A Good Old-Fashioned Handshake

Ecclesiastes 5

5 Better is it that thou shouldest not vow, than that thou shouldest vow and not pay.

We live in a society today that requires a lot of paper work. It used to be that all it took was a good old-fashioned handshake and that was how you sealed the deal.

Mr. Mahan that lives next to our Christian School wanted to trade me some frontage on the street where our school is in exchange for some lateral land beside his property. Our properties join and I told him we would get a lawyer to draw up the papers and have a surveyor come and re-survey the land. As I was walking away he said, “Hey, wait a minute.” I thought I had done exactly what need to be done and said. He squared up with me and looked me straight in the eye and said “I don’t make business deals until we make it official” He stuck up his hand and wanted a handshake. He squeezed the fire out of my hand. I guess the harder you squeeze the more sincere you are about the deal. That was all he needed. He wasn’t concerned with all the paper work involved. He wanted to look me in the eye and shake my hand and build a bond between two men saying, YOU HAVE MY WORD!

It amazes me the paper work involved in a deal. A few weeks ago, myself and the trustees of the church, had to go to Tri-County National Bank to sign our name on our $400K loan. There was a stake up papers that was large enough to toilet paper China that LaDonna Bowman began to go through. We had to sign that our signature was really ours. We had to sign this and we had to sign that and my arm ached by the time all the signing was done. Ladonna called me the next day and said, “come back, you forgot to sign a paper” So I went back and signed more papers.

Contracts rule our world. If anything needs to be done, just write up a contract. Before many people get married they have what’s called a pre-nuptial agreement that Lawyers draw up stating what each one will receive if and when a divorce takes place. That is why our divorce rate is where it is today because people are trying to figure how to get out of it before it even begins instead of for richer or poorer, it’s give me what I want our I’ll leave. Instead of for better or worse it’s I’m out of here if things don’t go my way.

Those contracts don’t amount to a hill of beans when it comes to commitment. A Signature doesn’t mean a thing if the heart isn’t in it. People sign a contract to pay for a car for 5 years, there’s a way out by just simply not paying for it and they will come and get it. The contract becomes void. People sign up for a credit card and go around like the Tasmanian devil and spend, spend and spend and when the bills come, no big deal, there is a way out. Just file chapter 7 or 11 and they get to keep all they charged and not pay a single penny for it. All because of putting there signature on a dotted line.

When people like Jimmy Asher call you and ask you about why you haven’t paid your bills you can just hang up n them and look at your caller-ID and not answer when they call. That will help dodge the bullet for a while but doesn’t hide the fact that was not the person you made the agreement with. You can’t un-scramble scrambled eggs but when you make a Val standing under the heavens and earth you need to keep that and if buy things and file bankruptcy you are stealing if you keep those items and use them knowing you never paid for them. Some of you may be driving a stolen car or sleeping on stolen sheets and brushing your teeth with a stolen toothbrush. And then you wonder why you never have any money or why you aren’t blessed.

The reason a handshake is so important is there is a bond between to people when you look each other in the eye and make a commitment to do what you have agreed to do. That physical contact sends electronically charges through the body to the brain and produces accountability.

In Bible days when an agreement was made the King would remove his ring and the indentions of the ring were noticed on the document and with that document you could take it anywhere in the kingdom and the that met you had the authority of the king and were acting on his behave.