Where are the signs and wonders the Lord promised those who believe? I have three friends who have walked on water… but it was in their bathtub without witnesses. Sort of like our miracles today, in a word nebulous. Well, after six months of treatment and $350K God healed me. Who did? Where’s the heart-stopping wonder in that? Is God still asleep in the back of the boat, waiting for us to demonstrate our mustard seed faith? Doesn’t He know how hungry we are for Him… well… at least to manifest His power! Does He know what He is doing, by not doing? What’s the deal? Who’s in charge anyway???
Matthew 7:7 Says “Ask and it will be given to you”, but there are twenty-six New Testament verses on the Theology of Answered Prayer, try hang gliding on just one verse and you will crash to earth real quick. “Say to this mountain, Be removed and be cast into the sea” (Matt. 21:21). Ever wonder why Jesus never moved a mountain? Read 1 Jn. 5:14-15, one of the twenty-six verses. Someone said “mountain” means an obstacle or problem in our life. Was the raging storm our Lord calmed a real storm? Was the fig tree that Jesus destroyed at its root a metaphor or a real tree? The mountain in this passage is referred to as “this mountain” in reference to the Mount of Olives (i.e., verse one). This mountain is no metaphor! The Lord we serve is God over the physical world He created and doesn’t need our help to make His word more palatable. Mountain moving faith is here qualified with “do not doubt”, similar to Mk. 11:23. The companion passage in Matt. 17:20 further qualifies mountain moving faith while referring to the Mount of Transfiguration: “If you have faith as a grain of mustard seed”, referring not to “small faith” but rather living active faith. And 1 Cor. 13:2 qualifies mountain moving faith even further as requiring “all faith”, referring not to a quantity of faith, but the completeness of that which is believed, God’s doctrine of Faith. The message in these passages is great wonders are released through fully developed living active never doubting faith. Seeing a mountain cast into the sea by a spoken command would certainly cause wonder, and not a little shock and awe, in anyone. Is our Lord God over our mountainous problem? Our Lord is God over all things, if it’s a thing, He is sovereign over it. The point: We down size the mountain to a problem to explain why we have never seen a real mountain cast into the sea by a spoken word, and in the process we downsize God. And don’t we do the same thing with our problems. When it comes to signs and wonders, we have become people of low expectations.
“The word of the Lord was rare in those days.” Could this be another dry-spell similar to the 400 years when God chose not to speak; only now its signs and wonders… where the power displays of God are on mute? During the first century signs and wonders were common place in the church of the living God. Since then church history has seen nineteen hundred years of periodical hot-spots, when God manifests in power, only to all too quickly subside. We live in a time when people are striving hard for the power of God and maybe, just maybe, we are trying too hard to coerce God into doing what He is obliviously not ready to do? We will even lend legitimacy to goofy “revivals” and healing “ministries” on TV and the internet, which hawk and merchandise signs and wonders like carnival trinkets. This is sad but remember the attraction of a counterfeit, what makes us vulnerable and gullible, is the value of the reality, the value of the real thing!
God will pour out His Spirit in signs and wonders again in this last time. Isn’t this a precious thought that time is ending and will soon be no more, no more the restraining tick of the clock. The outpouring that begin on the day of Pentecost has barely built up steam, but it’s coming again as a gale force hurricane of the Spirit, its coming to complete God’s work here on earth. And then we will know where the dead-raising, blind-seeing, deaf-hearing, limb-fixing, demon-casting, tomb-defying God of Elijah is -- no one will even ask the question, they’ll be too busy dodging flying mountains. In the mean while, we have need of discernment and patience.
IT’S COMING!!!
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