God Is Able: A Faith Bigger Than You Can Imagine

There is a question worth sitting with today, one that cuts straight to the heart of who you are and how you live: What comes to your mind when you think about God? A.W. Tozer once wrote that the answer to that question is the most important thing about you. Not your accomplishments, not your failures, not your reputation. What you truly believe about God shapes everything else.

Over the next few moments, consider a single, profound declaration found in Ephesians 3:20 — that God #ChristJesusis able to do immeasurably more than all we could ever ask or imagine. It is a statement so large that the apostle Paul, one of the most educated and articulate men of his era, could not find a single word in his language to contain it. He essentially invented one. The New International Version reaches for two English words — "immeasurably more" — and the King James Version stretches to three — "exceedingly, abundantly more." Neither translation fully captures it, because the truth itself is simply too large for language to hold.

That is the kind of God we are invited to know.

The Authority of God

Paul begins his prayer in Ephesians 3 by kneeling before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth derives its name. In Scripture, naming implies authority. God names every family, every tribe, every nation. He calls them into existence and holds them under His sovereign care.

The prophet Isaiah extends this picture outward to the cosmos itself, describing in Isaiah 40 how God brings out the stars one by one and calls each by name. Astronomers estimate there are one septillion stars in the observable universe — a number so staggering it barely registers as real. And yet the Scripture says God names every one of them, remembers every one of them, and when He issues the roll call, not one is missing. That is the authority of God. Every evening, the stars fall in line when the Father speaks.

If that is the God you are praying to, it changes the nature of the conversation.

The Love of God

Paul's prayer continues with a request that stretches the boundaries of language in a different direction. He prays in Ephesians 3:18-19 that believers would have power to grasp how wide and long and high and deep the love of Christ is — and to know a love that surpasses knowledge. He is asking us to know something that cannot be fully known. To understand something that defies understanding.

But notice the word he uses: grasp. Grasping is not about intellectual comprehension. It is about experience. You can be told that Lake Michigan in November hovers around 45 degrees, but you will never truly understand that until you jump in. Once you do, no one will ever need to explain it to you again. You will know it in your bones.

The love of God is like that. No sermon can fully preach it into you. No book can completely explain it. But when Christ takes hold of your life, when you experience the reality of being loved by a God who gave His own Son for you, something shifts. Your heart begins to resonate with the words of 1 John 4:8, which tells us simply that God is love. And that love overwhelms fear, defies explanation, and surpasses all understanding.

The Ability of God

And then Paul arrives at the declaration that drives everything: God is able. The prophet Jeremiah proclaims in Jeremiah 32:17 that nothing is too difficult for God. When three Hebrew men faced a fiery furnace in the book of Daniel, their response was not despair but defiance rooted in faith: the God we serve is able to deliver us. Paul reminds the Corinthians in 2 Corinthians 9:8 that God is able to bless abundantly so that in all things, at all times, every need is met. The book of Hebrews assures us that God is able to help those who are being tempted. Jude 24 declares that God is able to keep us from falling.

You will never carry a burden God cannot lift. There is no door He cannot open, no enemy He cannot defeat, no sickness He cannot heal, no sinner He cannot save, no prayer He cannot answer. God is able.

Praying Bigger Than You Think

Here is where this truth becomes personal. When we understand how able God is, it should expand the way we pray. Paul uses two words in Ephesians 3:20 to describe the prayer life of a believer: ask and imagine.

We are all comfortable with asking. We bring our daily needs, our worries, our requests. Scripture encourages this. But Paul says God is able to do more than we ask or imagine. Imagining is a different kind of thinking. It is the kind that breaks loose from logic and data and constraint, the kind that moves beyond things as they are toward things as they could be.

When God was preparing to do something impossible in Abraham's life, He did not lecture him. He took him outside on a clear night and told him to count the stars. He made Abraham imagine. In the book of Joel, and again on the day of Pentecost in Acts 2, the promise of the Holy Spirit is described in terms of visions and dreams — young men seeing what could be, old men dreaming beyond what is. When the Holy Spirit is at work, He knocks the ceiling off our thinking and invites us to pray according to God's power, not our own.

The Purpose of It All

Paul's prayer ends in a doxology — a declaration of glory. To Him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, forever and ever. Everything God does in you and through you is aimed at this single purpose: His glory. The church exists not as a monument to human effort but as a display of divine wisdom, a living demonstration that God can take broken, ordinary people and make something beautiful.

The invitation today is simple but enormous. Believe that God is able. Then pray like you believe it.