A 40th Anniversary Devotional

Forty years is a long time to keep saying yes to the same calling. It’s long enough to watch a vision become a movement, and long enough to know that none of it happened because everything went according to plan. 

As ICM’s team prayed about how to mark this anniversary, we kept landing on the same truth, one that reaches far beyond our strategies and points us back to God’s character: He has done far more than we could have imagined. Not more than we hoped for in a general sense, but more than we specifically asked Him for, more than we sat down and thought through. Paul had a description for that kind of God. He called Him the One “who is able to do far more abundantly beyond all that we ask or think.” 

That is not a verse about an organization. It is a verse about the limitless power of God. And it beautifully describes what we have witnessed over the last forty years. 

We could have chosen a theme built entirely around looking back, and there would have been nothing wrong with that. Forty years of faithful partners, volunteers, staff, and churches deserve to be honored. But the more we sat with it, the more we felt that a backward glance alone would miss the point of the milestone. 

God is not finished. He is still calling people, still opening doors nobody was knocking on, still taking small acts of faithfulness and multiplying them into things we would never have planned. The word beyond kept surfacing because it does double duty: it names what God has already done, and it points to what He has not yet done. His plans have always been bigger than our field of vision, and the next chapter will be written the same way the first forty years were, not by human ability, but by “the power that works within us.” 

Here is where we move from reflecting on ICM’s story to considering what this verse means for each of us.  

Every one of us is carrying something today that feels bounded by what we can ask for or think up. A need that seems too specific for God to bother with. A dream that seems too large to voice out loud. A situation we have already decided how God will probably handle, if He handles it at all. 

Ephesians 3:20 does not promise that God will do what we ask. It promises something both smaller and vastly larger: He will do far more than that, and the power to do it is not out there somewhere, waiting to be summoned. It is already at work within us. 

That changes the posture we bring to today. Rather than relying on our own plans and expectations, we can actively trust that God is already at work beyond what we can see.