Look Forward, Because He Promised
How many sleeps till my birthday?
When exactly is Grandma arriving?
What time can we open the presents?
You don’t need to teach children to look forward. They do it instinctively. We sometimes joke that my nine-year-old daughter has three seasons in her year: the season of looking forward to her May birthday, the season of looking forward to our August family vacation, and the season of looking forward to Christmas.
Children look forward to birthdays, Christmases, family visits, and so on not with a sense of anxiety but with the thrill of anticipation. That’s because someone they trust has promised them it will happen. They know the promise will be kept because they’ve seen these promises being kept before. When mom tells them Grandma is coming to visit, sure enough Grandma comes to visit. And so they hop from foot to foot in excitement as they wait not because they are unsure whether it will happen, but because they are sure that it will—and they can’t wait.
In those moments, children live with a kind of patient impatience until what they’ve been promised becomes their reality. You could call it eagerness. You could call it hope.
In doing so, they remind me of something that is fundamental to, but much forgotten in, my own Christian life.
A People Of Promise
If you’re anything like me, it’s easy to have your gaze focused on today—on what needs to be done, on what isn’t going to get done. And when we lift our eyes to look to tomorrow, or next year, or next decade, our sight can be filled with the worries prompted by future uncertainties.
Our looking forward can so easily be filled with anxiety rather than anticipation.
But by faith in Christ we are God’s people. And God’s people have always been, and still are, a people who can look forward to what has been promised. We are a people who are able to—commanded to, in fact—gaze into the future not with anxiety but with anticipation.
Why? Because we are a people of promise.
One day, the clouds will part and you will see the Lord Jesus, coming in power and glory. That’s a promise to you.
One day, you will live in a perfect place, without conflict or chaos. That’s a promise to you.
One day, your body will know neither failure nor frailty, and you will look in the mirror without disappointment or despair. That’s a promise to you.
One day, you will not be burdened by regret, by the reality of your sin, or by the consequences of someone else’s flaws or sins. That’s a promise to you.
One day, you will sing for joy, with no inner taint of sadness or fear. That’s a promise to you.
One day… you will stand before the throne of God, and all God’s promises to you will have come true.
“God’s people have always been, and still are, a people who can look forward to what has been promised.”
But Really?
I write these things about our future, and then I look around at our world in all its brokenness. I look at myself in all my stumblings and failings and… it all seems so unlikely. To think that that happy ending really will one day be our lived experience. It feels too much, too hard, too impossible.
And it is. But when we feel that impossibility, we are in the place where faith can grow: because when we feel that impossibility, God’s Word tells us to look to the past, where we see that the God who has made these impossible promises about the future has already kept equally impossible promises in the past.
This is the God who promised an elderly, infertile couple a son, and a family, and a nation. And then did it.
This is the God who promised an enslaved people their freedom, and a land, and prosperity. And then did it.
This is the God who stood in that land, among that nation, and said, “The Son of Man is going to be … killed, and after three days he will rise” (Mark 9:31). And then did it.
This is the God who always keeps his promises.
And so we wait with impatient patience (watch a kid waiting for something they have been promised, and you’ll see that’s not an oxymoron). With eagerness. With hope.
As the apostle Paul says, “We wait eagerly for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. For in this hope we were saved [as] we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience” (Rom. 8:23-25).
Or as my friend, the pastor and author Rico Tice, likes to say, as Christians we have “a joyful expectation for the future, based on true events in the past, which changes everything about our present.”
“Perhaps you find it hard to remember to look forward with joyful anticipation. Perhaps you need to return to God’s Word, reading it consciously and deliberately as a story of promise”
The Story of God’s Promises
Perhaps, like me, you find it hard to remember to look forward with this kind of joyful anticipation. Perhaps, like me, you find it easy to be burdened by the regrets of the past, dominated by the needs of today and weighed down by the anxieties of tomorrow.
Perhaps, like me, you need to return to God’s Word, reading it consciously and deliberately as a story of promise. Look for God giving his word that something incredibly unlikely will happen—and then keeping his word. See how his Old Testament people finish looking forward to the keeping of his promise that one great and awesome day, he himself will come to his temple (Mal. 3:1; 4:5). Feast on the Gospels’ accounts of how he did just that in the person of the Lord Jesus, and of how “all the promises of God find their Yes in him” (2 Cor. 1:20). Follow the ways of the early church, who learned to look back to all the promises Jesus kept in his life, death, resurrection, ascension, and outpouring of the Spirit; and therefore were enabled to look forward with certainty and joy to all that he would yet do, in the future. If you have children in your home, perhaps you can read it that way with them, too, so that they can connect their natural posture of looking forward to their view of eternity as they discover that God always keeps his promises.
You don’t need to teach children to look forward with anticipation to things they have been promised. But perhaps today we need to remind our own hearts to do so.
“Come, Lord Jesus,” we pray, just as the apostle John did as he signed off the final chapter of the final book of the Scripture (Rev. 22:20). Come, Lord Jesus. And he will. Because he promised.
Carl Laferton is the author of God’s Big Promises Bible Storybook and The Garden, the Curtain, and the Cross as well as several other books for adults and children. He serves as EVP of Publishing at The Good Book Company. Carl is married to Lizzie and they have two children. He loves virtually all sports, though these days is better at watching than playing.
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