I Promise!

READ: GENESIS 18:1-15; 21:1-3; HEBREWS 11:11

Have you ever trusted a friend and then found out they were not trustworthy? Maybe you confided in them, spilling your guts about something personal. And, even though your friend promised to keep it to themselves, they didn’t. Or maybe you’ve been an untrustworthy friend to someone else.

When someone has broken the trust of another, it’s a serious problem. It can damage and even destroy relationships. Some people never get over the hurt broken trust has brought them.

Another lamentable consequence of broken trust is that we tend to view our relationship with God like we view our relationships with friends and family members who have mistreated us. Because people have broken our trust—and we’ve broken theirs—we think, Maybe God is the same way.

In Genesis 18, God promised Abraham and Sarah that they would become parents, but Sarah laughed when she heard this. After all, Sarah was ninety, and Abraham was one hundred. Perhaps Sarah thought He meant well, but He would probably turn out to be like some of her friends, who just wanted to comfort her or say the right thing but ultimately weren’t reliable.

Yet, in verse 14, God makes it clear He keeps His promises: “Is anything too hard for the LORD? I will return to you at the appointed time next year, and Sarah will have a son.”

A year later, guess who had a son?

We live in a broken world where people let us down, but thankfully, we can learn to separate how people sometimes act from how God always acts. God’s promises may seem too good to be true, but 2 Corinthians 1:20 says that all His promises are fulfilled in Jesus. Even His promise to create life from Sarah’s dead womb points forward to His promise to raise Jesus from the dead—and then to raise all His people from the dead when Jesus returns (1 Thessalonians 4:13-18). Through Jesus’s death and resurrection, we can be in relationship with God. And as we get to know Jesus, we find that God is always trustworthy, and we can count on Him. • Susan Grant

• Why is trust so important in relationships?

• In what ways have people broken your trust? How have you broken others’ trust? Consider taking some time to bring these things to Jesus. In His trustworthy love, we find healing and wholeness.

God is not human, that he should lie, not a human being, that he should change his mind. Does he speak and then not act? Does he promise and not fulfill? Numbers 23:19 (NIV)