The promises of God[1]are many a-Christian’s favourite texts of the Bible, and for good reason. These promises can offer a great deal of hope, comfort, encouragement, and strength to God’s children, whether relating to eternal salvation or to temporal affliction. Many of God’s promises also offer a challenge to the promise recipient. This challenge-related aspect of God’s promises is the concern of this post.
Take, for example, two of my personal favourites of God’s promises, one each from the Old and New Testaments:
“You will seek Me and find Me, when you search for Me with all your heart.”
Jeremiah 29:13
God’s promise to His exiled people is that if they seek for Him with all their heart then they will find Him. The challenge is to seek for Him with all their heart. The promise is that if they do this, then God will ensure that He will make Himself be found of them.
“If anyone thirsts, let him come to Me and drink. He who believes in Me, as the Scripture has said, out of his heart will flow rivers of living water.”
John 7:37, 38
Here Jesus is speaking of life in the Spirit. The challenge is to come to Jesus and believe in Him. The promise is that abundant life in the Spirit will be found in Jesus.
Both of these promises are worth our receiving; thus, both of these challenges are worth undertaking. However, God’s children (and I speak from experience) often fail to respond to the challenge of these promises as we ought. If we are to respond to these challenges as we ought then there are four things of which we have a necessary need.
1. A recognition of our need
If we are take up these challenges there must be a recognition of our need of what is offered out to us in these promises. No Christian ought to need to be taught of their need of God (non-Christians also have this need but have been blinded to it through sin and pride. A Christian is a Christian because through God’s grace they have been enabled to recognise this need). All Christians have a thirst for the life of the Spirit found in Jesus Christ, though a young Christian may not yet have a fully understood sense of it. This recognition of our need may not be enough by itself to motivate us to take up these challenges, but they do prove to be the correct starting point.
D.L. Moody once told the story of a poor, young boy who had been sent out to work for a local farmer. One day, someone was walking through one of the farmer’s fields when he heard a voice from behind a hedge. Upon investigation the man found this young boy kneeling down with his eyes closed and hands clasped together, saying, “A… B…C…D…E…”
The man interrupted the young lad by saying, “My boy! What is it you are doing?”
“Why, I am praying.” answered the boy.
“That’s not praying,” the man responded, “You’re just reciting the alphabet!”
“Ah,” said the boy, “Well, I do not know how to pray; but I have heard that if we call upon God then He will help us, so I thought if I named the letters of the alphabet, God would take them and put them together into a prayer!”
The young boy here understood so little yet recognised his need of God. The question we must ask ourselves is that with what we do know and understand, how much do we recognise our need of God?
2. A recognition of God’s worth
By God’s grace, we might be able to recognise our need of God, but how much we recognise of God’s worth will also help to dictate how we respond to God’s promises. The Shulamite woman in Song of Solomon 5 provides us with a great illustration of how this is so:
The Shulamite woman is waiting for her Beloved to come to her, but it is late in the evening and she has been waiting for a long time, so she lays herself down to sleep. After some time passes, finally, she hears the voice of her Beloved and his knock at her door.
Perhaps feeling somewhat hazy having just been awoken from her sleep, the Shulamite woman’s initial response to her Beloved’s arrival is one of annoyance and inconvenience!
“Oh, great! Now I must get dressed again, and quickly put some make-up back on and make my hair look nice again… and then, later when I return to my bed, I’m just going to have wash myself again and mess my hair up again!”
After this initial response, however, the Shulamite woman quickly regains her senses once more, and remembers that here is her great love; her life and her joy; and now they can spend more wonderful time together, which is all that she has longed her since he had last left her presence. She rushes to the door, only to find that her Beloved has now left.
The Shulamite woman, in response to her Beloved’s abscondence, runs throughout the city streets, searching for her Beloved. She is beaten by the city watchmen, then taunted by the keepers of the walls, but still she searched on for her Beloved such was her great desire for him and to find him once again.
Why hadn’t the Shulamite woman even been able firstly to get up from her bed and simply walk to door and open it for her Beloved? It was because, for those moments, she had forgotten about his great worth.
3. A belief in God’s faithfulness
Recognising our great need of God and of His great worth are quite a formidable team-up, but how strongly we believe that God will be faithful to abundantly keep all that He has promised will also affect our responses to those promises.
My wife and I reward our football-playing daughter with £1 per goal scored, and £5 per hat-trick (three goals scored in one game). A few weeks back she asked what she would receive if she were ever to score eight goals in a match. Now, given the fact that the most she has managed to score in a single game is two goals, I jokingly promised her a reward of £100 for eight goals!
Now, should my daughter have believed that promise to be true and that the promise-maker was financially able to fulfil such a generous promise (seeing as she well understands my humour, as well as my shortage of available funds), what would her response likely to have been? I would have expected that her very next match would have seen her running like she had never run before; shooting from here, there, and everywhere; and perhaps even tackling her own teammates if it meant she could get more goals!
Or perhaps you can try to imagine that you have several large debts that you are unable to repay and my response to finding this out is to promise you that I have hidden an envelope within the church building that contains a cheque for £100,000 (I do realise these illustrations are making me look a little mean, but please try and work with them!).
Here we have a scenario where you recognise your own need, and the great worth of the content of the promise, so that now how much you believe my promise to be true will dictate your response to the challenge I’ve set you of finding the hidden envelope. If you didn’t really believe that what I was saying was true, then you might still search throughout the church a little bit just in case it was, but you would probably be prone to giving up before too long. If you were convinced that what I was saying was true, however, then you would likely leave no pew or hymnbook unturned as you earnestly searched, refusing to give up until you had found the envelope, no matter how long it took.
I don’t think too many Christians would have a problem in believing in God’s faithfulness in keeping His promises. The issue we might find we have here, in contrast, is that we don’t quite believe that God will keep His promise abundantly enough to make it worth the required full commitment to the taking up of the challenge laid down. However, this does still, inadvertently call into question God’s faithfulness, as well as His generosity, kindness, love and more.
4. Jesus Christ as Lord and Saviour
If God has made a wonderful promise to us and has laid down a challenge that we must meet if we are to receive the content of the promise, then it is essential that we recognise our need of it, as well of God’s (and of the promise content’s) great worth, combined with a belief in God’s faithfulness. All these factors would be moot, however, were we not to have Jesus Christ as our Lord and Saviour.
At their very best, our responses to these promise-challenges would be tainted with sin and need sanctifying by Christ’s blood. Furthermore, if we consider that all these promises are made to God’s children, then without Jesus as Saviour these promises (with their respective challenges) would never have any relevance to us anyway.
Recognition of our need, recognition of God’s great worth, and belief in God’s faithfulness are all necessary motivating factors as we take up those challenges laid down by God within His promises, but we must ever hold up our Lord Jesus Christ before us, that all the glory is His, for all the promises of God are “Yes” and “Amen” in Him! This intercessory work of Jesus is portrayed beautifully within this wonderful hymn of Charles Wesley:
Arise, my soul, arise,
Shake off thy guilty fears;
The bleeding Sacrifice
In my behalf appears:
Before the throne my Surety stands,
My name is written on His hands.
He ever lives above,
For me to intercede,
His all-redeeming love,
His precious blood, to plead;
His blood atoned for this our race,
And sprinkles now the throne of grace.
Five bleeding wounds He bears,
Received on Calvary;
They pour effectual prayers,
They strongly speak for me:
Forgive him, O forgive! they cry,
Nor let the ransomed sinner die!
The Father hears Him pray,
His dear Anointed One;
He cannot turn away
The presence of His Son:
His Spirit answers to the blood,
And tells me I am born of God.
My God is reconciled,
His pardoning voice I hear;
He owns me for His child,
I can no longer fear;
With confidence I can draw nigh,
And Father, Abba, Father! cry.
Charles Wesley (1707-88)
[1] A quick Google shows that there are anything between 3000 and 9000 promises made by God within the Bible.
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