Promises

It is amazing how confidently we speak about the future. We casually promise that we will do something or be somewhere on some future date. I guess that these promises can be good if they truly state our intentions. However we really don’t know whether we can fulfill the promises we make. Any number of circumstances can get in the way of fulfilling our intentions.

Politicians find this to be true quite frequently. During the campaign they make all sorts of promises. If they are elected, they quickly find out that fulfilling these promises, if they ever intended to do so, is much harder than they thought. They may even discover that to fulfill a campaign promise will do more harm than good.

I remember that my father promised to take me to a football game when I was a child. When it came time to go to the game my father showed up drunk. While it was a bad decision, we still went to the game. We nearly missed being the cause of several accidents along the way. That fulfilled promise nearly had disasterous consequences.

We should be careful with our promises. We don’t control the future, so we can’t be sure that the promises can be or should be fulfilled. James 4:13-15 says, “Come now you who say, ‘Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and make a profit’ – yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes. Instead you ought to say, ‘If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that.'”