The one thing you cannot overstate

Is It Possible to Exaggerate God?

1Co 1:31  so that, as it is written, “Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord.” 

What is boasting? We might call it today “bragging” or “exaggerating”. 

I believe that the God we serve is so mighty and so powerful that whatever you say about Him will not be an exaggeration. Our boasting cannot exceed the reality of who He is.

We cannot fully understand and know His greatness.  Ps. 145:3 declares His greatness is unsearchable. There is no end to His greatness.

So let us not underestimate the Lord: His power, His goodness, compassion and love. We cannot overestimate what He will do for us. He has already freely given us all things.

Unfortunately, our default is to magnify our fears and succumb to the “worst case scenario”.  The enemy hijacks our imaginations, and we lose sight of who God says He is and who He has already been in our lives.  He is diminished, and satan is magnified.

When faced with a mountain, the kind that can completely change your trajectory, or one that has the possibility of ripping apart your heart, how are we going to face it? 

When a diagnosis becomes bigger than God’s healing power, when lack becomes bigger than God’s Kingdom of always “more than enough”, when a relationship is broken, our boasting becomes an act of faith.

We worry about our future.  Worry is imagining that worst case scenario and then, more often than not, it becomes our experience.

Faith is the realm of boasting, the realm of bragging, the realm of exaggeration. 

Exaggeration means elevation, exaltation, amplification.  Literally, “to pile up, accumulate”. It eventually came to mean “to overstate”.  My point is we cannot overstate our limitless God!

Boasting becomes a declaration of faith that will bring you to a place of certainty and rest. It lives above the fear.

When the Apostle Paul wrote his letter to the Corinthians, he said:

1 Corinthians 1:31 “Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord.”

This is the last verse of chapter one, but Paul wasn’t writing with chapter and verse divisions. He was writing a letter. What we now call chapter two is a continuation of his thoughts.  Notice the word "And" that opens verse one. He's building on what he just said in verse 31, not starting something new.

1Co 2:1 And I, brethren, when I came to you, did not come with excellence of speech or of wisdom declaring to you the testimony (musterion-mystery) of God. 

The testimony was boasting in things that are beyond this natural realm. The greatest testimony and mystery of all is in the Cross.

1Co 2:2 For I determined not to know anything among you except Jesus Christ and Him crucified. 

1Co 2:3 I was with you in weakness, in fear, and in much trembling. 

1Co 2:4 And my speech and my preaching were not with persuasive words of human wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power, 

1Co 2:5 that your faith should not be in the wisdom of men but in the power of God.

He was boasting, amplifying, magnifying, exaggerating if you will, the power of the resurrection.   He was giving testimony to the power of what Jesus accomplished on the Cross.  His boasting led to a demonstration of power, his mind set on the limitless realm above, not on any existing power or wisdom that was on the earth.  (Col. 3:2) 

Gal 6:14 My only boast is in the crucifixion of the Lord Jesus, our Messiah. In him I have been crucified to this natural realm; and the natural realm is dead to me and no longer dominates my life. 

How can I magnify the Lord today? Can I exaggerate His power, wisdom, or love? What does that sound like?

Determine to boast in the Lord and nothing else. Power will manifest.