My mom taught me a great life lesson when I was younger: “Promises are sacred.” Therefore, they should only come from God and never our own lips.

Depending on the source, there can be anywhere from 3,573 to 5,467 to 8,810 promises in the Bible, of which supposedly 7,487 of them being promises made by God to humankind. Whatever the number, this much is true: God keeps them ALL.

Promises made from our own lips (or hearts) to someone else are rarely kept, as our selfish motives are what is prompting us to make the promise to begin with. Our own motives are not sacred. Our promises are not Divine. Our promises hold no Power. We have no power to keep promises made from our own selves. We even find ourselves making promises to God, in which we only have our own self-reliance to keep those promises; and that self-reliance is the very thing in which God wants removed from our old nature, and with His perfect work of transformation into the Christ-like nature, comes God-reliance.

Oswald Chambers wrote about the promises and God’s nature IS those promises: “The promises of God are of no value to us until by obedience we understand the nature of God. We read some things in the Bible three hundred and sixty-five times, and they mean nothing to us; then all of a sudden we see what God means, because in some particular we have obeyed God, and instantly His nature is opened up. “All the promises of God in Him are yea, and in Him Amen.” The “yea” must be born of obedience; when by the obedience of our lives we say “Amen” to a promise, then that promise is ours.”

A severe life lesson had to be re-learned when I made a promise to a dying loved one; and despite my best efforts, my sheer determination, my total self-reliance, my gritty resolve, and my fleshly tenacity, this promise could not be kept. It was a heart-wrenching experience, of one God gently and lovingly reminded me that promises are His, and His alone, to make. And His promises are always kept.