March 20, 2025 "But With GOD"!
“The things which are impossible with men are possible with God” (Luke 18:27).
“But With God”!
Some situations really do seem impossible. Don’t they! When I taught history at the predominantly white Walt Whitman H. S. in Bethesda, MD, I loved sharing about trailblazing African Americans like Rebecca Lee Crumpler. In 1864 she battled racism and broke thick barriers to become the first black female medical doctor with an earned MD in the U. S. Think of it! Slavery was still in going on– until it was ended by the 13th amendment in December of 1865.
It is easy to look at your present predicament and assume that you cannot do better because of negative countervailing factors, i.e., “I’ve waited too late; I’m too old; I’m not qualified; other people died with it; I just can’t do it.” The prevailing logic a few years ago was that it was not possible for a young, rather obscure African American man with a name like Barack Hussein Obama to ever join the ranks of Washington, Lincoln, Roosevelt, Kennedy, and Reagan. But he did! And surely, a poor black kid growing up in a sharecropping family in Halifax County, NC, picking cotton, cropping tobacco, plowing fields with mules, and later with tractors, integrating a white school at age 12, being called the N-word every day, threatened while walking home, and physically attacked on school grounds, could not grow up and become the principal of a majority white secondary school in an affluent community. But I did! And not because “All things are possible”…
I have heard songs, sermons, even read books that proclaim, “All things are possible!” But Jesus did not say that in isolation! Barack Hussein Obama could not have become president of the country that produced the Ku Klux Klan, skinheads, neo-Nazi’s, Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, and Donald Trump, simply through the strategizing of people. I could not have overcome the obstacles of poverty, racism, and having the “wrong” skin color to become the leader of a highly esteemed “White” school solely through my own initiative. Jesus said, “With men this is impossible, but with God all things are possible.”
If you are with God, you are not too old; it is not too late; you do not have to die with it because someone else did; God will qualify you for the position that He has for you, because “With God all things are possible!” Don’t worry about the evildoers and workers of iniquity who are wreaking havoc on the country. “For they shall soon be cut down like the grass and wither as the green herb. Trust in the LORD and do good” (Ps. 37:1-3). God is sovereign. Just stay with Him and watch Him bring you through! Rebecca Lee Crumpler provided medical services for many slaves and others who could ill-afford medical care. He wants to use us too to do impossible things! What is the impossible thing that He is waiting on you to partner with him to accomplish?
Focus Quote: “But Jesus looked at them and said to them, ‘With men this is impossible, but with God all things are possible.” –Matthew 19:26 (NKJV)
It seemed like an impossibility for me to complete my book and get it published, but with God…the new devotional anthology by Alton E. Sumner, Standing on the Promises: Defeating Fear and Breaking Barriers, is available right now via:
Amazon.com, Barnesandnoble.