For much of the church in Africa, there is a great fascination with miracles. You’ve all seen the adverts for various modern-day apostles and prophets hosting miracle crusades, to churches in our area hosting healing services, promising healing to everyone who comes. The assumption behind these events is that miracles are meant to be a normal part of everyday Christianity. This is rooted in the belief that the preaching of the true gospel will always be accompanies by signs and wonders. If there i...
For much of the church in Africa, there is a great fascination with miracles. You’ve all seen the adverts for various modern-day apostles and prophets hosting miracle crusades, to churches in our area hosting healing services, promising healing to everyone who comes. The assumption behind these events is that miracles are meant to be a normal part of everyday Christianity. This is rooted in the belief that the preaching of the true gospel will always be accompanies by signs and wonders. If there is preaching, but no signs and wonders, well then you are not preaching the true gospel. You’re preaching a sub-standard, powerless gospel. And if you don’t experience miracles in your walk with God, well you’re seen as a sub-standard Christian, you haven’t really understood the gospel.
This places huge pressure on Christians to be doing all sorts of miracles in their daily lives. And it creates a pressure on pastors to whip things up every church service in order to get people to be constantly expecting signs and wonders every worship service.
There are many problems with all this is – we will look more closely at some of them during this sermon. But very basically some of the main ones are that it fosters a very self-centred Christianity. Come to Jesus for what he can give you, not for who he is. It also results in many Christians living under condemnation and guilt because they don’t experience these miracles that they’re supposed to be experiencing and performing. They feel like failures and feel they can never match up to the kind of faith and spirituality of their pastors and leaders who are creating such expectations. How do I know this? I was one of those pastors who used to teach these things. And I saw first-hand the pastoral damage and hurt this kind of teaching causes.
Let me say upfront that I absolutely believe that can God perform miracles today. God is sovereign and all-powerful, and he does what he pleases. He is still at work today on earth by the power of his Spirit. As Christians, we should pray for the sick, we should ask God to intervene in all our circumstances.
Yet the truth is that miracles – like the ones we see in the Bible – blind eyes being opened, lame walking and mute people talking, are more the exception to the rule than the rule today. If they were the normal way in which God operates, we would have no need to consult the doctor when we are ill, as we would know that God would heal us without a doubt. Out of interest, why has there been a near silence from the many faith healers across the globe during this Corona virus crisis? Surely this would be their time to shine?
Our text in Mark’s Gospel this morning deals almost exclusively with signs and wonders that Jesus was doing. As we get into this portion of Scripture, we’re going to see something about the nature of the miracles that Jesus did. We’re going to see that because Jesus’ miracles reveal who he is, they are not an end in themselves.
Preacher: Rev. Antonio Coppola
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