August 28, 2015
Let Your Yes Be Yes
We just bought some new cordless phones for the house and while checking out the young sales clerk
asked if we wanted to purchase an extended warranty for $39. I told her no thanks
and in her sales-clerk-knows best attitude she said, “Are you sure?” No doubt corporate
headquarters trained her to push for the warranty and if I had hemmed or hawed around
I could understand how she might have thought I was on the fence. However, I
didn’t hesitate and my enunciation of “no” was pretty clear. Jesus instructed
believers that they were not to swear oaths, but I can almost hear this
generation saying, “Are you sure?” Jesus
said, “Simply let your ‘Yes’ be ‘Yes,’ and your ‘No,’ ‘No’; anything beyond
this comes from the evil one” (Matt 5:37 NIV).
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Gail;
-----One of my favorite uncles several times got quite flabbergasted over my habitual question raised at most everything anybody told me: “Are you sure?” It wasn’t that I had trouble with “yes” being yes and “no” being no. At the time I was only seventeen, a bit young to understand. So I couldn’t answer Uncle Bob when several times he asked, “Why do you always ask me if I’m sure?” Later, much later in life, actually, I finally comprehended from where my bothersome question sprouted.
-----When I was eleven my parents divorced. Some well educated and respected geologists theorize that twelve thousand years ago a rogue planet came careening through the solar system wrenching Pluto away from Neptune, tipping Uranus onto its side, destroying a planet between Mars and Jupiter, pelting Mars with a violent blast of debris, crossing paths with Earth inside the moon’s orbit, tilting Earth’s axis of rotation, speeding up its rotation period twenty-percent, causing an absolutely catastrophic, global flood, leaving caves around the world filled with crushed bone rich sediments, burying animals alive in standing positions, freezing them alive on their feet in artic regions, and jumbling up great tracts of water-laid debris and parts of animals of such mixed fauna that dead sea creatures are now even found there amongst dead land critters. That’s also how my parents’ divorce left my life (especially at the marriage altar, let your “yes” be yes.)
-----But, always being the serf to reality’s fiefdom, I could not carelessly think about my parents’ exploded planet pelting my Mars. I understood the damage was real. I understood its solution need also be real. I think even before this Phaeton mussed up our little family of planetoids, I had a love affair with reality. I thank God the devastation greatly intensified that instead of ripping it apart, too.
-----Consequently, I became very careful about everything I saw, heard, read, and learned. Having been introduced at eleven to the utter depths falsehood can reach, and the monsters it breeds there to crawl up into our lives, eating their ways through our sanity, destroying the emotions of our stability, I developed this nasty habit of requiring everything new to my mind to withstand the rigors of a double-check before I allowed it to become a part of my ongoing thinking. And that’s why at seventeen I was always asking everyone, “Are you sure?” If I had understood this then, I would have been asking, “Have you double-checked this?”
-----Before your “yes” can be yes it has to be “yes“. This gem from the Lord has three facets. 1) We are nobody to swear by anything. We are feckless little mites knowing hardly enough to tell “yes” from “no” anyways. That’s why God had to give us a Bible. Therefore, 2) make certain your “yes” is indeed yes, or your “no” is indeed no before you give it. We worship the Lord of Truth, so love truth and be true in your thoughts, feelings, speaking, and deeds. 3) Once you have double-checked your “yes“ or “no“ and given it, then abide by it. Let it not only be “yes“ or “no“ when given, but let it also be that thereafter.
Love you all,
Steve Corey
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