What Jesus said about......Keeping Promises

Exeter Temple Message notes 22^nd February 2015

Bible Reading: Matthew 5:33-37

1.  Purpose   v 33

Jesus starts off by reminding his listeners of something that they already knew.  Jesus says, “You have heard that it was said…..”

“When a man makes a vow to the Lord or takes an oath to bind himself by a pledge he must not break his word but must do everything he said.” (Numbers 30:2)

 In Jesus’ day the Jewish people had established an informal system of oath taking. If you swore by God you were bound to it but if you wanted to wriggle out of a promise you could swear on someone or something else. So for instance if you swore on your mother’s grave but she wasn’t actually in it yet you could plead that your promise was invalid. 

 Such things continue today whereby it is possible to keep the law but be ethically wrong.  Pay day lenders act within the law but many people have been deceived by the innocent looking ads which make it look as if they are doing you a favour. Companies make the headlines because although may not have broken any law they appear to have been avoiding their moral obligation to pay taxes to the countries in which they trade.

Jesus goes back to the purpose of the law - the promotion of honesty and integrity in all things.  Jesus strips everything back to one thing. “Let your yes be yes and your no be no.”  (v37)

 All the clever playing about with words doesn’t make a broken promise any less serious. What really matters is what kind of person are you if you want make gains at their expense whilst fooling others into thinking you are law abiding and righteous? 

 Some Christians have taken these verses as meaning that we must not, under any circumstances make vows. So they refuse to take an oath in a court of law, in a marriage ceremony, or in any other situation.

 Yet oaths and vows show up remarkably often in both the Old and New Testament, In fact in the OT God’s people are specifically commanded by God to swear their oaths in his name.

In Matthew 26:63-64 Jesus does not refuse to be put under oath in his trial before the Sanhedrin and makes a statement under oath and under oath agrees that he is the Christ. 

 In 2 Corinthians 1:18 Paul repeatedly invokes God as his witness to emphasize the solemnity and the truthfulness of the things he is declaring,

It is helpful at times to make public vows and pledges. It means we are more likely to be clear and intentional in our actions rather than just drift along. When we nail our colours to the mast as it were, by making a promise, we are be clear about what we stand for and what we believe in.  And if others witness our promise, then they can hold us to account for our actions.

 But what Jesus is saying is that we shouldn’t need to be forced into being faithful to the promises we have made or cajoled into being honest because we are scared of breaking the rules.  We don’t need legal restraints to be truthful. We should be honest and faithful anyway. 

2. Profanity

We can all do things thoughtlessly at times. In this passage Jesus warns against extending that thoughtlessness to the way we use God’s name. We utter profanities not just by using bad language but whenever we use God’s name lightly.

 In the Old Testament, when you swore by someone, you were invoking that person first of all as a corroborating witness to attest to your word. You were invoking the name of someone whose witness is reliable and trustworthy to testify to the trustworthiness of your own words.

You could also call on someone as a judge against you if your words were found to be untrue. However it became all too easy to use swear by someone’s name or even their life over the most trivial of things.

It still happens today as people say without thinking, “Well I’ll be damned!  or I swear by my  mother’s life.

 When people want to add emphasis to how strongly they feel about someone, or something one of the ways they find to do it is to call on the name of God to back what they are saying.  They are involving God in their opinion, their argument, their excitement, their response to a surprise or shock by the use of His name.

 The dishonour comes when in actual fact they have not in reality given God a second thought.  To lift up God’s name in vain is to use it in an empty, frivolous and insincere way. 

Jesus showed us that we can quite easily say all the accepted things but still get our use of the Lord’s name wrong.

 “Not everyone who says to me, “Lord, Lord will enter the kingdom of heaven but only he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. Many will say to me on that day, “Lord, Lord did we not prophesy in your name and in your name drive out demons and perform many miracles? Then I will tell them plainly I never knew you.”  Matthew 7: 21-23

 “The worst kind of verbal profanity is lip service.” (Anon)

We are not just to honour God without talk but with our walk. Taking the Lord’s name in vain also has with it the idea of bearing God’s name.

Remember that when Israel joined into the covenant they became God’s people.  God has a new people who now bear His name.

In Acts 11:26 we find that the disciples were first called Christians at a place called Antioch.  The term Christian means “Christ-ones” or little Christ’s. As Christians we carry around the name of Christ wherever we go. The reason the disciples were called Christians at Antioch is because they lived like Christ, they were different. It was an honour and a responsibility and certainly not something which was taken lightly.

None of us is flawless in living our faith but we must be careful to live out what we profess to believe in.  If the God we claim we believe in is merciful then we must be merciful. If the God we claim to believe in gave himself  sacrificially then we must also give of ourselves even if it is costly. If the God we believe in is love then we must be a loving person.

3. Pressure

One of the golden rules of parenting is to keep your word.  There is nothing more disappointing for a child that when a parent says yes to a child and then fails to deliver.  It is so damaging to a child when a parent declares that there will be consequences for misbehaviour but never follows up with action.  Equally, a child also learns that a parents word cannot be trusted if the child knows that if they nag long enough or make enough fuss a no comes a yes eventually.

Our word needs to hold, even under pressure. To be a person of integrity means that you are willing to go against the crowd if the crowd is wrong. It means being willing to stand alone, if necessary, for what is right. It means peer-pressure is no pressure for you.

Jesus faced the gut-wrenching choice of keeping a costly promise. 
God had been promising for thousands of years to send a Messiah, His Son to save the world through His death and resurrection. But when the moment of truth came in the garden of Gethsemane, Jesus felt the weight keeping this promise.In fact, He asked His Father, Please let this cup pass from me.

Jesus knows what it is like to face the weight of a promise.
But in that moment of truth, when He realized there was no other way, Jesus became the ultimate promise-keeper.

We need to make sure that we have more than a façade of faith.  It is the growth of character, and a spiritual life that supports who we are that counts.  

God bless

Alan