Seize the Moment – Day 870
S E R V _ : V is for Vow!
The next letter for the acrostic is V for VOW.
Matthew 5:37(NLT)
Just say a simple, ‘Yes, I will,’ or ‘No, I won’t.’
— Anything beyond this is from the evil one.
A vow is defined as a noun to be “a solemn promise” and as a verb to be “a solemn promise to a specific thing”. At a wedding, a couple does both the noun and the verb when they repeat their vows of commitment to each other. All throughout the Old Testament, we are told that a vow is not to be broken. And then in the New Testament, Jesus spoke to the crowd in His sermon on the mount to not make a vow, but rather let your yes be yes or your no be no.
Is this a contradiction? NO! The concept of the vow, a solemn promise, had been stretched, muddied, modified so much that it had become a contradiction to itself. When someone makes you a promise to do something, then they should show up. When they don’t, the response you normally will hear is “Oh, sorry. I forgot” or “Something else came up and I couldn’t make it.” This is not who we are to be as Christians.