Imagine If...

Last week at the Youth Specialties convention I had the opportunity to attend a session titled "Leading Change In Your Ministry" by Mark Oestriecher. I have had the benefit of hearing MarkO speak about ministry topics a couple different times and he always provides some great, challenging stuff and this was no exception. During this session he talked about how you begin to get your leadership in your ministry to dream about changes and he led us through some differnet group excercises that you can do to dream about the future together. One of those was an excercise called "Imagine If...." Basically, you spend about an hour imagining what your ministry would look like if you had no limitations or restraints. If there were no budgets to stick to or no time limitations or no nay-sayers holding you back, what would your ministry look like? Basically, imagine if the resources and possibilities for your ministry were limitless....I'll have to say that it was pretty fun to imagine all we could do, but then kind of deflating to realize that we don't get the opportunity to do a lot of it....
But the past week I have been thinking about this whole concept of "Imagine If..." In Psalm 50, God tells us that he owns "the cattle on a thousand hills" and that the "world is His and all that is in it." In the gospel of Luke (chapter 11, verse 9) Jesus is teaching his disciples about praying and he tells us "Ask and it will be given to you, seek and you will find, knock and the door will be opened." As God answers the accusations of Job in the Old Testament (Job 41) he says that "Everything under heaven belongs to me." In Psalm 24 and 1 Corinthians 10 we read that "The earth is the Lord's and everything in it." The biblical examples of this go on and on and on. We read all throughout the New Testament that Jesus did crazy, astonishing, shocking miracles that escaped and passed the limits of the physical and understandable in our world. We see time and time again that Jesus defies logic and rational thought to make a blind man see, to make a crippled man walk, and to make a dead man (that's right - D.E.A.D. for 3 days!) come alive again. So I come back to our little group dynamic dreaming game, "Imagine If..." and I ask myslef (and anyone who might read this, I guess, if anyone does read it...) "Imagine If...when it came to doing what God has called us to do, there were no limits. What if we had a limitless resources and all we could dream of could be done?"
I don't know what is going on in your life or what obstacles that you are facing. I have no clue about what God has called you to do that seems impossible. I don't know in which ways God has revealed to you that He will use you and has left you feeling incapable. But I do know this: As followers of Christ, we serve a God who takes the game "Imagine If" and turns it into reality. God's power, ability, and resources are limitless and beyond our imagination. If we truly put our trust in Him, there are no limits to what we can accomplish.