Beyond Imagination
Is your life better than you could imagine?
Ancient manuscripts suggest that if a person allows God to transform them, then they will experience a life beyond their imagination. But if you sit down and really talk to someone, even someone who knows and believes in what these manuscripts say, almost none of them feel that they have really experienced this. Maybe their lives are better for having their faith, but not to the level that these manuscripts seem to promise.
Personally, I feel that my life has frequently been beyond my imagination, and today I want to talk about why that may be. I certainly don’t think of myself has having any exceptional wisdom—but I have spent a great deal of time searching and even radically altering my own perspective of my faith, and a lot of people have told me that they had never heard some of the views I’ve shared. I hope you’ll gain something from them.
To start with the obvious, “more than you can imagine” doesn’t necessarily mean outward, physical circumstances. Not everyone can be a multi-millionaire, for example, or should be. I think the key to understanding this promise is to remember that what we want and what we actually need are two vastly different things. If you’re willing to accept the premise of a life outside this one, and that this world is only a sort of testing and training ground for the spirit, then it follows that you don’t actually know what you need. Just as a child can’t fully understand what it means to grow up until they’ve done it.
A life beyond imagining, then, is not a condition of having, but of becoming. Ancient manuscripts seem to support this view as well. There are multiple passages which suggest or even state outright that once you have allowed God to change you in this way, anything you do becomes justified as long as you remain in that spirit, because you’re acting in unison with the will of God. I don’t know if I’ve ever gotten quite that far, but as a younger man I did make the jump from fearful legalism to a spirit of truth and freedom—and that difference certainly was beyond imagination.
So what’s the takeaway? If I could leave you with one thing today, I hope it is the need to search for truth. These days, people set a lot of store by personal truth. Basically, truth that people feel for themselves, that might be very different from what is true for another person. I think there’s a place for that. But if we have the humility to admit how much we don’t know about spiritual truth, then it only makes sense to look for an authoritative source. Of course, we must do all that we can to verify our sources to find the one that is the most credible. But the simple fact of the matter is that the spiritual world is too big and too strange for us to feel our way through it alone.
We need a map.
Have a blessed, wonderful day!
Dr. Alex Loyd
