Keeping Your Covenant With God
The story about a man crying out to God and promising something in exchange for pulling him out of his predicament has become familiar to most of us. The promise he makes could be a material sacrifice or to mend his bad ways. God, being trustworthy, answered his prayer.
This story is familiar because it is our own. At some point, we encountered problems so big that we felt helpless and didn't know where to go. So, we turned to God and made a covenant with Him that if our prayers are answered, we will serve Him or give up a prized possession to His Church or any other promise.
A covenant, by definition, is an agreement or contract between two parties that contain certain conditions, duties and obligations that should be fulfilled. In this case, God helped and blessed us by answering our prayers. Now the question is, did we keep our end of the bargain?
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There are two covenants that bind us in life and violating them will result in dire or unpleasant consequences. One of them is marriage, wherein we commit to being faithful to our spouse for the rest of our life under the pain of committing a felony. The other covenant is our personal contract with God.
Because of our shallowness, we easily question God when things go wrong, but easily forget our promises to Him once we overcome our predicament. We abuse His merciful nature by being weak, unfaithful and unreliable in keeping our word. But He is not merciful all the time.
We may think of the Israelites who, despite having broken their covenants with God repeatedly, kept going back to Him. True, but that came with a price. For thousands of generations, the Israelites were enslaved by foreign rulers, experienced hardships and were slaughtered over and over again.
That was the price they had to pay. The Bible says God is not mocked or shouldn't be taken for a fool (Galatians 6:7). Yes, He is merciful and an all-loving God but He takes covenants seriously. Whatever we promised to Him is nothing compared to His ultimate sacrifice of offering His Son to save us even if we don't deserve it.
