July 20: Looking To The Miraculous
The Church Fails the “Drive-thru” Test
In the modern Western world of Fast Food, Fast Entertainment, Instant Marriages and Instant Makeovers the church fails to meet the ever-growing and insatiable craving of Christians to want everything from God right NOW.
Sadly, when it doesn’t come right away they are left believing that prayer doesn’t work; that healing isn’t for today; God must not want them to be healed and a myriad other answers to satisfy their sense of disappointment.
This can lead to anger at God for letting them down. Or, to providing an avenue of entry for wrong thinking and wrong teaching that would suggest that God wants to teach you something by ‘making’ you sick. Even worse, that God is the author of your sickness.
The truth is that God is not in the party trick, or the side show business. He isn’t into providing cheap thrills, or performing at our whim.
Yet, we are asked to believe that God, who demonstrated his perfect will through Jesus, is the same today as he was back then. The bible indicates that the realm of the miraculous is available in the here and now. Otherwise, there would be grounds to believe that God is not as great as we have been led to believe.
One of the major problems, I believe, is that we, as Christians, have a badly skewed concept of what a miracle actually is. Through common usage we have come to believe that any healing that is miraculous is an instantaneous healing.
We hear stories of Evangelists, in countries like Africa and in other similar parts of the world, conducting great tent meetings where hundreds of people receive their healing instantaneously; the blind see; the deaf hear and the lame and crippled are made able to walk again.
Yet, signs and wonders, like these are few and far between in western society. Why is that?
What is it about the miraculous that is so important to us?
Why do we have this idea that every healing that Jesus performed was instantaneous?
There must be more to this subject than meets our first glance.
This important message looks at these questions and provides answers that may have never entered your thinking on this subject before.
As the church of Jesus Christ the miraculous is the realm we are called to both live and walk in; all the time. But, if we don’t have a clearer picture of what that is supposed to be like we may be experiencing failure when we could be, and should be rejoicing in the Victory that overcomes the World; Our Faith.
To download this important message click on the following link and save the linked file to a directory of your choice, on your computer. Otherwise your browser will open up with a player to simply listen online.
Looking To The Miraculous
1.Photo Source: iStockphoto