Don’t limit what God can do

Jem Chesman reflects on her dad’s life in church leadership as he and her mum retire, and she imagines how her grandfather would have felt knowing her dad’s ministry had impacted so many lives.

At the end of 2024 my parents, Stephen and Julia Derbyshire, retired from the leadership of City Gates Church in Ilford after a 32-year tenure. As I attended their farewell service and heard many stories of the impact they had through their years of ministry, I thought for a moment that it would have been so nice if my grandfather had been there to see that day.

In his early teenage years, my dad fell in with the wrong crowd and that led him on a journey of self-destruction. The first registered heroin addict in his town, he lived for the next drug fix to the exclusion of all else. As a result, everyone wrote him off. Everyone, that is, except my grandfather. A praying man, with eyes of faith, my grandfather held on through the heartache and refused to tell the score at half-time. That not only changed the trajectory of my dad’s life, it had generational impact.

Throughout Scripture, we read of people who in the natural would have been overlooked, rejected and written off. People whose situations would have looked hopeless but who encountered the power of a turnaround God, which changed everything.

Lazarus had died. He was in the grave and his grief-stricken sisters were questioning where Jesus was. They felt that by not rushing to Lazurus’ deathbed and performing the miracle they were desperately seeking Jesus had let them down. They were struggling to process that. Have you ever struggled with God? Struggled to understand what he’s doing? Have you ever felt disillusioned because God didn’t answer your prayer in the way you hoped?

Mary and Martha may have believed that Jesus didn’t care enough to answer their prayer, but how wrong they were! When Jesus reached Lazarus’ tomb, he wept and entered into their grief knowing that while a miracle was just around the corner, they only saw in part. Jesus then called Lazarus out of the grave. When all seemed lost, Jesus spoke life into a seemingly dead situation. He called an apparently impossible situation into the realm of the possible.

Jesus hasn’t changed. He is calling us to life today. He speaks life to things that are dead, things that are lying dormant. He wants to roll the stones away from our lives and speak life to dead dreams, reconciliation to broken relationships, peace where there is turmoil, hope where there is despair.

Let’s be inspired by Lazarus’ story. Let’s refuse to limit what God can do in our lives, in our homes, in our churches, and in our nation. Let’s remember that no matter how things look, we have a Saviour who cares. Let’s be a company of tenacious women; women who refuse to give up, who refuse to give in and who refuse to tell the score at half-time.

This article first appeared in Direction Magazine. For further details, please click here.