I love the idea that God is quite willing and able to do more than I ask for, more than I can even imagine. I far too often doubt his ability and question his plans for me. I let the circumstances all around me define how much faith and trust I have, instead of looking to him and his word.

The trouble with me, and I suspect most Christians, is that we really do not believe God. He holds out to us so many grand and glorious promises, but we have a hard time actually believing him and accepting what he has said. God says he is able to do this, and he wants to do that, but we too often doubt him and question him.

And it is not just contemporary Christians who struggle in this area. If we read through the stories in the Bible, we find all sorts of God’s people who seem to question God and doubt what he has declared. Two obvious examples are found in Genesis 17-18. Abraham and Sarah would have good reason not to believe God’s promise of a child – he was 100 and she was 90! So we read of their reactions:

“Abraham fell face down; he laughed and said to himself, ‘Will a son be born to a man a hundred years old? Will Sarah bear a child at the age of ninety?’” (Gen. 17:17)

“Now Sarah was listening at the entrance to the tent, which was behind him. Abraham and Sarah were already very old, and Sarah was past the age of childbearing. So Sarah laughed to herself as she thought, ‘After I am worn out and my lord is old, will I now have this pleasure?’” (Gen. 18:10-12)

And then we had people like doubting Thomas in the New Testament. Indeed, consider what we find in Matthew 28:16-17: “Then the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain where Jesus had told them to go. When they saw him, they worshiped him; but some doubted.”

Even after the resurrection of Jesus from the dead, some still doubted. But so do we. That is why we need to really take God at his word and start believing him. One crucial passage in this regard is Ephesians 3:20-21: “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.”

I love the idea that God is quite willing and able to do more than I ask for, more than I can even imagine. I far too often doubt his ability and question his plans for me. I let the circumstances all around me define how much faith and trust I have, instead of looking to him and his word.

Countless sermons on this text have been preached over the centuries. Often my go-to man in this regard is the late, great Welsh preacher Martyn Lloyd-Jones. Volume 3 of his 8-volume set of expository sermons on the book of Ephesians is titled The Unsearchable Riches of Christ. It covers all of Eph. 3. And the final chapter looks at verses 20-21.

In a previous article I shared some quotes from the first half of this chapter.

Here I want to share some portions of the second half:

Bring your most daring petitions, bring your most impossible requests, add others to them; let the whole Church join together in their wildest desires and demands! There is no danger of exceeding the limit – ‘For his grace and power are such, None can ever ask too much’. His power is beyond all that we can ever ask.

But not only so, God’s power is even beyond what we can think. . . . God is not only able to do exceeding abundantly beyond all that we can ask; but also beyond all that we can imagine, all that we can think of, all that we can conjure up with our highest and most inspired thoughts and imaginations.

Surely our greatest trouble in the Christian life is our failure to realize that God is not as man. The greatest sin of every Christian, and of the Christian Church in general is to limit the eternal, absolute power of God to the measure of our own minds and concepts and understandings. God’s people have always been guilty of this. They have ‘limited the Holy One of Israel’. (pp. 307-308)

He continues:

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