Covenants To and From God

By Peter Thorniley

My dictionary says that a covenant is a formal agreement, pledge, commitment or a contract. Though I’m usually uncomfortable about this, I realize this is what has helped me the most in life. The promises that God has made to me have meant everything. The covenants I’ve made to God have kept me out of trouble.

I remember making covenants with God. After receiving Jesus as Lord, which was my first covenant, I made others to seek God and to stay away from temptation. I remember the people at school I told God I would avoid as friends. One of them Mark. is buried 20 yards from my dad’s grave; he died of an overdose. Another guy Jeff spent 15 years in the State Penn. Another guy, Hunter had his first DUII at 14 and was in drug rehab for a decade. You can tell how much I missed out on their friendship!

When I was 11, I told God I’d never touch tobacco. That was an easy covenant because I was watching my Grandmother smoke herself to death. But decades later, seeing a school friend, neighbor, and my uncle having their jaws taken apart in surgery to remove oral cancers from tobacco, confirmed my decision. Attending my high school reunions and seeing classmates decades later that’d lived sinful lives also confirmed my decisions. When I saw how bad some of them looked, I was so glad I never did what they did!

Making and keeping commitments is one of the biggest problems for Christians today. We make promises to God we don’t keep; then we wonder why we’re not growing in God. Psalm 15 speaks of the one who will stay in God’s tabernacle and live on His holy hill. In verse 4 it mentions, “He who swears to his own hurt and doesn’t change.” Verse 5 concludes, “He who does these things will never be shaken.”

Some commitments to God don’t get much of a start. I remember seeing lots of people attend church after New Years Day and by the end of January some have quit. Some commitments fail because people don’t plan on making it easy or feasible to do. Making a commitment involves making plans to keep it. I’ve found that if I keep a Bible or radio with me, I’m more apt to study God’s word. If I plan on being at church on time, I’ll be there. Usually, every commitment we make to God gets plenty of interruptions and opportunities to fail. We need to overcome this.

God’s commitments to us never fail. But how much we appreciate or take advantage of God’s blessing often depends on how much we are committed to Him. If I’m not plugged into God, I don’t get much from God. Lots of people complain that God let them down when they were the ones who let God down.

We’ll all be blessed if we covenant with God and plan to keep the commitments we make.

Peter Thorniley writes from Talent, Oregon.