If you are like me, having grown up in church hearing incredible bible stories of God’s amazing feats of power you may have developed a correlation between the power of God you learned about and your own deep desire to witness or experience that kind of power during your lifetime. Right? Think creation itself, parting of the Red Sea, manna from heaven, a cloud by day and fire by night, a river of water streaming from a rock just to name a few of many amazing miraculous and powerful events from the Old Testament. Think from the New Testament a virgin birth, the Transfiguration, water into wine, raising Lazarus from the dead, feeding 5,000 and of course the resurrection…to again name a few of so many. No wonder as a child hearing these and many more stories over and over you develop a desire to witness or be a part of something similar in relation to God. “C’mon God…do another one for me to see!” Right?
But as time goes on and you get older you realize that odds are you’ll likely not see anything miraculous on the scale of what you ate up in Sunday School. As you come of age you hopefully learn that God does love you, has a plan for your life and if you ‘accept Jesus into your heart’ you will be born again into a new life. Who wouldn’t want that, right? Though deep down you might expect there to be some kind of fireworks or existential experience along with accepting Jesus. Maybe not tongues of fire resting on you or an outbreak of speaking a language unknown to yourself. But something powerful, even if just a smidgen of something out of this world. “Use the Force, Luke.”
It is fair to say perhaps, that some lives that turn away from a life of hopelessness, trouble or even evil and find God, embrace Jesus are nothing short of a miracle. We might call it a miraculous thing that anyone would turn to God and even more so miraculous to sense or hear a calling from God to come to Him. Unlike many of the stories in the Bible, for us these days and perhaps the past few thousand years, for most of us the power of God is super subtle. Now let’s be clear. We’ve all heard of amazing stories of how “God has worked in people’s lives” over the past few thousand years and how it seems God orchestrated certain circumstances in the events of individuals or groups of people or nations perhaps.
Here's where I’m going with this. I’ve spent a lifetime yearning to see God do something spectacular in the realm of our physical world like I heard about all through childhood. But I’ve come to realize slowly over my lifetime that the real and likely only powerful and miraculous experience I’ll have is what has and will occur in my own heart when I allow it to….the very subtle work of the Spirit to confirm I am a child of God…the very subtle work of the Spirit to help me know I am loved by God…the very subtle work of the Spirit to help me in times of distress…the very subtle work of the Spirit to humble myself and love others...the maybe not so subtle work of the Spirit to rescue me from myself when I'm at my worst too.
Every generation since the Day of Pentecost has yearned to see the miraculous and powerful return of Christ appearing with “wonders in the sky above and signs on earth below.” None yet have seen or witnessed what they desperately hoped would occur in their lifetime. That’s OK. It has to be OK, right? The constant miracle at work in any life that allows it to happen is the subtle day in and day out work of God’s Spirit in the lives of those who are loved by God, love God and allow themselves to love others. Mostly a very subtle work. I’m Ok with that. Are you? I think it is what God has wanted all along. It’s that simple.
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