Nothing Is Impossible with God

When the angel Gabriel announced to Mary that she would give birth to the One who would be the Savior of the world, he gave her assurance by telling her, “With God nothing shall be impossible.” (Luke 1:37)

From this, we have the common saying, “Nothing is impossible with God.”

Typically, we interpret this verse to mean that anything that can be conceived within the mind of an infinite, eternal, omnipotent, omniscient God can be accomplished by Him. He is only limited by His nature and His holiness, such that He can neither die nor tell a lie. (1 Tim. 1.17; Num. 23:19)

That is why anything we request in prayer will always meet with success as long as it is circumscribed by the boundaries of His will. For whatever God wills, He will do. (Ezekiel 24:14)

Yet there is another way of expressing the relationship between “nothing” and God. The idea is not original with me, but it is an interesting perspective on the power and the authority of God.

From the Common Book of Prayer:

Eternal God,
protector of all who put their trust in you,
without whom nothing is strong, nothing is holy;

The prayer affirms our belief that the world offers nothing that is strong and holy apart from God. But C.S. Lewis took expressed this thought from a different perspective.

C.S. Lewis, Screwtape Letters

And Nothing is very strong: strong enough to steal away a man's best years not in sweet sins but in a dreary flickering of the mind over it knows not what and knows not why...

I also read a sermon from the pastor of The Parish Church of St. Michaels’ Cornhill in the city of London that reflected this same sentiment. Read or download the entire message here.

Reflect on how strong nothing actually is. For nothingness, denial, the void, the abyss is the very strong and potent force of evil.

In practice our society operates on the basis that there are no moral absolutes. You are, as the saying goes, free to make up your own mind. This leads to the dereliction of reason, to depravity and to moral and social chaos.

…poisonous intellectual posturing and satanic destruction of all values has produced the vicious society in which we all now live. This is the society without God. It is bound to be a culture of death.

When there are no real values, when there are no absolute standards of judgement, then we must expect our education system to collapse too. And that is just what has happened.

When God created Adam, He breathed into him the breath of life and Adam became a living soul, made alive by the indwelling Spirit of God. When Adam chose to rebel against God, he died – he lost the indwelling Spirit and left a void – a “nothing” – within man’s soul.

Satan has multiplied the strength of that “nothing” to create a world where God is rejected and where the dominant themes are tolerance and even the promotion of evil as if it were good.

Nature abhors a vacuum. It cannot tolerate “nothing,” and thus seeks to fill it with something else. Man may confess that there is no God or that he does not need to worship God, but God has place eternity in the hearts of men and thus there is a desire to worship.

Man has attempted throughout his existence to fill the void left by the departure of the Spirit of God following the fall of Adam. Yet eternity is a driving force within his being, and man will forever seek to replace that which was lost with something that is worthy of his worship – something that man deems worthy of the sacrifice of his time and health and fortune – even his very life. Man will worship.

Nothing is strong, but with God, nothing is impossible. He is infinite, eternal, transcendent, and perfect in all of His ways, expressing His love for His creation through inconceivable gifts and ultimate sacrifice.

Thus, even when the world is at its worst, the child of God can join Jeremiah in his song, “This I call to mind, and therefore I have hope: 22 The steadfast love of the LORD never ceases; his mercies never come to an end; 23 they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness (Lam. 3:21-23).

The Practice of Prayer

I am currently in the midst of a sermon series on the practice of prayer and how prayer works according to what God has revealed to us in the Bible.

The first sermon dealt with two fundamental points:

Point 1: We must pray because the will of God is not released for action until we do.

In Matt. 16:19, Jesus told His disciples, “I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.” (ESV) He repeated these words in Matt. 18:18.

2 Chron. 7:14 If My people who are called by My name will humble themselves, and pray and seek My face, and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin and heal their land. (NKJV)

Notice the contingency in the verse: If my people…pray…then…I will heal their land

We do not command God to do anything, but God seems to be willing to wait to see His will carried out based on our obedience to His command to pray.

I heard about a room is Heaven that will surprise all of us when we see it. The room has within it large boxes, each neatly decorated with a lovely ribbon on top, and with a label with each of our names on them. The label reads, “Never delivered to Earth because never requested from Earth.”

Point 2: We must pray according to God’s will and not our own.

In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus taught His disciples how to pray. He said, “Pray then like this: ‘Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.’” (Matt. 6:9-10, ESV)

So, we must pray to release God’s will, and we must pray according to God’s will.

The question, then, is “How do I pray God’s will?”

The short answer is that you must know God’s will – a subject for another lesson actually. We come to know God’s will by spending time with Him in prayer and by spending time studying His word.

Yet even then, we may struggle to know that we are praying God’s will. But God already knew that we would have this challenge. So He made provision for it, as He did for every other aspect of spiritual growth.

Romans 8:26-27 Likewise the Spirit also helps in our weaknesses. For we do not know what we should pray for as we ought, but the Spirit Himself makes intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered. Now He who searches the hearts knows what the mind of the Spirit is, because He makes intercession for the saints according to the will of God.

How do we pray God’s will? We submit ourselves completely to the Holy Spirit who fills us and carries out the task of molding us into the image of the Son (Rom. 8:29). He who knows the thoughts and purposes of God (1 Cor. 2:10-11) brings to us the mind of Christ (1 Cor. 2:16).

As the Holy Spirit intercedes for us, He always prays according to the will of God.