Does God ever break His promise? If He does just one time, then it would produce a cloud over the rest of your walk with Him? That cloud would then cause doubts on any future situation.
Mary and Martha’s brother was a good friend of Jesus. Lazarus was sick so the sisters sent word to Jesus. They expected Jesus to drop everything and come running. John 11:4 (GW) When Jesus heard the message, he said, “His sickness won’t result in death. Instead, this sickness will bring glory to God so that the Son of God will receive glory through it.” So Jesus did not drop everything and the sisters held onto a promise…he will not die.
Lazarus proceeded to get sicker and sicker until…Lazarus died!! Jesus didn’t show up…not until Lazarus had been in the grave four days. You know what made this even worse…Jesus seemed to be insensitive to the whole situation. John 11:15 (GW) “…but I’m glad that I wasn’t there so that you can grow in faith. Let’s go to Lazarus.” Ouch!
The darkest time in life comes when you receive a promise from God and then you realize that He broke His promise. Can you imagine the cloud that suddenly appeared over the head of Mary and Martha. Up to this point in life, they lived with the knowledge that God would always keep His Word, that Jesus had always come through for them, that they could always lean on the faithfulness of God and Jesus. Now the sisters had a precedent. A precedent is “a legal decision establishing a principle or rule that a court or other judicial body or individual adopts when deciding subsequent cases with similar issues or facts”. That simply means that when need arises in the future, we don’t know if God will meet that need!
But hold on! Let’s look at this more closely. What did the sisters hear Jesus say? They heard Jesus say that Lazarus would not die. What did Jesus say? He said that Lazarus’ sickness would not result in death. The sister’s believed that death wasn’t part of the story and this was the end. They didn’t know the rest of the story…they had no idea that Jesus would take Lazarus through death’s door and back again!
One writer puts it this way, “God is the perpetual present, the Eternal I Am. He is not limited to the past of the future; He lives in the constant state of being Can I tell you what it means to me? In the realm where Jesus lives, in the realm of perpetual life, Lazarus wasn’t dead. God can never be late; He doesn’t wear a wristwatch. He’ll reach into the past to pull your promises back into your present if necessary. He’ll resurrect something you thought was forever lost.” (God’s Eye View by Tommy Tenney)
God has never broken a promise…it may be that you simply don’t have the full story yet.
Do you trust Him enough to wait on the promise? 500 people saw the resurrected Jesus and watched His ascension. Jesus told them to ‘wait in Jerusalem’ and they would receive a wonderful gift of power. But when that gift was given, there were only 120 there to receive it What happened to the other 380? Maybe they thought that He was not keeping His promise. They missed out on what God was up to.
If God has not fulfilled a promise to you…look at it again. Just because you don’t see it yet, doesn’t mean that He isn’t doing it…you can’t see the end of the perfect story that He has written just for you.
We love yall.
Billy and Sheilah Daws
Does God ever break His promise?
Responses
I came out of a broken and abused childhood. This resulted in brokeness in my own early relationships…won’t go into details. At 26 the Lord gave me Is 54 and called me to Himself while I was pregant in a crises pregnancy and the father had left. The Lord through many of his servants and through the leading in His word promised me that He had redeemed me…that He was my husband and that I would no more suffer the shame I had known so long…God asked me to wait on him for the one he had for me and he would lead me to him. So for 12 years I let the Lord filter my suitors…I allowed Him to close doors on a mate as I trusted His promise that He would bring the right one…despite the constant poverty and lonliness of raising 2 kids totally alone…no family nearby…not one date or valentine’s etc…I had the hope of God’s promise. Then the time finally came…after going all through my 30s alone I felt the Lord call me to join a dating site for Christians…I did and a man came forward…I continued to set it before the Lord and got prayer from my pastor who told me it was time and I’d hear wedding bells by Christmas…the man pursued me and we made a deep bond…soon after, he was gone…things began to be revealed about him that were not good…so I went to prayer knowing that God would not have sent the “wrong” man after His promise that he would not put me through that deep shame and rejection again…a promise that motivated me to completely give him my gift…the only gift I had to give my faith and my body…now it’s been 2 years since my first date after 12…nothing…no redemption…no nothing…pastors tell me that he was just a distraction and a test.
So, that is what God sends his daughter after over a decade of faithfulness in her suffering? A test He knew I would not pass…I asked for bread and got a distraction?
I feel that I gave God my gift and thought it would be special to him…if it is not special to God and was given to a distraction…why should it be special to me? Now half of my 40s are gone too…God never brought him and did not redeem anything…it is the same broken record of my youth…that which God called me out of is what I was put right back in to…
You are right that this broken promise has cast a huge shadow of doubt over everything else…looks like I am on my own…how will I know if any man is just a test or distraction? I never will…wish me luck…my faith did not seem to be enough…
By: skc on February 15th, 2010
at 3:43 am
I found this quote from a very wise pastor: “It’s very tough to take a step of faith, especially when you feel inadequate, and then have it more or less blow up in your face. Deep inside we all like to think that if we obey God and do what he tells us to do, then things may be tough but they will work out somehow. And in the macro sense, that statement is certainly true. Obeying God is always the best way to go, and the fruit of obedience will always be ultimately sweet to the taste. But it’s that little word “ultimately” that trips us up. Sometimes obedience may seem quite bitter to us when we have tried to do the right thing, ventured out in faith, taken the next step, obeyed God’s will with as much courage as we could muster, following the leading we were given, and still we end up frustrated and wondering if somehow we made a mistake.
At least once in your life, something so difficult and painful will happen to us and we will ask “God, why is this happening
to me?” Find God’s strength through
life’s greatest heartaches.
No “Welcome Abraham” Signs
Whenever those thoughts come to me, and they do come from time to time, I recall the circumstances that greeted Abraham when he finally arrived in the Promised Land, having left Ur of the Chaldees not knowing where he was going, by faith following God’s call. And when after much difficulty, he finally reaches the Promised Land, who is there to greet him?
No one.
Hebrews 11:9 says that he lived in tents. He was like a foreigner in the land of promise. In many ways this is even more remarkable than leaving Ur in the first place. As long as he was traveling across the desert, he could dream about the future. But when he got to Canaan, all illusions disappeared. Think of what he didn’t find:
* No “Welcome, Abraham” sign.
* No discount coupons from the merchants.
* No housewarming party.
* No visit from the Welcome Wagon.
* No mayor with the key to the city.
* No band playing “Happy Days Are Here Again.”
* No ticker-tape parade.
Nobody expected him. Nobody cared that he had come. Nobody gave him anything.
God had promised him the land . . . but he had to scratch out an existence in tents. Hundreds of years would pass before the promise was completely fulfilled. Abraham never saw it happen. Neither did Isaac or Jacob.
God works across the generations to accomplish His purposes; we’re worried about which dress or shirt to buy for the big party this weekend.
Was Abraham in the will of God? Yes. Was he right to leave Ur? Yes. Was he doing what God wanted him to do? Yes. Why, then, was he living in tents? Because God’s timetable is not the same as ours. He’s not in a big hurry like we are. God works across the generations to accomplish His purposes; we’re worried about which dress or shirt to buy for the big party this weekend. There is a big difference in those two perspectives.
Famine in the Promised Land
But there is something else even more remarkable in Genesis 12. What happens when he gets to the Promised Land? He moves from place to place, he sets up an altar and worships the Lord. Then a famine strikes (verse 10). What’s up with that? Here’s a man who has dedicated everything to follow God. He sacrificed his career, gave up his security, traveled a long distance, couldn’t even find a home of his own, and now there’s a famine? How do you explain that? As it turns out, Abraham ends up going down to Egypt where he gets in trouble because lies about Sarah to Pharaoh (verses 11-20). It doesn’t make any sense. Why the famine and why the test?
The answer is, the test is the whole point. After all that Abraham has been through, you would think that God would give him a period of peace and quiet. Life is rarely that simple for any of us. God often sends trouble following a period of prosperity in order that he may test our motives. Are we serving him just because things are going well? But what if we lose our job? Our marriage? Our friends? Our reputation? Our wealth? Our home? Our health? Will we still serve him then?
God often sends trouble following a period of prosperity in order that he may test our motives.
Donald Grey Barnhouse commented that just as every coin has a head and a tail, so every event in life either draws us to God or leads us away from him. If Abraham had stayed in Canaan during the famine, he would have learned to trust God in a brand-new way. If he hadn’t lied to the Egyptians, he would have given God a chance to meet his needs without resorting to deception. But because he didn’t do those things, that same famine led him away from God.
How much better it would be if we would learn this lesson. Instead of complaining at every trial and saying “Why me?” we would be better off to say, “Lord, what are you trying to teach me through this?” Every difficult situation gives us the opportunity to become a student of God’s grace or a hapless victim of negative circumstances.
When the famine comes, remember that God has not abandoned you. He sends the famines of life in order to see if you will trust him even in the most difficult moments. We should say, “Here is another opportunity for me to trust God. I wonder what wonderful things he is going to do for me this time.” It’s not easy to say that. Sometimes it takes more grace to stay in the Promised Land than it does to get there in the first place.
What Difference Will This Make in 10,000 Years?
Now I come back to address the questions raised in the email. And of course, to the specific situation I can give no certain answer. We rarely can know when we are in the middle of a discouraging circumstance why it is has happened or how things will turn out. Sometimes in our quest to do God’s will, we focus too much on questions such as, “Am I right where the Lord wants me to be?”
Good question, but to ask it that way puts too much of the focus on us and on our own decisions. We naturally tend to see life with ourselves at the center of the universe. We naturally spend hours worrying about questions regarding our career, our education, and our future plans. On one level, this is healthy. If we don’t think about our future, no one else will either so we ought to spend some time thinking about the details of life. But life doesn’t begin and end with us. Deep inside we know this is true, but we live as if the universe exists for our personal benefit. Recently I read about a football team that lost a big game by the humiliating score of 51-0. It’s hard to get beat that bad in football. You really have to play lousy to lose like that. After it was over, the coach, trying to console his players, told them to forget it about because “there are 800 million Chinese who don’t even know we played a game today.” (This was some year ago. Today he would say 1.3 billion Chinese.)
Ninety-nine percent of what you worried about this week won’t matter three weeks from now, much less 10,000 years from now.
And along that line, I am reminded of something I heard Vernon Grounds say. When we face a major decision, we ought to ask ourselves, “What difference will this make in 10,000 years?” He went on to say that most of our decisions—the ones we agonize over—won’t matter at all in 10,000 years. What a liberating way to look at life. Ninety-nine percent of what you worried about this week won’t matter three weeks from now, much less 10,000 years from now. In the year 2452 it won’t matter whether you lived in Minnesota, Santa Fe, or South Carolina. But what will matter is that you decided to follow Jesus Christ. All those trivial, piddly details that soak up so much energy will in that day be seen for what they really are–trivial, piddly details.”
I do not say that what you are facing is unimportant. It is. But do you really want to walk away from God or do you want to wait on Him a little longer? It has to be tough. We started praying for you this morning and will continue.
By: Billy Daws on February 15th, 2010
at 4:03 pm