Our Promises Broken, His Promises Kept

This is another excerpt from a Christmas devotional we are reading, Repeat the Sounding Joy, by Christopher Ash. Here Ash talks about the promises of God revealed at Christmas:

Christmas is God keeping a promise. Christmas had to happen, because God had promised that it would....

Plenty of tears will be shed this Christmas for broken promises: marriage vows cast away, business commitments reneged on, pledges of care for elderly parents or young children lying torn up on the floor like discarded wrapping paper. Maybe your life is littered with the debris of a broken promise, and it hurts so much. Perhaps you feel the dreadful guilt of a promise you yourself have broken, knowing that others are hurting. But - most wonderfully - God is utterly faithful and keeps his promises without fail. Christmas - properly understood - brings comfort to the casualties of broken promises.

....

When God redeemed the people from slavery under the Pharaohs, he was remembering his promise to Abraham. When he brought them into the promised land, he was keeping the vow he had made to Abraham. When he gave them David the king, he was acting on his solemn oath. And yet all these little mercies and rescues pointed forward to one great final keeping of the covenant. On that day the "seed" of Abraham - one wonderful man, God incarnate - came to earth and took upon himself a fully human nature in order to live for, love and die for sinners, and be raised from the dead. The astonishing, unique man, whose birth we remember at Christmas, is the seed of Abraham. In him all the promises of God say their resounding "Yes!" (2 Corinthians 1:20) Jesus Christ is God keeping his covenant to Abraham.

And so, amid the misery of broken promises and shattered dreams, when we despair of our own unfaithfulness to our promises, take heart that at Christmas God has kept his covenant promise to Abraham.