Things that Are Impossible for God - Week 5

This semester we have been navigating through our series Things that Are Impossible for God, exploring what is impossible for God in the sense that it is contrary to His good and loving nature.

We have learned that being untruthful is impossible for God, proving that we can trust Him. We have discussed how it is impossible for God to reject us or leave us stranded. And most recently, we addressed the concept that it is impossible for God not to care.

If you come from a church background, you may have a family member who dominates the prayers at every holiday gathering for so long that they have to actually increase their volume to be heard over grumbling stomachs. All you can think about is shoveling that turkey in your mouth and they are spending precious time soliciting prayer for their dental assistant’s cat. Seems a bit trivial when they can be praying for strength and recovery regarding another family member’s health or restoration of a marriage or safety and provision or that you don’t kill anyone working on your group project, right?

What we fail to realize, though, is that no matter how much we tend not to care about their idea of what’s appropriate to pray about, God cares. He cares about every single one of their prayers – and ours – because He cares about us.

Care can come in many forms. It can be expressed through protection, concern, investment of time, or being willingly inconvenienced, just to name a few. The thing with humans is that all of these forms tend to be conditional. We will be inconvenienced until we feel the other person is no longer worth the trouble. We will protect them, as best we can. Our concern for what others have going on in their lives extends as far as it possibly can without overlapping into the concern we have for other things that demand our attention.

With our God though, His care for us is like His love for us: unconditional. And He doesn’t just care about the “big” things either. He cares about even the tiniest details of our lives. Did you know that as humans (those of us who aren’t bald) we have anywhere from 90,000-140,000 strands of hair on our heads? Every one of us. Yet, Matthew 10:29-31 tells us that God has numbered each one of them.

“Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground outside your Father’s care. And even the very hairs of your head are all numbered. So don’t be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows.”

You better believe that a God who pays that much attention to what you put in a ponytail or under a baseball cap, and who also takes care not to let birds out of His sight that are sold for much less than the price He paid with His son for His precious children, that kind of God certainly cares about what plagues your mind and what’s going on inside of your heart.

God appreciates authentic prayer. Not the stale, programmed prayers we offer because we know we should or we feel guilty if we haven’t. God cares about the things that stir up our hearts, what we can’t shake from our thoughts. God wants to hear about the guy or girl in whom we are interested and the exam we’re stressed about and the lust we are struggling with and the anger we have and the worry we feel. In prayer, we are to thank God. We are to acknowledge Him as the provider of our blessings and respond in gratitude. We are also to be truthful. We cannot hide anything from God, so there is no use trying and no point pretending.

How glorious would it be if we could just leave all of our reservations behind as we bow our heads and hearts before the Lord? Why is that so difficult?

You may be thinking, “I could do that when I was younger, when all I had to worry about was finishing my math homework before I could go outside and play. But life has gotten a lot harder the older I’ve gotten. Worrying about finding a job or a spouse or battling an addiction or losing a parent or just trying to make it through midterms, those things make authentic prayers more difficult. I know things could be worse. I know I’m blessed. My financial struggles can’t even be called struggles when I think of all the people who went to bed hungry last night, and their bed was a pile of newspapers in a one-room house. No, I should censor my prayers. God can’t possibly care about the argument I had with my roommate. Instead, I’ll pray for peace. Authentic prayers used to be so simple. They were simple when life was simple.”

Our lives are not really as complicated as we make them out to be. Yes, things happen. Tragedy strikes and unexpected complications arise. Rather than depending on our parents, we begin to accept responsibility for our own lives and then before you know it other people are depending on us. We graduate high school, head to college, expect to find a great job and a loving spouse and live the American dream. That’s how life works. At least, it’s supposed to, right?

But somewhere in the midst of all that life happens. Life happens to us. And when life happens we begin to lose sight of the simplicity. When so many trials happen in a day that all you want to do is go to sleep so that you don’t have to think anymore, that’s when life happens to us. When that drink that is supposed to make you relax turns into two to help you forget your stress, and that leads to four or five every night, that’s when life happens. When you begin to lash out at others because you can’t figure out how to express what you feel internally, you know you should be happy, you know things could be worse, life is happening.

We will call on anyone in the world before we call on our Father. We will call our friends, our parents, that random person we met last weekend...just to talk. And then when we feel as if they don’t care, they don’t understand us or what we have going on, we feel abandoned, question our worth and get angry or defensive.

But from the One who will not reject us, who cannot lie to us, and who cares for us like no other – from Him, we shy away.

Rather than passively letting life happen to us our job is to recognize that sometimes God uses these happenings to point us back toward him. He drives us to our knees to call out to Him.

There is a difference in the way God and people express care for others. People express it cautiously, sometimes with expectancy of reciprocation; it’s often temporary, and sometimes self-serving.

The way God expresses His care is not that way. It is so counter-cultural. He is so counter-cultural. He is self-less. He extends His care to everyone, excitedly and eternally. Eternally.

What can we do to receive that care?

“What we have received is not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, so that we may understand what God has freely given us.”

(1 Corinthians 2:12)

As with everything else we have learned this semester, until we realize that God does not do things the way we’re used to them being done, that He does not treat us the way we are used to being treated, until we recognize this we will not be able to accept the gifts he has freely given. And what a shame that is. These gifts are given with no strings attached, all we have to do is accept them and the One who gives them.

“Come, let us bow down in worship, let us kneel before the Lord our Maker; for he is our God and we are the people of his pasture, the flock under his care.”
(Psalm 95:6-7)

Reflection Questions
· What emotions arise in you when you feel as if someone who is close to you doesn’t care?
· How does it feel to know that God cares about every single thought, action, and prayer of ours, no matter how small we think they are?
· Though it may be difficult to understand, we know that God cares about us. How can we acknowledge that we care about God?