Unleashed: As You Go – Pray

That was God!

“What are we going to do with these men?” they asked. “Everybody living in Jerusalem knows they have done an outstanding miracle, and we cannot deny it.” Acts 4:16

When was the last time you simply said, “That was God!”  Maybe you had been sick and recovered; maybe you were out of work until one day, out of the blue, you get a job offer; maybe you had been dealing with a problem at work and all of a sudden you had an epiphany.

It is not always easy to explain the unexplainable. Non-believers will try to find a rational answer. Some will call it fate, others, pure luck. Believers will often use the word miracle but more as a good luck term. “The living God, the God Who is God and not a philosopher’s abstraction, lies infinitely beyond the reach of anything our eyes can see or our minds can understand.” –Thomas Merton

IMB missionary George Smith should be dead but he is not! George and his wife Geraldine serve in the country of Uganda. George became sick in January with Covid and had to be medically evacuated to Nairobi, Kenya where he was placed on a ventilator with very little chance of survival. Yet as doctors talked to his wife about the need for end of life decisions, she simply continued to pray. People around the world simply continued to pray. New believers in Jesus who had recently come out of Islam realized the need to pray. George is now home in Louisiana recovering. Is this miracle or medicine?  The simple answer is both, but if I could ask George he would probably say, “That was God!”

The miracle for George is not necessarily the recovery, but the story that he will be able to tell. Miracles have a purpose which always point us to God. Jesus performed many miracles that always told a story – a story that pointed people to God, a story that changed lives, a story that led to redemption. “What makes it a miracle is that God performed it specifically to make Himself known, to communicate with human beings. When God pokes into our world through the miraculous, He is communicating with us, otherwise we cannot appropriately use the term “miraculous” to describe the event.” –Eric Metaxas

Peggy Noonan thought miracles existed “in part as gifts and in part as clues that there is something beyond the flat world we see.” We live in an age when people are looking for clues that there is something more than the life they are living. It could be that God will use miracles to point people to Him because you would think miracles would be a sure-fire way of drawing people to Him. Unfortunately, that is not the case. Jesus performed miracle after miracle yet faced increasing opposition and rejection.

Mark tells the account of when Jesus was in his hometown of Nazareth. “And he could do no deed of power there, except that he laid his hands on a few sick people and cured them. And he was amazed at their unbelief.” (6:5-6) If Jesus couldn’t perform miracles in his own hometown, how can we expect people to be moved by miracles today?

Moses stood on the shore of the Red Sea and watched the hand of God split the water. That was God!

Queen Esther stood before the king to save her people. That was God!

David stood at the edge of the battlefield having faced the biggest giant of his life. That was God!

Jesus hung on the cross and said “It is finished.” That was God!

Today you may be standing at the edge of a hospital bed praying for healing of a loved one. Today you may be pouring out your heart for a wayward child. Today you may be pleading for mercy. The miracle you need more than anything is God himself. At the end of the day you are able to cry out, “That was God!”

“Now, Lord, consider their threats and enable your servants to speak your word with great boldness. Stretch out your hand to heal and perform miraculous signs and wonders through the name of your holy servant Jesus. After they prayed, the place where they were meeting was shaken. And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and spoke the word of God boldly.” Acts 4:29-31

That was God!

God is great

Lynn