Everything

Everything

With God everything is possible. Matthew 19:26

ASK ANY BELIEVER if anything is impossible for God, and the answer will quickly come: No, of course not. Ask any believer to pray for something impossible, and the reluctance is palpable. Our theology says one thing; our faith says another. And nowhere in Scripture does God promise to honor our theology, as important as it may be. He does, however, promise to honor our faith. We generally don’t receive what we wish for or think about. We receive what we believe.

The problem is that even though we know God can do the impossible, we are rarely confident that he wants to. Some things seem too unrealistic, too outside-the-box, perhaps even too frivolous. When Jesus told his followers that everything was possible with God, he was likely speaking in hyperbole about salvation for those who are most often blind to their need for it. Ah, we might think, he’s using “impossible” for something very common, very doable from my experience. After all, people with money and spiritual blindness are saved quite often and go on to use their material resources very faithfully. How impossible does that really seem? Yet Jesus also calmed storms, made the lame walk, fed multitudes with a small bag of food, cleansed lepers, turned water into wine, and raised the dead. Impossible takes on all sorts of meanings when we survey the scope of his ministry beyond this passage.

Much of the life of faith is a stretching exercise in filling the gap between our theology and our actual expectations. One of the best ways to do that is to recall all that God has done. If, for example, we believe he can create an entire universe out of nothing, the rest is easy. Resurrections, parted waters, and healed diseases are a piece of cake. Faith-building involves seeing the impossible as doable—consistently—and then stepping into it even if first efforts to do so end in failure. Over time, if we are persistent, our definition of impossible becomes more realistic and our definition of realistic grows larger. We begin to believe in greater measure. And things that were once impossible become common.

The miracles of Jesus were the ordinary works of his Father.