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You're tuned into Everyday Theology in Plain English, making sense of God's truth for your everyday life. Here's your host, the man who thinks finding a parking spot at Walmart on a Saturday counts as a small miracle, but is drawing a clearer line today. Charlie Miller.

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Hey there. Welcome back to Everyday Theology in Plain English. I am so glad that you're here. Last episode was a heavy one, so today we're shifting gears to a question that gets people fired up in every direction all at the same time. Do miracles still happen today? Or did they stop somewhere back in the pages of the New Testament? Maybe you've heard the stories a friend of a friend who got healed after the doctors completely gave up. Or a missionary account so dramatic it almost sounds made up. And you honestly don't know what to do with it. Do you believe it? Do you roll your eyes? Or do you feel a little guilty for being skeptical? Or maybe, maybe it's more personal than that. Maybe you prayed for something specific. You desperately wanted a miracle and it didn't come. So now you're quietly wondering if God even does that kind of thing anymore. Or if you were foolish to hope for it. Or maybe you grew up in a church culture where miracle got thrown around so casually that the words started to feel cheap, and somewhere along the way, you got suspicious of the whole idea. Well, let me name the tension honestly, because there are two ditches here, and both of them are real. On the one side, you can get so skeptical that you've basically decided deep down inside that God doesn't do that stuff anymore. You've boxed him into the Bible, like his power was a first-century thing that has completely expired. On the other side, you can start seeing a miracle behind every coincidence. You chase the spectacle, and you slowly lose the ability to tell the difference between God actually showing up and plain old wishful thinking. Well, today we're going to walk the narrow road between those two ditches. We'll look at what a miracle actually is, why God does them, and how to think clearly about miracle claims today, not cynically and not gullibly. Let's start with a definition because miracle gets slapped on everything from a healing to a good parking spot opening up right when you need it. So here's what we mean by it. A miracle is a less common kind of God's activity where he stirs up people's awe and wonder and points them to himself, usually by working outside the ordinary predictable patterns he built into the world. There are two pieces in there that are worth slowing down on. So the first piece is a miracle is still God's activity. Now, notice what the Bible rules out. The Bible doesn't actually teach that God normally runs the world by natural laws and then every so often steps in from the outside like some kind of visitor. That's not the picture. God is deeply, personally involved in holding everything together all the time. Now, we'll dig into that more when we talk about providence later this season. A miracle isn't God finally breaking into a universe he usually leaves alone. It's a rarer, more startling version of the same thing he's always doing. And here's the second piece: miracles have a point. They're not there just to dazzle you, they're there to show off God's power and turn your eyes toward him. You can see that purpose clearly in how the Gospel of John talks about Jesus' miracles. John doesn't even call them miracles, he calls them signs, not just power for power's sake, signs pointing to who Jesus really is. John chapter 20, verses 30 and 31 says, Jesus did many signs, but these are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name. The miracle itself was never the point. What the miracle showed you about Jesus, now that was the point. Here's a way to think about that. A miracle is less like a magic trick meant to wow a crowd and more like a signature at the bottom of a letter. It tells you who's really behind the message. When Jesus healed someone, calmed a storm, raised the dead, he wasn't just doing something amazing. He was signing his name to the claim that God's kingdom had shown up in him. Now here's a question I want to name head on because good, careful Christians honestly land in different spots on it. Did the dramatic apostle-level miracles, the healings and wonders the first apostles did, did they keep going at that same intensity after the apostles died? Or did that particular concentration taper off once the New Testament finished and the foundation of the church was laid? There's even a nickname for each side, if you want to sound fancy around the water cooler this week. Folks who think those dramatic sign gifts largely wound down after the apostles are called cessationists, think ceased. Folks who think they simply continue right on to today are called continuationists, think continue. That's a real respectable debate inside the church. It's not some fringe fight. But here, what is not up for debate among Bible-believing Christians. God still heals. God still provides. God still steps in. God still works today in ways that go beyond any ordinary explanation. Nobody serious is arguing God lost his power or set it down. The debate is narrower than that. It's about how often and in what pattern the most dramatic sign miracles show up compared to back in the Apostles' Day. A scripture never once hint that God's power shrank. What we're talking about is his ordinary pattern of working across different seasons of church history. And here's why that concentration around the apostles' era actually makes sense, no matter which side of the debate you land on. In the Bible, miracles bunch up around a few key turning points. The Exodus under Moses, the ministries of Elijah and Elisha, and then dramatically around Jesus and the Apostles, getting the early church off the ground. In every one of those windows, God was putting his signature on a brand new stage of what he was revealing and doing. That doesn't mean he retired his power in between. It means that big cluster of sign miracles was doing a specific job, authenticating those pivotal moments. And God stays every bit as powerful and every bit as active in every era since, including this one today. So here's the line to hold on to. All of that is genuinely God at work, even though it runs through the processes that look natural and don't stop traffic or make the news. A miracle is different mainly in how it happens, not in whether God is behind it. In a miracle, God works in a way that goes beyond those ordinary means. In a way people clearly recognize as out of the ordinary. Both are real, both are God. One's just more visible than the other. And here's the mistake Christians make without meaning to. We imply God is only really doing something when it's dramatic. That quietly drains the rest of your ordinary life of His presence, as if the quiet parts don't count, and that's not the biblical picture at all. This also helps with something a lot of us bump into, those unusual answers to prayers that aren't technically miracles, but sure feel like God. Say you prayed for provision and a friend unexpectedly offers help at the exact right moment. That's not the laws of nature getting suspended the way Jesus walking on water was, but it's still God's real providential answer to your prayer, worked out through everyday ordinary means. Something doesn't have to qualify as a full-blown miracle to be a real, meaningful, faith-building answer from God. Let me stop here for just a second to check in with you. If a light just came on, tell me, drop a comment and say so. And if you still feel confused about something, ask it. That's what this community is for. This one especially, I genuinely want to hear where you're landing because thoughtful people land in different places. All right, enough big picture. Let's make it concrete. Three ways this matters come Monday morning in how you pray and how you weigh the claims that you hear. First, keep praying expectantly and don't treat an unanswered prayer as proof God has stopped. I'll be honest with you here. If you've prayed hard for something, hoped against hope for a miracle, and watched it not come, and you're feeling that quiet ache of maybe God doesn't do this for me right now, I'm right there with you. I've prayed those prayers. I've sat in the silence afterward and felt something cool off inside of me. Felt myself quietly stop expecting, just to protect myself from the disappointment. So I'm not handing you a tidy formula from a safe distance. I've walked this too. And here's the pattern I've watched play out in a lot of lives, mine included. Someone prays fervently for a specific thing, a hard thing, healing, a marriage restored, provision. It doesn't come the day they hoped, and they quietly landed on one of two conclusions. Either God doesn't do that kind of thing anymore, or their faith just wasn't strong enough to unlock it. And neither one of those fits with what the Bible actually teaches. God stays free and powerful to act miraculously, and in his own wisdom, he also sometimes says no, or not yet, for reasons we may not see on this side of eternity. Remember, Paul, he begged God three times to take away a thorn in the flesh. And God's grace, his answer was that grace was enough. So keep bringing your real, specific request to God. Don't let a no convince you he stopped listening, and don't let it become a report card on your faith. Second, weigh the miracle stories you hear with both an open heart and a clear head. When somebody tells you about a miraculous healing or a dramatic answer to prayer, you don't have to pick between swallowing every claim whole and sneering at all of them. Scripture actually asks you to do neither. It calls for discernment. 1 John 4, verse 1 tells us to test the spirits. 1 Thessalonians 5, verse 21 says to test everything, hold fast what is good. So it's not unspiritual to ask honest questions about a claim to miracle. Does this fit with God's character? Is it pointing people toward Christ or toward some preacher's platform? Does it hold up under a little basic scrutiny? Healthy discernment isn't a lack of faith. It actually protects the real testimonies from getting lumped in with the manufactured ones. Asking good questions guards you and it guards the credibility of the genuine stories, too. Third, don't miss God's ordinary, steady work while you're waiting on the extraordinary. This might be the most practical point in the whole episode. If your eyes are only peeled for the dramatic and the sudden, you can miss what's right in front of you. That God's faithful day-in, day out sustaining of your life is also his activity. Provision that shows up in unremarkable ways. Timing that just works out. Strength you didn't know you had for a hard stretch. That's God too, even when it doesn't look like a parted sea. Miracles grab the spotlight because they are rare and startling, but the Bible never once suggests God's quieter, steadier faithfulness matters less. Picture someone in a rough financial season. They've been praying for months for a breakthrough, scanning the horizon for something dramatic, like an unexpected windfall, a sudden reversal. And the whole time they've had steady work, a roof over their head, and people around them ready to help out. Now, none of it feels miraculous because it's steady instead of sudden. But here's the thing: steady provision, month after month, is still provision. Learning to spot God's ordinary faithfulness doesn't mean you quit hoping for the extraordinary. It means you stop being blind to everything that doesn't show up with fanfare. Now, I can hear the objection coming already. Okay, Charlie, that's fine. But if God can heal and provide and step in whenever he wants, then why doesn't he do it every single time somebody sincerely prays for something urgent and good? And that's a hard one. I won't pretend it isn't. And it ties right back to what we said last episode about suffering. God's wisdom about when and how he acts isn't fully visible to us. And Scripture never promises that sincere faith guarantees the exact outcome you asked for. What it does promise is this God is good. He hears every prayer. And his no to a specific request is never, not once, proof that he's absent or that he doesn't care. A miracle is never something we can demand or squeeze out of God with enough faith or the right formula. It stays, as the definition says, an expression of his free choice to act. Which means the one miracle you were desperately hoping for and didn't get is not a verdict on his power and it's not a verdict on his love for you. And let me name one more thing, uh, because it does some real damage in some corners of the church. The teaching that if healing doesn't come or the hope-for miracle doesn't show, it must be because the person praying didn't have enough faith. That teaching isn't in scripture. And it dumps a cruel extra layer of guilt onto people who are already hurting. Look at Paul again. This is the same apostle God used to do genuine miracles all through the book of Acts. And God did not heal Paul's own thorn in the flesh, even after he pleaded three times. And nobody reads that and thinks, well, Paul just didn't believe hard enough. So if a miracle doesn't come like the way that you hoped, that's not the evidence that your faith was too small. It's evident that it's evidence that God, in his wisdom, chose a different path for reasons you may not see yet. As we wrap up, here's what I want you to carry out the door. The same God who worked wonders all through Scripture has not changed. He has not grown weaker, and he has not stopped being free to act whenever he chooses. Wherever you land on how often the dramatic sign gifts still show up, hold on to three things. Keep praying with real expectation, weigh what you hear with honest discernment, and don't let your hunt for the extraordinary blind you to the ordinary faithfulness God is showing you every single day. And wherever you land on the finer points of this debate, don't let the debate itself talk you out of praying boldly. The God of the Bible has never been boxed in by our theological categories, and he doesn't need our permission to act. Your job isn't to predict exactly how he'll answer, it's to keep bringing your real requests to a God who is genuinely able, genuinely good, and genuinely present, both in the dramatic moments and in the quiet ones. So here's your assignment for this week. Think of one situation right now where you've been praying, or I'm sorry, where you've quietly stopped praying with real expectation. Maybe because you prayed a long time and never got the answer you wanted. This week, bring that request back to God. Bring it honestly and specifically, and then spend a few minutes each day noticing one piece of God's ordinary, sustaining faithfulness you'd normally walk right past. And here's our community question. Have you ever experienced something you believed was a genuine direct answer to prayer? Something that felt miraculous to you? Or are you in a season right now of praying for something and wondering whether God still works that way? I'd love to hear either story, and I promise this community would too. If you'd like to go deeper on this, I have good news. Hey, the season three companion guide is available right now, and it's built to help you sit with these topics beyond this episode. And if the show's been good for you, one of the simplest ways to help is to subscribe and leave a quick review. It genuinely helps people find these conversations. Next time, we're wading into something that trips up nearly everyone at some point. If God already knows exactly what's going to happen, then why pray at all? We're going to unpack why prayer isn't about updating God on anything he doesn't already know about. It's about something deeper, meaningful, uh, that most of us were never taught. So until then, remember, the same God who worked wonders throughout history is still at work today, sometimes dramatically, and far more often, quietly, faithfully, in ways worth noticing. Thanks so much for being here with me on Everyday Theology in Plain English. I'm Charlie Miller, and I'm glad that you're a part of this. Take care of yourself this week, and I'll see you next episode.