Eccl. 5 – Promises

Guest Post: Alex Shootman

"When you make a vow to God, do not delay in fulfilling it. He has no pleasure in fools; fulfill your vow. It is better not to vow than to make a vow and not fulfill it." Eccl. 5

Why do we promise stuff to God anyway? Sitting in church, saying, “God – if you just do XYZ then I will really behave this time”. We cannot imagine that it makes God feel better when we promise Him something. First of all, He already knows if we are going to keep our promise and second; He does not need our promise. All of these broken promises we have made to God because we didn't have enough sense to just listen and keep our mouth shut when we came into the house of God. So we promise instead of listen. And then we break our promises. We make promises because it makes us feel better. We get sort of satisfied, “I promised God I'm going to give Him everything, you know. Whew, took care of that today!” And then we feel relieved of guilt of amassing things, because after all, it all belongs to God.

But in the end, when we break our promise we feel worse than not making one. And when we keep a promise, it is merely self-discipline, because we cannot earn grace anyway.

“We must not promise what we ought not, lest we be called on to perform what we cannot” Abraham Lincoln