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Matthew 19:26 vs. “In Jesus Name (God of Possible)”

Katy Nichole · checked 2026-08-21

What we checked

PassageMatthew 19:26 chapter ↗
Translation shownBSB (Berean Standard Bible)
Presents itself asinspired-by
Categorynot a quote
AlbumKaty Nichole (EP) · 2022
Words addressed tonot addressed to God (sung about Him)
Teaching or experiencemixed

Graded against the standard

Quotation criteria not graded: this song never presents its words as scripture

Applies to every song the Name held holy · God shown holy · true of God · the standard

✓Reverent treatment

✓ What's good

  • Never says it is quoting: no verse cited, no scripture framing, nothing in the song presented as the Bible's words
  • What the bridge says about God is true of Him. Scripture does say the impossible is possible with God, and it does tie asking to Jesus' name
  • Worship Together publishes the passages it lists behind the song, so the basis can be checked rather than guessed at
  • It is intercession sung out loud over a specific person's trouble, which turns the singer's attention outward rather than inward

⚠ Cautions

  • Matthew 19:26 is an answer to a question about salvation. Sung over healing and circumstances, "all things" covers ground the verse was not answering
  • The verse is a contrast with two halves, and the force comes from the half about man. A song that keeps only the possible half keeps the smaller part of the sentence
  • The verse locates the possibility with God. The bridge locates it in the name of Jesus. Both ideas are in scripture, but they are not the same clause, and no reference is given
  • A prayer for an outcome can be heard as a promise of one. The song asks, which is right, but it never says what God has undertaken to do in any particular case

Verse Proof

Matthew 19:26

The text in BSB (Berean Standard Bible)

“Jesus looked at them and said, “With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible.”

A rich young man has just walked away from Jesus rather than sell what he owns. Jesus turns to the disciples and tells them how hard it is for a rich man to enter the kingdom, with the camel and the needle. The disciples are greatly astonished and ask who can be saved at all. Verse 26 is the answer to that question, spoken to them, while He looks at them. The "this" in the first half of the sentence points back at their question, so the impossibility on the table is a person being saved. The second half widens the language but not the subject. Peter's reply in the next verse keeps the same thread running: they have left everything to follow Him, and what then.

What the song says, described not quoted

The song is a prayer sung over another person. Two verses describe someone in a hard season: fear, chains, a situation that has not moved. The choruses are first-person petitions for that person, asking for healing, for circumstances to change, for fear to leave, for breakthrough, for miracles over their life. The bridge stops asking and starts stating. It invites the hearer to believe and to receive, says the power of God's Spirit is now theirs, and closes by saying that in the name of Jesus all things are possible. The second person throughout is the human being prayed for, not God, which is why the addressed-to tag here is "not addressed" rather than a person of the Trinity. No verse is quoted and no reference is given anywhere in the song.

Two things shift between the verse and the bridge, and neither is hidden, because the song presents nothing as scripture. First, the sentence loses its question. In Matthew 19 the words are an answer, and the answer is about salvation. In the song the same predicate stands on its own over healing and changed circumstances. Second, the possibility moves address. The verse says the impossible is possible with God. The bridge says it is possible in the name of Jesus. Asking in Jesus' name is its own thread in scripture, and the song is on solid ground praying that way, but it is not the clause Matthew 19:26 contains, and no reference is offered for the swap.

· Not a quote: The song quotes no verse and cites none. Its bridge restates the second half of Matthew 19:26. It leaves out the contrast the sentence is built on. It also leaves out the question about who can be saved that the sentence is answering.

▸ Official upload. Now listen with the proof in mind.

Before the famous sentence about possibility, someone asked whether anyone could be saved at all.

Why it matters

This sentence may be the most borrowed half-verse in the English-speaking church, and it almost always travels alone. Detached, it reads as a general statement that nothing is off the table. In place, it is the moment the disciples' hope collapses and Jesus rebuilds it, and what He rebuilds is confidence that God can save people who cannot save themselves.

Nothing the song asks for is off limits. Scripture prays for healing, and it prays boldly. The stakes are in what the verse is being used to underwrite. A prayer that borrows its confidence from Matthew 19:26 is borrowing from a promise about salvation, and salvation is the thing the verse actually guarantees. Praying for a changed circumstance is right. Reading a guarantee of it out of this verse is more than the verse says.

Is it safe to dwell on?

Sung on repeat, this song moves between God and the singer.

What repetition plants here is a habit more than a doctrine: praying out loud, in Jesus' name, in specific terms, for somebody else. That is a good thing to wear a groove in. The dwelling tag is mixed because most of the words are about a person in trouble and the content about God sits mainly in the bridge, but the human pole in this song is the listener rather than the singer, so the loop trains attention outward, which is rarer than it sounds.

What the loop will not plant is the question that produced the verse. Sing the bridge two hundred times and you will have "all things are possible" by heart with nothing under it. Read Matthew 19:23 to 26 alongside it and the sentence gets a floor. The thing God does that no one else can do is save people who cannot save themselves. Everything else anyone prays sits on top of that, and it sits there more steadily for knowing which is which.

Helpful comparison

Two pages outside the song are worth looking at side by side, because they disagree. Worship Together, the song-resource platform Capitol CMG Publishing runs, carries the song's licensing metadata and lists its scripture references as Matthew 19:26 and Psalm 77:14. PraiseCharts publishes a devotional for the same song that works entirely from Lamentations 3 and Romans 8 and never mentions Matthew 19. None of those four passages appears in the song itself. That is normal practice and no one is doing anything wrong, but it shows how the verse behind a song gets assigned after the fact, by different hands.

One note on the title. The song is registered and released as "In Jesus Name (God Of Possible)" (CCLI 7186326), and several outlets write it with an apostrophe as "In Jesus' Name". The version without the apostrophe is the one on the copyright line.

Sources

Corrections

  1. This entry called worshiptogether.com the rights holder, or the song's publisher. It is neither. Capitol CMG Publishing's About page calls Worship Together "Capitol CMG Publishing's outreach to the global church", and the site describes itself as a song discovery and resource platform for worship leaders. It also carries songs Capitol CMG does not publish, so a scripture list on it is the platform's, not the songwriters'. This site already corrected the same wording on the Ephesians 2:4-6 entry on 2026-08-07; these lines were missed then. The finding is unchanged — the reference is still published outside the song and still checkable — only who published it.

Think we got something wrong? Tell us what and where, and we will check it against the text. Real errors get fixed here, dated, in public. Every correction on the site →

Where the text survives the song

Not a ranking, and not a swap. If what you came for is the passage sung whole, these proofs found it kept: word-for-word verified, or paraphrase that says so and names its source.

~ FAITHFUL “Seek Ye First” Karen Lafferty Matthew 6:31-33 Sing it. Stanza one is Matthew 6:33 almost exactly, in King James wording. Just know that the later stanzas were added by other people from other chapters, and no translation is ever named.

✓ Stanza one follows Matthew 6:33 in the King James wording, with nothing altered or reordered

⚠ No translation is named, so the King James wording has to be recognised rather than checked

 ~ FAITHFUL “Jesus, Strong and Kind” CityAlight feat. Colin Buchanan Matthew 11:28 Sing it, including with children. It says what Jesus said without pretending to be quoting him, and the invitation it reports is really his. It just never tells you where to look it up.

✓ The song never puts a sentence in Jesus' mouth. Every attribution is reported in the third person, so nothing is offered as a quotation that would then have to be checked against a translation

⚠ No reference and no translation anywhere: not on the recording, not on the official chord chart, and not on CityAlight's own page for the song. Four reports of what Jesus said, and no address for any of them

 ~ FAITHFUL “The Lord's Prayer” JJ Heller Matthew 6:9-13 Sing it. It is the Lord's Prayer in King James English, unaltered. The closing line about the kingdom and the power is in the King James and footnoted in most modern Bibles, for reasons older than either.

✓ The words are the prayer and only the prayer, with no verses of the songwriter's own attached and nothing inserted between the petitions

⚠ No translation is named on the recording or in its description, so the King James has to be recognised rather than verified

More songs like this

NOT A QUOTE “My Jesus” Anne Wilson Matthew 11:28-30 Sing it as testimony, not as a quotation. Nothing in it is offered as a verse. If it sends you to Matthew 11, read the whole invitation. The rest Jesus offers there comes with a yoke.

✓ Nothing in it is dressed as a quotation. No verse, no chapter, no translation, and no line where the song speaks as Jesus, in either published review

⚠ The invitation in Matthew 11 comes with terms. Take my yoke, learn from me. Neither review reports a yoke or an instruction to learn in the song

 NOT A QUOTE “O Sacred Head Now Wounded” Reawaken Hymns Matthew 27:29-30 Sing it. It is devotion built on Matthew's crucifixion scene, not a quotation of it. Know that its printed credit line names an author the manuscripts do not, and skips the two men whose words you sing.

✓ Every physical detail in the opening stanza is in Matthew 27:29-30 itself. The thorns, the crown, the scorn, the blows to the head. The hymn describes the scene without adding to it.

⚠ The credit line on both the official upload and the publisher's resource page names Bernard of Clairvaux and the year 1153. The earliest manuscript of the Latin cycle names Arnulf of Leuven, and scholarship has not accepted the Bernard ascription for over a century.

 NOT A QUOTE “Come, Ye Sinners, Poor and Needy” Sovereign Grace Music, Bob Kauflin Matthew 9:12-13 Sing it. It quotes nothing and never says it is scripture, and its reasoning is the passage's own: the sick are who the doctor came for. Just know the refrain is not Hart's.

✓ The hymn's central argument is the passage's. Matthew 9:12 says the sick are the ones who need a doctor, and the third verse says that waiting to be better first means never coming

⚠ The refrain is not Hart's and not from this passage. It came out of Caleb Jarvis Taylor's 1804 collection, where the lines belonged to another hymn's first stanza, and became a chorus in 1806. Its opening echoes Luke 15:18

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