Exceedingly Abundant Blessings

In today’s reading, we find the closing of a wonderful prayer the apostle Paul offers for the Christians in Ephesus.

He prays for them to be strengthened in the Spirit and for Christ to be comfortably at home in their hearts through faith. He asks that they would be rooted and grounded in Christ’s unfailing and unfathomable love, and for them to be “filled up to all the fullness of God.”

Paul closes this prayer with today’s passage, acknowledging that God is able to do so much more than any of us can ever ask, think, or imagine.

Paul knew that the church in Ephesus was facing a difficult battle to stay strong in their faith and be bold witnesses for Christ in the pagan culture that surrounded them. He knew that their hope for success could only be realized through faith and obedience to God.

His words remind me of the story of the widow and Elisha in 2 Kings. This woman is saddled with a debt she cannot repay.

But rather than give up, she turned to God’s representative, the prophet Elisha, for help.

All she had was a small amount of oil—nowhere near enough to make even a small dent in the debt she owed. But little becomes much when it is placed in the Master’s hands. Elisha told her to gather vessels from her neighbors and to “not get a few.”

Then he told her to go into her house with her sons, shut the doors, and begin pouring out the oil into the jars. She was not to stop until the jars ran out.

Now I don’t think Elisha gave the woman these instructions all at one time. She had to complete the first step, gathering the jars, before she could move on to part two, filling them up.

Gathering jars may not have made much sense to her at first, but she responded in faith. From her story, we learn two important lessons about trusting God in difficult times.

First, real faith believes God with obedience.

The longer you walk with God, the more you’ll come to realize that you can trust His instructions—no matter how crazy they might seem at the time.

Look, if you want to be a person of strong faith, you have to believe God with obedience. Real faith has legs on it. It gets up and does whatever God says to do. It doesn’t have to have all the answers. It just needs to say, “Yes, Lord.”  

We say that prayer changes things, but are you really praying about your impossible circumstance? And are you doing what God is guiding you to do? Are you saying, “Yes, Lord,” and following that up with action? Are you gathering lots of jars, even though that assignment seems ludicrous?

But real faith doesn’t just act in obedience …

Real faith also believes God for abundance.

Elisha told the widow to gather jars. She didn’t know what was going to happen; she just knew she needed to start collecting jars. And not just a few, but many.

Once she obeyed and started pouring the oil into the empty vessels, she saw the miracle. The little jar of oil never ran dry, filling jar after jar after jar! In fact, the only reason the oil stopped flowing was because she ran out of empty jars!   

You see, when we believe God can do more than we ever imagined, we will prepare and plan for abundance.

That’s the lesson we learn from today’s passage in Ephesians 3. God doesn’t just do the bare minimum. No, He goes WAY beyond. He is not the God of barely enough; He is the God of more than enough!

He is able to exceed your wildest imaginations!

So don’t just trust Him to fill a few jars of oil, trust Him to blow you away with His provision! He can make your marriage not just a tad better, but over the top awesome! He can help you pay off that pile of debt and have abundant provision left over.

GOD IS ABLE to work through your impossible to produce the unimaginable!

We serve an unfathomably great God who is more than able in any and every circumstance. That means when we come to Him with our tough, impossible situations, we can come to Him with confidence, because there is no problem too big for Him to conquer!

1. How have you seen God provide abundantly for you or for someone else in ways that seemed unlikely?

2. What might God be calling you to do today to prepare for His abundant provision in your life?