How much does it cost to break a promise? Apparently, for one newlywed couple, the answer was $75.90.
Yahoo posted an article in 2015 about Jessica Baker and her husband who RSVP’d to go to a friend’s wedding, but then on the day of the event, their childcare fell through, so they couldn’t attend the no-kids allowed wedding. A few weeks later, they received a bill for $75.90, with a note on the bill that said:
This cost reflects the amount paid by bride and groom for meals that were RSVPed for. Reimbursement and explanation for no show (card, call or text) would be appreciated.
Now, Jessica and her husband did break their promise to attend the wedding, but it seems like the newlywed couple broke an even bigger, unspoken promise: to not be rude and greedy with their friends. And because of that, they probably lost much more than $75.90. They probably lost their friends.
It’s in our nature to make promises. Many of our promises are commitments to one another, like when we say “I do.” And we also tend to make promises like, “I’ll never,” as in, “I’ll never leave you,” and “I’ll never hurt you.” Sometimes we’ve heard people we love make those promises to us, and they’ve hurt us, and sometimes maybe we’ve even made those promises to others, and we’ve broken them.
You know, God promises us many things in His word. Philippians 4:19 says:
My God will supply all your needs according to his riches in glory in Christ Jesus. (Philippians 4:19)
1 Corinthians 2:9 says:
What no eye has seen, no ear has heard, and no human heart has conceived— God has prepared these things for those who love him. (1 Corinthians 2:9)
Deuteronomy 31:8 says:
The Lord is the one who will go before you. He will be with you; he will not leave you or abandon you. Do not be afraid or discouraged. (Deuteronomy 31:8)
And that’s not even scratching the surface of all of the promises that we have in God.
It’s incredibly easy in our world today to become cynical. We become cynical of society, of the promises of others, of church, and even sometimes of God. Like, we read all these promises in God’s word, and we wonder, “Are they really true? Do they really apply to me? Can I really count on them?” We become cynical.
And our distrust of God and people can often lead us to retreat from doing the good that we know that we ought to do. Rather than loving our neighbor, we might blame them for their position in life, and convince ourselves that they’re not worthy of our help. Our hearts can grow hard and cold, and we justify our sin to ourselves, but even as we do so, we know that there’s got to be a better way, because we just feel so empty in our lack of compassion.
But if we turn to Jesus, we find that there’s a life full of joy and hope in believing, and that we can rejoice in one another as we rejoice in Jesus together.
Ephesians 1:15-16.
This is why, since I heard about your faith in the Lord Jesus and your love for all the saints, I never stop giving thanks for you as I remember you in my prayers. (Ephesians 1:15-16)
Father, help us to see how good You are. Transform our hearts so that we might reflect Your love to those around us. In Jesus’s name, Amen.
Several years ago, before Abby and I got married, I decided life would be less lonely if I had a pet. So I went to the pet store and told the owner that I wanted to buy a pet that would be easy to care for, but would be a bit of good company whenever I needed a friend.
After some discussion, I finally bought a talking centipede, true story. I called him Sammy the Centipede. Here’s a picture of it.
Centipedes, by the way, do not have exactly 100 legs, but can have as few as 30 legs, and as many as 382 legs. But the cool thing about Sammy is that it could talk, at least that’s what the owner of the pet store told me.
So I took Sammy the Centipede home. It came in this little white box for it to use as its house. So I found a good spot for the box in my room, and decided I would start off by taking it to church with me. So I asked the centipede in the box, “Sammy, would you like to go to church with me today?” But it didn’t answer me. This bothered me a bit, because I wondered if I was scammed by the pet store owner. But I wanted a few seconds and then asked again, “Hey, I’d like to share my faith with you, do you want to go to church?” But again, there was no answer. So this time I waited about a minute, and then put my face up against the centipede’s house and shouted, “Hey, in there! Would you like to go to church with me and learn about God?” And this time, a little voice came out of the box, “Quiet down, I heard you the first time! I’m putting my shoes on!”
Of course, none of that happened, but I hope that it does illustrate our need for both faith and community. We weren’t made to be alone, but to be members of a faith community where we can love one another and rest in God’s love together.
I want to look at the two ideals that Paul lifts up in our verses this morning that we need to have and show to others. First, Paul wrote in verse 15, “I heard about your faith in the Lord Jesus.”
The word for “faith” here is ??????, which means to believe, but it’s far more than a simple thought that exists in your head. It means to trust and be faithful to. The kind of faith that the Bible encourages is the kind that expresses itself in faithfulness to God. It causes us to follow God, even when the future is uncertain, which is what we call taking a step of faith. So biblical faith is not merely in our head, but clearly reveals itself through our actions.
It’s kind of like going ice skating on a lake. Now, I’ve never been ice skating on a lake, because I don’t have that much faith in the thickness of the ice. But a pastor named Jeff Hage told this story about wanting to play ice hockey with his brother on a frozen lake.
They thought that it would be thick enough to skate on, but they just weren’t completely sure, so they got down on their bellies and kind of crawled on the ice to see if it was safe to be on. As they went further and further onto the lake, they looked and noticed a truck pulling a trailer with gear for ice fishing which pulled onto the lake and then drove right past them on the ice.
You see, they hoped and kind of believed that the ice was safe to be on, but the driver of the truck really had faith that it was!
Of course, what we put our faith in matters, and sometimes ice does break, but God is always trustworthy, and therefore we can put our faith in Him with complete confidence.
And God doesn’t want us to just have a vague faith in Him, knowing that He’s out there somewhere, but not knowing much about Him. He gives us a clear object for our faith. Paul wrote, “I heard about your faith in the Lord Jesus.” Jesus is to be the object of our faith.
And there’s many reasons for that. Jesus is the Son of God. Jesus is our Savior. Jesus is our Hope. He’s our Example, our Leader, our Teacher, and our Lord. In other words, when we become Christians, we don’t just add a little Jesus to our lives, we invite Jesus to be our Life, because He is the way, the truth, and the life.
One way to think about this difference would be kind of like the process of metamorphosis in nature.
The most common example is of how a caterpillar becomes a butterfly, but there are actually a ton of examples of this. Swimming tadpoles transform into land-dwelling frogs.
Ants and many other insects go through larval and pupal stages before becoming adults. Sea urchins actually pull themselves inside out as they mature, it’s really crazy and remarkable!
And in the same way, faith in Christ ought to completely transform us so that we don’t look the same as we did before. Having faith in Jesus means that we find our whole new identity in Jesus Himself.
The second ideal that Paul names in this passage is love, specifically love for other believers in Jesus. Paul wrote in verse 15, “I heard about your faith in the Lord Jesus, and your love for all the saints.” As we saw in the opening verses of Ephesians, “saints” refers to believers not because we’re so incredibly perfect because of our superior righteousness when compared to unbelievers, but we’re called saints because we’re set apart for God’s purpose. It’s a calling that we have.
Because as we already mentioned, faith is not just to remain in our heads. It’s to be expressed with our actions. We’re called to love, just as we’ve been loved.
The word for “love” used here is ?????, which is the kind of love that God shows us. It’s the purest of all loves. It always wishes good, and never harm. It’s unconditional. It’s charitable, being not merely a feeling of love, but being benevolent toward others, showing kindness to them even when, and especially when, they don’t deserve it.
Now, we could look at these two ideals – faith and love – and be challenged to implement them in our own lives. And we should. We should be challenged to have a strong faith in Jesus that causes us to have a strong display of love towards others. That’s definitely a challenge we need to hear often, and we can all benefit from those reminders.
But that’s actually not the point of our passage today. Instead, because he saw these things in the Ephesians believers, faith and love, Paul wrote in verse 16, “I never stop giving thanks for you as I remember you in my prayers.”
Our point today, from this passage, is that we ought to be so incredibly thankful for the faith and love that we see in others that we praise God for the blessing of knowing each other.
In the first section of Ephesians chapter 1, we looked a few weeks back at how incredibly blessed we are in Jesus. In Jesus, we’re blessed to be holy and blameless, we’re blessed to be adopted as God’s children, we’re blessed to have redemption through the blood of Jesus, we’re blessed to receive an inheritance in Christ, we’re blessed to be sealed in the Holy Spirit, and one of the last blessings that we saw that we have is that we’re blessed to be united with all other believers in Christ.
But in our very individualist society, we often fail to appreciate how important it is to be united with others. We treat life as if it’s all about what makes me happy. We do everything for ourselves, and very little for others. And when it comes to church especially, we take it or leave it, because we see faith only as a personal decision to believe in God, rather than a communal relationship with the God who made us all.
But in contrast to that way of thinking, Paul expresses his thankfulness for fellow believers, and in so doing reminds us that we need to be extremely thankful for the faith and love that we see in each other.
So, I have a lot of illustrations about insects today, so I thought I’d share another one.
Did you know that out of all the insects on the earth, ants have the biggest brains of them all? In fact, ants have the largest brains in proportion to their size of any creature on Earth!
Check out what the Bible says about ants. This is Proverbs 6:6-8 in the Easy-to-Read Version:
You lazy people, you should watch what the ants do and learn from them. Ants have no ruler, no boss, and no leader. But in the summer, ants gather all of their food and save it. So when winter comes, there is plenty to eat. (Proverbs 6:6-8, ERV)
So ants use their big brains for two things: working hard, and working hard together.
In fact, when an individual ant finds a food source, the ant will take a bit of the food back to the nest, leaving a trail of pheromones behind them to mark the path. Over time, ants organize their search, optimizing the best and shortest path between the food source and the nest. As more ants follow the optimal path back and forth, they leave more and more pheromones, which in turn attract more and more ants, which makes it that much easier for them to provide not just for themselves, but for all of their ant community.
Are we that devoted to another? Are we seeking not just our own good, but the good of our church family, and even our neighbor?
William Barclay wrote in his Daily Study Bible:
The two things which must characterize any true Church are loyalty to Christ and love to men. -William Barclay, Daily Study Bible
It’s incredibly sad that churches tend to focus on one or the other. Liberal churches tend to lean towards trying to love people, but in doing so often compromise in the area of believing the truth of God. Conservative churches often lean more in the direction of loyalty to Christ, and that sounds very commendable, but not if it’s at the expense of loving our neighbor, because then it’s not really loyalty to Christ.
In reality, these two ideals are not actually in conflict with one another. When you truly love the Lord your God with all of your heart, soul, mind, and strength, you will also love your neighbor as yourself, because the only way to practically and truly love God is to love your neighbor. 1 John 4:20 says it very clearly.
If anyone says, “I love God,” and yet hates his brother or sister, he is a liar. For the person who does not love his brother or sister whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen. (1 John 4:20)
We must love one another! Anything else is merely lip service.
And, of course, we see the intersection of faith and love most clearly in Jesus Himself.
Jesus was faithful to God the Father by sacrificing Himself for His neighbor. And even when Jesus was nailed to the cross, out of love, Jesus prayed, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”
We need to have the same attitude. When we’re hurt by others, even we need to bear our cross, instead of lashing out, love the very people who hurt us.
And this even goes for our relationships within the church. We need to recognize that even though the church is full of sinners, and therefore we definitely have the potential to hurt one another, we’re also saints, called out by God to show sacrificial love to one another. And even when you’ve been hurt by the church, especially when you’ve been hurt by the church, you have the God-given calling to do as Jesus did, and love the church, give your life for the church, and show the church God’s love through you.
Because this is exactly what God did. God demonstrated His love for us in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. He gave us the promise that He would never leave us nor forsake us, and God never breaks His promises.