Promises...Promises (Luke 24:49 / Acts 1:4)
Keeping your promise: it’s a measure of your character. Some people make promises lightly and don’t keep them. Other people make them sparingly and are often resolute in their commitment.
When a person who makes a promise lightly, to a person who is the exact opposite—you at times will hear a caution. “Don’t make a promise you cannot keep”.
Enough about people, what about God? We say that God keeps his promises. He does.
Have you ever heard of The Promise of the Father? It is a BIG Promise.
Jesus tells his disciples twice to go and wait for it in Luke 24:49 and Acts 1:4. Let’s look at how this promise winds its way through Scripture.
What follows will have you switching back and forth between this blog post and Scripture. You may find it easier to have your Bible open next to you, but I have also cut and pasted portions of Scripture and provided hyperlinks.
Turn with me to Jeremiah 31:31-34.
31 “Behold, the days are coming, declares the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah, 32 not like the covenant that I made with their fathers on the day when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt, my covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, declares the Lord. 33 For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts. And I will be their God, and they shall be my people. 34 And no longer shall each one teach his neighbor and each his brother, saying, ‘Know the Lord,’ for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, declares the Lord. For I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more.”
This is the Promise of the Father. He will make a New Covenant, putting his law in our hearts.
God said he would give us a New Covenant. Which begs the question, “What is the Old Covenant?”.
Most folks would say the Old Covenant is God’s giving of the Law, the people of Israel’s commitment to keep it, and in turn God’s promise of blessing.
Exodus 20-23 provides the basic terms of the covenant, with Exodus 24 as the people’s response, signed in blood. Thereafter you can find summary descriptions of the covenant in Deuteronomy 30:15-18.
15 “See, I have set before you today life and good, death and evil. 16 If you obey the commandments of the Lord your God that I command you today, by loving the Lord your God, by walking in his ways, and by keeping his commandments and his statutes and his rules, then you shall live and multiply, and the Lord your God will bless you in the land that you are entering to take possession of it. 17 But if your heart turns away, and you will not hear, but are drawn away to worship other gods and serve them, 18 I declare to you today, that you shall surely perish. You shall not live long in the land that you are going over the Jordan to enter and possess.
We of course know that the Israelites, in fact all of us, do not keep the law. We just read Jeremiah 31 capturing this truth, “…my covenant they broke, though I was their husband…”
Did you notice how personal it is to God?
The roots of this go all the way back to Abraham, and I write about it herein my blog about Genesis chapter 15. If you look at that post, God promises to make Abraham the Father of many nations, and God says he, God, will pay the price if Abraham fails to keep his promise.
And we know the we ( Abraham’s children) don’t keep up our end of the agreement. God is not surprised. Jesus is not “Plan B”. God has known what He will do to save and restore all of his creation.
He sketches it out in Jerimiah 31:33 that we read above. He is giving us new hearts! A heart where he will write his law. What is that all about?
Consider a question. When you went to school, did you have a subject in school that you didn’t like very much? What was doing homework like?
Okay, so what about for subjects you liked? For me, it might be done before I left school. I was drawn to the subject. It was work, but I was drawn to it.
Can you relate? God wants to “write His Law on our hearts”.
But there is a challenge: To “write on someone’s heart means their hearts have to be “writable”. And my heart isn’t writable; I need a new heart. No problem for God. Check out Ezekiel 36:26-27.
26 A new heart I will give you, and a new spirit I will put within you; and I will remove from your body the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. 27 I will put my spirit within you, and make you follow my statutes and be careful to observe my ordinances.
In Ezekiel, we read how God will take out our hearts of stone and put in us hearts of flesh, hearts that He can write on – HOW? By His Spirit.
This is THE FATHER’S PROMISE – that we will someday have a heart where the very Spirit of God lives!
How will we know when this happens, and who will receive this promise? Joel 2:28-29 tells us:
28 “And it shall come to pass afterward,
that I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh;
your sons and your daughters shall prophesy,
your old men shall dream dreams,
and your young men shall see visions.
29 Even on the male and female servants
in those days I will pour out my Spirit.
Everyone will receive this promise, his Spirit—and Abraham will become the father of many nations—not just Israel.
People were longing for the Promise to be fulfilled.
And once you begin looking in the Scripture, you see it all over the place.
In the Gospels, we see the Holy Spirit about to burst over all humanity.
In Luke 1:15, 35, 41, & 67, everyone around Jesus’ birth is filled with the Holy Spirit. In Luke 3:15-16, John the Baptist is the first one to proclaim the connection of Jesus and the Holy Spirit. The word “baptism” can be translated “to overwhelm.
Then in Luke 3:22, 4:1, 4:14 & 4:18 we read of Jesus directly connected with the Holy Spirit.
And then, in John 7:37-38 we read,
37 On the last day of the feast, the great day, Jesus stood up and cried out, “If anyone thirsts, let him come to me and drink. 38 Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, ‘Out of his heart will flow rivers of living water.’”
Most people thought Ezekiel 47 was about the Temple, it was about Jesus—and about You! For those who believe in Jesus, out of our hearts will flow living water.
What is this living water? Read onto verse 39:
39 Now this he said about the Spirit, whom those who believed in him were to receive, for as yet the Spirit had not been given, because Jesus was not yet glorified.
I started this post talking about “promises…promises” and noting that in both Luke 24:49 and Acts 1:4, Jesus tells them to wait. He goes on, in Acts 1:5 saying, “Because John baptized with water, but ‘you’ are going to be baptized with the Holy Spirit.”
And then the Holy Spirit comes.
How will we know when this happens?
Peter tells us in the reading from Acts. In Acts 2:26 he quotes the prophet Joel.
Peter is proclaiming that the Father has fulfilled His promise. He explicitly says that in Acts 2:33.
Perhaps you are thinking, “This segment is long”, or “While interesting, how does this apply to me?”
Then let me encourage you, read Acts 2:37-39.
37 Now when they heard this they were cut to the heart, and said to Peter and the rest of the apostles, “Brothers, what shall we do?” 38 And Peter said to them, “Repent and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. 39 For the promise is for you and for your children and for all who are far off, everyone whom the Lord our God calls to himself.”