If you Need a Yet (Not Yeti. A Yet)

Have you ever given yourself a good hard look and thought, “I can’t do it.” Maybe you did some soul searching after hearing a sermon on forgiveness. But after contemplating if you could forgive a person, you realized, “I can’t.” Or maybe you’ve had surgery or been hospitalized and were told to get up and walk down the hall. Laying in bed, you considered how weak you felt. The idea of swinging your legs over the bed seemed impossible and to touch your feet to the hospital floor and take steps insurmountable. Maybe you’ve been nauseated and hanging your head over the toilet. You haven’t slept. You’re weak. You contemplate the twins’ cries to be lifted from the crib and you don’t think you physically have the strength to take care of them all day.  The above situations are ones you’ve perhaps experienced, and somewhere deep down inside you ended up realizing that hard as it was, you were able to do the hard work before you. But there was another person who contemplated his situation and unlike the ones we ended up being able to do, he truly wasn’t able. Yet God was telling him a result that was expected. We find the situation being recounted in Romans 4:17-21. God told Abraham he would be the father of many nations and that he would father children with his wife, Sarah. But listen to his odds for fathering a child. “Without becoming weak in faith he contemplated his own body, now as good as dead since he was about a hundred years old, and the deadness of Sarah’s womb;” Stop right there. Can’t you just see it. Abraham is looking at his body. He’s staring at it. Contemplating it. “Ain’t gonna happen,” he must be thinking. But even if a miracle happened with his body, he turns and looks at his wrinkled wife and contemplates that she wasn’t able to get pregnant in her fertile years. Not gonna happen. “Yet, with respect to the promise of God, he did not waver in unbelief but grew strong in faith, giving glory to God.” Amazing! Whoop it up with me will you, please? We all need more “yet”s in our life. (Not Yetis) Are you with me? Go back and read the progression. Looking at self and others = Dead. Nope. Not gonna happen. Looking at self and others + God’s promises = growing strong in faith and giving glory to God. Friend, do you need a “yet”? A “yet with respect to God” factored into your life, into your situation, into your marriage, into your health, into your child, into your work, into what is happening in our nation?  I need a yet. And I’m planning on factoring it in as I contemplate the “nope, not gonna happens” in my life. I hope you will, too.

“and being fully assured that what God had promised, He was ABLE also to perform.'”  Romans 4:21