IF and THEN...

If it is January in Wisconsin…then…

With a few rare exceptions the phrase above is easy to conclude. I’d like to take you down a similar path based on the Words of Jesus from Mark 9:23; “All things are possible to him who believes”.

If all things are possible to those who believe, then those of us who believe must never again allow ourselves to be fatalism’s slave. Fatalism is the belief that all the events of life are staged and determined by fate and therefore inevitable. I won’t drag you through the details of how this is the root and substance of a loud segment of the church’s doctrinal view of the “end times”. What I WILL tell you is that fatalism has enslaved too many of us for too long! It has trapped “believers” in a stymied posture of watching the world around us throw itself into fires and deep dark waters to destroy itself, just like the little boy in the story that is wrapped around Jesus’ Words in Mark 9.

If all things are possible to those who believe, then the church should be a culture, a community and a system of transcendent supernatural creativity. We have at our disposal the Genius of the Universe. For all of our bluster about “intelligent design versus evolution” you would think that we would be eager to fully demonstrate God’s resourcefulness. If we want to be taken seriously about intelligent design then we had better take a dive into the deep end of the Presence of God and come up like a water fountain of glorious goodness. This deserves far more elucidation but I better save some of my good stuff for my book.

If all things are possible to those who believe, then our minds and hearts must be washed of the culture of complaint we are surrounded by and be fed instead with “great and mighty things which (we) do not know” (Jeremiah 33:1-3). I don’t remember who it was who coined the phrase “culture of complaint” but whoever it was, nailed it. “I complain, therefore, I am” is an American mantra. But God is baiting us upward with Jeremiah’s promise, “Call to Me and I will answer you, and I will tell you great and mighty things, which you do not know.”

There is Something in the Heavens that we don’t know and it is pregnant with “All things are possible to those who believe”. God is feeling pretty good about Himself. Secure, at rest, pleased and satisfied. Isaiah said that God looked at the sacrifice of Christ and He was “satisfied”. From that point forward, “all things are possible to those who believe”. There is Something in the Heavens that is more Good News than all the bad news combined.

One last thought; Prayer is learning the lifestyle of being bowed to the conditions of heaven so that I become an agent of spreading heaven’s conditions on earth. In the story of Mark 9 Jesus concluded the matter by declaring that such challenges do not end without prayer. The greek word for prayer He used refers to being “bowed”. Let me ask you: What has you bowed down today? Are you bowed to impossibilities? Or, are you bowed down to God with Whom, all things are possible?

Whatever has you bowed, that is your god.