Miracles

 October 10, 2022

“What keeps you from praying for a miracle?” That question sparked some deep thinking in our men’s Bible study tonight. The Scripture behind the question was from Genesis 18:14–“Is anything too hard for God?” I’ve often found myself praying by the limits of my own imagination. When praying for healing for example, I used to mentally calculate the likelihood of the person getting better. If the illness was minor, I could pray confidently. If it looked terminal, I’d pray for comfort. After all, I didn’t want people to lose faith from unanswered prayers.

God finally got through my thick head that he didn’t need any protection from me; that I wasn’t responsible for his reputation. So I began praying for healing no matter how desperate the situation, knowing that God might have other plans, but also knowing that generally, he intends people to be healthy. 

The conversation took a sudden turn when one of the men, a relatively new Christian, spoke of a debilitating condition he has that the doctors tell him will only get worse. He spoke of the transformation that Christ has already worked in his life, and that he wonders if physical healing might somehow induce him to slowly let go of his faith and return to his old way of life. “I don’t want healing on those terms,” he said. 

So we returned to the question of praying for miracles. What constitutes a miracle? Are we praying for God to shape us by whatever means necessary into the image of Christ? In many ways, that would be a greater miracle than healing someone of cancer. 

One of the men said he wondered if he didn’t pray for a miracle because if he got into a bad situation by his own foolishness or sin, how could he with integrity ask God to bail him out? The answer to that question is easy: We all got ourselves into bad situations by our choices to sin. God’s offer of salvation is to those of us who got ourselves into situations we can’t get out of. Salvation is by definition, God bailing us out of the situation we got ourselves into. That in itself, is quite the miracle!