I DID, BUT I DON'T

Vows are an interesting aspect of spirituality. They should never be made strictly on emotion.

God takes our vows seriously because he is one for keeping his word. So making a vow an later reneging on it is not a way to impress the Lord.

Promises are in many ways similar to vows as I see it. Only if you don't keep either of them on a spiritual level it is never a good thing.

I don't think any of us enjoy dealing with people who make promises the don't keep. It is a common problem though.

When I used to work in the credit industry it was amazing to me the number of people who would borrow on credit and then for one reason or another not pay the money back. I do appreciate how things like unemployment can prevent a person from keeping their promise to repay, but I also say way too many instances of people who didn't pay their bills by choice.

Fortunately with credit you only have to concern yourself with any eternal consequences. However from my experience with some who claim to follow the Lord they don't seem to worry about that either, which is truly sad.

This is perhaps the one thing that truly amazes me the most. Dealing with those who claim to believe in Jesus, but never keep their promises. In fact in some situations they even go so far as to deny when they did make a promise as if God doesn't know the difference.

So often the mind is capable of such incredible heights of denial and excuse. And Satan is so good at helping us avoid doing what we promise.

How easily he can help us to find some reason to explain for not keeping a commitment. Then the moment we do, in comes the waves of guilt and recrimination to kill our sense of value.

God does know when we are sincere about a vow and also when our spirit is willing and the flesh is weak. There is also his bountiful gift of grace that covers us when we do stumble.

So above all, if we make a vow and later fail to keep it, the first option shouldn't be to lie about it. We should take it to the Lord and let his spirit teach us the lesson we should learn about ourselves in the process.

It is one of those behaviors that we never seem to learn so perfectly that we can easily forget it the next time a crisis of promise occurs. But hopefully it will be the voice of the Lord's spirit we listen to more than Satan.