
More That We Ask or Imagine
There is so much more available to us as believers:
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 facedown; 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: https://billmuehlenberg.com/2022/09/23/beyond-your-wildest-dreams-lloyd-jones-on-ephesians-3/
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:
“God’s people have, like Sarah, Abraham’s wife, constantly been guilty of failure to believe God and to trust in His power. This is seen in the Old Testament and the New alike. When the archangel Gabriel announced to Mary that she was to give birth to the Son of God, she staggered in her unbelief, and the angel had to reprimand her saying, ‘With God nothing shall be impossible’ (Luke 1:30-37). By asking, ‘How shall this be?’ she was thinking only in terms of human power, and thereby limiting God. . . . How constantly are we guilty of limiting the power of God in our petitions and requests for ourselves! Thus when we are told that we can be ‘filled with all the fulness of God’ we feel that it is not possible,
We are guilty of the same unbelief when we limit our petitions with respect to others. For instance, we may say of a certain man that he is so steeped in sin that nothing can save him. You may be concerned about some dear one who is antagonistic to Christ and blaspheming His name, and have prayed for his or her conversion for years; and you begin to say that there is no point in continuing to do so, and that the psychologists are right after all in speaking about a religious temperament. You feel that it is impossible. The answer still is, ‘With God nothing shall be impossible ‘. He is ‘able to do exceeding abundantly above and beyond all that we ask or think’. God’s word to us today, as of old, is ‘Open thy mouth wide and I will fill it.’ Let us remember that, when we are praying to God, the omnipotent, the everlasting and the eternal. (p. 309)


He reminds us about the great persecutor of the church, Saul. Were believers back then praying for him? Undoubtedly. And now Paul says there is hope for all of us. Says Lloyd-Jones:
We recall how he refers to himself at the beginning of this third chapter, when he says, ‘If ye have heard of the dispensation of the grace of God which is given me to you-ward: how that by revelation he made known unto me the mystery’. There he referred them to his own experience. Does anyone doubt the power of God? Well, if so, says the Apostle, look at me! I was at one time a blasphemer, a persecutor, and an injurious person. I hated Christ with all the intensity of my being; I did my utmost to massacre the members of the church and to destroy it out of sight. I set out to Damascus one day, breathing out threatenings and slaughter against Christians. Never was a man so opposed to Christianity, never was a man so held by prejudices, national prejudice, prejudice of training, prejudice of religion and of learning, prejudice of self-conceit and self-righteousness. How could such a man as I, Saul of Tarsus, ever become a Christian? But I am a Christian! I am the man who has had the privilege of preaching the gospel to you. How has it come about? There is only one explanation – the power of God!
Nothing but this eternal power of God could have turned the blaspheming, persecuting Pharisee into the Apostle of Christ, yea, the Apostle to the Gentiles. But this had not only been working in Paul, the same power had been working in the Ephesian Christians also… (pp. 310-311)
He looks further at Paul’s doxology and closes the chapter this way:
Note what Paul says. The church will be there for ever and ever. You and I will be there, unto all the generations of the age of the ages. Principalities and powers in the heavenly places will look at us in astonishment and amazement, and seeing us, they will ascribe unto God all the honour and glory and the majesty and the might and the dominion and the power. It is in us, in the Church, that they see the glory and the wisdom of God as they see it nowhere else. We shall thus be manifesting the glory of God for ever and for ever, ‘unto all the generations of the age of the ages’. Such is the power of God. While we are still in this world, it is a power great enough to keep us from falling. Jude’s doxology reminds us of, and commands us to, ‘him that is able to keep us from falling’. But He is not only able to keep and to hold us, He is also able ‘to present us faultless before the presence of his glory with exceeding joy’. It is not surprising that Jude adds, ‘To the only wise God our Saviour, be glory and majesty, dominion and power, both now and ever. Amen’ (vv. 24-25).
Are you joining in this great doxology? Having looked at the possibilities that are open for you even now in Christ Jesus, and having offered these petitions for yourself, are you saying: ‘Let all the glory in earth and heaven and sea, and wherever there are any beings, let all glory and honour be ascribed unto the blessed God, the Father of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, our God, the God of our salvation. Unto him be glory in the church by Christ Jesus, unto all the generations of the ages of the ages’? Are you ready to join with Samuel Davies in singing:
Great God of wonders, all Thy ways,
Are matchless, godlike and divine;
But the fair glories of Thy grace
More godlike and unrivalled shine.
O may this strange, this matchless grace,
This godlike miracle of love,
Fill the wide earth with grateful praise,
And all the angelic hosts above:
Who is a pardoning God like Thee?
Or who has grace so rich and free? (pp. 314-315)
Great words from Lloyd-Jones. Let us press on in Christ and remember that he “is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine”.
[1705 words]
Thanks Bill, a really good article that brought back memories of how God has answered some of my prayers. Two of the things I wanted as a child were a koala and a German Shephard dog. However, the first time I can remember an answered prayer was when our cat Tommy didn’t come home as usual so all I could do was pray and he came home after a week with a dislocated hip so we think he was hit by a car, but then another of our cats just disappeared but for some reason I cannot remember praying for him. I did eventually own a German Shephard dog and she went missing when a car knocked a whole in the fence so every day I prayed for her to come home and after two weeks our vet called to say someone had found a female German Shephard 2 suburbs away in Sydney and it was her. I was so glad to get her back. Then when I returned back to the farm to look after my eldetly Mum after being in Sydney 31 years, there on the farm were two female koalas, so even though I didn’t really pray for koalas or a German Shephard dog when I was young, it seems God did answer my wishes.