How long can you wait for a promise before you start to believe it’s impossible?

It’s a question that cuts to the heart of human experience. We grow restless waiting seconds for a text message to send or for the microwave to finish heating our food. Our modern lives have conditioned us for instant gratification, making the concept of patient waiting feel almost unbearable.

Yet the story of Christmas—the first Advent—is fundamentally a story about waiting. And not just any waiting, but a wait that stretched across centuries, testing the limits of human hope.

The Weight of Silence

The promises began early in Scripture. God spoke of a coming Messiah who would change everything—a ruler, a deliverer, a king unlike any other. The prophet Isaiah declared:

“For to us a child is born, to us a son is given, and the government will be on his shoulders. And he will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.”

Micah added that this promised ruler would come from Bethlehem, standing to shepherd his flock in the strength of the Lord, bringing security that would reach to the ends of the earth.

Beautiful promises. Breathtaking promises. But then came the waiting.

From the first prophetic promise in Genesis 3, thousands of years passed. By the time we enter the New Testament narrative, nearly 400 years of divine silence had elapsed since the last prophetic word. Four hundred years without a message from heaven. Four hundred years of wondering if God had forgotten His promises.

To put that in perspective, 400 years ago from today, the Pilgrims had just established Plymouth Colony. King Charles I sat on England’s throne. The Dutch were building Fort Amsterdam on an island we now call Manhattan. Galileo was challenging the scientific understanding of his day. That’s how long Israel waited in silence.

And these weren’t peaceful years. Empires rose and fell. The Persians gave way to Alexander the Great and the Hellenistic world. Greek kings outlawed Jewish religious practices, sparking revolts. Civil wars erupted. The Romans arrived as invited liberators and stayed as occupiers. The silence was deafening, and with each passing generation, hope grew dimmer.

The sheer length of the wait made the Messiah’s arrival feel increasingly impossible.

The Impossible Made Real

Then, suddenly, the silence shattered.

An angel appeared to a young virgin named Mary in the small town of Nazareth. The message was staggering: she would conceive and give birth to a son—the Son of the Most High, the one who would reign on David’s throne forever. The Holy Spirit would overshadow her, and though she was a virgin, she would bear the long-awaited Messiah.

Another angel appeared to Joseph in a dream, instructing him not to fear taking Mary as his wife, for what was conceived in her was from the Holy Spirit. The child would be called Jesus, and he would save his people from their sins. He would be Immanuel—God with us.

If the long delay didn’t make the Messiah’s coming seem impossible, the details certainly did. God chose an unmarried teenage girl and a tradesman—people without religious or social merit—to parent the King of Kings? Mary would conceive while still a virgin? And people were supposed to believe this?

It was wild. Scandalous. Seemingly impossible.

Mary and Joseph faced shame, potential ruin, and a journey into the unknown. Yet despite all the questions and concerns, they pressed forward in faith. How?

The Discipline of Remembering

The answer lies in a powerful spiritual practice: remembering.

When Mary sang her famous song of praise, she remembered God’s faithfulness: “The Mighty One has done great things for me—holy is his name. His mercy extends to those who fear him, from generation to generation.”

Mary and Joseph would have recalled the stories that defined their faith: God building an entire nation from Abraham and Sarah’s small family. God breaking Egypt’s power through ten plagues and splitting the sea. God giving them the Promised Land by knocking down Jericho’s walls. God slaying a giant through a shepherd boy named David.

Their confidence didn’t rest on the strength of their faith but on the proven greatness of their God. The impossibility of their present situation was overwhelmed by the undeniable reality of God’s past faithfulness.

In Hebrew Scripture, remembering is never merely a mental exercise—it’s a spiritual discipline of survival. The word zakar implies action. To remember God means actively calling His past reality to mind and pulling it into the present moment to change how we act right now.

The psalmist modeled this practice beautifully. In distress, crying out to God, he asked, “Has his unfailing love vanished forever? Has his promise failed for all time?” But then came the turning point: “I will remember the deeds of the Lord; yes, I will remember your miracles of long ago.”

Remembering is an act of faith.

God instructed His people to make remembering central to their lives. They were to teach His commands to their children, talking about them at home and on the road, when lying down and getting up. They stacked stones as physical memorials. They built their calendar around festivals that forced them to stop and remember. They sang songs because songs are harder to forget than sermons.

Our Own Season of Waiting

Today, we find ourselves in another season of waiting. Jesus came once—the first Advent—bringing hope to a hopeless world. But He promised to come again to finish the renewing and restorative work He started at Christmas.

And we’ve been waiting for centuries.

Like Israel before Christ’s first coming, we can grow weary. We look at the news headlines—conflict, tragedy, disease, turmoil—and wonder if this is all there is. The ache of the wait and the pain of the world can lead us to the same conclusion that plagued ancient Israel: maybe it’s impossible after all.

But the second coming of Jesus is never to be thought of as an impossibility, because all things have already been proven possible for God.

We have our own stories to remember: the Virgin Conception, God wrapped in swaddling clothes. The resurrection—the most impossible feat of all, Jesus rising in victory over the grave. The establishment of the Church, a worldwide, unstoppable movement built through unlikely men and women filled with the Holy Spirit.

We also have personal stories—moments of impossible healing, unexpected provision, miraculous redemption. God has always proven able to accomplish the seemingly impossible.

The Advent Hope

The central message of that first Advent echoes across the centuries to us today: “Nothing is impossible with God.”

This declaration gives us hope—not wishful thinking, but confident expectation based on God’s proven track record. It’s the hope that was born in Bethlehem and the hope we hold for Christ’s return.

As we enter this Advent season, we’re invited to practice the discipline of remembering. To call to mind God’s faithfulness. To let past victories reshape present fears. To declare with confidence that the God who accomplished the impossible once will do so again.

The question isn’t whether God can keep His promises. The question is whether we will relentlessly remember and declare that nothing—absolutely nothing—is impossible with Him.