(According to my records, I shared this article in September of 2015. I feel strongly led to share it again. There must be many people out there in couchpotatoland (lol) who need this lesson. It also didn’t hurt me to reread it. Share it with your friends.)
"Is anything too hard for the Lord?" The background for this text is the promise of God to Abraham and Sarah that they would have a child. At the time, Abraham was one-hundred years old and Sarah was ninety years old. After the angel told them they would have a child after all of those years of Sarah’s barrenness, Sarah laughed, and Abraham was incredulous. That was when God said to Abraham, “Is anything too hard for the Lord.” As you probably know, Abraham and Sarah had a child in their old age – as incredible as it seems. They named the child “Isaac,” which in Hebrew means “laughter.” (Who says that God doesn’t have a sense of humor?) Given the results for Abraham and Sarah, the obvious answer to the question is no, there is nothing too hard for the Lord. It’s one thing to read this and agree with it, and it is another thing to apply it to our own lives. For just a moment, put yourself in Abraham and Sarah’s place. They had lived a long time with the frustration that Sarah was barren, but they had probably resigned themselves to that, and their lives were settled. What do you think you would have thought and said in their circumstance? I think you know that the answer is that you would laugh and think it impossible. On one occasion, Jesus said that “with God all things are possible.” We can read this and believe it, but do we apply that wonderful truth to our own lives? When you are faced with health problems, do you believe that nothing is too hard for God? You might say, “But I prayed and I became ill anyway.” That did not mean that it was too hard for God to heal you. What it means is that God chose not to heal you. You will probably never know the answer to the question of why God did not heal you, but He had His purpose(s) for your illness for your life. If nothing else, He might have known that you needed to a few days of rest and reflection, and He allowed you to be sick to accomplish it. I know that I have discovered this in my own illnesses. I might not have realized what God was doing at the time, but looking back I can see what God was doing. In these cases I am grateful that He loves me enough to do for me what I cannot, or will not, do for myself. When you are faced with problems in your life that seem unsolvable, do you think that God can’t remedy that situation? For example, there is someone at your workplace who is difficult for you to get along with. That person rubs you the wrong way every day. You talk to God about it, and it seems that He does nothing about it. Is this person too hard for God to change? If you will just have faith in the God for whom nothing is impossible, you might find that it is not only that person who needs changing, but you also need to change. That person is not too impossible for God to deal with, but God also wants to deal with you. I know that when I have had to deal with recalcitrant people in my own ministry, I have prayed for them and have seen God do a work in my heart that changed me as much as it changed them. When you think that there is no solution to the world problems that we all have to live with daily, does it seem that these events are too hard for God to handle? We might think that God can take care of the little things that bug us, but that the world situation is too much for Him. What you need to do is to go back to the Bible and see that God allowed things to go on for hundreds of years that negatively affected His people, but in the final analysis it worked out according to His purpose. For example, the first church had Saul of Tarsus to deal with. This mean Pharisee was doing everything that he could to destroy the Lord’s work. I imagine that most Christians thought that the situation was impossible, but God changed the man on the Damascus Road. Don’t you think that people like Simon Peter prayed for Saul, or at least prayed for him to cease his activities? Well, their prayers were answered, and once again, we see that nothing is too hard for God. This is true in your life as well. Think about it! Bro. Joe (As I reread this article, I realized that it does not even scratch the surface of our need to trust God's sovereignty, but perhaps it can help you get started in dealing with problems in your life.)
1 Comment
Arnold Carden
1/21/2016 05:39:26 pm
Amen! Praise God for His Love for me, even when I don't deserve it.
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