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Question:
What is a miracle?
The scriptural definition of a miracle is an event involving God’s powerful and direct action, transcending the standard laws of nature and defying expectations of behavior. Miracles are remarkable occurrences that can only be attributed to God’s supernatural work and show His involvement in human history. In the Bible, God uses miracles to reveal His character, Himself, and His purposes to humanity through phenomena that aren’t otherwise explainable.
All the books in the world couldn’t record the miracles that Jesus Christ did. Healing the blind. Walking on water. Calming the storm. Feeding thousands with a few loaves and fish. Every miracle Jesus performed was for a purpose. He performed thousands of miracles, to shows us that God is real, God loves us and God wants to heal and restore us to abundant life.
The miracle you need most in life will lead you to what you really need most – a deeper relationship with God. Our relationship with our Heavenly Father is so important. Miracles draw us closer to Christ because they always reveal Jesus’ character. Often times, when we think about or study the miracles of Christ, we only look at the wow of the miracle, and we miss the wonder of God’s character. Luke 4:40-41 is a great example of this. The Bible speaks of Jesus’ healing in these verses. If you read the short passage quickly, your takeaway may simply be that Jesus cast out demons, but if you read deeper, you’ll see that Jesus attended to people individually. He touched each one. He made it personal. The miracles of Jesus draw us closer to Him.
Most believers today can acknowledge God’s ability to heal. But like the leper who came to Jesus in Matthew 8 begging for healing, they pray, “If it be your will Lord, heal me.” They are just not sure that it is God’s Will for them to be healed. It’s important that we remember that God’s promises are timeless. When you bring your need to the Lord in prayer, take the “if” out of your asking and pray in faith, expecting to receive. It is God’s Will for you to walk in divine health and be in a right relationship with Him. Just as it was when the Lord Jesus walked this earth, signs, wonders and miraculous acts still occur today.
God does miracles His way, and it’s often when people don’t expect them. You might be sitting by the edge of a pool looking for assistance, for healing, from an escape from your circumstances. In that moment, Jesus may do something you never thought or imagined He’d do. This was the case with the paralytic. Jesus asked the man, “Would you like to get well?” and the paralytic man said to Jesus, “I can’t, sir, for I have no one to put me into the pool when the water bubbles up. Someone else always gets there ahead of me.” As he begins to talk to Jesus, he starts to experience some hope. He sees his deliverance in the Bethesda pool, but instead, Jesus tells him, “Stand up, pick up your mat and walk.” Jesus didn’t need a healing pool, or magic or troubled waters. In that moment, he was telling the paralytic that He was the miracle. The same goes for us. We don’t need to look towards people or things as the solution that will change our life. Jesus is the miracle and has the power to transform us.
If you are ready for a miracle to occur in your life, your faith must be in God and in His Word, not in your own or someone else’s spiritual gift. The apostle John wrote, “This is the confidence that we have in Him, that if we ask anything according to His will, He hears us. And if we know that He hears us, whatever we ask, we know that we have the petitions that we have asked of Him” (1 John 5:14,15). We understand through these verses that we can have faith in that which we ask “according to His will.” There is no point in trying to convince ourselves that something must be His will or hoping hard enough, refusing to allow any doubts to enter into our minds. We can know that anything God has promised or commanded is according to His will. Beyond that is up to God to give us certainty and faith in any particular case.
God can and does miracles for people today because of His incredible love for us. It was the same in the Bible times: “the whole multitude sought to touch (Jesus), for power went out from Him, and healed them all” (Luke 6:19). But the ones who saw miracles every day were those who were with Him all the time. Rather than living our own lives, ignoring Jesus and then coming to Him when we need a miracle, we should enter into a close personal relationship with Him, following Him every day. When we do this, we will see the greatest miracle of all, as our life changes to become like His.
There are hundreds of accounts of miraculous healings today among countless Christians. God miraculously heals some while choosing not to heal others for His divine purpose. No one could accuse the apostle Paul of having a weak faith, yet God refused to heal Him after he asked Him three times. God knows who and what to heal and what is best for the believer in choosing not to heal someone. God’s higher wisdom is always at play. Remember, these are at the discretion of God alone. Trust in His decision-making, even if the outcome isn’t what you expected. Our sufferings and afflictions work out a purpose that we may not be able to understand at the time.