Mountainous Faith

You can pray for anything, and if you have faith, you will receive it.

Matthew 21:22

Prayer has no limits. Nothing is too small to pray about, and nothing is too big to be impacted through prayer.

Some people think they shouldn’t pray about small things. God has bigger things on his mind, they reason. But Jesus invites us to be in an ongoing prayerful relationship with him—to pray without ceasing. As we maintain a certain level of mindfulness that he is ever present in us and to us, every thought becomes prayer. That mindfulness will sometimes be more focused because the activity of the moment doesn’t require much mental engagement, and other times it will be running in the background as we give attention to our activities. But it is always operating. All the details of life are topics for prayer.

Others think that some problems are too big and beyond prayer’s scope, considering some things or people lost causes. Some even think that God has washed his hands of certain situations. May I remind you of what has led up to this promise that you can pray for anything? Jesus used the metaphor of a mountain: “You can even say to this mountain, ‘May you be lifted up and thrown into the sea,’ and it will happen” (Matthew 21:21).

What’s more entrenched and immovable than a mountain? Jesus, in his typical teaching style, uses the familiar and known to introduce the unknown. He is saying that nothing is outside prayer’s purview. Don’t focus on the size of the mountain, but on the power of prayer. How much power does prayer have? I think we can answer that with another question: How much power does God have?

Jesus doesn’t promise that everything you think God should do, God will do. You can’t take this one statement and set it outside the totality of what the Scripture teaches about prayer. The promise he makes is that nothing in your life—big or small—falls outside the parameters of prayer. Prayer absolutely will serve as the conduit through which all the power of God will flow into the circumstances of earth, and the fact that those circumstances are mountainous makes no difference.

Lord, I leave my mountain in your hands. You can do with it as you will. My mountain is not too big for you.

Christ holds that prayer is a tremendous power which achieves what, without it, was a sheer impossibility. And this amazing thing you can set into operation.

A. J. Gossip(1873–1954), Scottish pastor and college professor