On March 29^th 1984 Robert Cunningham sat at Sal’s Pizzeria in Manhattan enjoying his all-time favorite meal of linguini and clam sauce.  As he finished his final mouthful he looked at his waitress, Phyllis Penza, whom he had known for the entire ten years that he had been eating at Sal’s, and smiled as he pulled out his wallet to pay the check.  Unfortunately, however, Robert did not have enough money in his wallet to be able to pay the bill and leave Phyllis a tip as well.  He smiled a guilty smile at Phyllis and said, “Sorry.  But, I do have a lottery ticket in my wallet and if I win tomorrow night’s draw I’ll give you half instead of a tip.  Would you be willing to settle for that?”  And Phyllis who knew that Robert had tipped her very well in the past smiled and said, “Of course, that would be fine.  It’s not a problem.”  Twenty-four hours later Robert Cunningham won $6,000,000 in the New York state lottery.  

Now what was Robert to do?  They had not shaken hands on it.  He didn’t swear on the Bible to give her half his winnings, and he hadn’t mentioned the name of God.  But Robert Cunningham was a person who kept his promises.  And so, the first phone call he made was to Sal’s Pizzeria where he got Phyllis on the phone and said, “Guess what?  You just won three million dollars!” 

Absolutely true, in every detail.  I even checked it on Snopes.com.  What would you have done?  If you’re like me you wouldn’t have bought a lottery ticket in the first place.  But what if you had, and you had made the same promise to Phyllis?  Would you have kept the promise?  I suspect that many people would not.  They'd have kept quiet about the win.  They would have taken the six million and moved to California and never gone back into Sal’s Pizzeria and hoped that Phyllis never got to hear about the win and track him down with her big brothers.  (Her name was Penza which sounds Italian … New York City, Italian, maybe you don’t want to mess with Phyllis’s ‘family’, if you know what I mean.)  Or maybe some people in Robert’s situation would have hired a fancy lawyer and got ready to go to court and prove that no formal promise had been made, should Phyllis sue him.  But Robert Cunningham was made of better stuff than that.  His word could not be bought, even for three million dollars.

I wonder what God’s word is worth.  Are there any circumstances in which God would break his promise?  How much would you have to pay him before he’d do that?  Well, it can’t be done.  That’s the advantage of owning the universe - there’s nothing anyone can bribe you with.  And we know that.  We all just got the right answer to the question.  When I asked the question, ‘are there any circumstances in which God would break his promise?’ you thought ‘no’, and that’s correct.  But like so many things in the Christian life we can know the truth intellectually, but we can still find it hard to live as if we actually believed it. 

In this morning’s Old Testament lesson we read some wonderful promises of God through the prophet Micah.  He says, “You, Bethlehem, though you are small among the clans of Judah, out of you will come for me one who will be ruler over Israel.  He will stand and shepherd his flock in the strength of the Lord.  And they will live securely, for then his greatness will reach to the ends of the earth.  And he will be their peace.”  Now I suspect that it would have been very hard for the people Micah was speaking to to believe this.  It was a solemn promise of God, but still it was tough to believe.  The reason is that there was a foreign invasion going on that that time.  To the north the nation of Assyria was attacking Israel.  And they were powerful.  The big empire of the region.  Now God does not promise through Micah that everything is going to be fine.  In fact, it will get harder.  There are foreign armies approaching, and God says that they will have some success.  He says “Israel will be abandoned until the time when she who is in labour gives birth.”  And indeed, they were.  In the year 721 BC Assyria invaded the Northern half of the country and took the people into exile.  But then, Micah says, there will be salvation.  And again, there was.  700 year later there came the fulfilment of the prophecy.  Bethlehem, backwater little Bethlehem, did produce a ruler.  Not in the sense that the people were expecting, of course.  They were looking for a political leader; someone who would overthrow the Romans and establish a proud and independent Israel once again.  What they actually got was the Prince of Peace.  A Saviour who brought freedom for God’s people in their hears and spirits, not in their politics.  And, as we know, because they weren’t expecting this prophecy to be fulfilled by a peaceful Messiah they missed him when he arrived, and worse, killed him.

So let’s think this morning about some of God’s promises.  How about these:

"I will never leave you or forsake you" (Heb. 13:5)

“I am with you always to the end of the age.” (Matt 28:20)

I know the plans I have for you, plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.” (Jer 29:11)

“When you pass through the waters I will be with you, and when you pass through the rivers they will not sweep over you.  When you pass through the fire you will not be burned.”  (Is 43:2)

"I will give you strength" (Isa. 41:10)

"I will help you" (Isa. 41:10)

"I will go before you" (John 10:4)

"Come unto me, all you that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest" (Matt. 11:28)

"If we confess our sins, God is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins, and cleanse us from all unrighteousness" (1 John 1:9)

"No good thing does God withhold from those whose walk is blameless" (Psalm 84:11)

"The Lord will not forsake His people" (1 Sam. 12:22)

"All things work together for good for those that love God" (Rom. 8:28)

And as I read these promises I ask myself, “Why do I act like I don’t believe them?”  I do believe them, but somehow they just don’t penetrate my heart and become the basis for my daily life.  I believe the promise that Jesus will relieve me of my heavy burdens and give me rest, but I still try to carry it all myself, unwilling to let him do it.  I believe that God will never leave me, but I still go about my day as if he were not present – ignoring him and trying to do everything in my own strength.  I believe that all things work together for my good, but I still resist suffering and testing.  I believe that God has forgiven all my wrongs, but I still try to beat myself up over mistakes I’ve made.

Sometimes our beliefs just don’t make the 12-inch drop from our heads to our hearts.  Our beliefs don’t really impact our lives.  And I guess that the true test of how much we believe something is how much we let it change us.  CS Lewis talked about this kind of belief in contrast to the belief that we often have when he wrote, “You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death. It is easy to say you believe a rope to be strong as long as you are merely using it to tie around a box. But suppose you had to hang by that rope over a precipice. Wouldn't you then discover how much you really trusted it?”   And so I find myself saying to God, “Lord, I believe, please help my unbelief.”

Believing and trusting in the promises of God doesn’t come easily or naturally.  Take that last one there for a minute.  Truly believing that God has forgiven us, as he has promised when we confess our sins.  I think that forgiveness is hard for most Christians.  And even those who are really good at forgiving other people can have a struggle doing it to themselves.  When someone else hurts us we may be quick to understand them, we may put ourselves in their shoes and decide that we’re not going to hold their actions against them.  But when we let ourselves down, or do ourselves harm, or fail to live up to our own standards, then we can hold onto to that guilt forever.  So God forgives us, but we don’t.  How crazy is that?  God is holding out forgiveness to us, he says “it’s OK, I do not hold this against you, Christ died for you, I love you, receive my forgiveness”, and we say ‘no’.  We say “What I’ve done is so bad that you can’t forgive me, God.”  And so we miss out on experiencing God’s peace.   We have all come across the experience of the phantom limb that people who have had amputations often experience.  Somewhere, locked in their brains, a memory lingers of the nonexistent limb.  They can experience their toes curling even though they don’t have a foot, or they feel their hands grasping things, even though the arm has been removed.  And this memory of the limb can be so strong that the patient can still feel pain in the arm or leg that isn’t there.  I read a story of a medical school administrator, called Mr. Barwick, who had a serious and painful circulation problem in his leg but resisted doctors’ recommendations to have it amputated.  As the pain grew worse, Mr Barwick grew bitter. "I hate it! I hate it!" he would mutter about the leg. At last he gave in and told the doctor, "I can’t stand it anymore. I’m through with this leg. Take it off.”   Surgery was scheduled.  But before the operation Barwick asked the doctor, "What do you do with legs after they’re removed?"
"We may take a biopsy or explore them a bit, but afterwards we incinerate them," the doctor replied.
And then Barwick made a bizarre request: "I would like you to preserve my leg in a pickling jar. I will place it on my mantle shelf. Then, as I sit in my armchair, I will taunt that leg, ’Hah! You can’t hurt me anymore!’"
And, he got his wish. But the despised leg had the last laugh. Barwick suffered terrible phantom limb pain. The wound healed, but he could still feel the agony of the cramping muscles and swelling tissue, with no prospect of relief.

And that is how we can be with our sins.  We, quite rightly, hate them.  We recognise that we’ve messed up.  We’ve hurt another person.  We’ve harmed ourselves.  We’ve let God down by failing to live up to his standards.  And even though, like the diseased leg, God has removed our sins, we insist on putting them in a pickle jar and placing them on the mantle piece.  And we look at them and remind ourselves of them, and so they still have a power over us that they don’t deserve and needn’t have.  God wants to incinerate the amputated leg and free us to live in the peace and joy of a new and forgiven life.  We insist on remaining stuck in the past, focused on our failings and obsessed with our frailties.

So, that’s just one of the wonderful promises of God to us – the gift of forgiveness.  We’d be foolish to refuse his gift and continue to condemn ourselves.  And it’s just one of so many great promises.  If only we not only believed them in our heads but allowed them to change us, what peaceful and joyful lives we’d have.  Because, God is faithful to all his promises.  Let’s trust and see.