I listened to an Easter sermon this morning from Mike Slaughter. You can watch it here. He said the only way the impossible will happen is if you believe the impossible is possible.
In other words, if you do not believe that with God all things are possible, then you are right… it is impossible! When Jesus was in his hometown, Mark 6:5 tells us, “He could not do any miracles there, except lay his hands on a few sick people and heal them.” The fact that they did not believe kept the miracles from happening. And the Scripture doesn’t say Jesus would not do the miracles. It says He COULD NOT! Their lack of faith in Him prevented Him from performing miracles in and through them. I can only conclude that it’s because God often uses us to accomplish His miracles. When they don’t believe… when we do not believe, we do not try and the miracles are prevented. Or at the very least God will choose someone else to perform them. God is doing miracles in Haiti because of Happy Kids International and people like Carrie Roush. If they are unwilling to try because they don’t believe the miracles are possible, then they prevent them. I have been to Haiti with them. They believe the miracles are possible and they are seeing them happen. I saw some in the week I was there. And if we financially support them, we are helping God use them to do the miracles in Haiti.
A few years ago I was meeting with a person in the position of authority in the WV Annual Conference of the UMC. I told them an idea I had and they gave me the ultimate compliment when they said, “What I love about you is you don’t see why things can’t happen.” This person said they had been around long enough to know why my idea couldn’t happen. What if the idea was really a God-inspired, God-glorifying, God-empowered idea that would have resulted in a miracle? Needless to say, the idea was not explored and it did not happen. One argument could be that it was not God’s will. The flip side is that we will never know if it was God’s will because we did not try. If we believed, tried it, and it failed… Then I could better accept that it was not God’s will. It may or may not have been, we will never know.
There are miracles on a grand scale and miracles in our own lives. There are miracles like feeding hundreds of people in Haiti and personal miracles like you quitting smoking or drinking. And as we believe and see miracles it gives us more confidence for God to work more. So the question I have for you is what miracle are you preventing?
(And to be clear, don’t take this as a ‘You’re not being healed because you don’t have enough faith’ message. Sometimes we do have the faith and things just don’t go the way we think they should, just as my idea may have not worked out.)
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