Vow Time!

March 14, 2009

Today's Reading: Numbers 29-30 and Acts 24

Numbers starts out with a nice thing to say: “When a man makes a vow to the Lord or takes an oath to obligate himself by a pledge, he must not break his word but must do everything he said”.

Okay, I would be very surprised that anyone has this amount of integrity when making any sort of vow. I myself have made a marital vow that I take very seriously. Because of that, there is no way I will put myself in certain situations, and make certain to maintain that my marriage is sound.

I also vow to my children that I will be a good father. That means a lot of good quality time with them, and also making certain my marriage is sound.

However, there are some vows that I take that I don’t really care about. Sometimes, I say I will do something, and I just don’t do it. It’s not that I just like to make empty promises, but I usually mean it when I make the promise. In fact, I’m certain that if someone were to put me on a lie detector test when I made the promise, I’m sure I would register positive.

What if every promise I made, I had to keep. Man, that would be crazy. Let’s try and think about this. What if every time that I didn’t keep one of my vows, some sort of “Promise Cop” would come by and smack me silly.

Of course, I don’t really see a point in going on about the whole “Keep Your Promises” thing. After all, I think we all know that most people don’t keep their promises. In fact, I have a problems when I work with businesses, and they say: “We’ll call you later today”. Usually, I have translated that to say: “I will have to call you later in order because you neglected to when you said you would”.

I remember one time I called some business, and I was actually quite surprised that they actually called me back when they said they would.

You know, keeping a vow can actually make it tough to do things. Take Paul, when he is on trial. His trial gets more bogged down then OJ’s trial. I am betting the people who were trying Paul probably cursed the power of due process.

So, what is a vow? It’s a promise that you make, and you keep it. Imagine if every vow we said was like this.