Great and Precious Promises

July 12

"If you turn away your foot from the Sabbath, from doing your pleasure on My holy day, and call the Sabbath a delight, the holy day of the LORD honorable, and shall honor Him, not doing your own ways, nor finding your own pleasure, nor speaking your own words, then you shall delight yourself in the LORD; and I will cause you to ride on the high hills of the earth, and feed you with the heritage of Jacob your father. The mouth of the LORD has spoken." Isaiah 58:14.

God rewards our obedience. “Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be long upon the earth,” Exodus 20:12, is said to be “the first commandment with promise,” Ephesians 6:2.

In Jeremiah 33:3 the prophet speaks in the behalf of the Lord, “Call to Me, and I will answer you, and show you great and mighty things you cannot imagine.” The great scientist, George Washington Carver comes to mind with the reading of this verse of scripture. It is said that he asked the Lord to teach him the secrets of the universe. The Holy One answered him, “Little man, the universe is too big for you. I will teach you the secrets of the peanut.”

We know that through his research, Dr. Carver discovered over 300 uses for the peanut, including chili sauce, shampoo, shaving cream, glue and plastic. When God makes a promise, and a man steps out to claim that promise, remarkable things occur.

Jesus said in Matthew 19:29, “And everyone who has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or wife or children or fields for my sake will receive a hundred times as much and will inherit eternal life.” This promise affirms the saying in Christian circles that a person can’t out-give God.

Yet we as people of faith do not lay hold of the promises because we desire the reward. We step out in faith to claim His assurances because our doing so brings honor to His name. When He shows Himself faithful in our behalf, He is manifesting His integrity to a lost and dying world. He is showing Himself to be faithful to those who establish their lives on the sure foundation of His Word that cannot fail and cannot lie.

As Isaiah 55:11 states clearly, “My word that goes forth out of My mouth shall not come back to me void but shall accomplish that which I please and prosper in the thing to which I send it.”

I Samuel 15:29 says, “ He who is the Glory of Israel does not lie or change His mind; for He is not a man that He should change His mind.”

God’s holy Word is true forever. He will not repent of the law He has given or the truth He has spoken. He has not modified His irrefutable law to compromise with a rebellious generation. In Numbers 23:19 it is unequivocally stated that, “God is not a man, that he should lie; neither the son of man, that he should repent: has He said, and shall He not do it? Or has He spoken, and shall He not make it good?”

God’s Word is “yea and amen,” I Corinthians 1:20 and the fullness of His promises is in Jesus Christ our Lord and Savior. May we learn to stand on His truth, abide in His word, and claim all His promises, for He says that it is His “good pleasure to give us the Kingdom,” Luke 12:32.

Our part in the matter is to walk after the Lord, to be faithful to Him in all our ways, to trust fully in Him rather than to lean on our own understanding (see Proverbs 3:5) and then to expect Him to fulfill His promises in His time, in His way, and to His glory.