The Are you struggle to stay committed beyond the first couple of weeks of January?

Today on Truth for Life

we'll see how quickly the Israelites neglected commitments they had made to

God in Nehemiah's absence and we'll see his response when he returned to Jerusalem.

Alistair Begg is teaching from the closing verses in the establishing of holy habits and the establishing of kept promises is imperative to spiritual wholeness.

When we married, we made a commitment to holy habits. When we married we made a

commitment to certain foundational promises and the keeping of these promises is absolutely crucial to the well-being of

the relationship which we enjoy with our spouse.

Therefore, someone encouraging us to maintain such promises

is in no way doing as a disservice,

is in no way calling us into some kind of legalistic lifestyle but is seeking

by their encouragement to bring us into all the fullness and all the benefits of what that

relationship might mean in the same way. When we say that we will

follow hard after Christ, when we commit ourselves to obeying fully all of his law, not so that we might be accepted by him

because we know that that could not be, but on account of the fact that we have

been accepted by grace through faith and made righteous in his sight

so that our commitment to the promises are not in order to gain acceptance but are on the

basis of the fact that God and His mercy has reached

down to us. Now the particular emphasis here we need be in no doubt about. It is simply this issue of what they were going to do on the

Sabbath. And they had said we are not going to monkey around with the Sabbath thing. But the traders had come into town,

they're up to their old tricks. Presumably they began to say to one another, you know, there's no reason to be so strict in particular

about this. After all, God knows that we have responsibilities. The

...