Deuteronomy 8:14-16 “Your heart will become proud and you will forget the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery. He led you through the vast and dreadful desert, that thirsty and waterless land, with its venomous snakes and scorpions. He brought you water out of hard rock. He gave you manna to eat in the desert, something your fathers had never known, to humble and to test you so that in the end it might go well with you.”

“What have you done for me lately?” In sports, if the quarterback who led you to the Superbowl, or the pitcher who won the World Series, has a down year, the team may trade them, or even cut them. There is little or no loyalty for past contributions.

“What have you done for me lately?” In business, if the CEO who drove the company to the top of the industry can’t keep it there, if last year’s salesman of the year can’t make his quota this month, they may find themselves on the street looking for a new job. “What have you done for me lately?” the board of directors, or the management team demands. People don’t value past contributions very much.

In history, particularly history seen from the viewpoint of faith, the God we worship has an impressive resume, one we can’t seem to remember very long. Moses walked the Israelites through some of the Lord’s more impressive work the last forty years: deliverance from Egypt, water from a rock, miraculous free food in the desert. In spite of experiencing these things themselves, the people’s forgetfulness was draw-dropping. Just two weeks after walking through the middle of the Red Sea on dry ground the people were accusing God of trying to starve them to death! It was as though the epic plagues the Lord brought on Egypt and the parting of the waters never happened. “What have you done for me lately?”

The Lord’s deliverances have only gotten bigger and more impressive since then. He left heaven to live on earth himself. He permanently adopted a human body and soul, fused himself to his own creation, and subjected himself to all the heartache and hardships of life in our world.

He made the guilt of our sins his own, carried it in our place, and faced the consequences for it though he was completely innocent himself. He endured the justice that should have been served to us, suffered the kind of abuse and torture that would be outlawed as inhumane in our place and time, and died pinned to a cross of wood, mocked or abandoned by all who knew him, forsaken by God the Father in heaven, to set us free from our sins.

Three days later he left his own grave alive and glorified to prove the price for sin was paid, and document the defeat of death and the devil. No greater sacrifice has ever been made. No greater danger to humanity has ever been overcome. No greater gift has ever been given.

But that was nearly 2000 years ago. Today Moses’ words urge us to remember the history that has brought us such good things. It is his promise of even greater blessings to come.

Deuteronomy 8:10-14 “When you have eaten and are satisfied, praise the Lord your God for the good land he has given you. Be careful that you do not forget the Lord your God, failing to observe his commands, his laws, and his decrees that I am giving you this day. Otherwise, when you eat and are satisfied, when you build fine houses and settle down, and when your herds and flocks grow large and your silver and gold increase and all you have is multiplied, then your heart will become proud and you will forget the Lord your God…”

There are three potential problems with our prosperity that Moses either implies or directly identifies. The first is its negative effect on our prayer life. “When you have eaten and are satisfied, praise the Lord your God,” he urges. Praise the Lord your God. That’s a kind of prayer. You might think it would flow naturally from our happy circumstances and prosperous condition.

But you know from experience that is not always, or even usually, the case. Be honest. When is your prayer life usually better, more regular, more fervent–when your life is purring along with no stress or worry, or when your world is caving in around you? Don’t you find yourself on your knees begging him for help in a crisis, but maybe going days without talking to him when all your needs are met? We are like the college kid who only calls home when he needs money. In our prosperity it is easy to forget to talk to God, and not talking is never good for a relationship.

Second, we get careless about keeping his commandments. Forgetting the Lord your God is practically the equivalent of “failing to observe his commands, his laws, and his decrees.” We have all known the spoiled rich kid who sees himself a little above the law. The rules are meant for lesser creatures who can’t buy their way out of trouble. He’s a common character in movies or literature. We see them on the news, too. A lawyer defended one spoiled rich kid by saying he suffered from “affluenza.” The uglier and darker truth is the way our own prosperity begins to erode the seriousness with which we take God’s law.

Third, all of this is symptomatic of the way prosperity can corrupt our hearts: “…then your hearts will become proud and you will forget the Lord your God.” Our proud hearts get the idea that we are naturally superior. Our wealth gives us the illusion we don’t need God. When prosperity makes us proud, our need for God is hard to see, and it is easy to forget the Lord your God.

We may be tempted to think, “At least I’m just a middle-class person. I probably don’t have to worry about this too much.” Take a moment with me for a brief reality check. Anyone who makes $34,000 a year is in the top one percent of income worldwide. Half of the people on the planet bring home less than $1300 a year. The poorest 5% of Americans earn, on average, the same as the richest 5% of people living in India.

This isn’t to say that our prosperity is immoral. But few of us can say that we haven’t tasted the prosperity Moses describes. Our food, our homes, our wealth, our possessions generally dwarf the experience of the richest Israelites 3000 years ago. The temptation to put all our focus on these things and forget God still haunts us today.

Though we may forget God, that doesn’t mean he has forgotten us. Prosperity itself is evidence of his loving attention. He is still providing for us, much more than we need.

Evidence of his love and attention appears even more clearly in the riches of his grace. Moses could speak to Israel’s prosperous future only because the Lord had rescued them from the slavery of their past. We anticipate an even more prosperous future in the abundance of heaven, because the Jesus has rescued us from the poverty of hell and the slavery of our sin. Praise the Lord for his goodness! Do not forget his greater gifts.

Luke 10:25-33, 36-37 “On one occasion an expert in the law stood up to test Jesus, ‘Teacher,’ he asked, ‘What must I do to inherit eternal life?’ ‘What is written in the Law?’ he replied. ‘How do you read it?’ He answered, ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind; and, Love your neighbor as yourself.’ ‘You have answered correctly,’ Jesus replied. ‘Do this and you will live.’ But he wanted to justify himself, so he asked Jesus, ‘And who is my neighbor?’ In reply Jesus said: ‘A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, when he fell into the hands of robbers. They stripped him of his clothes, beat him and went away, leaving him half dead. A priest happened to be going down the same road, and when he saw the man, he passed by on the other side. So too, a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. But a Samaritan, as he traveled, came where the man was; and when he saw him, he took pity on him…Which of these three do you think was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of robbers?’ The expert in the law replied, ‘The one who had mercy on him.’ Jesus told him, ‘Go and do likewise.’”

They say there is no such thing as a stupid question. But there is such thing as asking the wrong question. If you get the question wrong, you can’t get the answer right.

Do you see how Jesus corrected the question posed to him by the “expert in the law”? He subtly shifted the question from “Who is my neighbor?” to “What does it look like to act like a good neighbor to others?”

The first question is an attempt to justify myself. And we would like to defend ourselves. The problem is, we have no business trying to defend our failure to love others and show mercy when the opportunity has presented itself. We will never save ourselves by defending our failure to love our neighbor.

The second question helps us identify our sin more quickly. It leads us to see our lack of love, repent of it, and confess it. It keeps us from the horrible, deadly mistake of trying to justify ourselves.

Because we cannot justify ourselves. Because we cannot and do not love our neighbor like God demands. Only Jesus can justify us by living the life of love we don’t. Only Jesus can justify us by taking the blame and assuming the fault for our loveless neglect. Only Jesus can justify us by dying in our place and paying for our guilt. Only Jesus can justify us by forgiving our sins and reconciling us to God.

That is where Jesus wanted to lead the expert in the law with this honest look at how you love your neighbor. Get the question right, and we will stop asking, “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” “Who is my neighbor?” “How can I justify myself?”

Instead we will ask, “Why haven’t I loved my neighbor more?” “How can I escape the penalty I deserve?” “Where can I find a Savior to deliver me from my guilt?”

Then Jesus will be standing in front of us, the Good Neighbor who loves us, the Savior who justifies us in his mercy.

Luke 10:33-35 “But a Samaritan, as he traveled, came where the man was; and when he saw him, he took pity on him. He went to him and took care of his wounds, pouring on oil and wine. Then he put the man on his own donkey, took him to an inn and took care of him. The next day he took out two silver coins and gave them to the innkeeper. ‘Look after him,’ he said, ‘and when I return, I will reimburse you for any extra expense you may have.’”

How many times don’t we pass up the opportunity to help, and to love? Let me tell you a story from my own life. I wasn’t the man beaten and left for dead alongside the road. I was a stranded motorist whose battery had died along a Georgia highway in the middle of a thunderstorm. This was before ordinary people owned a cell phone. After over an hour, hundreds, maybe thousands of cars, had passed, including two highway patrols. No one stopped to help.

When no help came, I finally got out and started walking in the rain to the next exit. Then a man named pulled over and offered to give me a ride. It turns out that he was an agnostic recovering drug user. He was also dying of AIDS. He had no faith or church. He himself was low on gas. But he had compassion on this stranger walking in a rainstorm looking for help.

The Samaritan in Jesus’ story couldn’t be more different than the priest, the Levite, or even the half-dead man alongside the road. Two thousand years ago Jewish hatred for them was extreme. They publicly prayed in their synagogues that the Samaritans would not share in the resurrection from the dead. They were never accepted as converts. Eating their food was just as bad as eating pork. It was better to suffer than to accept their help.

I don’t know who might be our “Samaritans” today. For some perhaps Muslims, North Koreans, or illegal immigrants? Maybe it would be members of the opposite political party, or white supremacists, or members of Antifa.

At any rate, it is a Samaritan, a religious enemy, who helps. His help is full of sacrifice and risks. It is hardly convenient. The highway robbers had already struck once. The longer the Samaritan pauses to help the beaten man, the greater the chances for him to become the next victim. It isn’t safe.

He applies the standard first aid of the time. Then he gives up his seat on his donkey and walks so that the wounded man can ride. He spends a day caring for the man at an inn. When he leaves, he gives the inn keeper enough money to house and feed his injured friend for up to two months. What it would cost you to stay at even a cheap hotel for 60 nights? This gives us some idea of the Samaritan’s generosity.

As a pastor people often ask me questions about helping others. “I see this panhandler begging for food or money. What if I give him money and he wastes it on booze or uses it to buy meth? It is okay for me not to give him something?” “Someone is stranded along the highway. I have heard of cases in which people were faking their car trouble so that they could rob the person who stops to help. Should I put myself or my family at risk for someone I don’t know?”

I can’t say that it is wrong to be concerned about contributing to someone’s addiction. I can’t say that God wants us to put our children at risk, or that we should ignore potential dangers to ourselves.

I can say that self-interest should not be the greatest concern for the believing child of God. Almost all of Jesus’ twelve disciples ended up being put to death just for sharing their faith. No one I know criticizes them for that. Of course, Jesus himself came to our dangerous world knowing full well it would cost him his life. But he did it because our desperate need for salvation outweighed his concern for his own comfort or safety. Love led him to make the ultimate sacrifice to rescue us from our sins and bring us home to safety with him.

Sometimes showing Christian love will involve risks. Most of the time it calls for sacrifice. If we are taking an honest look at how we love our neighbor, we need to consider which one influences our choices more: self-interest or showing mercy. Self-interest will rarely, if ever, lead to mercy. Christ’s love leads us to risk loving our neighbor as well.

Luke 10:30-32 “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, when he fell into the hands of robbers. They stripped him of his clothes, beat him and went away, leaving him half dead. A priest happened to be going down the same road, and when he saw the man, he passed by on the other side. So, too, a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side.”

I don’t have to spend much time defending the notion that people have high moral expectations of religious professionals. This was true for ancient Jewish society as much as our own. The priest in Jesus’ story was a religious professional. His life was dedicated to the service of God. No one should have understood what God expects of us better. No one should have been more changed by constant exposure to God’s love for us.

The Levite was a religious worker who served in a support role. We might compare him to the elders or deacons in a church today, or to volunteers in the office or church committees.

Both of these men walk by the severely wounded man who had been robbed. Some believe their excuse might have been concern for ceremonial uncleanness. This is doubtful. Even if it were the case, it was no excuse for refusing to stop and help. There is nothing to suggest the beaten man was “unclean,” even according to Jewish ceremonial law. Nothing suggests he was a leper or a corpse. He was only “half dead.” Neither the priest nor the Levite managed to offer the man along the road basic human consideration.

Does faith make a difference in how we live, and love? Are we any different than the general population? The evidence doesn’t look good. A Barna poll finds a majority of practicing Christians, almost 70%, agree with this statement, “The highest goal of life is to enjoy it as much as possible.” That is similar to their secular counterparts. Jesus says, “Whoever wants to find his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me and the gospel will find it.” Again he asks, “What good will it be for a man if he gains the whole world, yet forfeits his soul?” Still, even practicing Christians will say, “God just wants me to be happy, right?” Where is that written?

On moral issues, Christians have often made the most noise about the problems with secular society. Yet Christian teens become sexually active before marriage at about the same rate as their non-believing counterparts. Christian marriages end in divorce more often than atheist ones. Apparently about half the time we find it difficult to love our very nearest neighbor, the one with whom we share a bed and a room.

On issues of kindness and charity we aren’t so different as we might like to think, either. Rosaria Butterfield is a Christian pastor’s wife with children. Before that she was an atheistic lesbian professor. But she says about the days before her conversion: “I strove to stand with the disempowered. I valued morality… The (LGBT) community values hospitality and applies it with skill, sacrifice, and integrity.” Helping others did not first become her concern when she became a Christian.

The main point of Christian faith is not to make us kind, or make us better. It is to make us God’s own. It is to make us safe in his forgiveness. God sacrificed his Son just because we need his grace, just like every other human being.

But God also intends his saving love and sacrifice to change us. Those who know what Jesus endured to come to our rescue will look at inconvenience, risk, and even suffering for others differently. His grace teaches us to put our faith into practice and show compassion. Christianity is not a “profession” confined to temples or churches.

Matthew 6:10 “Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”

“Your will be done” is an easy thing to say. The words are simple–no running to the dictionary to discover what they mean. They are short words–just one syllable each. These are easy words to pronounce. They are all words we could say and use by the time we began grade school. But together, as a sentence, these words form one of our hardest prayers.

This is a hard prayer because it is hard to want what these words say. “Oh,” we might think, “This isn’t so hard. What Christian doesn’t want what God wants to happen? Love your neighbor and love the Lord with all your heart, feed the poor and spread the good news–who doesn’t want that to happen?” But it isn’t as easy or simple as that.

It’s no secret to you that the people who live in this world have been corrupted by sin–every one of them. You and I have it too. God has never stopped loving us after we became sinners. But because he loves us, he wants, he wills, that there would be consequences for our sins. He knows that sin always hurts us. It messes with our minds and gives us a false view of reality. It is poison to the love that should live in our hearts. It suffocates faith and destroys our relationship with him. It makes us sullen and selfish and sad, and frankly we become generally unpleasant people to be around.

That’s why God created pain. He wanted us to realize that sin is bad for us. He has attached pain to practically every sin there is, even the little ones. It is his will. Sometimes the connection is obvious. For example, he wants us to take care of our bodies and practice a little self-control. It is not to satisfy our every desire. Too much alcohol or food, and in the short term we may suffer from a monster headache, or a stomach ache. Keep it up day after day, and the consequences dial the pain way up: liver disease, heart disease, diabetes, cancer, dementia, arthritic joints. God made it to work that way. It is his will.

But I don’t want to give the impression that the difficulty is the main feature of this prayer. This is a beneficial way for God’s people to pray. More than that, I will go so far as to say that “Your will be done” can be considered our best prayer.

The Greeks had an old saying: “Know thyself.” “To your own self be true.” But do we really understand what makes us tick, why we do what we do? David prays in the psalms, “Who can discern his errors?” Paul confesses in Romans 7, “I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do, I do not do, but what I hate I do.” Jeremiah says, “The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it?” If we don’t even fully understand ourselves, how are we going to know if what we want is best?

Jesus our Savior gives us the greatest proof that “your will be done” is our best prayer. If God had left me to my own will, I would be trying to pay off my sins by myself. My relationship with God would not be based upon his forgiveness but my own hard work. If I could work my little merit system honestly, I would live in constant doubt and despair of ever doing enough. More likely, I would “fix the game” in favor of my strengths and overlook my weaknesses. I would live in the delusion that I was really making it, only to lose the game for all eternity in the end.

God’s will called for his Son to become one of us and die in our place. We would never have dreamed of asking him for that. God’s will works, because the blood of Jesus Christ his Son purifies us from all sin. His will is best, because it always ends with our hope and our future in heaven.

Perhaps you have noticed this slogan used by the Salvation Army: “Doing the most good.” It’s an interesting sentiment, but it is hard to prove. If we really want the most good, a better place to look is the prayer Jesus taught us to pray: “Your will be done.” It may be hard to pray, but God promises us only what is good, if not always easy. That is better than getting what I want.

Matthew 6:9 This, then, is how you should pray: “Our Father in heaven…”

I know the picture of a “father,” or even “parent,” isn’t always a pretty one for us. Some of us may have had loving parents who sacrificed the world to raise us. They applied a good balance of discipline and boundaries, encouragement and freedom. Yet even then we can recognize some flaws.

Some of us had parents who drank way too much beer. They loved their careers and hobbies more than their children. They weren’t able to see the line between spanking their children and beating them. They used their children to try to feel better about themselves and soaked up all the love and affection in the relationship for themselves without sharing any of it with their kids.

When Jesus says, “This, then, is how you should pray: Our Father in heaven,” he isn’t saying, “Think of God as a really, really big version of your dad or mom, warts and all.” This is your Father in heaven. He is the perfect parent. That is what gives us the confidence to pray.

Your Father in heaven loves you perfectly, even when it comes time to discipline you. We often think of fathers as the disciplinarian in the family. It is a special kind of love, a perfect love, that loves us enough to set aside our comfort when a little pain or discomfort will do us some good. The writer of Hebrews reminds us, “Endure hardship as discipline; God is treating you as sons… No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful. Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it” (Heb. 12:7,10-11).

Because your Father in heaven loves you perfectly, he gives you just what you need for your soul. That starts with the forgiveness of sins. David writes in Psalm 103, “As far as the east is from the west, so far has he removed our transgressions from us. As a father has compassion on his children, so the Lord has compassion on those who fear him.”

But when we look at what our Father did to forgive us, does it seem that the idea of “perfect Parent” and “perfect love” begins to break down? Ordinarily any hint of favoritism in a family is death to the relationships there. If a parent had some children who were “natural” children, and some children who were “adopted”, and the one set received preferential treatment, we would expect all kinds of problems. If anyone was going to receive special treatment and privileges, we would expect it to be the natural children, those who belonged to the family by birth, not the adopted children who were accepted into the family later.

Our Father in heaven sacrificed the only “natural” Son he had to spare the children he wanted to adopt. Our Father had the natural Son, the only innocent member of the family, suffer the punishment for the crimes the adopted children committed. We are the adopted children, Jesus the natural Son, and it doesn’t seem fair. But in our perfect Parent’s family, this wasn’t favoritism gone mad or injustice. It was perfect love, from Jesus who calls himself our brother, and his Father who has also become our Father.

These are the things Jesus wants us to remember as we begin our prayers: Our Brother suffers and dies for our forgiveness and adoption. That makes our God our Father in heaven. That makes us confident to pray as his dear children.

Luke 16:1-9 “There was a rich man whose manager was accused of wasting his possessions. ² So he called him in and asked him, ‘What is this I hear about you? Give an account of your management, because you cannot be manager any longer.’ ³ “The manager said to himself, ‘What shall I do now? My master is taking away my job. I’m not strong enough to dig, and I’m ashamed to beg– ⁴ I know what I’ll do so that, when I lose my job here, people will welcome me into their houses.’ ⁵ “So he called in each one of his master’s debtors. He asked the first, ‘How much do you owe my master?’ ⁶ ” ‘Eight hundred gallons of olive oil,’ he replied. “The manager told him, ‘Take your bill, sit down quickly, and make it four hundred.’ ⁷ “Then he asked the second, ‘And how much do you owe?’ ” ‘A thousand bushels of wheat,’ he replied. “He told him, ‘Take your bill and make it eight hundred.’ ⁸ “The master commended the dishonest manager because he had acted shrewdly. For the people of this world are more shrewd in dealing with their own kind than are the people of the light. ⁹ I tell you, use worldly wealth to gain friends for yourselves, so that when it is gone, you will be welcomed into eternal dwellings.

“Use worldly wealth to gain friends.” That is not where the manager in the parable began. He used the money he was managing to goof around. When you are spending someone else’s money, you tend not to be so careful with it. You aren’t so motivated to try to preserve it.

Former 20/20 journalist John Stossel once did a feature on a public restroom built by the New York City Parks and Rec department. The little building featured two or three stalls in each bathroom and a couple of sinks. It cost over 2 million dollars. That was much more than most of the upscale homes in the area cost–for just a bathroom. City officials explained that superior materials had to be used because of all the traffic. Stossel pointed out that a nearby city built a better looking facility of comparable materials for about one tenth the price. When the official explained that New York City pays workers a fair wage, Stossel discovered that meant about 100 dollars an hour. New York City is pricey, but even there those wages seem high. But when you are spending someone else’s money…

Sometimes God’s people forget that they are spending someone else’s money. We think that all this stuff is ours to do with as we please. We use God’s gifts like the manager in the parable. We manage and plan and spend as though our possessions have no higher purpose than to let us enjoy ourselves. It doesn’t cross our minds that we have to answer to the Owner someday, and that maybe he had some expectations for what the funds he placed into our keeping were going to accomplish. It would be a scary thing to hear him come and fire us from his service. “Give an account of your management, because you cannot be manager any longer.” If we lose our relationship with our Lord, all is truly lost.

Let’s cut to the chase on the meaning of Jesus’ parable. He is not suggesting that Christians ought to be so self-serving in the way they manage God’s money for him. He is not condoning dishonesty, cheating, or fraud. These are all necessary components of the story to move the story along. They are needed to get to his point. They are not the point itself.

The point is this: the shrewd manager acquired a strong sense of mission and purpose when he heard he was going to be fired (twisted as that mission and purpose might be). He spent a long time thinking about how to use the time and resources he managed to accomplish that mission and purpose, and then he executed his plan. Central to that plan was using his master’s wealth to build relationships, to make friends who would take care of him later.

The manager in the parable was looking at a future which had suddenly become very uncertain for him. His career was over. His prospects were bleak. He didn’t know how he would eat or where he would live. His money decisions were driven by a need to bring some clarity and stability to his future.

We are looking at a future which has been made entirely secure for us. We don’t have to buy our spot in heaven’s courts. Jesus has paid all we owed at the cross. Forgiveness is full and free. We don’t have to scratch and claw to preserve our lives ourselves. Jesus has risen from the dead. His resurrection promises new life for these bodies on the other side of the grave. We don’t have to worry about our future. Eternal life is guaranteed.

Why not spend our money, why not invest ourselves, in the one thing we know is going to last, the one thing we know is going to be there in the end? One of my old teachers used to say, “What you invest in God’s kingdom is the only investment that will be worth a dime the day after judgment day.” We don’t have to purchase a place for ourselves there. But we can invest in ways that help others hear the gospel that secures their eternal future. Someday they will welcome us, as we will welcome them, into our eternal home.

Micah 7:19-20 “You will again have compassion on us; you will tread our sins underfoot and hurl all our iniquities into the depths of the sea. You will be true to Jacob and show mercy to Abraham, as you pledged on oath to our fathers in days long ago.”

“You will again have compassion on us,” Micah says. Again. God showing compassion is practically the story of the whole Bible, isn’t it? Adam and Eve fall into sin, and God shows compassion by winning them back to his side from the devil. They lose a son Abel and God replaces him with Seth. Noah lives in a world that has become dark and dangerous for the believer in God, and the Lord shows compassion by sparing him and his family from the flood in the ark. Abraham and Sarah are childless, so God gives them a son in their old age. Joseph is sold into slavery in Egypt, so God raises him up to become prime minister of that country. One story after another recounts God’s compassion.

We may not know the details of God’s plans for our future. But the conclusion he wants us to draw from thousands of years of previous history is this: they all involve compassion. Our pain genuinely moves him, and he cares how we are treated.

Do you want to know how to get a parent riled up? Then hurt one of their children, and see if the claws don’t come out. Do you want to see a parent moved to action? Then see what they do when their children are in distress. By sacrificing his Son and forgiving our sins, God has made us his children. When we hurt, whether in body or in soul, God plans to have compassion.

That doesn’t mean we never suffer now. This has been another year of hurricanes, wild fires, and extreme weather. You know that your own life hasn’t been an endless parade of happy events.

For the believing child of God it does mean that he isn’t punishing us for past indiscretions. “You will tread our sins underfoot and hurl all our iniquities into the depths of the sea,” the prophet promises with two more pictures of grace that need no explaining. Our suffering may present our Lord with a new opportunity to show us compassion, but it is never payback for our sins. That’s not the kind of God he is.

These are all happy thoughts. They make our God truly unique. But we will share the prophet’s praise and optimism only if we can say with him, “Your promise is dependable.” “You will be true to Jacob and show mercy to Abraham, as you pledged on oath to our fathers in days long ago.”

Do you know what Jacob and Abraham had in common, besides being grandson and grandfather? They had the saving promises of God, the promises that involved a Savior, and blessings for all nations on earth, and heaven. We may not be their genetic descendants, but we belong to the same family of faith. We own the same saving promises.

All by itself God’s word is his bond. His promises never fail. Bible scholar Alfred Edersheim documents 456 distinct prophecies Jesus fulfilled, prophecies made hundreds and even thousands of years before his birth. Such accuracy gives us no reason to doubt God’s word.

In case some sliver of doubt remains, the Lord says, “I will go one step further. You have ample evidence that my word is good. But I will put myself under oath. Even though you have no right or reason to question me, because I am God and you are not, I make you my judge and invite you to hold me accountable to my promise.” If you were God, would you make a concession like that to the little creatures you had made?

Do you remember God’s appearance to the prophet Elijah on Mount Horeb after wicked Queen Jezebel threatened to end the prophet’s life? God put Elijah in a cave, and there was a great wind that tore apart the rocks, but the Lord was not in the wind. Then there was an earthquake that shook the mountain, but the Lord was not in the earthquake. Then there was a fire that swept across the mountain. But the Lord was not in the fire. Finally God spoke with a still, small voice–just a gentle whisper of his grace–and God was in that word.

Do you want to know what God is really like? Listen to what Elijah heard, look where Micah looks. In the forgiveness and compassion of an absolutely faithful God, you will find a God like no one else.