The problem with working miracles in people’s lives is that, too often, we want to make it so much more complicated than it needs to be.
A lifetime’s experience of unanswered prayer can so often be the thing that has led us away from ministering God’s goodness into the ‘easier’ way of praying hopefully for it.
This is not to criticise devoted prayer as such; it is to say that it has largely become easier and safer, to ask God for a miracle than it is to simply invite that person to step into the kingdom and receive what has already been given.
Prayers of request may tend to give the impression that we presuppose God might not decide to heal on this occasion. We develop all sorts of spurious reasons to as to why God (sometimes) might not heal us; we play the blame game of laying fault at God’s door, e.g. concluding that he is not going to play ball on this occasion.
All this so–called ‘deeper understanding’ of spiritual things (which is anything but), only leads to scepticism and doubt.
Unbelief has all too often made the grace-dispensing ministry of the Christian church into a hit–and–miss, ‘religious’ affair —trying it now and again, to see if God will ‘do the business’.
But the fact is that wherever we see God at work in miraculous power we also see a childlike, simple, trusting expectancy into which the river of grace can flow.
When a meeting can take place between our simple, child-like expectancy and divine grace, it is as though heaven ‘explodes’.
We might say that ‘grace plus expectancy’ triggers heaven’s dynamite, because when real, expectant trust is there,his power begins to flow.
We begin to see miracles in New Testament proportions.
This is not to think in a mechanistic way about divine, supernatural power. We are considering here the flow of grace.
Our prayer requests may sometimes be hopeful, but are much less often marked by real, confident, trusting expectancy and the consequent results.
