More Than We Ask or Imagine
What’s the biggest thing you and God have ever done together?
If you are thinking “coming to faith in Christ,” Paul tells us in Ephesians that that’s pretty much all God, with even the faith to believe coming to us a gift. He takes us while we are completely unable to respond spiritually , non-functional, dead in our failures and deliberate disobedience and declares us to be alive in Christ, giving us the faith to trust His words and the work that Jesus has done.
THEN He gives us His Spirit by whose presence and power we can begin to do the deeds He has planned for us all along. In fact He says that He crafts us specifically to walk around doing those planned deeds.
Some of us have taken the time, or had the experiences to find out what kinds of things those might be. It’s pretty exciting when we notice or are told that what we are doing or saying is a benefit to someone else! It is very satisfying when, in following Jesus, pretty much just being our “trustin’ Jesus” selves, we hear that someone else is encouraged, or corrected or given insight into the goodness of God by just us being us. But we do not have to be limited to what we expect God to use us for, or what “deeds” He has in mind for us.
Recently a friend said she knew what she was designed to do, but had put her expectations “in a box.” She was stunned to discover that God might have much larger, richer and more spectacular intentions for how He designed her. Our God is so big that what He has in mind for us to do in us and through us is beyond anything we can imagine. Paul says, God “is able to do far more abundantly than all that we ask or think, according to the power at work within us.” The power He is referring to is the power that raised Jesus from the dead, the power that loved us with a love so enormous He has to make us strong to grasp it, the power that brings reconciliation between races at odds for centuries, the power to rescue and adopt His enemies into His own family.
There’s no limit to what God can empower us to do, because it depends on Him and not us.
Let’s look together for opportunities to cooperate with Him that are outside our little “boxes” as we are following Jesus!
Christi
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