To Encourage You

Mark 9:23 “All things are possible for one who believes.”

Currently I’m reading a book by the late English pastor F.W. Boreham.  Have you ever heard of him? What an incredibly gifted writer he was. What a gift for explaining spiritual truth.  Yesterday I read an essay he wrote about impossibilities.  He wrote about the existence of so many things in our world that were once thought to be totally impossible. For example, what person who lived 500 years ago would have ever believed that man could fly around the world and even to the moon.  Impossible! Yet it was not.  Who would have believed that someone could talk to a person in another city, state, or nation, or communicate instantly with someone on the other side of the world before we had the telephone and then the internet?  It was definitely possible although at one time it would have been thought otherwise.  And who would have believed that you could instantly light a home, indeed a whole city, with the flip of a switch?  But again, what was once impossible was not impossible at all. There are thousands of other such examples.  But in all of this, there had to be someone, first, who believed. They had to “see” things before they existed, and work towards that end for it to occur. Think Alexander Graham Bell or Thomas Edison. What was impossible to others was not impossible to them, because they believed.  Belief always came first.  Boreham even points to Jesus’ words about the ability to move a mountain if we only believe.  Seems impossible, doesn’t it? But for those who have believed that there was copper, coal, or other valuable things under a mountain – well, they moved those mountains as we all can see. 

Belief comes first, for the impossible things to become possible.  But so often, as in the examples above, belief must be followed by hard work for the impossible to come to be.  I have a friend from Uganda who looked at the plight of so many abandoned children in his country.  He believed that he could help them, and so he acted on that belief.  At a young age he took a step of faith to reach out to these children and step by step he started an orphanage called Agape House. As a result, he and those who have worked with him have helped hundreds of children over the years.  Recently, he saw the need for a school for these children, and he believed that such a school could be built.  Step by step he acted on that belief, looking to his Heavenly Father for help, and today there’s a school building at Agape House and children are being educated there every day.  Much closer to home, there were those who saw a need for helping the youth of Penns Valley who believed that a Youth Center could be the vehicle to help. Step by step there were those who acted on that belief, and today Penns Valley has been blessed by a Youth Center, and hundreds of children and their families have been helped. 

Belief, then action, then results.  That’s how the impossible becomes possible. Isn’t that the truth?  And so, as God lays on our heart what others may see as impossible, may He give us the faith to believe and give us the strength to act, for as Jesus has told us in the words from the verse above, “all things are possible for one who believes.”