him as your Lord and Savior, you must ask yourself, am I willing to make that promise in exchange for the wonderful promise of life forever with Him? The Bible says, “The yes to all of God’s promises is in Christ, and through Christ we say yes to the glory of God.” (2 Corinthians 1:20 NCV)

That’s the real message of Christmas. Christ came into the world to save us and bring us to live with Him forever. That’s the promise of Christmas. And it is just one of the many promises that God has made to us.

There are too many to share about in one message. But think about these three: He promises to be with you through everything you may face. He promises to comfort you when times are tough. And He promises that you will live with Him forever — all through our faith that He is who He says He is and that we will trust our lives to Him.