His Promises

His Promises

Our relationship to Christ must be intensely personal. If it is not, the deepest longings of our soul can never be satisfied. Augustine prayed long ago, "0 God, Thou hast formed us for Thyself, and our hearts can know no rest till they rest in Thee." It is the personal contact with the Lord Jesus that will cause us to grow in Him. No one can thrive spiritually on mere church membership, sacraments, ritual, or formality. Stained glass windows and soft music, beautiful and permissible as they may be, will cause a soul to forget itself for a moment, and will lift the soul up aesthetically, but they cannot feed the soul that is hungry.

God our Father wants us to be very personal with Him. He desires that we should appreciate His promises and use the riches He has unlocked to us in Jesus Christ. Several years ago I was preaching for several weeks just outside of London. A woman noted for her saintliness lay at the point of death. Everyone spoke of her great joy in life and of her joy in death. She heard of our meetings, and asked, just before she died, that her study Bible, with the Newberry references, be given to me. A few days later her earth-life span ended and life indeed began for her.

Today her Bible lies on my table. Her marginal comments have often delighted me and I have discovered the secret of her power and joy. She believed it was all for her, personally. On the blank pages at the back of the book she has lists of promises gathered together over the years. The headings of the lists are alive with meaning. "How was I saved?" she wrote, and underneath, "2 Cor. 5:21." Then, for the deeper Christian life: "A definite act, July 9, 1894, S.E.H." Following this, she has "Gal. 2:20; Rom. 6:19, a slave of God's righteousness." Then are listed together "Power Tests," "The riches of God's grace," "The root of holiness," "The Lord's call to praise and joy," and also groups of verses for "Hours of darkness" and for "Shields against the legal spirit."

She had fortified her soul through God's revelation. One feels that here was holy ground where a soul met God. It breathes the atmosphere of personal contact. It would be a real blessing to many of us if we would, alone with God, take these headings and beginning with "How was I saved?" seek the answers in His Word.

We would discover that God has made two kinds of promises. He has bound Himself to us conditionally and unconditionally.

One line of promises throughout the entire Word is made upon certain conditions. If we fulfill the conditions the resultant blessing is ours. If we fail to meet the conditions, we do not receive the blessing.

Still other promises are absolutely unconditional. They are ours because God says they are ours; nothing that we do alters the situation in the least.

This is illustrated in the life of Abraham. Certain blessings were conditional upon his remaining in the land, and when he left the land he forfeited the right to the promises. God made him other promises - that his name should be great, that his seed should be made as the stars of the sky and the sand of the sea. God has accomplished this. Abraham is one of the universal names and his descendants cover the earth, in spite of the fact that they have broken every ordinance of God.

The same is true for the child of God today. Scores of promises are conditional - to receive we must ask, to know the power of His strength we must recognize and acknowledge our weakness. But there are unconditional promises for us as well, and one of them is "My God shall supply all your need according to his riches in glory by Christ Jesus." This does not mean that God is going to give us everything we think we need, and herein lies the true explanation: as God secs our need He will meet it. Who has not heard a father or mother say to a child, "You need a spanking"? Very often the child does. If the heavenly Father sees that we need discipline, He will provide it. The supply of our need does not mean merely that of material or spiritual blessing, but includes the discipline as well, and every other care that a heavenly Father can bestow upon His children so that they should grow toward the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ.

Yet someone will point out that some believers who give every evidence of being born again are in the midst of terrible testing. Some of them are receiving charity as their only means of livelihood. How does one explain the promise of God's supply of every need in the light of such experiences of some true believers?

We must be very careful with the Word of God, that we do not interpret it to mean other than what it really does mean. Every promise must be judged in the light of the entire Word. It is true that we have a definite promise. "My God shall supply all your need according to his riches in glory by Christ Jesus" (Phil. 4:19). This promise was spoken well within the age of grace and there is no means of getting around the fact that it must apply to all believers in the age in which we live. Furthermore, it is not a promise that is conditional upon our righteousness, as are certain promises of supply which are to be found in the Old Testament and in the Sermon on the Mount. It is a promise that is conditioned on God's grace alone. Like that other great promise in the eighth chapter of Romans, it is based on the blood of the cross. "He that spared not his own Son, but delivered him up for us all, how shall be not with him also freely give us all things?" (Rom. 8:32).

Such a promise would seem to indicate that the believer had a universal store of material blessings, and that he could count upon an unfailing supply from God. Yet only a moment's thought would take us through history and we would realize that there have been thousands of believers who have had their lands confiscated, their loved ones torn from them, their bodies racked with torture, their homes and possessions destroyed, all because they trusted in the Lord Jesus Christ. Why did God not supply their need? The answer is that He did supply it. They needed strength to resist, and He gave it to them. Lack of food was merely the means of their passage to His presence. Our mistake lies in defining our need as being what we think it to be. The passages of Scripture refer to our needs as they are measured by God's omniscience.

The proof of all this lies in that same eighth chapter of Romans. If we would always read the context of our promises, we would not make so many mistakes. For in the same paragraph with the great promise that He would give us all things with Christ, He continues to show that nothing can separate us from our Lord. The apostle writes, "Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?" (Rom. 8:35). Notice two of these words, famine and nakedness. These cover the lack of the elemental things of life. Food and clothing. We know that believers have been deprived of these things before and have left a fragrant testimony to the supplying power of the Lord.

The body they may kill, God's Word abideth still, His kingdom is forever. There are times when food and clothing are essentials in our need as God sees our need. Then they will be supplied. There are other times when these are secondary to the testimony He wants us to bear. Then He will supply strength and sweetness in the midst of want. The attitude of Christian people who suffer is a condemnation of the attitude of many others who suffer while cursing God.

Nothing that we have said here, however, should be construed as diminishing our responsibility to give to the welfare of those who are our brothers and sisters in Christ. If a man seeth his brother in need and does not give unto him, how dwelleth the love of God in him? Not at all.

1. How do the attributes of God play directly into the promises that we receive from God?
2. Do the promises of God only work in certain contexts?
3. If they are not purely contextual how do the promises of God work in the 21 century context or a third world context?
4. Think of some promises that God has proclaimed in scripture and take some time to thank God for those promises.