DIFFICULT OR IMPOSSIBLE

Is the work that God has called us to difficult or impossible? This is a very important question because how we answer will correspond directly to how we go about fulfilling our Great Commission calling in the church.

Let me illustrate it this way, what if I told you that I would give you two-million dollars if you worked out at a gym for ten hours a day for a whole year? Would that be difficult or impossible? For most people it would be difficult, but not impossible. You could make the job easier by reducing the required number of hours or by increasing the reward. You could also make it harder by requiring that the ten hours be consecutive, but either way this task would still exist somewhere on the spectrum of what is possible. However, what if I offered you a reward of two-million dollars if you could lift a Mack truck up over your head? That would be impossible for a human being, and because this task does not exist on the spectrum of what is possible, it cannot be made harder or easier. It would not become harder if I asked you to do it on a hot day, and it would not be made easier if I increased the reward or allowed you to lift it with an empty gas tank. Either way it would still be out of reach. Impossible.

My point is this, if a task is difficult the solution is clear- marshal resources, put in more hours, throw more money at it, work harder, or get more people on the job. However, if the task is impossible then the solution must be to call upon one who is mightier and more able than you. Lifting a Mack truck is impossible according to the finite limits of a human being’s musculoskeletal system, but there are heavy duty cranes that are equal to the job.

A prayerless approach to the Great Commission reveals that we think the job is difficult but not impossible. Prayer is the act of calling on one who is mightier and more able than us, and if we believe that something can be accomplished without prayer it is the same as thinking it can be done without God.

Fellow Christian, I often hear people say that things are becoming harder for the church today. How can that be? It can never become easier or harder to accomplish impossible things. The God-given objectives of the church are impossible. We have been tasked with nothing less than to make dead people alive (Ephesians 2:1-10, 2 Corinthians 5:11-21). There was never a time when that was easy and there will never come a day when it is more difficult. It will only, ever, always be impossible according to the limits of human strength. So the belief, so often expressed in these days, that things are becoming harder for the church reveals the smallness of our goals (Comfort? Approval? Security?) and an inflated view of what men can accomplish in their own power under the right circumstances.

These days are not harder. They are just a more dramatic backdrop for the coming miracles.

But Jesus looked at them and said, “With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible.” Matthew 19:26