Ok so, one thing I decided to do this year is to read the Bible from Genesis to Revelation. Right now, I have been reading in Exodus; Exodus 30 to be exact. The Children of Israel have just promised Moses that they would do whatever God says to do. Moses went up on Mount Sinai to await further instruction from God. You know the story while Moses is getting God’s instructions; the Children of Israel got tired of waiting and convinced Aaron to create a god for them. So what happened to “Whatever God says to do we will do”? One of the things that God said was, “You shall not make for yourself an image of anything in heaven, on the Earth, or under the Earth”. It appears that the heat of the moment swept them up. In other words, God had come near enough to them that, in that moment, they promised God that they would do whatever he wanted. However, when they had to put it into practice, they found it harder than they imagined. They were not prepared to keep going when the going got hard. It is easy to point a finger at the Israelites and say, “They should have known better” or “They should have waited”. But, how often are we guilty of the same thing? We go to a camp, a retreat, or some other meeting, and we promise God that we are going to serve him; we will follow him. Then we go home, and we forget all about the promises we made to God. It served as a reminder to me to be careful making promises. Making a promise to God in the heat of emotion may be ok as long as when the emotion is over we can still keep the promise. Perhaps you have made some promises that now seem hard to keep and, to be honest, you no longer feel like keeping that promise. I want to encourage you to stand on your promise even if it seems hard, and you cannot see an end right at that moment. The rewards are eternal.
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