Insurance. No matter what kind of insurance just came to mind, I can almost guarantee that you did not have a positive reaction to hearing the word insurance. Whether you have had to navigate everything with a car insurance company after an accident or had to forgo a medical procedure or help because you didn’t have insurance or your medical insurance didn’t cover it, we all know the pain associated with dealing with insurance companies. The whole idea is that you pay a monthly fee or premium, so that if something catastrophic happens in your life that the insurance company will cover it.

In ideal situations, it is beneficial for you because an event can happen at any moment and you are guaranteed help. It is beneficial to insurance companies because they have multiple streams of income and not all of them are facing something catastrophic and withdrawing at the same time. Now, the ideal is often not what plays out on a regular basis. Instead, even in facing somewhat normal situations, you end up haggling and fighting with insurance companies over how much they will pay out and insurance companies have to be vigilant to keep people from defrauding them. Dateline even sensationalizes this stuff right with the turning point at about halfway through the episode when you find out that one spouse has taken out an insurance policy on the other and the murder investigation takes a big turn because it becomes obvious why the one spouse killed the other.

No matter what industry you look into, at some point, you will run into contracts that are written in confusing and complicated ways in order to provide loopholes to one party or the other to be able to back out on their part of the contract. As long as X circumstance takes place, I am no longer obligated to pay you or you are not entitled to get your money back if you take the dress to a wedding, but have to have it dry cleaned afterwards. It is like trying to lead a game at youth group where prizes are involved. I have to add rules because students find ways around the conventional rules in order to give themselves an advantage over other students. People writing contracts also keep adding things to their contracts because they are trying to close loopholes that could be used against them and perhaps open up some loopholes that they can use to their own advantage. This is one of the main reasons that we have so many lawyers in our world and why they are paid so well. We have many contract disputes of one type or another and we have to get a third party involved (the legal system) in order to navigate these contract disputes.

We have developed this quite sophisticated system around contract negotiations and disputes, but at the heart of it, we often are like kids on the playground. We make a bet that our friend won’t jump further off the swing than we can and the loser will pay $5 to the other. However, when we lose, we say we had our fingers crossed behind our back, so it doesn’t count. We think we are more sophisticated than that, but all of these legal discussions are really just a way for us to try and say that we have our fingers crossed behind our backs, so we don’t have to do what we said we were going to do.

This isn’t a new problem either. As long as there has been the possibility of backing out of an agreement, people have been doing it. So, in a discussion of morality Jesus ends up addressing it. Remember over these last several weeks, we have been looking at Jesus’ longest recorded sermon. What we have in our Bibles is probably a synthesis of Jesus’ teachings put side by side or a skeleton of a message that he gave to many different people many different times. What is important though is not the exact way in which Jesus gave this teaching, but what the purpose of His teaching was. The last several weeks we have been noting how Jesus is pointing out what true spirituality and morality was in this message. He has made seemingly outlandish statements that their righteousness needed to surpass that of the religious elite of their day in order to be valid and that hate or lust make us just as guilty before God as murder and adultery. It doesn’t mean that these failures in thought or spirit are the same as the actions, but that the thoughts and attitudes of your hearts are still sinful even if they don’t lead to outward sin.

In this week’s section of Matthew 5, Jesus is dealing with the morality of failing to follow through on what you say you are going to do. Once again, Jesus is speaking to a specific form of teaching or commentary on the Jewish Scriptures. So, that is why the passage starts out, “You have heard it was said, but I tell you.” Jesus is not disputing what the Scriptures say, but what different schools of thought were saying about the text.

Let’s read Matthew 5:33-37: “Again, you have heard that it was said to the people long ago, ‘Do not break your oath, but fulfill to the Lord the vows you have made.’ 34 But I tell you, do not swear an oath at all: either by heaven, for it is God’s throne; 35 or by the earth, for it is his footstool; or by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the Great King.36 And do not swear by your head, for you cannot make even one hair white or black. 37 All you need to say is simply ‘Yes’ or ‘No’; anything beyond this comes from the evil one.”

This teaching is as straightforward as you can get in the Bible. Do what you say you are going to do. Be dependable and don’t find ways to back out of what you say you will do. You see what the people had heard was the commentary that one school of Jewish religious thought was at the time that as long as an oath wasn’t made to God, especially by his Jewish proper name of Yahweh, that the oath was not legally or otherwise binding. In other words, only the oaths sworn in the name of God could be counted on. Oath is a word we don’t use very often. So, what we mean by oath is a promise. You are pledging or agreeing to do or say something in the future. Other words for it could be contract or covenant. This means that essentially what this Jewish religious thought was teaching was that you only had to keep those promises that invoked the name of God. Jesus is disputing this thought though and saying, “Nope that isn’t the way it works.” Don’t look for ways to have different categories of promises. Just be people of your word.

This is an incredibly simple and basic teaching. Do what you say you will do and don’t look for ways to get out of it. This seems pretty straightforward and I honestly believe that this is a value that has been ingrained in Protestant culture in America from its origins. This value of Christians being dependable people of their word is something I have found to be generally true of the American Christian experience.

Most small business owners with some kind of Christian faith structure I have dealt with, treat people fairly. They do the work they say they are going to do and don’t overcharge. For sure there are exceptions, but I even know small business owners or contractors even here in this building who live this principle out well. They are trustworthy people. They are the type of people you wouldn’t even feel you needed to sign a contract with because they are just that trustworthy. Yet, this doesn’t mean that we never struggle with this idea or that our world isn’t saturated with manipulative contracts, promises, or negotiations. As I mentioned above, we have an entire legal industry built around navigating the loopholes of contracts or promises made to one another.

What is going on here? What is it about this simple teaching that we struggle to follow? For the religious leaders of Jesus’ day, they were using these tricks and tools to gain an advantage in negotiations.

Let’s look at this passage from Matthew 23:13-22: “Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You shut the door of the kingdom of heaven in people’s faces. You yourselves do not enter, nor will you let those enter who are trying to.[14] [a] 15 “Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You travel over land and sea to win a single convert, and when you have succeeded, you make them twice as much a child of hell as you are. 16 “Woe to you, blind guides! You say, ‘If anyone swears by the temple, it means nothing; but anyone who swears by the gold of the temple is bound by that oath.’ 17 You blind fools! Which is greater: the gold, or the temple that makes the gold sacred? 18 You also say, ‘If anyone swears by the altar, it means nothing; but anyone who swears by the gift on the altar is bound by that oath.’ 19 You blind men! Which is greater: the gift, or the altar that makes the gift sacred? 20 Therefore, anyone who swears by the altar swears by it and by everything on it. 21 And anyone who swears by the temple swears by it and by the one who dwells in it. 22 And anyone who swears by heaven swears by God’s throne and by the one who sits on it.”

Jesus gives a little more explanation as to what they were doing. They had a whole hierarchy built around what promises or contracts could be counted on and what ones couldn’t. They might swear to do something by the altar and that was a binding contract or oath, but if they swore by the gift on the altar, it wasn’t a binding oath or promise. So, I can only imagine that they were tricking people. Give me this much money and I swear by the bull on the altar I will do X for you. You will get the best seat at church or a special blessing from me in front of everyone. So, they handed over the money and the promised action did not take place because they swore by the gift not the altar itself. I think kids probably feel like this in negotiations with their parents or teachers all the time. When things are not going well, we can make a variety of promises just to get our kids motivated to clean their room, quiet down, be nice to one another, etc. Yet the moment passes and we let the promise fade because it was motivated by what we needed the kids to do more than it was by a desire to fulfill a promise. Insurance companies make policies look great to you on the outside because insurance companies want to get your money, but look for every loophole when it comes time to pay because they don’t want to pay.

This is something that touches even the most trustworthy among us. We are so focused on our needs in a particular moment that we use our words to get the other person to do what we want them to do without really thinking through what we are promising. Jesus encourages us to avoid this behavior. Don’t do it, He says, because this is not how followers of Christ are meant to treat one another. We aren’t supposed to be playing a game where we are jockeying for advantage against one another.

I grew up in a family that took this very seriously. My dad is a man of his word and does what he said he was going to do and expects us to do the same. Perhaps that is why this teaching seems so simple and straightforward to me and negotiation feels quite foreign to me. A couple of months ago, my wife and I were looking for a newer car for her to haul Cohen around in and I found myself at a car dealership. Now, I can feel the anxiety that some of you are experiencing just by mentioning this process. It just feels slimy. The car salesman is trying to make the max amount of money they can from the interaction and you are trying to save the most money you can. So, with your two opposed values you enter conversation.

I don’t like negotiation. Perhaps because of how I was raised, I just want to have everything on the table and have a yes or no. I told the salesman what kind of car we were interested in and how much we could pay before we even did a test drive and told them we would not waste their time if we weren’t even in the right ballpark. Of course, we weren’t, but they were unwilling to tell us that. So, three hours later, we finally left hungry, upset, and cranky—and our ten-month old was even worse off. How does this happen? The dealership thought they could use words to trick me into going against what I said at the very beginning, partially because, I am sure they didn’t believe me.

The worst consequence out of it though was that we all had a wasted evening and I know what dealership I won’t ever go to again. The positive result was it led me to another dealership who I would absolutely buy from again someday. There are manipulations and false promises that have a far greater reach and impact though aren’t there? Guys can desire to have a physical relationship with girls, so they make promises that they don’t really intend to keep. This can be devastating because a young woman might think that she is now in a serious relationship and she might feel thrown away by this guy who wasn’t being serious. A charismatic leader can promise that if you give your life to support his or her cause that you will receive financial prosperity or peace or something else and when they turn out to be a crook it erodes people’s trust and ability to follow.

Ultimately, I believe we manipulate others by false promises because we don’t actually believe that we have a good Father looking out for us. We feel that we have to fight for our own and do our best to control other people and outcomes in order to make our way in this world. Sadly, we have become convinced that when the cost becomes too great, it is okay to violate promises, so we build in loopholes in our minds. Personally, I have felt that pain of a broken promise or contract and I know many of you have as well. You sit across the table and you hear those terrible words, I no longer want to be with you or we need to let you go as if you were a disease. But you promised… but I haven’t done anything to deserve this… my contract with you states… why aren’t you honoring that?

It is time to start fighting. I think Jesus’ call is to trust in someone bigger than yourself. You don’t have to fight for what you feel you deserve. You don’t have to try and manipulate others to get what you want because you find that you are content in Him. It is a husband who sacrificially loves his wife to the end, even when she is sick or can’t return that love. My grandmother had terrible dementia for almost ten years. She had it so bad, she had to live in a memory care facility for most of those years, but my grandfather never gave up on his marriage vows. He went and had lunch with her multiple times a week every week. He was a man of his word even when it wasn’t easy, even when it cost him something. Now, I am in no way advocating that you stay in an abusive relationship, but there are moments when you might be duped or someone takes advantage of you. I don’t want that for you and be wise not to fall for it again, but sometimes you have to let the results lie with our Heavenly Father. We have to trust that He will be the one to make things right and set accounts straight.

As I have faced different circumstances in my life, I have just found that God will let us rely on human resources like lawyers or contracts, etc., but that He will let it lend to human-sized results. Yet, when I have chosen to rely on God to rectify a situation and set accounts straight, I have had access to God-sized resources. It doesn’t mean that I always received a material compensation to equal the loss, but that what He filled in was more than any court or lawyer could have given to me. What it required was that I let go of control.

In conclusion, I for sure hope that you don’t make contracts you don’t intend to keep or find loopholes and gaps in order to get your way, but more importantly, I encourage you to ask yourself where you are putting your trust? Perhaps as you come in today you are even carrying some church hurt with you because someone in a church made some promises to you that they never kept or even worse, they manipulated you and took advantage of you for their own gain in the name of Jesus. I am sorry that happened and the fact that the church is generally a place where people are trustworthy makes that reality even more shocking. I only pray that you can take a moment to turn your heart towards Jesus and the resources that He has and let Him fill up that which you lack because He is trustworthy and does keep His promises, especially His promise to never leave or forsake you.

The truth is that as much as we would like to be the masters’ of our own destiny, we aren’t. Jesus goes on later in the Sermon on the Mount to say that we can’t make even one hair on our heads white or black. If we have no control over such a simple thing as the color of hair on our heads or the amount, how can we think that we can make wild promises to people or be unwilling to forgive when people let us down? Our hope isn’t in having control over our world, but in accessing the resources of Christ to whom all things are given in heaven and on earth.

Life Level Application

1. What is it like to deal with a trustworthy person vs. an untrustworthy one?

2. What makes people look for loopholes and ways out of promises they have made?

3. How does placing your trust in God allow you to be a person who is both true to their word and someone who can forgive others when they aren’t true to theirs?

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