Miracles Don’t Always Happen As We Think They Should

Many Christians today believe that if they pray and have faith then God is obligated to preform a miracle or give them what they ask for in prayer.  However, this mindset often fails to take the whole of scripture into account when trying to understand when and if God will move on our behalf with a miracle. I believe Christians today have a patch work understanding of scripture and not a cohesive understanding of what God is communicating in his word.

What Jesus said about prayer is an example of this. When you isolate passages on their own, without taking into consideration other passages and narratives on prayer, you get a lopsided view about what it takes to get prayers answered.  Some may believe that we can get instant answers to our prayers for miracles but, most of the time, that is not how prayer works.

Matthew 7:7     Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. 

Quoting verses out of the Bible, even in their context, doesn’t mean we understand the other rules of answered prayer. Speaking verses out in prayer to gain access into the realm of the miraculous with God does not mean that God will move on our behalf in that instant. God may, in fact, have other plans regarding our prayer request. God’s answer may have nothing to do with whether we walk in faith and obedience to all that God has revealed to us thus far. His plans may have a greater concern and need than our personal request, no matter how legitimate they may seem to us. God works on a universal scale and no answer to prayer is insignificant.  Each has ramifications we don’t yet see or understand.

Take, for example, the events in the book of 1 Kings 17:8-9.  God’s prophet sent Elijah to a widow to supply his food during a drought that Elijah prophesied about. The widow, from what we see in scripture, was not Jewish, lived right in the heart of Baal worship and she was a gentile.  Instead of using a Jewish believer, God chose to use a gentile widow who was about to die with her son.

1 Kings 17:8-9     Then the word of the LORD came to him, saying, “Arise, go to Zarephath, which belongs to Sidon, and stay there; behold, I have commanded a widow there to provide for you.”

It is interesting that God said he “Commanded” the widow to feed Elijah even though she only had enough food for one more meal and then intended to die with her only son. Many times miracles only happen when we are asked to do something that seems almost impossible for us to do, which causes our faith to rise to the level of the intended miracle.

What’s more interesting about this story is that Jesus uses it to remind the people of his home town that there are times when God moves or doesn’t move as we expected and there are times when God will give a miracle to someone who we feel is less deserving than ourselves. Jesus says Elijah was “Only” sent to this gentile woman and her son and not to a Jewish person who would be more spiritual. The people of Jesus’ home town got so mad when he used this story that they tried to stone him to death for such a statement because they thought God would do a miracle through a Jewish person and not a gentile. God often surprises us with doing miracles for people we might think he shouldn’t.

Luke 4:26-27     Elijah was sent to none of them, but only to Zarephath, in the land of Sidon, to a woman who was a widow. “And there were many lepers in Israel in the time of Elisha the prophet; and none of them was cleansed, but only Naaman the Syrian.”

Jesus combines the story of the widow with the story of Naaman, a captain of the army of Aram who was Israel’s enemy. Again, Jesus is trying to illustrate that God often performs miracles for different reasons because he is trying to wake up people who are spiritually aware and those who are not exposed to his glory for man’s need of him.

Here is the point. God encourages us to pray and ask for God’s help because he loves us and wants to help. However, his help is beyond the temporary. Secondly, he encourages us to pray in faith and not doubt when we pray, but he doesn’t say that every time we do both that he is obligated to answer our prayers as we would prefer or almost demand. God is in charge of miracles, not us.

The plans of God for an individual, group, town or nation may require that he does or does not release his miraculous power. We see our own needs as most important but God sees the bigger picture of this world with the 7 billion people and thus he acts accordingly. Try to imagine how complex his job is because every act he does for one person has a ripple affect on so many others.

When we truly pray in faith it implies that we are trusting the wisdom of God even when our specific needs are not granted as we would prefer. We trust the character of God and the wisdom of God to do the right thing even when that right thing is in direct conflict with our desires, no matter how worthy they might seem. Faith, after all, is about trust and not about getting what we want. I fear that this idea of faith takes a life time of experience to fully understand and accept.

The early church learned to walk in faith not because their lives were always made better physically or financially but because their relationship with their creator was healed and in that relationship they learned to trust God even if they were persecuted or  had to die for that faith.

As you pray for miracles trust your Heavenly Father that he knows the big picture and he knows the desires of your heart. Trust his good judgment when things don’t work out as you feel they should because of who he is and what his word says about his intentions.

Exodus 34:6      Then the LORD passed by in front of him and proclaimed, “The LORD, the LORD God, compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in loving kindness and truth; 

Questions:

1) Are you praying for a miracle? Trust the character of God, that he will answer you as his wisdom and his intentions desire the best for you.

2) Do you struggle when God doesn’t answer your prayer as you anticipated he would? Only by studying the scriptures will you gain confidence in God’s answers and thus rest in his love.

Learning to pray as I should and endeavoring to trust the wisdom of God in all things,

Pastor Dale