What He Hoped And What He Swore

The pecan trees threw good shade over three long tables, and the food kept coming down from the hall in relays: rice and peas, a pan of macaroni that somebody had to carry with both hands, a bowl of slaw big enough to bathe a baby in. Two of the deacons were arguing happily about a ball game. Somebody's grandmother had claimed the one chair with arms on it and was holding court from there like a queen.

Trina sat at the end of a bench with a paper plate she was not eating from, laughing in the right places and not entirely present.

Her father had been a wonderful man and a terrible promiser. Every year, usually in May, usually with his hand on the back of her neck: "We should drive down to the coast this summer, you and me. Just go." He said it eleven summers in a row. It never happened once. He never said it unkindly and he never said it falsely; he wanted it every single time he said it.

And then there was the other night, the one she does not tell people about because she cries.

She was nineteen, finishing at a community college two states over, and she had told him not to worry about coming. He put both hands flat on the kitchen table, the way a man does when he is about to say something he intends to be held to, and he said: I give you my word. I will be there.

His truck died outside Chattanooga. He got a ride, and then another ride, and he drove the last stretch through the night in a car he had borrowed from a man he barely knew, and he stood at the back of that hall in the same clothes he had worked in all day, and when they called her name he made a noise that people turned around for.

Same man. Same mouth. Two completely different kinds of sentence, and nobody ever sat her down and taught her which was which.

So she did what a person does. She put them all in one drawer. And after enough Mays with no coast, she quietly downgraded everything he ever said, including the one he had crossed two states in the dark to keep.

And you have a drawer.

In it, all filed together in no particular order: a verse your grandmother loved, a line from a chorus, something somebody said over you at a retreat in a hotel conference room, a promise God actually swore to, and a hope you had that you later decided must have been God. All of it in one drawer, all of it weighing the same, all of it equally likely to come to nothing. So when one thing in that drawer did not happen, the whole drawer got quieter.

Nobody has ever taken the drawer out and sorted it with you.

Sit down here in the shade. We are going to sort it.

The drawer where everything weighs the same

Here is the first honest thing, and I want to say it plainly, because a lot of tender people have been quietly ashamed about it for years. Not everything in that drawer is a sworn word of God. Some of it is a proverb, which is wisdom about how life usually runs. Some of it is a prayer somebody prayed in a psalm. Some of it is a kind sentence a kind woman said to you at a hard time, and she meant it, and it was not an oath.

That is not disillusionment. That is literacy. A person who cannot tell one kind of sentence from another ends up trusting nothing, and that is a wearying place to live.

And there is a second kind of sentence in that drawer, and it is the reason we are sitting here. There are places where God does not describe, encourage, or advise. He binds Himself. He puts His own name under a sentence and gives His word.

So you are not looking at a stack of sentences that might each fall through. Hebrews 6:18 names two things standing under you that cannot move, God's promise and God's oath, and the Holy Spirit is the One who separates the sworn from the merely warm and hands you the sworn one to hold.

so that by two unchangeable things, in which it is impossible for God to lie, we who have fled for refuge might have strong encouragement to hold fast to the hope set before us.Hebrews 6:18

Read what that verse says God was doing, because it is astonishing and it goes past most people. A promise from God is already unbreakable. His word alone is enough and He knows it is enough. And He added an oath on top of it anyway.

Not because the promise needed strengthening. Because the heirs needed convincing. He looked at people like you, holding a drawer where everything weighs the same, and He did a legally unnecessary thing so that you would have two immovable objects under your feet instead of one.

What He actually swore, in His own words

This category is content and not comfort, so I am not going to hand you a general feeling that God is good. You already have that, and a general feeling has no clauses in it and cannot be quoted back at three in the morning. Here are sentences with edges.

I will never leave you nor forsake you.Hebrews 13:5

That one is a quotation of an older promise, said again under the new covenant, and the Greek behind it stacks negatives the way a person stacks stones on a grave: never, not ever, in no way, under no circumstance. It is not a mood. It is a commitment with the strongest possible language wrapped around it.

You have that sentence as a sworn thing rather than a hopeful thing, because Hebrews 13:5 records God saying it about Himself, and His Spirit inside you is what keeps it from being a line on a card and makes it a floor.

For the mountains may depart and the hills be removed, but my steadfast love shall not depart from you, and my covenant of peace shall not be removed, says the LORD, who has compassion on you.Isaiah 54:10

Notice the order of that sentence. God does not begin with your circumstances. He begins with geology. He names the most permanent things a human being can see, mountains and hills, and He says those are the movable ones in this comparison.

So here is the ground under everything else in this message, and it belongs right here in the middle of the teaching rather than tacked on at the end. His side is settled. It was settled by an oath He swore about Himself, and it does not fluctuate with the quality of your week. Your side is a response, and it is real, and it is genuinely asked of you, and it is not the thing holding His side up.

You were never given the job of keeping God's word for Him. Isaiah 54:10 puts His covenant of peace beyond the reach of the hills, and the Spirit who wrote it through the prophet is the same Spirit steadying your hands right now while you read it.