Lord Jesus, please destroy any misconceptions I have about who you are and what you can do. Don’t let my thoughts of you be confined to what I think is possible and what I’ve seen before. You are able to do above and beyond what I can possibly think of or imagine. Help me to remember that.
This was my prayer as I read Mark 6:3:
“But in the next breath they were cutting him down: “He’s just a carpenter—Mary’s boy. We’ve known him since he was a kid. We know his brothers, James, Justus, Jude, and Simon, and his sisters. Who does he think he is?” They tripped over what little they knew about him and fell, sprawling. And they never got any further.”
They tripped over what little they knew about him and fell, sprawling. And they never got any further.
Is it just me, or are those words insanely powerful? They’re like a huge, heavy, concrete brick that hit an unsuspecting me right in the middle of my quiet time one morning.
Maybe it’s just because I know I’ve fallen prey to these confining ideas that act as barriers in my relationship with the Lord. I see him do something amazing, but even that one amazing thing can be a wall, because I set that as the limit for what Jesus can do. When my relationship with him gets stagnant, I ask him to take me back to a place where I was closer to Him. I should be asking Him to take me to new heights, and to show me radically new things.
We as humans commonly have this issue: we fail to look beyond our conceptions of what is possible. We fail to see a God who is omnipotent, omnipresent, and able to transcend human knowledge. We fail to see the life of vibrancy and transformation that is at our fingertips, if only we have an ounce of faith.
Some people in the Bible had the same problem. I mean pretty much every story in the Bible presents a situation in which God did the impossible and moved in an insanely unexpected way because of the trust and faith people placed in him. Abraham. Moses. Daniel. Mary. Paul. To name a few. Seriously, a woman isn’t supposed to have a baby at age ninety. A man locked in a cave full of lions is not supposed to survive. A virgin is not supposed to have a baby. But God challenged those conceptions of what should be and what shouldn’t; He traversed far beyond them and did what humans failed to comprehend.
And then there’s a flip side to it. So many times we see Jesus unable to work in people’s lives because of a lack of faith, a lack of belief in what He could do. Just like the people who lived in Jesus’s hometown, who grew up knowing Him as a child and thought they knew Him when He was older. They missed out on a world of possibilities. Jesus “could not do any miracles there, except lay his hands on a few sick people and heal them” (Mark 6:5).
I don’t know about you, but I don’t want my life to be limited because of my lack of faith. I don’t want that now, I don’t want that as I step into this next season of my life.
There are going to be so many opportunities for Jesus to move and I don’t want to miss out on any of it! I want an overflow! An overflow of His goodness, of His power, of His spirit.
Thanks for reading, I hope this post encouraged or challenged you in some way today. Feel free to subscribe if you’d like to stay up to date with what the Lord is showing me as I move forward into this next exciting season of my life.
God bless!
Emma
Love this!