Commitment
Part 2 in series
Relating to God: What We Can Learn About God Through Our Closest Relationships On Earth
Wildwind Community Church
David Flowers
February 14, 2009
We’re in our series on relationships right now, and last week we talked about trust, because all relationships are built on trust. Today I want to talk to you about commitment because if you want any relationship to last, you must commit to it as if that is your intention.
It is human nature to be risk-averse. We are cost-counters. Actuaries are people who calculate risk for the insurance agencies. But in our personal lives, nearly all of us are actuaries. We are constantly running cost-benefit analyses in our heads. Do I do this? What will it cost me? What will I get? What will be the rewards and/or consequences? Should I do that instead? A certain amount of this is normal. We have a word for people without the ability to do this. That word is reckless. Normal, healthy people will take risks to some degree, but they are usually calculated risks. Dysfunctional people either will not take risks at all (which leaves them closed off and rigid), or else they take foolish risks without counting costs and benefits.
We live in a society that attempts to manage risk and minimize it wherever possible. The banks are doing this with a thing called FICO scores (credit ratings), which help them decide whether you’ll be good for a loan. Hyundai now is offering to allow you to return a car you buy from them if you lose your job and can’t make the payments. Most stores have liberal return and exchange policies. Offers you see on TV usually come with money-back guarantees. The extended warranty business is huge, with stores making way more money in the risk management business than they make from whatever product they sell. If you are unemployed, the federal government will send you checks for a while. You willingly (in most cases) pay into the unemployment fund because you know it’s an important part of managing risk. Before you have contractors come to work on your house, what do you do? You get estimates! Why? Because you are putting a lot of dollars on the line – taking a risk. Getting estimates is a form of risk management.
In our society we have even come up with a way of managing risk when it comes to relationships. Of course dating is one form of managing risk, right? You don’t want to just marry the first person who comes up and asks you out (usually). But our society has another way of managing risk. We call it cohabitation. Now if you are currently cohabitating with someone, or have done so in the past, please know my intention is not to embarrass you in any way, but I ask you to please hear me out here. And know that you are not alone. Many in this congregation have cohabited before. And that is my point. This is another way we have come up with in our society to manage risk. We figure, “We’ve dated for a while. The next step is to move in together before we make that huge commitment of marriage.” In a society that is obsessed with risk management, this seems logical. The same society that gave birth to the idea of prenuptial agreements would see the risk-management logic of living together – giving it a “trial run.” Why not? After all, this is a serious commitment here.
Well, the why not is because if you want something to last, you must commit to it as if that is your intention. That’s true whether you are buying a car or a house, getting into a friendship, or wanting to spend your life with someone. If you want something to last, you must commit to it as if that is your intention. As it turns out, the research on living together shows that couples who live together before marriage have not a lower but a higher divorce rate. Why is this? Because in not marrying, cohabitating couples are often not committing to the relationship like it is their intention to see it last. There’s something in commitment itself which produces staying power. I don’t have time to give cohabitation the nuanced treatment it deserves tonight, and there are always exceptions to things, but higher divorce rates among those who cohabitate – as a general rule – show that when we go into a relationship with less than full commitment, we make it more likely that the relationship will not last.
This is the problem. If living together tends to backfire, what is a better way of making a huge decision like who we’ll marry? It seems like in relationships, there are no ways of knowing for sure what will happen. We can’t manage all the risk out. There are no guarantees.
I remember well how when Christy and I were engaged, she used to say to me, “Promise me right now that you will never, ever, ever cheat on me.” That was a fear of hers. She had infidelity in her family background and was really freaked out about this and needed that reassurance. And so I said to her what any loving fiancé would say who cares about his girl and wants her to feel loved and secure. I said, “How am I supposed to know right now what choices I will make in the future? There are no guarantees, darling.”
Now my intention here was just to be honest. I mean, how ARE you supposed to make guarantees about what you will and will not do in the future? Whether I should have said this to my fiancé or not (okay, I definitely shouldn’t have said it!), it kind of makes sense. I mean you don’t KNOW what you’ll do twenty years from now – do you? There are no guarantees, are there?
Of course not. But there’s more of a guarantee than you might think. The guarantee begins with commitment itself. In this case, it would have begun with my looking deeply into Christy’s eyes and saying, “Sweetheart – I love you. And I promise I will never, ever cheat on you.” That’s a commitment. But there’s a second part to that commitment – that’s keeping it. It’s easy to make a commitment, but it’s much harder to keep it. Why? Because you can make a commitment as the person you are now – but keeping a commitment requires you to become a certain kind of person down the road. I can commit to Christy that I will never, ever cheat on her. That’s an easy commitment to make. But if I’m going to keep that commitment, then I must immediately begin cultivating the characteristic of faithfulness. In other words, after making a commitment, I must then intentionally become the kind of person who will be capable of keeping that commitment.
See, it IS possible to know what you are going to do in the future. You simply make a commitment, and then you begin taking the steps that will lead you, slowly but certainly, to become the kind of person who is capable of keeping the commitment you made. Every married person sitting in this congregation tonight who has been faithful to your spouse – you have, so far, managed to become the kind of person who is capable of keeping that commitment. Because temptations will come to all of us. The question is when they come, will we be capable of recognizing them and responding to them in appropriate ways that guard the commitment we have made?
We see in scripture a couple of examples of people making a commitment that they simply were in no position to keep.
Matthew 26:31-35 (NIV)
31 Then Jesus told them, "This very night you will all fall away on account of me, for it is written: "’I will strike the shepherd, and the sheep of the flock will be scattered.’
32 But after I have risen, I will go ahead of you into Galilee."
33 Peter replied, "Even if all fall away on account of you, I never will."
34 "I tell you the truth," Jesus answered, "this very night, before the rooster crows, you will disown me three times."
35 But Peter declared, "Even if I have to die with you, I will never disown you." And all the other disciples said the same.
Peter had some fancy words of commitment to Jesus. “I will NEVER abandon you.” “I will NEVER disown you – DEATH FIRST!!” But if you are familiar with the account, you know that Peter and the rest of the disciples all DID in fact abandon Jesus in his hour of need. Jesus knew this would happen. Why? Because he knew they were not yet the kind of people who were capable of keeping commitments that might cost them their lives.
Matthew 26 – Jesus is praying in the Garden of Gethsemane the night of his arrest, asking God to please make it possible for him to not have to die.
Matthew 26:39-41 (NIV)
39 Going a little farther, he fell with his face to the ground and prayed, "My Father, if it is possible, may this cup be taken from me. Yet not as I will, but as you will."
40 Then he returned to his disciples and found them sleeping. "Could you men not keep watch with me for one hour?" he asked Peter.
41 "Watch and pray so that you will not fall into temptation. The spirit is willing, but the body is weak."
Here Jesus acknowledges exactly what I am saying. The spirit is willing. We often commit to things with good intentions. We SAY we’ll do this or that, and we mean it. But when it comes down to it, we cannot or do not follow through, because we have not become the kind of people who are capable of doing so. Simply making a commitment will not magically give you the ability to keep it. But if you make a commitment, and then set appropriate boundaries and guidelines in your life, and develop habits that are centered around maintaining and guarding that commitment, then the commitment will have power to form you into a person who is able to keep the commitment. I have met many people who, upon getting married, spend a great deal of energy justifying why they should be able to remain best friends with that person of the opposite sex they’ve known for so long, or why it’s still okay to be alone with the opposite sex with no accountability, or saying naïve stuff like, “We’re just friends – nothing’s gonna happen.” More energy often goes into maintaining prior commitments than establishing healthy boundaries in which the new one can be kept. I tell these couples, “Consider whether it’s important to be more committed to your marriage than you are to the previous relationships in your life.”
People do this same thing with God. They make a commitment to God, but then spend time asking how they can hang on to as much of their old life as possible. What they should be doing is investing their time in the establishment of healthy new habits and guidelines that will allow their new relationship with God to thrive. So we sometimes go into human relationships, and into our relationship with God, so weak-willed, so unwilling to build our lives around the commitment we have made, that the commitment itself barely stands a chance from the beginning. We’re going into it hedging our bets to begin with, and that virtually assures failure.
See, just as trust is the foundation of all functional and healthy relationships, commitment is the breath of them. You must trust someone to be in a relationship with them, but the moment by moment keeping of your commitment to them is what maintains that trust. Without basic trust commitments will never be made. If commitments don’t get made, trust cannot grow and develop. This is true in both our human relationships and our relationship with God.
Most of us are bet-hedgers by nature. And we will bring our hesitation and risk-management maneuvers into our relationship with God. Remember, our relationship with God, though it is lots of things, is a relationship. And we will relate to God as if God were a person, because that is what we understand and are familiar with. The problem is that we will bring all the hang-ups we have in our human relationships into our relationship with God. Why? Because it’s a relationship! If you have a hard time trusting people, you will have a hard time trusting God. If you talk all the time and never let your friends get a word in, you will go on and on in prayer and rarely listen to God. If you have a hard time committing in your human relationships, you will struggle to commit in your relationship with God. If you try to control people, you will try to control God. If you get angry with people, you will get angry with God. If you struggle to let people love and care for you, you will struggle to let God love and care for you. You will not, in fact you cannot, respond differently to God than you respond in your human relationships.
1 John 4:20 (NIV)
20 If anyone says, "I love God," yet hates his brother, he is a liar. For anyone who does not love his brother, whom he has seen, cannot love God, whom he has not seen. (emphasis mine)
This is not to say that there will be absolutely zero difference, because after all, you do relate to different people slightly differently – so you can expect to relate somewhat differently to God since God is another person. But by and large, you will bring your hang-ups in human relationships into your relationship with God.
People who struggle to commit in human relationships will struggle to commit to God. People who over commit and get co-dependent in human relationships will want God to do everything for them and not be able to live fully as the individuals God created them to be.
Like in our human relationships, we may commit to God too quickly before we’ve had a chance to count the cost and think it through. Or we may commit too slowly, putting it off out of fear, overthinking it, etc.
If we wish to have a relationship with God, commitment is as important as in any other relationship. Imagine what happens to any human relationship with little or no commitment, and that’s what you can expect to happen in a relationship with God where commitment is lacking. Yet relationship with God is one of the only areas where people routinely exempt themselves from the necessity of commitment. There’s no human relationship we would ever seriously attempt to sustain without some kind of commitment. Yet people frequently attempt to maintain a relationship with God with very little commitment. We often keep God on the line for our purposes. We ignore him when it’s convenient, then beg him to get us out of trouble and blame him when he doesn’t act the way we want him to act. We make promises to commit to him when things are bad, but as soon as things get good again, we somehow forget those promises. Just like any human relationship would fail if we behaved this way, so ultimately will a relationship with God fail.
Now in a human relationship, you become the kind of person who can keep a commitment how? By keeping your commitment every day! The same is true with God. Once you make a commitment to live with God, then just like in any relationship, you must keep that commitment regularly, with all that it entails. Just like in human relationships, there will be ups and downs – days when you’re sure this is the best commitment you’ve ever made, and days when you wonder why you made it in the first place. But the commitment stands. At least, the commitment is sure to stand if you steadily continue becoming the kind of person who is able to keep that commitment. The longer you keep a commitment, the more momentum you’ll have in your favor, and the easier it will be to keep keeping it. Let’s talk for a second about commitment momentum.
I started this message saying we are all actuaries – constantly calculating risk. But the thing is, there are different kinds of risk, aren’t there? When you’re dating someone and you think about marriage, you think about losing your freedom and independence, your dating and parts of your social life, financial flexibility, etc. In other words, you think about what you will be giving up as you go from single life to married life. It can be tough to imagine making and keeping that commitment because singleness has all the momentum in your life – it’s the current state of things – it’s what you know. But let’s shift perspectives. Think about being married for ten or twenty or thirty or forty years. Now when you think about not keeping that commitment, you realize that the losses you might encounter perhaps could be unbearable. An investment of decades of your life. A sense of failure. Loneliness. The respect of your children. Not to mention the loss of someone you might dearly love, despite whatever is going on in the marriage.
The point I’m trying to make is that after you have kept a commitment for a period of time, the downside of breaking that commitment often becomes larger than the difficulty of keeping it. The reason is that you now have momentum on your side – and the momentum leans in favor of keeping your commitment. When I counsel men regarding pornography I tell them the best way to get away from it for good is to get away from it for a while. The more days you rack up without it, the more you build up momentum and the less you want to think about indulging in it and having to start the count all over again. This is what I mean when I talk about becoming the kind of person who is capable of keeping a commitment. The more days you keep a commitment (to God, to a friend, to a spouse, etc.), the more the relationship will mean to you. The more the relationship means to you, the harder it is to imagine not keeping that commitment. By keeping your commitment in small and large ways every day, you are slowly but surely turning the “risk” in favor of the relationship – so that there is more to lose by breaking that commitment than there is in keeping it. At a certain point momentum is on your side and breaking your commitment begins to appear foolish and selfish.
This is how it is with God. Before you commit to God, you think about all you would have to give up, how hard the transition would be, and how much you would miss your old life. But as you keep that commitment, you build momentum in favor of your new life and you get to where you can’t imagine going back to the way things were before. Too much to lose. You get to where, when you run the actuarial tables, you realize you’d be risking far more in giving up your commitment to God than you risk in maintaining it – it becomes natural, logical, and entirely rational for you to keep the commitment you have made. Let’s look at some language that reflects that state of mind.
Romans 6:20-22 (NIV)
20 When you were slaves to sin, you were free from the control of righteousness.
21 What benefit did you reap at that time from the things you are now ashamed of? Those things result in death!
22 But now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves to God, the benefit you reap leads to holiness, and the result is eternal life. (emphasis mine)
Or this…
Romans 8:12-14 (MSG)
12 So don’t you see that we don’t owe this old do-it-yourself life one red cent.
13 There’s nothing in it for us, nothing at all. The best thing to do is give it a decent burial and get on with your new life.
14 God’s Spirit beckons. There are things to do and places to go!
Words from a man who came to a place, after years of keeping this commitment to God, where momentum was firmly on his side – where he could no longer even understand the logic in living without God. Just like if some single guy would come up to me tonight and say, “Dave, I just don’t get the marriage thing – there’s so much that you have to give up.” I’d say, “Yep – but it’s nothing compared to what you stand to gain.” Commitment is the door to bigger and better things. With friends. With spouses and children. And with God. God’s Spirit beckons. There are things to do and places to go!
