Overcoming Obstacles Series

This too is what the apostle Paul and his co-workers discovered in their ministry among the Corinthians and other Gentiles. Paul reminds the church at Corinth that he and his co-workers are legitimate and trustworthy leaders of church precisely because they have been courageous, confident, and trusting in the LORD even in the face of overwhelming obstacles. He tells the Corinthians that he and his co-workers put no obstacles in anyone’s way so as to keep the door open for them to receive the ministry of Paul and his friends and to be given the message of the gospel. However, Paul goes on to tell them that he and his co-workers have themselves faced and overcome many obstacles. Then he lists the obstacles they had to face: great endurance, afflictions, hardships, calamities, beatings, imprisonments, riots, labours, sleepless nights, hunger, being dishonoured, being treated as persons of ill repute and as impostors, being regarded as unknown strangers, being punished and regarded as dying, being poor and having nothing. WOW! WHAT A LIST OF OBSTACLES! Yet, Paul and his co-workers remained faithful, trustworthy disciples of Christ and, with the LORD’s help were able to face and overcome all of their obstacles.

It is oftentimes only when we realise how all the odds are against us; how ill equipped we are; how overwhelming and giant-sized our obstacles are that our LORD can work many, many wonderful things in us and through us as we face and overcome those obstacles.

Some of the world’s greatest men and women have been saddled with disabilities, adversities (and obstacles) but have managed to overcome them. Cripple him, and you have a Sir Walter Scott. Lock him in a prison cell, and you have a John Bunyan. Raise him in abject poverty, and you have an Abraham Lincoln. Subject him to bitter religious prejudice, and you have a Benjamin Disraeli. Burn him so severely in a schoolhouse fire that the doctors say he will never walk again, and you have a Glenn Cunningham, who set a world’s record in 1934 for running a mile in 4 minutes, 6.7 seconds. Deafen a genius composer, and you have a Ludwig van Beethoven. Have him or her born black in a society filled with racial discrimination, and you have a Booker T. Washington, a Harriet Tubman, and Marian Anderson, or a George Washington Carver. Make him the first child to survive in a poor Italian family of eighteen children, and you have an Enrico Caruso. Have him born of parents who survived a Nazi concentration camp, paralyse him from the waist down when he was four, and you have an incomparable concert violinist, Itzhak Perlman. Call him a slow learner, “retarded,” and write him off as ineducatable, and you have an Albert Einstein. 1

These are only of few of the countless people who have displayed courage, confidence and trust in the LORD to overcome giant-sized obstacles. They are an inspiration to us all. They remind us that we too are able to overcome life’s obstacles when we face them with courage, confidence, and bedrock trust in the LORD.

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1 Cited from: James S. Hewett, editor, Illustrations Unlimited (Wheaton, ILL: Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., 1988), pp. 19-20.