Your God Is Too Small - Luke 8:53-55

"But the crowd laughed at him because they all knew she had died. Then Jesus took her by the hand and said in a loud voice, My child, get up! And at that moment her life returned, and she immediately stood up!" In Luke 8 Jesus calms a storm, commands a large number of evil spirits to come out of a man, heals a woman who suffered from a bleeding condition for twelve years, and raises a little girl from the dead. This series of events in Luke 8 demonstrates Jesus’s authority over disease, the elements of this earth, and death, and illustrates the power of faith. It is during the last event in this chapter, the restoration of life to the little girl, that He is laughed at by a crowd of people who had seen or heard from those who had seen that the little girl was already dead before Jesus arrived to heal her. But then Jesus arrived and changed the facts! When we distrust or mistrust God's sufficiency for our lives, it is almost like we join with this crowd in laughing at the divine power and authority of Jesus. God can and will infiltrate our lives and handle our problems if we trust Him. However, the way God handles our problems and the subsequent outcomes aren't always the way we anticipate. In fact, God's possibilities and solutions often seem incomprehensible to us, even absurd. But that's because our false conceptions and low expectations of God limit our faith in Him. When we don't have faith in His omnipotence to rule and reign over our daily lives, it's like we put God in a box. In our minds we make God too small to handle the big and complex events of our our lives. However, if the modus operandi for Jesus, in addition to saving souls, is to calm storms, drive out the devil, heal disease, and restore life, then is there any misfortune we can encounter that He can't handle? Jesus has the power and authority, if we have the faith! "For the Lord your God is among you, and he is a great and awesome God" (Deuteronomy 7:21).