Genesis 18:1-14; Matthew 19:26
GOD IS FULL of surprises. To use baseball jargon, about the time we expect one “low and inside,” He throws one at us “high and outside.” We expect Him to do one thing, and He does another. We anticipate His movement in this direction, but He goes off in that direction. We trust Him to handle something immediately, but He waits and waits, sometimes seemingly forever. Other times we anticipate the need to wait for a long time and come to find that almost overnight He has solved something that appeared to us to be impossible. About the time we think someone is too far gone and will never change – after we’ve put some person on our list of “impossible individuals” – God may just set off and change that person’s heart.
God specializes in the impossible. He does what we have absolutely no power to do. That’s the way He’s planned it.
As a matter of fact, the more we think about it, the more we realize all the ways that we are opposite from our God. We are impotent; He is omnipotent. We are finite; He is infinite. We are limited and restricted; He is neither. He knows no earthly parameters. We operate in time, according to our clocks and calendars, and He is outside of that sphere. He operates in the eternal, so He faces no limitations with what time it is on earth or what the season may be or how old or young we may be. He is at work constantly in the realm of the infinite. His parameters have no boundaries. What we call impossible, God sees as no problem at all. He has never had His first frustration. He has never encountered His first barrier. He has never met – nor will He ever meet – His match. He is matchless.
Look at Matthew 19:26. The disciples have asked Jesus who can possibly be saved if rich people have difficulty getting into heaven. (Remember, this was a time when wealth was thought of as a sign of God’s blessing.) Jesus answers, “Humanly speaking, it is impossible. But with God everything is possible.” Now, in place of the word everything in that verse, put your most impossible item – that person or situation that is on your “impossible” list.
With God, that thing is possible. It may not turn out how we envision it. The answer may come out of left field. But we can trust that God’s plan is better than any we could ever devise.
As a matter of fact, we are all faced with a series of great opportunities brilliantly disguised as impossible situations. Unless I miss my guess, you have already decided that there is no way even God can intervene when it comes to the impossible item you have in mind. If you have, I challenge you to change your thinking. Put your impossible situation in God’s hands. When you do, you’ll experience some of God’s best work.
You see, He prefers to work in those situations. When we throw our hands up and say that there is no way, God loves to prove Himself to be the God of the impossible.
