Keeping Your Word When It’s Hard (Matthew 5:33-37)

Keeping your word when it’s hard — that’s what I ended up calling this week’s episode. If you’ve already seen the cover art floating around, you know the short version too: let your yes be yes. Same idea. It’s just a lot easier to go along with than it is to actually do.

We’re still working our way through the Sermon on the Mount, and Jesus is talking about something that sounds small at first — swearing oaths — but it’s really about whether people can trust what comes out of our mouth at all.

What Does It Mean to Keep Your Word?

Back in Jesus’ day, folks had this whole system for making a promise sound more serious. You’d swear by heaven, by earth, or by your own head, and some of those counted more than others. There was basically a ranking for how much you were allowed to lie to somebody, depending on which words you used to say it.

Jesus looked at that whole mess and said, real simple — just say yes or no, and mean it. Don’t swear on anything. Your plain word ought to be enough all by itself.

And we do our own version of that today, don’t we. “I promise” doesn’t really mean much anymore. “I swear” sounds a little more serious or “I swear on my life” is supposed to be the one you really can’t break. And underneath all of it is something most of us don’t want to say out loud — that we don’t quite trust our own plain word to be believed, so we keep dressing it up bigger and bigger.

About That Divorce Verse

Before Jesus gets to the oath part, this verse opens with something else — divorce, and the certificates men could hand their wives with almost no reason back then. I know that can be a hard one to hear, especially if divorce is part of your own story. It’s part of mine too.

What matters is what’s underneath both parts of the verses. People were following the rules on paper and missing the whole point. A certificate was legal. An oath sounded serious. Neither one meant a person’s word was actually good.

That’s really the question Jesus is asking here. Not “did you technically keep the rule,” but “is your word something people can actually stand on?”

Think about the small stuff. “I’ll call you back.” “I’ll be there by six.” The promise you made in the middle of an argument that you meant with your whole heart in that moment. Every one of those is a chance to either build a little trust or spend a little trust, and most of us are spending more than we realize.

A Few Places to Start

You don’t need some big gesture to fix this. Just a few small things: say less before you say yes, especially when part of you already knows you can’t follow through. Notice when you’re reaching for a bigger promise — “I swear,” “I really mean it this time” — and ask yourself why the plain version didn’t feel like enough on its own. And when you do say yes, even to something small, treat it like it matters.

That’s really the whole thing. Say what you mean. Mean what you say. Let that be enough.

Listen to keeping your word when it’s hard

This post only covers part of it — the full episode gets into where the oath system in Jesus’ day actually came from, and what it costs to live like your yes just means yes in a marriage, a friendship, or at work. Press play below and let’s talk about it like we’re sitting on the porch.

If you want to read the full passage, Matthew 5:31-37, the Message version and NLT.

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Hey, if you liked this one, make sure to check out these:

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