God Almighty Made His Covenant Between Him and You!

Finding an unopened Christmas gift while cleaning up the Christmas decorations would fill us with excitement, unless the note on the gift said, “Wait 25 years to open.” So many things could happen over 25 years that it would make the gift unappealing, or make it sound so amazing that it must be worth the wait.

Abraham and Sarah did not know how long it would take for God to fulfill his promise to give them a son. In our Old Testament reading from Genesis 17, we pick up with Abraham and Sarah 24 years after God had made a covenant or promise that they would have a son that would grow into a great nation. It was another 2,000 years for Jesus to be born from that great nation God made a covenant to create. The joyful anticipation of Jesus’ birth was captured in the words of Zechariah, whose wife was Elizabeth and son was John the Baptist, in our Gospel reading from Luke 1,

68 “Praise be to the Lord, the God of Israel, because he has come to his people and redeemed them. 69 He has raised up a horn of salvation for us in the house of his servant David 70 (as he said through his holy prophets of long ago).”

Zechariah praised God for Jesus and his work to redeem even before Mary went into labor. Zechariah was so sure that God’s covenant spoken of by the prophets long ago was now coming to life. Although it did take God’s miraculous closing his mouth during Elizabeth’s pregnancy because he questioned the angel Gabriel about the possibility of he and his wife having a child in their old age, much like Abraham and Sarah, to spur on his excitement and confidence in the Lord, the God of Israel.

After waiting a decade, the excitement and confidence had faded for Abraham and Sarah, so they tried to help God with his covenant. In order to get around waiting for God to make his covenant a reality, Abraham and Sarah made a New Year’s resolution to speed things up by having Abraham produce an heir through Sarah’s maidservant Hagar. Although they kept their resolution and Ishmael was born to Hagar from Abraham, it was not the covenant God had made. So, they waited over a decade more and God appeared to them in our Old Testament reading from Genesis 17, to affirm his terms with Abraham,

1 When Abram was ninety-nine years old, the Lord appeared to him and said, “I am God Almighty; walk before me faithfully and be blameless. 2 Then I will make my covenant between me and you and will greatly increase your numbers.”

God was not giving Abraham a New Year’s resolution with these words but making sure he understood that God was going to make him into a great nation. Thus, God commanded him to walk in faith, not by the resolve of his ninety-nine years walking the earth, but to keep his faith as it was in the Almighty God who does what he says. God would be the one to give life and he would get the glory due his name, God Almighty.

New Year’s resolutions depend on you. Whether it is the New Year’s resolution or some other goal or expectation in your life, the viability of what you want to make happen depends on you. You are the one to give life to the new diet, gym membership, budget, sleep schedule, attitude adjustment, etc. That discipline, responsibility, time, faithfulness, etc. needed to make good on what you want might happen or might not. With anything we commit ourselves to in life whether great or small, the problem we cannot escape is that there will always be things that happen that we cannot control. None of us can prepare for or know all the variables that will come at us over the next year, month or even hour. We all know this on some level but still end up relearning this truth again and again. In most cases, things work out, but that is not what God wants our faith to be like. God does not want us wandering in and out of faith in him when things do not happen how we want them to happen. When we start making New Year’s resolutions for God, or even ‘New Day’s’ resolutions for God, we lose. God is the Almighty, not us. When we give into temptations, sin and wreak havoc in our lives and the lives of others, and when inescapable death comes for us, we are nothing-mighty. We are hopeless when we depend on ourselves and not on God.

God assures us that his covenants are dependable. God gave Abraham encouragement while he waited for God to make his covenant a reality. The name God used when he appeared to Abraham in Genesis 17, was God Almighty or El Shaddai in Hebrew. This name communicated God’s power to bend the laws of nature that he established to make Abraham into a great nation. During this appearance, God also changed Abraham’s name as a seal or mark to testify to the certainty of what God was going to do as we read in Genesis 17,

3 Abram fell facedown, and God said to him, 4 “As for me, this is my covenant with you: You will be the father of many nations. 5 No longer will you be called Abram; your name will be Abraham, for I have made you a father of many nations. 6 I will make you very fruitful; I will make nations of you, and kings will come from you. 7 I will establish my covenant as an everlasting covenant between me and you and your descendants after you for the generations to come, to be your God and the God of your descendants after you.”

Abraham’s name change meant that every time he introduced himself it would remind him of God’s promise. It would also be a testament to anyone who thought his faith foolish to consider the greatness of God to make his covenant with Abraham. In a similar way, each time we introduce ourselves as Christians, we give testimony to what God has done through the birth of our Savior Jesus. In our New Testament reading from Galatians 4, we hear that when God knew the time was right, Jesus was miraculously born to a virgin and he grew up to make us heirs with him of heaven,

4 But when the set time had fully come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, 5 to redeem those under the law, that we might receive adoption to sonship. 6 Because you are his sons, God sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, the Spirit who calls out, “Abba, Father.” 7 So you are no longer a slave, but God’s child; and since you are his child, God has made you also an heir.

A price was paid to make you God’s child. The great debt of sin is the cost of a life, so Jesus paid with his life on the cross to give you the rights of a heavenly citizen, and a place at your Father’s table with brothers and sisters from all times and places. The wait we do not know, but the One who made the way for us we do know.

Walk with the One who made the covenant. It is not a New Year’s resolution to walk with Jesus, it is who you are. The covenant God made with Abraham extends to you through Jesus. The value of your faith does not depend on you, but on God Almighty. I saw a billboard last week that read something like, “Best friends wait to send a text.” It was an encouragement to not text and drive, which might be a good New Year’s resolution for some of you. Jesus is your best friend. Lots of things are going to happen to you this year that will work to distract you from waiting for him and tempt you to depend on yourself. Walk with God this year by faithfully reading and hearing his Word. Treat each verse like a personal text message to you from God, then you will gladly wait to be with him.

You would not expect to find an unopened Christmas gift while cleaning up the Christmas decorations with a note that said, “Wait to open.” The note would fill you with questions. It would excite some and frustrate others. Abraham and Sarah did not know how long God would take to make his covenant come to life with a son, but they waited because it was God’s promise. God gave us the gift of his newborn Son 2,000 years ago. God has already done amazing things through our Savior Jesus’ sacrifice and resurrection, so we will walk in faith waiting for heaven because it is God Almighty who made his covenant between him and you. Amen.