I don’t know how you’re closing out this year. Maybe you’ve crushed this year. Maybe it feels like you’re limping towards the finish line. Maybe you’re hopeful for 2024. Maybe you’re not. You could be relaxing on vacation right now. Or perhaps you’re just trying to survive home life until the kids go back to school.

In Ephesians 3:20 Paul nods to the Lord who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine. This benediction has long been a favorite prayer. God’s creative power extends beyond our imaginations, which is both comforting and confounding all at once. It is comforting because God’s capacities for good in our lives are beyond our wildest dreams. We put limitations on what God could do. We doubt that God can really change our life or our loved ones’. We hedge on hope and joy, stoically grinning and bearing it. We doubt that God can really restore that ruined relationship. We doubt that God transcends our life circumstances. Yet God is not limited by our doubt, our failure of imagination. He is able to redeem and restore beyond our wildest imagination.

Yet it is also confounding because God is doing more than all we ask or imagine. He’s the author of our story. Wouldn’t we love to take the pen from his hands? “Lord, I know how this part should go: the new job, the fulfilling marriage, the rich community.” But we are not able to do immeasurably more. That’s God’s role. In fact, growth in wisdom is coming to terms with the considerably limited agency we indeed have. That’s humility. And growth in faith is trusting the Lord with the pen. Let him write it. He’s a way better author than you.

Don’t we see the same in the cross of Christ? None of us would have written a story where God gives himself for us in suffering, in sacrifice, in servanthood, and in death. It is confounding. But it is infinitely comforting because, as Paul says in Romans 8, if God was willing to give us Christ, will he not give us everything else (Rom 8:32)? And the death of the cross is followed by resurrection and power and life and glory.

At the risk of being autobiographical, my being at Indelible Grace is one of these places where God did more than all I asked or imagined. I could not have guessed at the end of 2022 that I’d be writing this a year later in the Bay Area for a church with a unique name I had never heard about. But I’m profoundly thankful to the Lord. He outperformed my imagination. I am not and will never be omniscient, however much I might pine after it or pretend I am. But every now and then I catch a vision of what God’s doing and why he’s doing it. And it’s compelling and convicting. It’s a better story than I could or would write. And unlike the stories we’re all tempted to write, the hero is not me, but the Lord. It is his power and imagination that is immeasurably more. And perhaps most comforting is also his love that is immeasurably more. Indeed, that’s really what Paul is praying in Ephesians 3:14-21. He says, “I want you to have the strength and gumption and boldness to see and know the breadth and length and height and depth of Christ’s love for you.”

So Indelible Grace, let’s pray that we would have the strength to know the endless dimensions of his love. And let’s pray that we would know God’s immeasurably more in 2024. May we know it as a church. May we know it as families and households. May we know it as God’s beloved sons and daughters. And may he do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us, to hm be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, for ever and ever! Amen.

Pastor Jesse