PROMISES

When you promise something, you open up possibilities.

The path of promise

When you commit with the firm intent to keep your promise, you set things in motion. You open doors of opportunity; you bring resources and help to your side that are beyond chance and personal control.

You also close the door to other possibilities. This helps you to focus all your energies on the course that you have chosen, rather than leaking your power in every direction. And it precludes all kinds of dire consequences.

The Bible is full of promises. God makes many promises and He keeps them all. Human promises vary in their fulfillment. People often desire to have greater faith in God’s promises. Jesus’ disciples asked him to increase their faith. Jesus answered that if they had faith as a mustard seed, they would be able to move mountains. What is it about a mustard seed of faith that accomplishes so much?

When you plant a seed, you have faith in the seed, the process, and even the science of growing. Keeping the promises you make is like planting a seed. You don’t know how it will grow and it isn’t up to you. But you have set something in motion and your faith in its outcome is natural. When you plant a bean seed, you expect a bean plant to grow. When you plant a corn seed, you expect corn to grow. When you plant a promise, you expect the fulfillment of the promise.

Learning to keep our promises, we see how faith works. We begin to see that God is keeping His promises as well. When we plant that seed, we don’t go back and dig it up and throw it away. We let it settle into its soil and we water it and keep the weeds away. This is what we need to do with our promises as well. A promise is an experiment in trustworthiness. The more faithful we are to our commitments, the more we understand God’s faithfulness to us. When we are watching for something, we see more of it. We look for the sprouts to come up.

To the faithful, God shows Himself to be faithful. To the trustworthy, divine Love shows Herself to be trustworthy. This doesn’t mean that God picks and chooses His favorites. It just means you will not notice much of God’s loving care and constant benefits until you begin to value and watch for them and express them yourself. Of course, God is the source of trustworthiness, but we only discover how great is His faithfulness by attempting to be faithful ourselves. When we act as if what He tells us is true, respecting His character and word, we find a depth of truth and steadfastness impossible to see otherwise.

Keeping our promises—what we promise to ourselves—helps us to see how God is keeping His promises to Himself —and to us. “Results are guaranteed,” you sometimes hear in advertisements. What kind of faith would be willing to promise this to yourself when you pray for something? What kind of trustworthiness would it take to stick with something until you achieved it?

Certainly we never presume to tell God what He is going to do for us. But when we base our prayers on what God has already promised us, then we are committing ourselves to reconciling our experience with His promises.

There is no one more consistent in keeping His promises than God. Then it isn’t really such a leap to seeing things through to the fulfillment of His promises. Our consistency and continuity and even simple attention, brings into our notice and experience the very things we have committed to, in ways that we could not personally control.

Since God lives in eternity by definition, and knows His own purposes in His universe, He is used to waiting for us to discover what He has already done. God is the source and example for a patience that is certain of its ultimate fulfillment. Then we can do our part and simply reflect God’s own faith in His own plan.

We are invited to make a daily commitment to a promise in one of the tenets of Christian Science. It’s not a mere exercise to be recited, but something to pay attention to in its deep meaning and infinite possibilities.

“We solemnly promise to watch, and pray for that Mind to be in us which was also in Christ Jesus; to do unto others as we would have them do unto us; and to be merciful, just, and pure.”SH 497:24

Promising to live life from the standpoint of the Mind of Christ, promising to uphold the Golden Rule, and to hold yourself in continual relation to the pure, the loving, the eternal, opens doors of endless possibilities of good. It brings into your individual experience the power to follow Christ and to exercise the power of real mercy, justice, and purity in motive and action.

A solemn promise is not to be taken lightly. When you do make a promise a priority, it opens up vistas far beyond what you saw before. Promising to reconcile daily life to higher ideals broadens your perspective and expands your sphere of interest and influence. Your capacity to care and not despair increases. This kind of promise helps you to follow Jesus in the way he invited us to. Keeping our own promise shuts the door on ugliness, dullness, and disappointment. Solemnly promising shows us the endless possibilities awaiting us that God’s promises have always opened.