DO YOU BELIEVE IN MIRACLES?

“For to me, living means living for Christ, and dying is even better.”  – Philippians 1:21.

Most of us know of a miracle—a friend with breast cancer now cancer-free; a quadruple bypass survivor walking 5 miles every day; a baby that was given little hope for survival, alive and happy today, or cash appearing out of nowhere to keep a church from closing.

Do you believe in miracles? Maybe you feel like the conversation in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland: Alice and the Queen were talking, and Alice says, “There’s no use trying—one can’t believe impossible things.” Then the Queen replied, “I daresay you haven’t had much practice…When I was your age, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast!”

In 2025, with the ability of computers to do millions of calculations per second and mankind reaching farther and farther into space, people can be skeptical about miracles. But the Bible tells us of many miraculous events and happenings. But what is simply a happy coincidence, and what is a miracle? A rough definition of a miracle is a divine intervention into the regular course of the world that would not (or could not) have occurred otherwise. In other words, it is an act of God that can’t be explained conventionally. We tend to think of miracles as parting the Red Sea, feeding the 5,000, bringing Lazarus back to life, or catching so many fish that the boat was about to sink, and those types of things don’t happen anymore. Much about the Christian life is inexplicable by conventional human standards, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t true or that miraculous things don’t happen in our modern age.

Our unchanging God is still in the miracle business today – not just in the dim and distant past or in some far-flung part of the world – but here, at home, in the 21st Century. He is still supernaturally performing acts that shouldn’t be able to happen according to the laws of nature or science. They may be rare, but they occur more often than we realize. These things don’t happen routinely and are impossible to predict in advance; they are always about God, never about us, and always have a purpose.

Our God is big enough to do whatever He wants—and sometimes He divinely rearranges things like trees falling everywhere but not on the house during Hurricane Michael. Or he reignites a marriage that was all but over. God can perform extraordinary acts or miracles in people’s lives. God can still intervene in seemingly impossible situations to bring about positive outcomes. God can break into our world whenever He chooses to do things we cannot explain. It is an amazing thing to see an act of God that can’t be explained any other way. It has nothing to do with luck or coincidence.

The greatest miracle of all is when someone opens their hearts to Christ, and He gives them the gift of a transformed life. What else can it be than a miracle when someone accepts Christ as Savior and you see joy and compassion where there was anger and discontentment?

God shows up in powerful ways, in ways that are inexplicable, incredible, and mysterious ways, both big and small.

Discussion Questions:

1. How can miracles demonstrate God’s love, power, and desire for a relationship with us?
2. How can we live with a “miracle mindset” even in everyday situations?
   
3. What are some ways we can be instruments of God’s miraculous work in the lives of others?