Luke 18:8b
However, when the Son of Man comes, will He find faith on the earth?

The other day I realized that it requires absolutely no effort to sit on your butt. None. You can literally sit for hours and hours and not expend any energy at all other than what it takes for you to reach into a bag of chips, chew, and pick crumbs off your shirt. I’d rather not go into how I came to this realization, so let’s move right along.

God calls us to do things, and the doing of those things very often seems impossible.

As I pondered this during a recent run with Perry Noble (okay, fine, he was on my iPod), it dawned on me that we have become really good in the North American church at strategizing faith right out of the stuff God calls us to do.  God specializes in calling us to impossible tasks, things that are far beyond what we could actually even think of. The modern translation of Ephesians 3:20 – “now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine” – is simply this: bring together the sharpest, brightest, most creative minds and devise the greatest strategy for making a plan happen, and you haven’t even touched the surface of what God wants to do.

The dark side of that promise is that, not only do we limit the role of faith by trying in our own strength to make the impossible possible, we also cut ourselves off from His unlimited supernatural resources that are specific to the impossible task. Look at the last part of that verse in Ephesians, and you’ll find out how God does the impossible: “according to his power that is at work within us.”

What we can achieve on our own is pretty good.  What we can achieve when a lot of us work together is better.  But when we come together and believe God for something so big that we can’t reduce it to a planning session and a checklist, then we’ve stepped into the realm of faith, and have opened the door for His power to work in us as He accomplishes what we can’t.

That’s a door that I want to leave open.