The “How Much More” God
By Tracie Nall
I sat in the familiar circle of women jotting notes in my journal as reminders for each shared praise or requested prayer; but something felt different. As the ladies communicated immediate needs, urgent concerns, or pressing worries, I grew increasingly unsettled and uncomfortable.
We had just closed our Bibles completing a lesson on the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 7:7-11) where Jesus emphasized the need for perseverance and progressive intensity in prayer. Jesus tells His disciples, “everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks finds, and to the one who knocks it will be opened.” He then follows with a comparative example between earthly fathers and our Heavenly Father saying, “how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him!” How much more indeed!
The thought that had me twisting in my chair was this, “if God is not limited to my prayer, then perhaps my prayers are limiting God.”
Our God is Infinite. He is able to do much more because He has NO limits.
If you have a child in your home born in the 1990’s, then you are probably familiar with the saying, “To infinity and beyond,” the famous catch phrase of Buzz Lightyear from the movie Toy Story. Our God is not a fictional character, but His character is Infinite and Beyond.
The word “infinite” is defined as “limitless or endless in space, extent, size or strength, impossible to measure or calculate, continuing without end.”
Are we praying so specifically that our prayers have become a boundary? Are we putting God in a box? Are we asking too little and expecting even less? Ephesians 3:20 tells us that God “is able to do immeasurably more than all that we ask or imagine,” (NIV) Thankfully, God is not limited to answering according to our asking.
Sharing these thoughts out loud, I referred to the notes I had taken; specific dates and times, fixed results, certain outcomes, or definite conclusions all described our measure of desired answered prayer, but we cannot measure an immeasurable God. Author, Jen Wilkin writes, “Measurement is the millennia-old obsession of the limited human, who, perceiving his own limits, seeks to transcend them by quantifying his world. That which-we-can-measure we think we can to some degree control.”
Our God is Infinite; immeasurable, unquantifiable, and uncontainable, completely without limit and our prayers should be as well.
We pray from our limited perspective to a limitless God.
We pray with limited knowledge, to the God of Infinite Knowledge:
God knows our needs because His knowledge surpasses and supersedes our human understanding.
Gill’s Exposition of the Bible referring to the phrase, “how much more” states, “how much more shall your Father, which is in heaven; who is omniscient and omnipotent; who knows the persons and wants of his children and what is proper for them, and is able to relieve them, being Lord of heaven and earth give good things.”
Psalm 139:1-4 tells us of the intimate knowledge God has of us:
You have searched me, Lord,
and you know me.
You know when I sit and when I rise;
you perceive my thoughts from afar.
You discern my going out and my lying down;
you are familiar with all my ways.
Before a word is on my tongue
you, Lord, know it completely.
We pray with limited time, to the God of Infinite Time:
Punctuality is not my suit; I have lived most of my life with the philosophy “the party will start when I get there” (arrogant, I know!) but let it never be said that God does not have a sense of humor because Mrs. Never on Time is married to Mr. Never Late. My husband’s philosophy is “early is on time, on time is late, and late is unacceptable.”
God’s timing is perfect because He knows the beginning from the end. He is not limited by past, present or future, He existed before time and will exceed beyond time.
Psalm 90:2 says, “Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever you had formed the earth and the world, from everlasting to everlasting you are God.”
We pray with limited space, to the God of Infinite Space:
In the movie, A Walk to Remember, my favorite scene is when the main character, Shane takes his girlfriend, Jamie, to the line that divides the states of North Carolina and Virginia and tells her, “You are in two places at once.”
Unless we straddle a state line, it is impossible for us to be physically in two places at one time, but God is in all places at all times!
There is no place we can go to that He is not present. (Psalm 139:7-10)
We pray with limited power, to the God of Infinite Power:
If you have seen the damage done to a shoreline as waves churn during a hurricane or the destructive path of spiraling wind in the wake of a tornado, then you have seen the visible evidence of God’s power; it is undeniable.
God’s limitless power would be terrifying if it were not matched by His limitless love. In the same degree with which He can destroy, He saves.
There is no greater display of God’s infinite power than the cross, where God’s sinless Son took on the sins of the world to grant us access to the Father. (1 Peter 2:24)
Friend, because of Jesus, we can boldly approach the Father with our worries, cares and concerns and rest in His Infinite goodness to answer our prayers as the “how much more” God that He is.