God will keep his promise to you

I promise! Do you always keep your promise?

With the business of life and having four children, many times I make promises and forget to keep them. It’s not that I don’t wanna keep my promises, nor is it a regret of promising the thing in the first place and hoping my wife or children will forget.

It is simply I cannot remember all of the things that I have promised and fulfill them accordingly.

Unlike me, God keeps everyone of His promises, for good or for judgment.

In Genesis Chapter 12, we meet a man that God will use to bring about one of His most precious promises. Ever since the Garden of Eden mankind has knowingly and unknowingly strayed from the Lord.

After the flood and the confusion of the languages, Eden had never been more distant in the minds of man. God, on the other hand, had not forgotten, and His heart was still after man’s original intent. In Genesis 12, He reiterated His promise to bring all mankind back into a covenant relationship with Himself.

Fast forward several millennia and we find ourselves at one of the busiest feasts on the Jewish calendar. The Feast of Booths celebrated the nation of Israel’s deliverance by God from Egypt and the march toward the promised land.

All the while the promise made to Abraham, and to every man and woman, had yet to be fulfilled. Had God forgotten His promise? He had been busy guiding human history, sustaining the created universe by His power, so maybe it simply slipped His mind. Until Jesus lifted up His voice at the festival.

God was so intent on keeping His promise to mankind that He took on flesh, and came down from heaven to reiterate that He had every intention of fulfilling the promise. Quoting the Old Testament, Jesus reiterated the promise in somewhat of a peculiar manner.

“Whoever believes in me, out of His heart will flow rivers of living water,” Jesus said. He framed the promise in the manner of thirsting physically. John, the author of the Gospel, went on to write, “Now He said this about the Spirit whom those who had believed in Him were to receive.”

As with every promise, this promise came with conditions. The first was that we recognize our spiritual thirst. Obviously Jesus wasn’t speaking literally about a fountain of water being created inside my body.

However there is a deep spiritual thirst within this heart of mine, and within every human heart that nothing in this world can satisfy. Oh, how people have tried to quench this thirst. Some convince themselves that more money will fill the void in their life once and for all, only to find their thirst ever increasing. The pleasure and treasure of this world never can satisfy what God alone can.

If you will but admit your need, and take the initiative to receive satisfaction. Initiative is in short supply these days.

If you will receive the promise of God, to be filled with His Holy Spirit, to walk in a convenient relationship with Him, it is ours for the taking but take it we must. He will not force us.

The last condition of the promise is that we come to Jesus to receive it. I cannot fulfill this promise to myself much less anyone else. I must come to Jesus — not to Buddha or Mohammed, they being ordinary men who can’t satisfy their own thirst.

Jesus on the other hand, the very God who put the thirst in me to begin with, is the only one who can satisfy.