As our church group sang at a local nursing home one evening, I noticed a lady feeding a seriously handicapped man. His disability was so severe that he reminded me of an infant, yet the lady persisted very patiently and very gently, just like a mother caring for her child. She later told me that the man was her husband and that every day she came to the nursing home to feed him. When I complimented her on her faithfulness, she replied, “When we were married forty years ago, I made a vow, and I meant every word of it.” In another situation, my friend Mike was happily married with a loving wife and three children. But after he became paralyzed from a work injury, his wife told him, “I never bargained for anything like this,” and she proceeded to divorce him. 

A vow is a voluntary commitment made before God as Jacob did in today’s reading, and it is never to be broken regardless of circumstances. Its seriousness in God’s sight is clearly revealed in Scripture: “When thou vowest a vow unto God, defer not to pay it; for he hath no pleasure in fools” (Ecclesiastes 5:4). Jephthah was one who made a vow and kept it even though it was very difficult to fulfill (Judges 11:29-40). 

The most common vows among Christian people today are those made at baptism, marriage, and ordination to the ministry. These all need to be made in the love and fear of God. They should be preceded by earnest prayer and a sincere seeking of God’s will, and not even the fear of death should cause any of them to be willingly compromised. May we ever be faithful to encourage one another in those vows that we have made. 

Better is it that thou shouldest not vow; than that thou shouldest vow and not pay. Ecclesiastes 5:5 

~ Pete Lewis