Miracles today…really?

Steve Brown:
Miracles today…really? Let’s talk about it, on Key Life.

Matthew Porter:
This is Key Life, with our host, author and seminary professor Steve Brown. He’s nobody’s guru, he’s just one beggar telling other beggars where he found bread. If you’re hungry for God, the real God behind all the lies, you’ve come to the right place.

Steve Brown:
Thank you Matthew. If you have your Bible, open it to the ninth chapter of Acts. We’re looking at verses 32 through the end of the chapter. And, there are two happenings there. And I read it yesterday, I’m not going to take the time to do that today. One was with a man who had been bedridden for years. And Peter was called and he said you’ve been healed, get off that stupid bed and dance. Well, that’s not exactly in the text, the way it was put, but that’s what was going on. And that’s what happened. And then there was another lady and her name was Tabitha and it was too late for her cause she was dead, but they figured they would have Peter come do the funeral, I guess. And so, he came. He came, he went in and everybody’s standing around and they’re mourning. And they should, mourning is appropriate, when somebody you love has died. And Peter said, look, you guys, leave the room a minute. So they all left this upper room and Peter began to pray and he prayed that God would intervene. And then he looked and to his surprise and her surprise, she opened her eyes. And he got her off the bed, took her out and introduced her, the woman who had been dead, to the crowd that had gathered. Now, if that doesn’t cause revival, nothing’s gonna cause for revival. I just want you to know that. And the question that we’re talking about, and I’m going to be talking about the rest of this week and probably into next week, is this. Can miracles still happen in our time? And if they can, why don’t they? And how can we see God operate in supernatural ways with us? Now, before we go any further, you need to know I’m not charismatic, I’m not Pentecostal, but I don’t make fun of those folks in thunderstorms. Now, I’m going to tell you a story. And, it’s a true one. And it’s an experience I had that absolutely shook my world. We have a younger daughter, we have two daughters. One is Robin, she’s our older daughter, and the other is Jennifer, our younger daughter. When Jennifer was one day old, she was very sick. And the doctor called me down and talked to me and was very concerned. Now, you’ve got to know something about me in those days. I was a liberal, just this side of wacko. I was in a graduate school in Boston and I didn’t believe hardly anything. It was just not what we intellectuals accepted as being true. But the doctor said, Mr. Brown, if, if you know how to pray, you ought to pray. Well, I didn’t, frankly, I had no idea how to pray for something like that, but I was scared and I’m not a good person necessarily. Occasionally, I do good things. Occasionally, I do bad things and Jesus loves me either way, but, but I’ll tell you something, I love my family and Jennifer was only one day old and I loved her and would have given my life for her. Now, shortly before that time, I met some people at a place on Cape Cod called Rock Harbor Manor. And it was a community of Christians who were by and large charismatic, mostly Anglican, very formal, and God listened to their prayers. They met on Monday nights for Bible study. And for some reason I’d started going, only two or three weeks before. And when I didn’t know what to do about my daughter, didn’t know how to fix it, didn’t know how to pray about it, I went to the only people I knew who knew how to pray. And it was them. And so they said, we understand you have a new little girl, isn’t that wonderful. And I started crying. They said, they said, we need to pray. And I told them what the doctor had said. So they gathered in a circle, they held hands and they prayed. And some of them, I think, although it wasn’t out loud, prayed in tongues cause they were charismatic. Well, I felt better. You always feel better when you pray, even if God doesn’t do what you tell him to do. But I felt better. I felt more at peace and I went home and went to bed and my wife who was still in the hospital, Anna, called me the next morning. And she said, without saying, good morning, she said, honey, did anybody pray last night? I said, well, yeah. And she said, well, the doctor came in early this morning and said, this is miraculous. Now, let me tell you where our daughter was, she had a blood count and it was rising rapidly. And the doctor was talking about taking her to children’s hospital in Boston for the complete blood transfusion. And people died of that in those days. And, and that was pretty scary. Plus, she had a leg that wasn’t getting nourishment, they called it modeling. And he said, they had called in an expert, a specialist to look at the leg. And he had said in 20 years of practice, he had never seen a leg like that. So the doctor, my wife said, came in this morning and said, this is a miraculous, the blood count is normal and I’m no longer worried about the leg. Well, that’ll mess with a liberal’s mind. I just want you to know that. I mean, I was an intellectual, that’ll mess with an intellectual’s mind. You can’t imagine how my world was shaken after that. All of a sudden, the God I talked about when I studied the Graf Wellhausen Documentary Hypothesis, the God who may or may not exist, but certainly, certainly is not involved in our day to day affairs. All of a sudden, that God came. And he came in a very personal, very definable, very real way. And our daughter was well, that daughter is grown up to be a fine young woman and she has three daughters of her own, which would make our three granddaughters. I mean, I feel sorry for you guys, who only have boys or who have too many boys. God really likes those of us who get only girls. And I have two daughters and three granddaughters and not a single gorilla among them. And the younger of our daughters is healthy and serving Christ to this day. So, to pose the question again, do miracles happened today? If you have some me, I would say, are you crazy? I mean, I don’t see him every hour or every five minutes. I don’t see them every week or every month, but I’ve been doing this longer than a lot of you have been alive and I have seen stuff that would blow your mind, when God intervened in lives and supernaturally healed people and changed people. It was the skeptic who said to the little girl, do you really believe that Jesus turned water into wine? And she said, I don’t know about that, but I know in my house with my formerly drunk father, he turned wine into furniture and to food. Well, I’ve seen that my whole life. I sometimes tell seminary students, this is a hard job and only crazy people would take this or those who were called by Jesus. If you would do this for anybody, but Jesus, you’re crazy. And I tell them the hard places, the disappointment, the discouragement, the tiredness, the criticism, it’s a hard job. That’s why I always say at the beginning of Monday’s broadcast, I hope your pastor’s sermon was as good as my pastor’s sermon because I want you to do the same thing, when you go to your pastor. Encourage him, encourage her, be understanding of the difficulty of serving, but I say to students, but you have been called not only to serve and to hurt and to walk into dark places, you’ve been called to sit on the front row of the greatest story in the history of mankind. You’re going to see things, most people never see. You’re going to see answers to prayer, that most people never see. You’re going to walk in places where God has changed things in amazing and supernatural ways. And when you look back at it and you remember it, you will think, oh God, thank you for letting me be around when you do so much neat stuff. And so, I move the previous question, but don’t have time to answer it, but I sorta did. Is it possible to have miracles today? Well, we’re going to analyze that tomorrow. We’re going to be in more detail and see what this text has to say about it, but right now don’t ever despair. Don’t ever think there’s no hope, don’t ever think god never answers. He does. He cares. He knows. And he wants to be involved in your life. You think about that. Amen.

Matthew Porter:
Thank you Steve. Yes, miracles still happen today. We know that’s true, but we could still use the reminder. At least I can. More from Steve about Acts 9 tomorrow. So, yeah, we’ll meet you right here again then. Hey, speaking of miracles and the book of Acts, Paul had one of the all time, most dramatic miraculous conversions. Can we agree on that? But if you’ve been a Christian for a while, it’s kind of easy to breeze past Paul’s past, you know, all the horrible things that he did when he was Saul. That kind of stuff can haunt a person. You might even know something about that. So, what do we do about our past? Well, Steve spoke about this very big question in one of his classic sermons called appropriately enough, What About the Past? It is so good and I know it’s going to bless you. So if you would, let us mail it to you on a CD for free. Just call us right now at 1-800-KEY-LIFE. That’s 1-800-539-5433. You can also e-mail [email protected] to ask for that CD. If you would like to mail request, send it to

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