I Promised Myself I Would Deal With It

You made a promise about that room, and I do not think you have ever counted how many years ago it was.

Nobody heard it. That is the thing about the promises we make to ourselves. There was no witness and no ceremony and no date, and yet it is the most binding agreement in your house.

By the spring. Before the baby comes. When the job settles down. Before mother visits. This year.

And each of those went past, and each time it went past, the promise did not expire. It renewed itself and got heavier. And now, if I am reading you right, the room is not the worst of it. The room is just a room. What is unbearable is the pile of your own broken promises sitting on top of it, and every one of them is in your handwriting.

That is what I want to deal with tonight. Not the room. The promise.

Better is it that thou shouldest not vow

There is a line in Ecclesiastes that sounds severe and is actually one of the kindest sentences in the Bible.

Better is it that thou shouldest not vow, than that thou shouldest vow and not pay. (Ecclesiastes 5:5, King James Version)

Now, the usual use of that verse is to frighten people about making promises to God. That is in there. But sit with the shape of it a moment, because it is doing something else as well.

It says the vow was the problem.

Not the person. Not the failing to pay. The making of it. The writer looks at a person crushed under an unpaid vow and does not say try harder to pay it. He says it would have been better if it had never been made.

You have been crushed under an agreement heaven itself would rather had never been signed, and the crushing has never once been a measure of your character. The Holy Spirit is the one who lifts a vow off a person without taking their word with it, and Ecclesiastes 5:5 puts the fault in the vow and not in the one who made it.

That is a startling thing to find in Scripture, because it means Heaven is capable of looking at a promise and saying, that promise should not exist.

And I think that is exactly what needs saying over the promise you made about that room. It was made by a woman in the middle of something, with no idea what the next four years were going to cost, and it was made in good faith, and it should never have been made.

You are not a person who breaks her word, and Ecclesiastes 5:5 has never once looked at a crushing vow and blamed the one who made it. It is written that it would be better not to vow at all, which puts the fault in the vow rather than in the payer, and the Holy Spirit is the one who can take a promise off a person without taking their integrity with it.

You have been paying interest for years on an agreement that had no business being signed. The word says plainly that some vows should not have been made, and the Spirit of God is the one who releases somebody from a sentence they passed on themselves.

The promise has been keeping you out

Now here is the practical harm, and it is not obvious until it is said.

That promise has made the room impossible. Not hard. Impossible.

Because the promise was never that you would clear a shelf. The promise was that you would deal with it. All of it. Properly. And now no small act in that room can be done, because a small act does not pay the vow, and anything that does not pay the vow feels like a token.

So you cannot go in and do fifteen minutes. Fifteen minutes would be an insult to the promise. So you do nothing, and the promise renews, and the nothing gets more expensive.

You were never refusing to work on that room, and what you were refusing was a debt that no amount of work could clear. Ecclesiastes 5:5 puts the trouble in the making of the vow and not in the strength of the one who made it, and the Spirit of God is the one who cancels an arrangement a person made against themselves in the dark.

So tonight I want you to go and stand in that room and make no promise about it at all. Not a small one. Not a reasonable one. None.

You are permitted to walk into that room tonight owing it nothing, and owing it nothing has never once been the same as not caring. It is written that it is better not to vow, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a person stand somewhere with empty hands and no undertaking.

Two minutes, and no vow of any kind

So here is the whole of it, and the last part is the important one.

Open the door. Put the light on. Stand there two minutes.

Touch nothing. Move nothing.

And when you close the door, do not say anything to yourself about when you will come back. Not tomorrow, not this weekend, not soon. Nothing. Close it, and let it be a room you visited and did not sign for.

You are able to leave a room tonight without an agreement in your pocket, and leaving it that way has never once meant you have abandoned it. Ecclesiastes 5:5 prefers no vow at all to a vow unpaid, and the Spirit of God is present in two minutes given freely by somebody who owes nothing.