...But God

Good Morning,“…but God”I want to stretch you a bit this morning with something God has really been challenging me with. It centers around one of the worst statements in scripture found in Ephesians 3:20.  It tells us that God can do “immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine”.I think this is one of the worst ideas in scripture because if it is true, then it makes a very large number of us who say we are Christ followers, who attend church week in and week out, who can rattle off countless scriptures that we have memorized, who hang out with our Christian friends and talk about how good God is, to look like huge hypocrites.  Now before you delete this, hear me out.I am afraid that the way we live and the amount of faith and trust our lives demonstrate would yield a translation of this verse as follows: “God can do nearly everything I can envision as possible, that is logical and that I can help him with”.  We sayGod is absolutely awesome and yet we rarely put ourselves in a position (at least willingly) that would give him the chance to demonstrate His awesomeness. Oh, for sure we believe this verse completely for others and can’t understand why they don’t trust God more. But we have difficulty living in a way that demonstrates that we believe it ourselves.I got to thinking about all the events in scripture that we gloriously celebrate that would not have happened if God had acted according to the amount of trust I place in him.  The Red Sea doesn’t part, no blind people receive their sight, Daniel gets eaten alive by lions, the three in the fiery furnace get burned to a crisp, no angel comes to let Peter escape from jail, Goliath crushes David like a bug, Saul never earns enough spiritual brownie points to become useful to the Kingdom, Gideon’s army gets wiped off the planet, the burning bush burns up, Moses drowns as a baby, Jesus stays dead.Yet, over and over again the scripture says “but God”; and that changes everything.  It is because of “but God” that Eph. 3:20 goes from a horrible concept to the most mind blowing, life transforming, sin crushing, Satan defeating, circumstance changing, hope giving idea in the bible. Why?  Because God CANdo immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine. In fact, it is the longing of his heart to act that way on our behalf, if we will just give him the chance.Oh that our lives, my life, would be lived out with the unbridled passion that says we believe that is true.Live this week on purpose,Ron Klopfenstein