Insight for the Journey

Christianity is based on miracles! The birth of Christ, the life and ministry of Christ, His resurrection and ascension … all of these are miracles. One day He will return in power to this earth. That is also a…, you guessed it, a miracle. Christianity is solidly founded on a series of amazing miracles.

Why is it then that many Christians struggle with the idea of miracles? More specifically, why do many struggle with the idea of God answering prayer in miraculous ways? I’ve met numerous Christians who were quite clear about the fact they believe every miracle recorded in Scripture. In fact, they can eloquently defend their belief in miracles. But when they hear of a modern miracle, they immediately retort with skepticism: “It’s probably someone’s over-active imagination. I doubt if it really happened like that.”

The result of skepticism in the Christian community has been devastating to our desire to seek God in prayer. If people have no faith that God will respond (with or without miracles) it greatly hampers their willingness to keep on asking, seeking and knocking as Jesus encouraged.

My faith in God’s willingness to sometimes respond miraculously was greatly bolstered in 1985-86 while grading thousands of applications for Amsterdam ’86, an international conference for evangelists. The participants were from 184 countries around the world. Their applications often told of how God had miraculously helped them while conducting their ministry. Let me share two such stories.

Festo Kivengere, a Ugandan Christian missionary and speaker at the conference, tells of fleeing with his family from Idi Amin and crossing the African plains by night into Kenya. The Kivengere family became seriously lost in the blackness of the night on three different occasions, and on all three occasions a stranger mysteriously appeared and pointed them in the right direction. By dawn they arrived safely at their destination.  Kivengere can’t say with certainty that these were angels, or simply people who helped, but someone appeared miraculously to preserve he and his family.

Another contemporary saint with a similar experience is an Indian missionary named Sadhu Sundar Singh. He is a legendary evangelist in India. He tells about preaching in Tibet, where he offended the chief Lama by his proclamation of the gospel. He was thrown down in a well. And the well was sealed with a lid for a covering, and it was locked. He was left there to die. 

In the fall down into the well, his left arm was injured seriously, as he fell among the bones and the rotting flesh of others who had been imprisoned in the same well. For the next three days and nights he prayed constantly and cried out to God. On the third night he said that the door of the well suddenly opened and a rope was lowered. Fortunately it had a hoop in it, because he was unable to hang on by his arms. He put his foot in and held on with one arm as he was pulled up. He got out of the well to find no one there!

He slept that night, and then in the morning went back to the same village and again began preaching Jesus. The Chief Lama was enraged and set out to find who had helped him escape. The subsequent investigation proved that the only key to the lid of the well rested on the belt of the chief Lama himself.

Sundar Singh could not say with certainty that he was rescued by angels, or the invisible hand of God. But there seems to be no logical explanation for his miraculous delivery.

Sometimes God works miraculously in answer to our prayers…

…but not always.

When He doesn’t we must keep on trusting and looking to Him. Genuine faith does not require a miracle a day to keep the Devil away. But as believers in a miracle-working God, we should be open to any miracle God truly wants to perform.