Ephesians 3:20 Meaning Now to Him Who Is Able

God's generosity runs past the edge of what anyone can picture, so the size of a prayer sets no limit on what he gives. Asking still matters, since he has chosen to tie his giving to the prayers of his people.

The power is already inside the believer through grace, God's own life given freely. It works from within rather than reaching in from outside, planted at baptism and fed by the sacraments, the ordinary channels through which God shares that life. Praise belongs to God for a power that is real whether or not anyone feels it working.

The mechanism at work inside a person runs far past the size of his requests. He asks small, imagines less, and the power operating within can do abundantly beyond either. His picturing is the floor, not the ceiling.

The limit is rarely the supply. What holds a man back is the cramped image he keeps of what is possible for him. As that picture widens, the power already at work within finds more room to carry him.

Prayer gets small at the point where a person's imagination quits, not at the point where God runs out.

Imagination is the bottleneck, and it gets built out of disappointments. Each one is filed as a reference, each reference trims the next request, and the trimmed request becomes the working ceiling of a life whose source has no ceiling at all.

Paul locates the power inside, already at work in a person, which means the narrow ask is a fence accepted long ago rather than the humility it gets mistaken for. What someone thinks to ask for decides what they act on, and what they act on decides what they are ready to receive. A life spent requesting the manageable arrives at exactly the manageable.