Romans 4:20

The apostle Paul is writing about Abraham, a figure central to Jewish, Christian, and Islamic faith. God had made Abraham an astonishing promise: that he would become the father of many nations — even though Abraham was nearly 100 years old and his wife Sarah had never been able to conceive a child. By every human calculation, the promise was biologically impossible. Paul holds Abraham up as the model of genuine faith: not someone who had no doubts or difficulties, but someone who chose not to give in to unbelief, who kept trusting the promise even when it looked absurd — and who gave God credit before seeing a single piece of evidence that it would come true.

God, I want to be honest — the waiting is hard, and there are things I've nearly let go of. Strengthen my faith the way you strengthened Abraham's, not by making it easier but by making it real. Let me give you glory before I see it, trusting you are more faithful than my doubt. Amen.

Abraham was old. His body, Paul says a few verses earlier, was "as good as dead." Sarah was well past childbearing age. They had been waiting for a promised child for decades — long enough that it had moved from hope to embarrassment to a kind of numb resignation. This was not a short delay. This was a lifetime of standing in front of a door that never opened. And yet Paul says Abraham did not waver. What's striking is that Paul doesn't describe Abraham's faith as the absence of struggle — he describes it as a choice made in the teeth of impossibility. Abraham looked at the evidence and chose the promise anyway. Most of us are waiting on something. A child who hasn't come home. A diagnosis that hasn't improved. A calling that hasn't opened up after years of knocking. Abraham's story doesn't guarantee that what you're waiting for will arrive on your schedule, or even in your lifetime — and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. But it does say something about the shape of real faith: not the absence of doubt, but the refusal to let the waiting hollow you out. Giving glory to God before the outcome is visible — that's the hardest, most honest form of trust there is. And somehow, Paul says, it's also what makes faith real.