“I promise.” Two little words with so much power. Quite often we think that they are synonymous with “I swear”, but they are not. When you swear to something (which we are not really supposed to do because we are always to tell the truth) you are swearing to the truthfulness of what it is you are about to say. A promise is much more than that. You don’t promise about a truth that you need to convince someone of. Rather, when you promise, you are agreeing to do something; you are making a commitment; you are setting your feet upon a certain path. Promises come in all shapes and sizes. There are promises that we make and receive without thinking, casual promises that we don’t give much thought to. These are the things that we agree to do (and often in our minds we’re just agreeing to the possibility of doing them). I made a promise to our cat a couple nights ago. We had been out all day so she had been locked up all day and when we got home I told her we wouldn’t lock her up any more that night. Thankfully, cats can’t hold us at our word, cause she started acting up later on and we had to put her in her room or possibly see the Christmas tree come tumbling down.
There are other promises that we make that are more far-reaching… like the ones made on our wedding days, or the ones we make when we enter into a contract with someone.
The problem with promises nowadays is that we don’t pay much attention to ones that are kept. Instead we focus on broken promises. We have grown used to broken promises, we let ourselves expect people to break their promises, and we feel that there is a place where we can get away with breaking our promises… especially if we are making them to our cats.
Yet we serve a God who keeps promises. He has made numerous promises to people throughout history. He has made promises to you and me. And he has yet to break a promise. So, this morning, let’s forget about all those promises we have made that we haven’t followed through on; let’s forget about those promises that have been made to us which we hold against people. Instead let’s focus on real promises, the promises of God, the promises that have been fulfilled throughout history and will be fulfilled in God’s wonderful time.
I. Uncertainty
Music out of silence, Light out of darkness, and now promises made and kept to a people whose lives were full of uncertainty. This advent season we are looking at the change that Christ brought into this world. We are looking at the fact that the world changed when God sent his Son to be a part of it. There is a joke about how children look at their parents and grandparents and look at the television shows that their parents and grandparents watched and they wonder if there was color when their parents and grandparents were growing up. The movies and television shows were in black and white… perhaps the world they grew up in was black and white.
I don’t wonder this about my parents or my grandparents… but I do wonder about those who lived before Christ. Now, honestly, I know there was color before Christ, but I wonder if it was less bright, I wonder if the world was less alive. When God becomes human and dwells on the world he created, there’s got to be something in the world that changes.
But Christ coming to the world on Christmas morning, though it did change the world is not the only thing that changed. We each are changed when Christ enters our lives and becomes a part of our life. We don’t come to church on Sunday because it’s our responsibility, we don’t come here because it’s what we are supposed to do. We come to church to celebrate with each other the change that Christ has made in each of our hearts… and we come to church to open our hearts to God so that he can change them more. If you don’t know this, if you have yet to ask Christ to change your heart, then you’re missing out, you are lacking something that is vital, and I would love to share that vital thing, the presence of Christ with you.
Today we are going to talk about how Jesus brings promise to our lives where there was uncertainty. And as I have these last two weeks, I am going to begin, briefly, by talking about the lack of promise, uncertainty.
Uncertainty is a horrible place to live in. It is a place where we all actually do live at different points throughout our lives. We are uncertain about so much in our lives. We are uncertain about our jobs, whether we will have good crops this year, how our children will turn out. We are uncertain about our health, about our futures, and often we find ourselves uncertain about our relationship with God.
We are not the first to feel this way… people throughout history wondered about all of these things. The world Jesus was born into had these same uncertainties and others. They worried about the hostile nation, Rome, that was ruling them. They worried about whether God was going to answer his promise, whether God was going to send a Messiah which he promised. They also worried about themselves. They worried about the laws that they were supposed to follow, whether they could save themselves or not; whether they could be good enough to earn salvation on their own; whether God loved and cared for them.
One can be overwhelmed by uncertainties, by questions, by worries. The uncertainties, if we allow them, can make our lives quite bleak and lead us to despair, which we will be talking about next week. But there is hope, which we will also be talking about next week. And the hope comes from promise. Not human promises, ones made by fallible people who are not always ready to hold to the things they promise, but heavenly promises that will not easily be broken.
II. Promise
In the passage that was read this morning from Isaiah, we are introduced to a people who were in need of promise. We are introduced to a nation who is in exile, who is paying for sins committed and cannot find comfort in anything… And God makes a promise to them through Isaiah… God promises relief, physical relief. God’s promises are not pie in the sky promises, purely spiritual. They are promises that affect our daily lives. So God promised to the exiled people of Israel that they would be free from the exile, their hard service would come to an end. Past what we read this morning we are shown a God who will come in power to rule and he will reward those who are his people.
The people in Isaiah are a people living in a time of uncertainty, they are a people living in toil and trouble, in pain. And God promises redemption. God promises to come to them himself and to change their world. This is obviously a prophecy and a promise that God is interested in fulfilling. And we see the fulfillment of the promise, or at least the initial fulfillment of it, in the gospel.
Mark begins his gospel not with Jesus’ birth nor with Jesus’ childhood. Instead he begins it with the one who came before Jesus, John the Baptist. And the gospel begins with the promise that was made in Isaiah, showing that it is being answered in the events chronicled in the gospel. Isaiah’s prophecy, Isaiah’s promise was that a messenger would come preparing the way. Preparing the way for what? For the glory of the Lord to be revealed. The promise in Isaiah is actually greater than that, though. It includes a promise of comfort for God’s people, a promise of God’s glory shining forth for all to see, a promise that the suffering that God’s people were in the midst of would come to an end. What wonderful promises… they seem to tie in quite well with what Jesus brought to this world. The glory is there (as it seems to continue to show itself when we talk about Jesus). So is the comfort and peace.
It’s important to look at the people as they lived in expectation of the promise. There were promises made, and the people believed these promises with certainty. Uncertainty is an ugly place to live, it also is something that we don’t need to live in in every part of our lives. We are used to broken promises. We are used to people making promises that they have no intention of keeping. Or we are used to people intending to keep promises, but then failing to do so. But God’s promises are not like that. God’s promises are always kept.
My parents spent much of their early adult life as non-Christians. My grandmother spent the whole time praying for them. When God touched their lives with his glory, and they came to know him, my father called my grandmother to share the good news with her. He was a bit worried because he thought she might get so excited she might hurt herself. So he had her sit down and told her that her daughter, my mother, had accepted Christ and was again a part of God’s flock. My grandmother did not leap for joy, she didn’t shout out in excitement. Instead, she sat there calmly and said, “I knew it would happen. I’ve been praying for it daily and God is faithful in his promises.” That is a faith and a trust in God that is powerful to me… mostly because it came from my grandma, but there is definitely a strength in it. My grandmother had known that God kept his promises, she had seen this throughout history and throughout her own life, and she trusted God to continue to do that very thing.
Each of the gospels in the New Testament are about God keeping his promise. And they each begin differently in their desire to show that God does keep his promises. Luke tells of the birth and childhood of Jesus, showing how it is true to scripture. Matthew begins with a genealogy, sharing with the readers that Jesus is the promised descendant of David come to be king. And then wise men come to worship this king. John ties Jesus’ coming to the creation of the world… which is important because one of the first promises God made was at the fall when he promised that the seed of Eve would conquer Satan… something that is fulfilled in Christ.
But Mark doesn’t want to begin right away with Jesus. Instead he uses the one crying in the wilderness to prepare us for Jesus. I love the image we have of John the Baptist… clothing made of camel’s hair, a leather belt, eating locusts and wild honey… a wild man prophet. This wild man prophet is out in the wilderness preaching that people need to repent from their sinful ways and turn back to God… and as this wild man prophet is the beginning to an answer to God’s promise, he is making his own promises for God. For he shares that one will come after him who will baptize not with water but with the Holy Spirit. John the Baptist is already trying to help people to better understand the promise that God has made. He is sharing that the answer to the promise will come, but not as people expect. They expect a king to rule over Israel, and Jesus will be doing so much more than that.
III. Fulfillment
Jesus was the answer to God’s promise. His coming to this world answered a promise made at the beginning of time, and again and again. Jesus, in everything he did throughout his life and death and resurrection, was keeping promises that God had made. That is why throughout the gospels we hear it said that, “This was done so that the scripture may be fulfilled.” This began with Jesus’ birth which we celebrate in a week and a half, and continued through his death and resurrection. But these moments were not the only place Jesus was fulfilling prophecy. He also did so throughout his life in the teachings he taught, in the healings he performed, in his very presence in the world. What is important to pay attention to, though, is that Jesus wasn’t the answer that the people expected. The people expected an earthly savior to come and rescue them from Rome. Jesus fulfilled the promise of God, whether the people were expecting him to or not. Jesus kept the promises that God had made.
But Jesus not only kept the promises of God, he made new promises to his followers. And how do we know that these promises will be kept? Because we saw God and Jesus keep promises before. So like my grandmother before me, I trust the promises that God has made to us all and to me. I trust the promise he made which says that he has a plan for me, personally. This is a promise he made to each one of us, and it is a powerful promise, a promise of empowerment, a promise of meaning and vision for our lives. I trust the promise that he made to care for us, like he does for the birds and the flowers. When we pray the Lord’s Prayer we ask for God to give us our daily bread… we ask God to give us the things that are necessary for us to not just survive, but thrive. I pray this prayer knowing that God will answer it. I trust the promise that Jesus made as he ascended into heaven… He promised to be with his people, to be with you and me until the end of the age. He promised to be an active part of the world, he promised to work in our lives and in the lives of those around us. I trust that this is a promise that Jesus keeps. I trust in the promise that Jesus made that stated that when two or more are gathered in his name, he is present. I believe that Jesus is present here now because of that promise. There are promises that God made throughout scripture. He will fulfill them.
This holiday season, in the midst of uncertainty, I encourage you to trust the promises that God has made to you. Believe that God has the power and the desire to bring them to fulfillment. God’s timing is odd, and he doesn’t always fulfill promises they way that we expect… but the God who was born in glory, and at who’s birth the angels sang, this God will be true to his promises. Amen.
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