To Encourage You

Psalm 119:140 “Your promise is well tried, and your servant loves it.”

Have you ever promised anyone anything?  One of the things my wife and I discussed from time to time when our children were young was that we should be very careful about our promises. Although we love our children more than our own lives, we have no control of the future, and to promise them anything with certainty was to risk going beyond our capability to deliver.  

In James 4 we are warned “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.’”

Thankfully, the Lord’s promises aren’t like ours. Unlike us, He knows, and in fact, He controls the future.  What He promises will come to pass. This has been proven from the beginning of time in the lives of millions of people.  As Joshua said on his death bed to the nation he led for many years “you know in your hearts and souls, all of you, that not one word has failed of all the good things that the LORD your God promised concerning you. All have come to pass for you; not one of them has failed” (Joshua 23:14).

And you see, if we follow the Lord as Joshua did, we too will find that we will be able to say this at the end of OUR lives.  Praise God that we can trust his “well tried” word.  We can lean hard on this promise of Jesus: “For truly, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the Law until all is accomplished (Matthew 5:18).”