The miracle of faith

A message for the 6th Sunday after Pentecost 

If something happens regularly, routinely, we don’t call it miraculous. The miraculous is when it goes beyond our understanding, beyond our finiteness. That is where the word of grace comes in … and the strength that grace gives to our hearts.

The Miracle of Faith

Do you believe in miracles?

One day this summer, I had gone to the grocery store, about two miles from my house. When I’d opened the liftgate and was putting groceries in the back of my vehicle, I set my cell phone down on the back bumper’s step pad. As I was arriving back at my house, it dawned on me that I’d never picked up my phone. I parked, with the prayer in my head: “Please, please—somehow let my phone still be sitting on the bumper pad.” I walked to the back of the vehicle and, amazingly, there the phone was, exactly where I left it.

Okay, that may not have been a miracle. Maybe I should thank the manufacturers of my cell phone case and the step pad on the car bumper for good friction and grip. We tend not to think of day-to-day fortuitous events as miracles in our lives. Then again, we often fail to acknowledge that the very fact of our lives—that we live and move and have our existence at all—is a constant miracle of God’s providence, as the apostle Paul pointed out (Acts 17:28).

I once knew a couple with two young children. The wife and mother was a devout churchgoer, who was teaching faith also to her children. The husband/father was an atheist, unwilling to acknowledge any invisible God overseeing all things. One night, after his wife led the children in prayer before supper as she always did, his pent-up frustration got the better of him. After they’d said their prayer, he said, “I don’t know why you insist on thanking some God out there for the food on the table. I’m the one who works and sweats to earn what we need. I’m the one who puts a roof over our heads and food on the table. You should be thanking me.” Billy, his son (about five years old at the time), looked at him with a child’s innocence and wisdom and said, “Yeah, but Dad, if God didn’t let you, you’d be sick or dead and you wouldn’t be able to work.” His dad didn’t have an answer … except that he started to come to church with his wife and children. And that was a miracle. The fact that a father listened and responded to the faith expressed by his child is nothing short of miraculous.

In my years in ministry, I came to serve a church that was badly in debt. (Something I found out after I got there.) They were perpetually behind on payments on their church building. They had not been paying anything on the principal of the loan, and many months weren’t even paying the full interest amount owed. The loan was from the national church body, not a bank, or they’d have been foreclosed on. We decided it was time we talked about faith and finances (including our obligations to Christian brothers and sisters from whom funds were borrowed). We started with a Sunday workshop. We followed with cottage meetings organized in member homes. As we were in the midst of our stewardship efforts, one of our members, a man named Richard, called to tell me he just won a sizable prize on a state lottery ticket. That wasn’t the miracle. Lotteries are the luck of the draw. Richard’s attitude and response was the miracle. He wanted to discuss how he could use the funds he was receiving for various charitable causes. He intended to use some in regard to our congregation’s debt, but didn’t want to become the “sugar daddy” of the congregation. We were making good progress in faith building with the membership as a whole, and Richard did not want to impede those overall efforts. He wanted recommendations of other places of need, beyond our own congregation, where he could send support. In a world where money drives the mindset of so many people, this gentleman was focused not simply on himself or ourselves, but on how he could benefit many others. That was a miracle of faith. Faith is always the most powerful miracle, wherever God is turning hearts to his way, his truth, his life.

Let’s talk about Abraham and Sarah and the mighty miracle that happened for them. Your first thought might be the miracle of bearing children in their old age. When the LORD announced to Abraham that he would have a son and that his descendants would be as numerous as the stars in the sky (Genesis 15:4-5), Abraham and Sarah were already past the point of fertility and childbearing (Genesis 18:11). It was indeed going to be a miracle that they would conceive and have a child of their own. The bigger miracle, though, was that they believed what God promised them. Yes, I know that Abraham and Sarah both struggled to believe when months went by and there was no pregnancy. They schemed that maybe Abraham was supposed to father a child with Sarah’s younger handmaid, Hagar—that somehow that’s what God meant. That was (obviously) not an ideal situation. And then, after more years went by—and more challenges in their lives occurred—the LORD came to Abraham’s tent in person with two angels and repeated the promise. In the midst of their doubts, the LORD said, “I will surely return to you in due season, and your wife Sarah shall have a son” (Genesis 18:14). Now, yes, I know that Sarah laughed, because it seemed so impossible. But the LORD asked them, “Is anything too wonderful for the Lord?”—calling on them to continue believing, because faith is maintaining conviction about things not yet seen (Hebrews 11:1). Ultimately, through all their experiences, and even through times of doubt and uncertainty, Abraham and Sarah did keep believing the LORD. And the LORD did keep all his promises to them. They did have the son of their own that God promised them. They did become the parents of a whole nation of descendants—though that part of the promise, and receiving the homeland God had promised for those descendants, were things that would happen after Abraham and Sarah’s lifetime. They weren’t always flawless in their faith, but they held onto faith, and the LORD held onto them as his own, counting them as righteous in his eyes. 

Our experience of faith is like that too. Sometimes we are ready to give up hope. Sometimes we may even laugh out loud—or cry out in pain—because God’s promises to us seem so far off, so hard to believe. As one wise pastor has said, too often our idea of faith is that it should give us wins here and now, keeping us comfortable and well off. But the Bible’s message is that Christ will overcome the world, not that we “win” in this world.  Faith is trusting that through pain and discomfort, God will hold onto us.

We’ve heard God’s promise, “I know the plans I have for you … plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future” (Jeremiah 29:11 NIV). But we have difficulty hanging onto hope for our futures when the circumstances we see in the present fill us with worries and concerns. We  are all like the man who struggled in asking Jesus for a miracle, saying, “I do believe; help me overcome my unbelief!” (Mark 9:24 NIV).

We tend to pray for miracles when we find ourselves in trouble, but we don’t always have faith even as big as a mustard seed, maybe not even as big as a grain of salt. Or we can be a bit like Martha in the Gospel reading (Luke 10:38-42)—ever so busy, doing what seems important in the moment, stuck in a mindset of how things are supposed to happen in this life. Whether burdened by life’s many anxieties or distracted by life’s many duties, what we need most is simply to listen for our Lord’s voice—to listen hopefully, faithfully, with a desire for inspiration and growth. We probably miss many miracles of faith because we are too lost in our own worries or too caught up in everyday obligations. We may notice nature’s miracles but not acknowledge the miracles God is working in our own hearts and lives. As a Minnesota author expressed it in a story, “We see a newborn moth unwrapping itself and announce, Look, children, a miracle! But let an irreversible wound be knit back to seamlessness? We won’t even see it, though we look at it every day” (Leif Enger, Peace Like a River, 2001). 

When I read that line in that book, about “an irreversible wound knit back to seamlessness,” my thoughts went back to an experience of my own years ago, when playing racquetball. In a fast-paced match, I raced up to the front wall of the court to make a play on the ball. Then, as I turned, my opponent had fired his return, and the ball smacked me directly in the ear. In addition to the pain I felt, immediately everything in that ear sounded very muffled. I had ruptured my eardrum. The doctor told me it was fully ruptured and not likely to heal on its own, that surgery would be required. He allowed that we’d wait a couple weeks to see if healing did progress, but he was not optimistic. I was a young father at the time, and we were on a very limited budget. The thought of what copay costs would be for surgery scared me. I prayed, “Please God, let this heal on its own!” But like a lot of our prayers, I asked yet doubted at the same time. Like a Bible writer described, I was more a doubter than a believer, “double-minded and unstable in every way,” and ought not to have expected to receive anything from the Lord (James 1:7,8). But lo and behold, my eardrum did heal “on its own.” Or really, I prefer to say, God’s kindness toward me allowed the ear to heal without a surgery I couldn’t afford. Like my little incident with my cell phone, I cannot prove to anyone that God’s invisible hand or a guardian angel was protecting me. But maybe that is a sign of how little faith I have. If I struggle to believe that God could and would do even the littlest of miracles in my life, what of the far greater miracles of life that God has promised to you and me?

Ultimately, the Lord is calling us to the  miracle of a place at his side. Even if we don’t see immediate miracles in the day-to-day now, the greater miracle is what God promises us at the end of life. The greatest miracle on which we stake our faith is resurrection to eternity with God. We believe that in the end our Redeemer will stand upon the earth, and even after our bodies have decayed, yet in our flesh we shall see God. We will see him on our side with our very own eyes (Job 19:25-27). We haven’t seen that happen with our own eyes yet. It defies all principles of the natural world. Things that are dead don’t come back to life. People that are dead don’t get up and resume their lives. But the promise of faith in Jesus is that the dead WILL rise. “The dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed” (1 Corinthians 15:52). Our perishable bodies will put on imperishability; our mortal bodies will put on immortality, and death will be swallowed up in victory (1 Corinthians 15:53-54). That is our faith, our hope, our reason for living. Because – “If there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ has not been raised, and if Christ has not been raised, then our proclamation is in vain and your faith is in vain” (1 Corinthians 15:13,14). Without Christ’s resurrection, there’s no promise for our resurrection, and then any faith we’d have would be futile. We’d still be stuck in our sins with nothing but death to look forward to. As Christ’s apostle has said, “ If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied. But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead” (1 Corinthians 15:19,20). By his life and death and resurrection, Jesus has become the firstfruits of resurrection for all of us and for all those who have died, promising us he will take us to be forever with him. That’s a promise even more miraculous than God telling Abraham and Sarah they’d have a son in their old age (and they did). That’s a promise God is telling all of us, that we will have life beyond what we know in this world—and we will. 

Sometime after the visit we heard about in the Gospel account—where Martha busied herself with too many chores trying to be the perfect hostess when Jesus just wanted to sit with her and speak to her heart—Jesus had come to visit Mary and Martha again. It was when their brother Lazarus had died. Martha wasn’t worrying then about daily, ordinary tasks—about whether or not dinner was on the table. She went out to meet Jesus as he was arriving, and asked him for a miracle. Let me share with you what was said that day:

• Martha said to Jesus, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died. But even now I know that God will give you whatever you ask of him.”  Jesus said to her, “Your brother will rise again.” Martha said to him, “I know that he will rise again in the resurrection on the last day.”  Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?” She said to him, “Yes, Lord, I believe that you are the Messiah, the Son of God, the one coming into the world” (John 11:21-26).

Lord, give us such faith as Mary and Martha had—faith that was there even on days they may have seemed distracted or in despair, faith that trusted Jesus when it mattered most.  Lord, give us such faith as Abraham and Sarah had—faith that struggled through years when they did not see how the promises made to them possibly could be fulfilled, but hanging onto hope and trust still that whatever you said, Lord, would come to pass.

Lord, we DO believe in miracles. Help us on the days when our faith is shaken and it’s hard to believe. You are our help and our friend and our Savior always.

Scripture quotations, except where otherwise indicated, are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

Other quotations from THE HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®, NIV® Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.® Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.