I Don't Have Any Promises

Dave here this time, just to offer some "rough" thoughts from my heart.

I have been thinking long and hard about the biblical account of Abraham, particularly reflecting upon the bold faith that was required for him to leave all that he had ever known in order to go to a place that the Lord hadn’t even revealed to him yet.

Comparing our present situation to Abram’s, I thought: How easy it was from Abram to believe since he had been given an amazing set of promises, directly from the Lord…but, in the middle of all this adoption waiting and uncertainty, we don’t have any promises like that.

I went so far as to verbalize this to a couple of godly friends, who probably immediately saw the flaw in my thinking, but graciously said nothing to correct me, realizing that I just needed to come out of the theological fog that trials often produce (they did much better than Job’s friends!).

Nonetheless, here is the reality of our situation: we don’t have a promise exactly like Abraham’s; the Lord has not spoken to us to assure us that our son is indeed coming home. None of that has happened.

But we do have promises. How wrong I was! In fact, we are the recipients of God’s promised blessing through Abraham! Ultimately, he was promised not just a great number of descendants, but a single Descendant — the Christ, the Son whom God would send, rather than spare (Is. 9:6; Rom. 8:32; Gal. 4:4-5). Ironically, it is the fulfillment of that very promise to Abraham that presently is assuring us that God is for us (He’s on our side!), that nothing can separate us from His love, and that for us all things will work together for the good (Rom. 8:31-39, 28).

Now we certainly understand that the good that God is working may not be that He is bringing Oliver home, although it looks like this possibility is getting stronger by the day. Rather, the good that He is working is the degree to which God further chisels Emiley and me to look like Jesus, the One who is our brother by virtue of our blood-purchased adoption into God’s family (Rom. 8:29)! In that way, our good and God’s glory are inseparably linked.

In light of all this, friends, please don’t tell us: I have faith that God will bring your son home. Frankly, our faith is not in what we want God to do. Rather, our faith is in God Himself, based upon who He has revealed Himself to be and based upon what He has done for us in Christ. If you’ve said that to us, we know you mean well, and we sure love you still! In fact, we were moved that you said anything to us at all. But, please know that our faith is in God, not necessarily in a particular outcome for this situation.

And so the hard reality facing us today is still that we do not know what God will do; we are not assured that God will bring our son home. Yet what we do know is that God has sent His Son to bring us “home” — adopted, clothed in a perfect white garment, seated at His table, sharing an inheritance with Jesus, and enjoying its guarantee already. Since God has proved Himself to be for us in this resounding and irrefutably objective way, we must fight to trust Him to do what is best in this situation — to disseminate the gospel through us, to show forth His glory, to make us more like Jesus, and a countless other billion things that exist in His mind alone.