Robert McLaughlin Bible Ministries
God loves to do the things we have absolutely no power to do, and that’s the way He has planned our live.
Sunday, December 21, 2003
God seems to specialize in surprises but especially the impossible.
God loves to do the things that we have absolutely no power to do and that is the way He had planned our life.
MAT 19:26 “With men this is impossible, but with God all things are possible.”
We are all faced with a series of great opportunities brilliantly disguised as impossible situations.
God prefers to work in that situation that you deem impossible.
Some of God’s best gifts come in the form of tiny infant surprises, unexpected arrivals.
Malachi, four centuries earlier, had predicted that One would come who would be the SUN of righteousness.
The One called the Sun of righteousness, TLJC, would be preceded by a forerunner who would have the spirit of Elijah.
Christmas is a time when we, as ambassadors of Christ, EPH 6:20, 2CO 5:20, should also announce the fact that Messiah has come by whatever means possible.
“Herod the great” was the one, MAT 2:16, who murdered all the male children who were in Bethlehem and in all its suburbs, from two years old and under.
Who would have ever expected in a time like that when the tunnel seemed longest and darkest, that God would step in and bring fulfillment to the words of Malachi?
In the midst of the darkness, discouragement, and depression of an era when it seemed that God would be silent for the rest of time, God slipped onto the scene of this earth, and He pointed to an aging priest.
The Jewish Rabbis said that seven people were excommunicated from God and the list began,
“A Jew who has no wife, or a Jew who has a wife and who has no child.”
Old people have a marvelous and wonderful life when they reach spiritual maturity and occupation with Christ.
The common practice would be that the priest would go into the Temple accompanied by two associates who would stir up the coals and add to the coals so the coals would be hot.
Two angels named for us in scripture:
Michael and Gabriel.
God is full of surprises, He never runs out of fresh ideas, He wants to get Zacharias’ attention.
All the more reason to become good students of the Scriptures so that we may be trained vertically.
MAL 4:2 But for you who fear My name the sun of righteousness will rise with healing in its wings; and you will go forth and skip about like calves from the stall.
MAL 4:5 Behold, I am going to send you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and terrible day of the Lord.
“Filled” is not pleroo, used for the filling of the Spirit; it is pletho = supplied, accomplished, or furnished.
Your wife Elizabeth will bear you a son.
Like many of us he was a man who was fixed on the horizontal.
He focused on age, he listened to all the doubts and skepticism about himself.
Just like you will hear from people who will remind you all the time of limitations of the past, so therefore you will live in the backwash of those limitations forever.
“My wife is advanced in [hemera] days.”
Ego.
We know what we saw.
We know what we heard.
We know what we experienced.
But we are not able to put it into words.
He is learning a lesson in silence he never learned when he had speech.
He is learning when God gives you a promise, you can bank on it.
To think that one would be the vehicle for giving birth to the baptizer, what a contribution to the world.
1. Our impossibilities are the platforms upon which God does His best work.
2. God can do His best work, when we are faced with such impossible situations.
3. God’s delays are not necessarily His denials.
4. When God intervenes, His surprises are always for His immediate glory and for our ultimate good.