Hello and welcome to Friday’s Podcast. It’s been fantastic to be with you this week as we’ve sought to know God more through digging into his word. If you’ve been encouraged through listening to this podcast, then why not share that with others? Text a friend, post on Facebook, tell people at your small group. Let’s look to pass the blessing on!

REFLECTION:

Today’s reading is Ephesians 3:14-21. These are such well known verses which collectively form a beautiful, powerful and encouraging prayer that Paul offers for the church in Ephesus. It’s a prayer full of such deep imagery and meaning that we can’t hope to do this proper justice in a short 5 minute thought.

Today though we are just going to focus on verse 20:
Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us.

Each day this week, we’ve been considering the word hope: one of the very foundations of our faith. We end our week by being reminded that we can hope because with God all things are possible.

I write this podcast off the back of our youth weekend away. We had an amazing time! It was so encouraging and inspiring to see so many of our young people encounter Jesus in a really personal and powerful way. Over the course of the weekend, God did a wonderful work in each of their lives. It just revealed to us as a team again that when people met with Jesus, really experience his presence, his majesty, his grace – they receive hope into their lives. They acknowledge that something fundamentally has altered and their life is now somehow different forever.
It was an incredible weekend. If there’s one thing I’ve taken away from it, it’s that through God we can have hope for our younger generation. We can have hope because in Him all things are possible.

And yet the challenge is, and I know this is something I’m finding in my own faith walk, knowing this truth and truly believing this each time I pray are two separate things. As we saw on Wednesday, we can sometimes find ourselves feeling held back in our faith. We face setbacks. Things don’t go as planned. Hope can begin to waver. It has a knock on effect in our prayer life. Where we once prayed big bold prayers of faith, we find ourselves perhaps subconsciously beginning to limit what we think God can do.

But Paul writes this… ‘Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine.’

The youth weekend has been an encouraging and yet at same time challenging reminder of how our own limits as humans can get transposed onto the God we pray to. We began preparations praying for 40 youth to come away with us for the weekend. It seemed like a good number. It was in fact last year’s number. With a few weeks to go we only had 10 signed up and I began to think we might need to re-evaluate how many we thought would come. We continued to pray. We’d seen God come through in the past. We persevered. Two weeks before we went we reached 40 youth – praise God! I announced this to the team to much whooping and cheering and then as the noise died down one of the team remarked – we should have prayed for 50! In the end, 51 young people signed up and we took 49 away with us. You’ve made your point God, I thought!

Paul encourages the Ephesians to look to Jesus – the one who is hope. The one whose love for us and for his creation is immeasurable. Paul encourages them as they look to God to pray bigger and bolder prayers beyond what we think is imaginable, is possible. Beyond what we can do in our strength, through our own initiative, and ideas. It’s safe to say I’m still very much learning how to say, ‘God I can’t do this on my own. I need you to step in’. But as Paul writes in another of his letters it’s in those places we know and experience something more of God’s grace, his power at work within us. It’s in those moments when we let go of what we think is impossible, and we grasp hold of what God can make possible that we rediscover hope.

As we end this week, let’s ask ourselves this – where have we perhaps subconsciously put a limit on what we think is possible? Is there a situation or a particular person we’ve stopped praying for? Perhaps we recognise within ourselves a willingness to settle for something which we know isn’t right. Today, let’s bring that before God now and ask him to fill us with hope. To give us a bigger and bolder vision of what to pray for and to enable us as his children to, in faith, knock on the door of heaven this day and say, ‘Father your kingdom come, your will be done. Let it be on earth as it is in heaven’.

We end today again with these beautiful words as a prayer – a prayer which is call to place our hope in him.

PRAYER:

Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, for ever and ever! Amen.

BIBLE READING: Ephesians 3:14-21

For this reason I kneel before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth derives its name. I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge – that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.

Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, for ever and ever! Amen.