Throughout my four years at Dallas Theological Seminary–four years of intense biblical study and spiritual growth–I learned that I was to follow Jesus in his teaching and discipleship methods, but not in his supernatural ministry. His miracles, I was taught, were for the purpose of validating his person and message. I learned such miracles are no longer necessary since the resurrection and the completion of the New Testament scriptures.
All of this made sense to me and my spiritual life validated it. Not once, in decades of ministry, did I see someone healed. My personal experience with divine healing was based on the stories of others.
Until the day, almost seven years ago, when God repeatedly spoke to me the name of a woman at a church service in Louisiana. I found Lisa and God divinely healed her.
But my spiritual bias against supernatural healing wasn’t so easily overcome. I learned I had much in common with the men and women of Nazareth about whom we read, “And he did not do many miracles there because of their lack of faith” Matthew 13:58). The only Jesus they knew was the one who grew up in their village. Nice boy, hard worker, but no miracle worker.
And so when the Jesus of power visited their town, their bias against THAT Jesus limited what he could do among them.
A single miracle drove me to know the real Jesus, the Jesus of Power, not just wisdom. With that in mind I began to read the Gospels monthly. I tried to set aside my theological biases and accept what I read at face value. I sought to do what I saw Jesus doing in the Gospels–practices I had always skipped over because they didn’t apply today. As I lived this way, the results astounded me, and still do. They filled me with joy and expectation, and still do.
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