I have been thinking lately about how casually we speak about commitments now, and how ordinary it has become for people to say something with complete confidence in the moment and then behave as though the words carried no weight once the moment has passed.
There was a time when a handshake meant enough that two people could settle an agreement without pages of paperwork because both understood that their reputation was tied to what they had just promised.
Human nature was no better then than it is now, and dishonest people certainly existed, but there was still a cultural expectation that giving your word meant you had placed your character behind it.
If you said you would do something, you were expected to arrange yourself around that commitment even when carrying it through became inconvenient.
I sometimes wonder how much of that we have lost.
We live in a culture increasingly comfortable with vague answers because vague answers leave room to escape later.
“We’ll see” can linger for days when a simple yes or no would have been kinder.
People agree to plans while privately waiting to see whether something better comes along, offer help because saying no feels awkward, and make promises according to how they feel in the moment without considering what those promises will require once enthusiasm has worn off.
There are reasonable times to say, “I don’t know yet,” and I appreciate someone who refuses to commit before they have enough information to know whether they can follow through.
The problem begins when uncertainty becomes a way of life and our words slowly lose enough credibility that the people closest to us learn to hear every commitment with an unspoken question mark behind it.
Trust is built through incredibly ordinary moments.
Somebody says they will arrive at a certain time, so they arrive.
They tell you they will take care of something, and you discover later that they did.
They make a commitment when it is convenient and keep it after keeping it has become inconvenient.
Eventually you stop wondering whether you can depend upon that person because experience has taught you what their word is worth.
The opposite happens just as naturally.
When promises repeatedly dissolve, people adjust.
They make backup plans, stop depending upon what was said, and protect themselves from the disappointment they have come to expect.
A person can remain dearly loved while becoming someone nobody trusts with anything important, and that is a much sadder thing than I think we often realize.
Children begin learning the value of our word long before they understand the word integrity.
Most of us have watched a parent warn a child repeatedly that a particular behavior will result in losing a privilege, while everybody in the room, including the child, already knows the consequence will probably never happen.
The child pushes again, the parent becomes louder, another warning follows, and eventually the evening ends with the child doing exactly what he wanted while the threatened consequence disappears somewhere along the way.
When this happens repeatedly, the lesson reaches much farther than the behavior being corrected.
The child learns how much weight to assign to his parent’s words.
He discovers whether “no” means no, whether a consequence exists only until enough whining occurs, and whether the adults raising him actually mean what they say.
Once a child figures out that the first five warnings are meaningless, we should not be surprised when he waits for the sixth before paying attention.
I do not believe consistent parenting requires becoming harsh, rigid, or unwilling to reconsider something when new information genuinely changes the situation.
Mercy has a place in parenting, and wisdom sometimes leads us to modify a decision.
Still, there is a difference between thoughtfully reconsidering something and repeatedly making threats we never intended to carry through.
A parent who means what he says often needs fewer words.
That principle reaches far beyond parenting, which is why Scripture speaks so plainly about our speech.
James 5:12 says:
“But above all things, my brethren, swear not, neither by heaven, neither by the earth, neither by any other oath: but let your yea be yea; and your nay, nay; lest ye fall into condemnation.”
Jesus says much the same in Matthew 5:37:
“But let your communication be, Yea, yea; Nay, nay: for whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil.”
There is a simplicity in those verses that our culture could desperately use.
A Christian should not need increasingly dramatic assurances before anyone believes him.
If we regularly have to add, “I promise,” or “I really mean it this time,” perhaps the problem is not that the people around us are too skeptical.
Perhaps our ordinary speech has not proven dependable enough to stand on its own.
That thought reaches into some very ordinary places in my own life.
There have been times I agreed to something too quickly because I wanted to be helpful, only to discover later that following through cost far more time or energy than I had considered.
In the moment, saying yes felt generous.
Later, I had to face the fact that enthusiasm when making a commitment does not lessen the obligation created by giving it.
I think many of us would become more trustworthy if we became slower to promise.
Sometimes the mature answer is simply, “I cannot commit to that.”
There is nothing unkind about an honest no given before someone begins depending upon us.
In fact, I would much rather receive a clear answer from someone who knows his limits than build plans around a cheerful yes that vanishes when the day arrives.
Once we have given the yes, though, Scripture gives us a much less fashionable standard.
Psalm 15 describes the person who walks uprightly before God, and verse four includes the words:
“He that sweareth to his own hurt, and changeth not.”
I find that deeply convicting because there are commitments we make before we know what keeping them will cost.
We agree to something when the calendar is empty, and then another opportunity appears.
We promise our time when we feel energetic, and the day arrives when we are tired.
We give our word while something is easy, only to discover later that honoring it will require rearranging something we would rather keep.
That is often where integrity becomes visible.
Character does not require us to ignore genuine emergencies, illness, or circumstances that truly make a commitment impossible.
Reasonable people understand that life sometimes intervenes.
Yet most of us know, if we are honest, when circumstances have made something impossible and when we have simply decided the commitment is no longer worth the inconvenience.
There is an old-fashioned steadiness in doing what we said we would do after we no longer particularly feel like doing it.
I think Christians especially should care about recovering that steadiness because our testimony is made up of far more than the doctrines we say we believe.
It is also built from thousands of ordinary interactions in which people learn whether the Christian standing in front of them is trustworthy.
If we tell someone, “I’ll pray for you,” those words should eventually reach the throne of God instead of disappearing when the conversation ends.
If we accept responsibility at church, work, or home, people should not have to chase us repeatedly before it gets done.
If we borrow something, repayment should matter to us because we said it would.
If someone has arranged their own schedule around our commitment, we should recognize that backing out casually costs them something even if it costs us very little.
These things may seem too ordinary to be spiritual, but Scripture has never separated character from the ordinary places where character is actually tested.
Ecclesiastes 5:4-5 says:
“When thou vowest a vow unto God, defer not to pay it; for he hath no pleasure in fools: pay that which thou hast vowed. Better is it that thou shouldest not vow, than that thou shouldest vow and not pay.”
The immediate context concerns vows made unto God, yet the passage reveals something about how seriously the Lord views words given in commitment.
Scripture does not treat promises as temporary expressions of whatever we happened to intend at the time.
Our words carry responsibility.
Marriage may be one of the clearest places we understand this instinctively because marriage begins with words we deliberately call vows.
Nobody standing at an altar knows what thirty or fifty years will contain.
They make vows precisely because circumstances will change and feelings will move through seasons nobody can predict.
The promise is meant to give stability when life itself becomes unstable.
That same kind of reliability, on a smaller scale, creates security in families and friendships.
There is something restful about knowing the people closest to you do not require constant monitoring because their word has history behind it.
A child knows Mom and Dad mean what they say.
A spouse knows a commitment will not disappear during the first difficult season.
A friend knows that when you say you will be there, there is little reason to wonder whether you found something more appealing to do.
We have become so protective of our options that perhaps we have forgotten what is gained when we willingly limit them.
Keeping your word does limit you sometimes.
A previous commitment can mean turning down something you would rather do.
Your yes from Tuesday may require something from you on Friday that Tuesday-you did not fully appreciate.
There will be moments when integrity costs convenience, and I think that is part of why reliability has become increasingly uncommon.
We like freedom without remembering that some of the most meaningful things in life are built by people who voluntarily bind themselves to what they said.
I do not write any of this from a place of flawless follow-through.
I know what it is to speak too quickly, overestimate my capacity, forget something I genuinely intended to do, or realize midway through a commitment that I wish I had never agreed to it.
Perhaps that is exactly why this has been on my mind.
I want my words to become simpler as I get older.
I want a yes that does not require an explanation afterward and a no that is honest enough that people do not waste time waiting for me to change it.
I want my children and grandchildren to know that if I say something, they can reasonably build their expectations around it.
And I want the same thing to characterize Christians generally.
There was once a world where a handshake meant something because the people shaking hands understood that their names were attached to the agreement.
Maybe we will never return culturally to a world where a handshake is enough for every transaction, and perhaps that is fine.
But Christians can still become the kind of people for whom a straightforward answer carries weight.
“Let your yea be yea; and your nay, nay.”
Biblical Womanhood
If you’d like to dive deeper into the power of the tongue may I invite you to order this pdf study:
“A Word Fitly Spoken”
Take an honest walk through what God says about the most untamable thing any of us carry, the few inches behind our teeth that can build a home or burn it to the ground.
"Death and life are in the power of the tongue" (Proverbs 18:21), and most of us have felt the weight of that verse from both sides of it.
Together we will sit with the passages we would rather skip, the gossip we excuse and the complaining we have learned to call honesty, and we will let the Lord do the slow work of teaching us to bless instead of wound, and to build instead of tear down, until we can pray with David, "Set a watch, O LORD, before my mouth; keep the door of my lips." (Psalm 141:3)
If you are ready to let God touch the way you speak to your husband, your children, people you love, even people you don’t like, and your own weary heart, come and study the power of the tongue with me.
