Nothing Is Impossible for God

"...nothing will be impossible with God." - Luke 1:37

Most of the time, we decide when something is over. We look at what happened, accept it, and move forward. But then something we thought was behind us begins to change again, and it makes you pause, because you realize maybe that was not actually the end. Maybe that was just where we stopped, and those two aren't always the same.

In John 5, a man is lying beside a pool in Jerusalem called Bethesda. He had not been able to walk for thirty-eight years. Jesus walked up to him and asked, "Do you want to get well?" (v. 6). He did not say yes. He said, "Sir, I have no one to put me into the pool when the water is stirred up, and while I am going another steps down before me," v. 7. That sounds like something we have said. Sometimes we stop answering and start explaining why change is not coming.

Jesus did not respond to the explanation or fix the system. He said, "Get up, pick up your mat and walk," v. 8. And the man walked. We build careful cases for why a situation will stay the way it is, and then God moves right past the case we built. Paul, the apostle, wrote that God "is able to do far more abundantly than all that we ask or think," Ephesians 3:20. The limitation that man accepted for nearly four decades was real to him, but it was never the boundary that mattered.

We do this more often than we realize. We explain to ourselves why a thing will not change, and over time the explanation becomes so familiar it feels like a fact. Jeremiah, the prophet of Israel, prayed for his nation while watching it fall and still said, "Nothing is too hard for you," Jeremiah 32:17. He wasn't ignoring the evidence. He was recognizing that what God can do and what we call finished are not measured the same way. The question Jesus asked at Bethesda is worth hearing again. Not "why are you still here?" but "do you want to get well?" He wasn't asking for a plan. He was asking if there was any readiness to let go of what had come to feel final.

Whatever you have set aside and accepted as settled may not require a new approach. You may just need to hear that the God who is questioning us is not limited by the reasons we have presented. His capacity has never been the problem, and the ceiling of possibilities we have created was never His.

He's not done.

Prayer

Father, we have spent a long time explaining why certain things cannot change. Help us hear Your question and answer it honestly. You are not limited by what limits us. Amen.