There are some words that we should use only to describe the magnificent nature of God. These are words like holy, divine, eternal, perfect, and omnipotent. When we don’t limit the use of words like these to exclusively describe the greatness of Heavenly Father, we run the risk of trying to elevate ourselves to His level, or worse, we try to bring Him down to ours. In many cases, this is what religion does. Every religion tries to put God in their little box and limit the magnitude of His greatness to their belief structure. It is a ridiculous notion to think that humanity can restrict, define, describe, or comprehend the infinite power, strength, and omnipotence of God. He’s in a class all by Himself, and our theologies can never do Him justice. It is important to remind ourselves of this because life will inevitably force us to see and trust God in a greater way. Our backs will be utterly against the wall, and to move to the place that God has destined us to be, we’ll have no other choice but to step outside the box.
In Malachi 3:6, God said, “I the Lord do not change.” This gives us a great window into His faithfulness. He makes promises to His people, and we can count on Him to keep His Word with every fiber of our beings. When He tells us that He’s going to do something, He gets it done. Numbers 23:19 says that He’s not a man, that He should lie. He never falters, never makes a mistake, and He tells us in Matthew 24:35 that Heaven and earth will pass away, but His Word will never pass away. His Word will never fail.
We must take every precaution that we do not lower the omnipotence and perfection of God to a standard beneath His greatness. Sometimes we try to do this because we are dissatisfied with our lives and disappointed with the outcome of our prayers. We think God ought to move on our timetable, and when He doesn’t, some of us will become disillusioned. We abandon our posts because we think that maybe God didn’t hear our prayers, or that He has refused to answer them. Neither of those modes of thinking is correct. 1John 5:14-15(NLT) says, “14 And we are confident that he hears us whenever we ask for anything that pleases him. 15 And since we know he hears us when we make our requests, we also know that he will give us what we ask for.”
To ask for things that please God, as it says in 1John 5:14, is to ask for blessings that are promised in His Word. People pray for all sorts of things. Sometimes they pray for blessings of wealth, yet, they have not demonstrated a capacity to help others. They want more money but refuse to be obedient to tithe into God’s Kingdom. They pray to meet the person they are going to marry, but they haven’t used the time as a single person to prepare spiritually and mentally for the challenges of marriage. We pray for a lot when we’ve not shown ourselves diligent to handle a little. People will even pray that harm or negativity will envelop the life of another. This is so wrong, but some people actually believe that God is okay with this.
James 4:2-3(NLT) tells us, “2 You want what you don’t have, so you scheme and kill to get it. You are jealous of what others have, but you can’t get it, so you fight and wage war to take it away from them. Yet you don’t have what you want because you don’t ask God for it. 3 And even when you ask, you don’t get it because your motives are all wrong—you want only what will give you pleasure.” God tells us that sometimes we don’t have what we want because we don’t ask God for it. He’s never mad at us for asking but wants us to ask in a way that demonstrates respect and gratitude. Verse 3 says that even when we ask God for blessings, we ask amiss. This means that we miss the mark. We’ve got the wrong motives or we’re not reverencing God the way we should. Again, sometimes we try to bring Him down to our level of thinking, and we simply cannot limit God in this way.
When we try to do this, to limit God, we are not believing properly. God doesn’t reward this. He tells us in Hebrew 11:6 that without faith we can’t please Him. Faith is activated when we believe God’s promises in the right way, this means we believe that God will honor His promises to us. Romans 10:17 says that faith comes by hearing the Word of God. It’s not by philosophy, some new theology, or by believing what I think or what someone else thinks that we are saved and made whole through the Lord Jesus Christ. It is by hearing and believing the truth of God’s Word that our faith is stirred up.
Some of us expect that God will override His faithfulness to His Word, and let us get away with not having the faith we should. He will never overstep His Word. And because of this, God cannot take you higher than you are willing to believe and trust Him. If we believe God’s Word, we’ll renew our minds to it as it says in Ephesians 4:23. This means that we will change the way we think. We are to have the mind of Christ so that we think like him, and he always trusted God. Heavenly Father doesn’t want us to be unhappy or sad. He wants to bless us, but we have a part to play in this. We must stretch ourselves by studying His Word, believing it, and then acting on it. God is calling us to step outside the box so that we won’t limit Him, and we will not limit what He will do through and for us.
Scripture quotations marked (NLT) are taken from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright © 1996. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Wheaton, Illinois 60189. All rights reserved.
"God Cannot Take You Higher than You are Willing to Believe”, written by Vince Mack. Blessing Beads and More© 2019. All rights reserved. All praise and honor to God through Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior.
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