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NOTHING IS IMPOSSIBLE
A desperate father had high hopes that Jesus’s disciples could heal his son from a severe affliction. But those hopes were dashed with the disciples’ inability to manifest the power necessary to set the child free.
The father fell to his knees and cried out to Jesus, “Lord, have mercy on my son” (Matthew 17:15). Jesus, the source of all power, responded with a moving display of the Father’s heart and power and the son was healed.
As the good students they were in a shame-averse culture, the disciples approached Jesus privately after their public failure and asked Him, “Why could we not cast [the devil] out?” (verse 19). As an answer, Jesus named their source of powerlessness: unbelief. Not prayerlessness, not hidden sin, not even mitigated spiritual zeal. Simply unbelief. Jesus emphatically called this unbelief faithlessness and perverseness (see verse 17)! Thankfully, He prescribed an antidote: prayer and fasting.
Now prayer, we get. People of nearly every religion on the planet recognize and revere the practice of prayer. Everybody prays. And yet not everyone prays with power.
That, I believe, is the sentiment behind Jesus’s indictment of perverseness on the disciples’ lack of power. The word perverse in that context means “common.” Our philosophy and convictions around prayer are simply common.
Jesus could have used the lesson from the miracle in Matthew 17 to remind His disciples of the virtues of prayer. After all, there was an undeniable correlation between Jesus’s prayer habits and His ministerial potency. But prayer habits alone weren’t Jesus’s diagnosis. He went on to say, “Nothing will be impossible for you” (verse 20). And right there, in that simple statement, He made impossibility the birthright of all believers.
Prayer is the balm of the masses. But prayer coupled with fasting—now, that completely shatters the paradigm of what is possible. In that combination of prayer plus fasting, Jesus invites us, the church, to step out of the boat of sound reason and step into lives of the impossible.
What feels impossible in your life right now? What would you say to Jesus if you brought that circumstance to him the way the father brought his son in Matthew 17?
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About this Plan
Fasting is, at its core, an invitation to intimacy with God. It’s an emp¬tying of all, so we can be filled by His all. Yet many of us aren’t sure how to start making this transformative practice a part of our lives. As Reward Sibanda explores, we never finish a fast the same person we were when we began, because through fasting we become more of who God created us to be.
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