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Promises are an important part of our lives. From businesses to friends, we all rely on a level of promises and guarantees more than we may realize. Yet when we fully understand God and human nature, we realize how dangerous, perhaps even worthless, promises can be. That’s why my family doesn’t make promises.
Pride and Promises
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.” As it is, you boast in your arrogance. All such boasting is evil. (James 4:13-14)
I adore the absolute bluntness of James. In a few words, he uncovers just how prideful we are and how little power we truly have. Our thinking, in general, is often loaded with pride. We often assume that things will be certain with no thought toward whether a sovereign God could have plans that contradict our own. Yet James isn’t advocating that every statement we make should have “Lord willing” added to it. What he is saying, however, is that we need to remember that God is God and we are not.
When my daughter first got me thinking about the nature of promises (more on that later), this part of God’s word clearly stood out to me. Simply saying “I’ll see you tomorrow” is a display of my arrogance, because I have no guarantee that will happen. A car could break down. With 4 kids in this house, there’s a coinflip’s chance I’ll be sick. There is very little I can control that guarantees tomorrow, yet I so rarely consider trusting God that tomorrow will be as mundane as today.
With that in mind, I started considering the danger of promises. If I promise my child they can ride their bike later, I’m implying a certain level of power and control that I simply don’t have. I’m telling them it will happen because I say it will. I tell them they should trust what I say, never doubting it will happen. And when I fail, I’ve not only broken their trust in me, but I’ve ruined the power of what a promise truly is.
Through Christ, God promises us forgiveness of sin and an eternity spent with Him. By removing promises from our incapable hands, my family tries to maintain the uniqueness and sovereignty of God. He is the only one who makes promises because He’s the only one who can keep them.
Truth and trust, without degrees
And above all, my brothers and sisters, do not swear, either by heaven or by earth or by any other oath. But let your “Yes” be yes and your “No” be no, so that you may not fall into judgment. (James 5:12)
I don’t remember the exact moment that we decided to strike “I promise” from the family vocabulary, but I do remember an important moment. My oldest daughter told us she’d do something, then didn’t do it. When questioned, she hit us with the famous kid line of “Well, I didn’t promise!” And with that, I realized my daughter thought truth had degrees of importance.
As Christians, we love truth because God loves truth. There’s really no wiggle room when it comes to something, or someone, being trustworthy. If we give any form of power to human promises, then what we’re necessarily saying is that we only need to be honest and trustworthy if it’s backed by a promise. Consider these 2 hypothetical conversations:
“Dad, will you always love me?
“Of course I will.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes. I promise.”
“Oh. Okay, good!”
or
“Dad, will you always love me?”
“Of course I will.”
“Okay, good!”
Those conversations were honest concerns I realized I was creating for my family. If what I said could only be believed by attaching a promise to it, then what I said didn’t have much merit at all. I didn’t want to teach my kids that they only had to keep their word if they made a promise.
Likewise, I didn’t want them thinking a magical phrase would make their words more believable. I wanted them to realize that faith is built on a history of trustworthiness. We trust God because He’s proven Himself to be true. Likewise, I wanted them to realize that everything a person says and does is building into their trustworthiness. I wanted them to value truth at all times, not just when evoking the phrase “I promise.”
Our word is our bond
The importance of humility before a sovereign God, coupled with the desire to love truth at all times, is what led us to purge promises from our family. We don’t promise or swear that we’ll do something so that others will find us more believable. I want my family to know that if we say something, we mean it. And if others say something, they should be held to it.
This comes with two understandings.
First, we all understand that by valuing truth, we are committed to keeping it as far as we’re able. My wife, who wakes up at 4:30, has lost countless hours of sleep to keep her word to people. Likewise, I’ve witnessed my kids regularly sacrifice their free time or personal preferences to follow through with something they’ve said.
Second, we’ve all learned the value of forgiveness and limitations. We want value keeping our word to others, but it’s equally important to forgive others who reasonably can’t. We try to do things as a family fairly regularly, but with 4 kids (and life in general) things rarely go according to plan. So while our family is willing to sacrifice what’s necessary to keep our word, we’ve had to learn that things happen which prevent it from happening. And in our limited power and understanding, we realize that circumstances don’t diminish someone’s ability to be trusted.
Overall, I don’t want my family to make promises because they’re simply impossible. Pride would lead to hurt when our minuscule amounts of power couldn’t fulfill our promises. At the same time, deceit and uncertainty were taking root as our words were only important to us if we added a promise to them, and even then we had to hope we remembered turning our statement into a promise.
Instead, we chose to cut promises from our lives. We let God promise because we know He’s capable of fulfilling them. As for the rest of us, we try to let our “yes” be “yes” while understanding that, by God’s design, our “yes” must sometimes become “no” despite our earnest intentions otherwise.
