“He said to the man with the withered hand, ‘Stretch out your hand'” (Mark 3:5).

The very thing the man could not do Jesus asked of him.

“And he stretched it out, and his hand was restored as whole as the other.”

To the young virgin of Nazareth, the angel of the Lord said, “For with God, nothing shall be impossible” (Luke 1:37).

He seems to love doing the impossible.

The impossible. Such a novel concept.  As though anything were beyond the scope of the Creator of the galaxies.

I’m recalling that a college class in the late 1940s once expressed the doubt that God understood radar.  Radar?  Well, it was all the rage back then, a scientific thing that had given us a great advantage during the Second War, and people were just getting their minds around it.

These days, ninth graders understand radar.

There was a time when radio, phonographs, motion pictures, and x-rays staggered human imagination by their sheer genius and complexities.  Germ warfare, penicillin, and radiation were once scoffed at.  And then there were the Wright Brothers who thought heavier-than-air contraptions ought to be able to fly.

The human mind is wonderful and pitiful.  It is amazing what it can dream up and accomplish, and sad how it can close itself off to something new and untried.

So many things God has done would be thought of as impossible.

Noah would be building an ark perhaps a hundred miles inland, with which he would save a sample of each animal species when God flooded the earth.

Ninety-year-old Sarah would give birth by her one-hundred-year-old husband Abraham to a son.

Moses, an 80-year-old has-been, will lead the million or more Hebrew slaves from Egypt on a forty-year-expedition and deposit them at the back door of the Promised Land.

During that forty year jaunt, God will provide water for Israel from a rock, drop meat from Heaven for them on a daily basis, and see that their clothes do not wear out and their shoes remain dependable.

God will save three Hebrew lads from a fiery furnace, protect Daniel in a den of starving lions, and use a shepherd boy to slay a fierce giant.

Three hundred men armed only with a torch and a clay pot led by a skeptic named Gideon would win a great victory over the murderous Midianites.

To accomplish His will and achieve His purposes, God asked Noah to build the ark, Abraham and Sarah to leave home for an undisclosed location hundreds of miles away, and Moses to walk into the throne-room of Egypt and confront the Pharaoh.

He would ask the million ex-slaves to follow Moses into a barren desertland without adequate supplies and depend on Him for their provisions.

God would ask the young virgin to bear His Son and later watch Him crucified before the cruel world.

Jesus would touch a leper and heal him, then ask him to keep this news to himself.

Jesus would ask a tax collector to leave everything and follow Him.

Jesus would ask a man with a withered hand to stretch it out in faith toward Him.

Jesus would ask His disciples to cheer up and believe in Him at the very time He was about to be arrested, given a kangaroo trial, and crucified.

He does not mind asking a lot.

He gives a lot in return.

He asks you and me to deny ourselves, take up our crosses, and follow Him.  When we do this, He promises that His yoke is easy and His burden is light.

He promises that “if you would believe, you would see the glory of God” (John 11:40).

We respond, “Uh, Lord, first show me your glory and then that will make it a lot easier to believe in you.”

But it doesn’t work that way.

Only those who believe see His glory. Only those who are willing to go forward in faith, obeying Him “anyway,” only they get the miracles.

Let your church choose leaders who believe in a God of the impossible.  That sounds so righteous, but there is a catch.  The God of the impossible will be asking the impossible from us, things we feel we cannot do, that are beyond our limitations, outside our capacity, more than a reasonable person can do.

You either have faith or you do not.

“Without faith, it is impossible to please God” (Hebrews 11:6).  “We walk by faith and not by sight” (2 Corinthians 5:7).  “The just shall live by faith” (Habakkuk 2:4; Romans 1:17, Galatians 3:11, and Hebrews 10:38).

All who would live by faith may expect the following….

1) You may expect to be asked to do what you cannot do, give what you do not have, go where you have never been, achieve more than you ever thought possible.

2) You may expect good people with a lot of everything but faith to want to clip your wings, discourage you, vote against you.

3) You may expect to love them anyway because you understand that the choice is always between faith and fear. (See Mark 4:40). Where the faith is small, the fears are strong.

4) You may expect the path to get hard before it gets good.  The Lord will not hesitate to do whatever it takes to strengthen your faith.

5) You may expect God to show up and achieve an amazing victory.

6) You may expect some areas of that victory to be a complete surprise, unlike anything you expected.

7) You may expect that everyone will now get on board, and vow that they have been with you from the beginning. When that happens, do not rebuke them but welcome them and rejoice.

Therefore, when you start out to do the faith-thing, you should give thanks to the Lord from the very first.

Anyone can celebrate after it’s all over.

Faith means you will celebrate from the start.

Some will find that crazy and call you unrealistic.  Do it anyway.

You serve a God of miracles for whom the impossible is all in a day’s work.