There are few things that can be more heartbreaking than a broken promise. Life is filled with broken promises. Can you think of a promise that was made to you and then was broken? How did you feel? Betrayed? Embarrassed? Angry? Broken promises can hurt terribly and sadly in our world they are pretty common.

Well, when you walk into this church this morning, in a sense you stepped out of that world of promises into the presence of God. God is different. He does not lie. God does, however, make some pretty awesome promises. In this message from the prophet Jeremiah today, we will see that God keeps his promise every single time. God’s promises are certain and they are full of grace.

1. They are certain

First of all, we need to get to know Jeremiah. Jeremiah wrote these words of our sermon text from prison. He was a faithful prophet of the true God and that meant sometimes he had to proclaim a very difficult message to very difficult people. This time it was the king of Judah, a rotten man named Zedekiah. You see, Jeremiah told the king that he was a loser. He would be defeated in the war and the Babylonians would capture him and take him back to Babylon.

God had told Jeremiah that Jerusalem would be destroyed and occupied by a foreign enemy. The people would be hauled away into exile. So here’s the amazing thing. While Jeremiah is in prison waiting for this to happen, his cousin comes to him and tries to get him to buy a piece of land near Jerusalem. Why would Jeremiah shell out money for land that is soon going to be taken over by the enemy?

Yet, God told Jeremiah to do just that. The prophet’s response was understandable. “Why would I pay good money for land that won’t be worth anything in a month when we are led away to exile?” God’s reply? “These people have sinned against me and I will punish them. But here’s my promise. My people will come back to this land. You can be sure of it because I have promised it.”

That is when the Holy Spirit moved the prophet Jeremiah to write the words of our text, “The days are coming, declares the Lord.” The prophet repeatedly wrote those words in his book. Each time he was about to emphasize how God keeps his promises. In this case, Jeremiah was talking about the days when God’s people would return to their homeland and also when the promised Savior return to establish his heavenly kingdom.

“The days are coming.” There is no room doubt. It is certain. God said so. It doesn’t matter how impossible it looks. It doesn’t matter that the enemy is about to take away God’s people into exile. It doesn’t matter that the Savior was to come from David’s line. Yet, in a couple months there would no longer be a physical king in Jerusalem from David’s line. “The days are coming.” God promised it. Jeremiah could count on it. And so can we.

The days are coming. Those are powerful words for you, too. Are you waiting on God to fulfill a promise he has made to you? The days are coming. Are you waiting for God to answer some special prayer? The days are coming. Are you waiting for God to help you out of some personal trial or difficulty? The days are coming. “I am with you always” Jesus promised. “Call upon me in the day of trouble and I will deliver you.”Think of the pages and pages of promises that God has spoken to you. What a comfort to be reminded that God will absolutely, undoubtedly keep every one of them.

Isn’t that the reason this time of the year is so powerful for Christians? Unlike Jeremiah, we have the privilege of seeing the fulfillment of the greatest promise God ever made—a promise that required the eternal God to take on human flesh and blood and become both God and man. Christmas is the celebration of God keeping this promise he made through Jeremiah.

But this season of advent is also about God fulfilling the rest of this promise. We are waiting for Jesus to come again and rescue us not only from the guilt and punishment of sin, but also from the grief and misery that are a part of living in this sinful world. The days are coming when we will live in complete safety, when we will live in the city called “the Lord Our Righteousness” because only what is just and right will be done in the land. The days are coming. We can count on it! God’s promise is certain.

2. They are full of grace

God will keep every promise he has ever made. That is our comfort! Yet, how awful it would be if God only kept his promises when we deserved it?

Look at what was happening to God’s Old Testament people. They were about to receive God’s judgment. They would be torn from their homes, their country, separated from all family and friends. They would no longer be able to worship at the temple, no longer be able to bring sacrifices to the altar or offer the morning and evening prayers.

But this judgment was not coming without reason. In Jeremiah 32, beginning at verse 17, Jeremiah spoke a prayer. He spoke of the great power of God that delivered his people out of slavery in Egypt. But then he said in verse 23, “they did not obey you or follow your law; they did not do what you commanded them to do.” Then in verse 30 he wrote. “The people of Israel and Judah have done nothing but evil in my sight from their youth.” In verse 33 he continued: “They turned their backs to me and not their faces; though I taught them again and again, they would not listen or respond to discipline. They set up their abominable idols in the house that bears my Name and defiled it. They built high places for Baal in the valley of Ben Hinnom to sacrifice their sons and daughters to Molech, though I never commanded, nor did it enter my mind, that they should do such a detestable thing...”

As horrible as the sins of God’s Old Testament people may seem to us today, are they really all that different from what we see happening in our own lives? Jesus summarized God’s law in a word—love. The bitterness, anger, impatience and jealousy that all too often rule our hearts, our mouths and our actions, do these flow from the love God commands? Just because our idols go by different names - money, materialism, worldly pleasures – they are still the same. Baal was the Old Testament god of sex. All too often this detestable god finds his way into our homes and lives today. Sacrificing children? Isn’t sad how often children are sacrificed on altar of worldly pursuits as we push God and spiritual growth to the bottom of our family’s priority list?

What if God spoke promises to us in keeping with our sinful actions? What if we opened the Bible and all we found were phrases like this: the days are coming when the Lord will give you exactly what you deserve! But that’s exactly why the message of the Bible is so great. The Bible is filled with God’s promises of rescue.

It’s so easy for us to get this “religion” thing all turned around—to begin to think that religion is my attempt to make myself righteous before God. That is insane! That’s like trying to bail out a sinking boat with a bucket that has a hole in the bottom. The religion of the Bible is not what man does for God, but what God does for man. The religion of the Bible is not us giving our best to God, but God giving his best for us. The religion of the Bible is not man attempting to overcome his sinful nature on his own, but God giving a new nature to his people through the power of Word and Sacrament.

The religion of the Bible is God promising and giving you everything because he loves you more than anything. He proved this by sending his one and only Son to be born a baby in Bethlehem to live a perfect life in our place, to die an innocent death on the cross to pay for our sins, and to rise form the dead for our justification. It is this love that lays the foundation for every promise that God has made to you and to me. What a comfort to begin this new church year with the powerful reminder that every promise of God is full of grace.

My dear friends, wherever you are in life, whether you’re frazzled because life seems to be asking too much of you, whether you’re filled with anxiety because of something that’s happening in your life, whether you feel ashamed and dirty because some sin has become your master, or you’re just trying to be the light for Jesus that God has called you to be, your greatest comfort is this: God’s promises are certain and full of grace. Hold on to those promises and believe them! Amen.