THE MIRACLE OF THE ORDINARY

'When God does something awe-inspiring one time, we call it a miracle. When he does it a billion times, we call it ordinary. Look a little closer, and you'll see that "ordinary" is just another word for the miracles God decided to repeat. And he repeats them on purpose - the natural world is overflowing all around us with a constant stream of God's language, with never-ending messages from our Creator.'

Seth Lewis, The Language of Rivers and Stars, p.159.

MIRACLES & BELIEF

'Miracles don't make people believe!...It's the belief that is the miracle.'

Penelope Fitzgerald, The Blue Flower, p.84.

HOPING FOR THE MIRACULOUS TO BREAK IN PERMANENTLY

'Miracles leave no trace. He had decided, hearing his father preach on the subject, that they happened once as a sort of commentary on the blandness and inadequacy of the realty they break in on, and then vanish, leaving a world behind that refutes the very idea that such a thing could have happened...he sat down on a bench with his hat beside him and thought what it might be like if the miraculous became the natural order of things. Loaves and fishes in inexhaustible supply. Troops of Lazaruses putting off their cerements. Infinite hours where Della was always waiting for him, and he was always somehow not a disappointment.' 

Marilynne Robinson, Jack, p.219.

MIRACLES ARE NATURAL NOT UNNATURAL

'When Jesus expels demons and heals the sick, he is driving out of creation the powers of destruction, and is healing and restoring created beings who are hurt and sick. The lordship of God to which the healings witness, restores creation to health. Jesus' healings are not supernatural miracles in a natural world. They are the only truly "natural" thing in a world that is unnatural, demonized and wounded.' 

Jurgen Moltmann in Dane Ortlund, Gentle and Lowly: The Heart of Christ for Sinners and Sufferers,  p.31. 

THE LIMITS OF RATIONALISM

'I wish only to say one more time that the rationalistic arguments that claim to winnow out the implausible and the meaningless by applying the flail of common sense are products of bad education. Religions are expressions of the sound human intuition that there is something beyond being as we experience it in this life. What is often described as a sense of the transcendent might in some cases be the intuition of the actual. So the religions are quite right to conceptualize it in terms that exceed the language of common sense. The rationalists are like travelers in a non-English-speaking country who think that they can make themselves understood by shouting. Sadly, too many religious have abandoned their own language, its beauty and subtlety and power, accommodating to the utilitarian expectations of those demanding outsiders who have no understanding of the language or culture and refuse on principle to acquire any. But the unfathomable has a most legitimate place in any conceptualization of an unfathomable reality.' 

Marilynne Robinson, The Givenness of Things, p.212. 

REPLICATING MIRACLES TODAY

'We love the miraculous stories of Jesus, his feeding of the five thousand, his divine healing, his contagious grace. And we miss the most obvious things about these stories: that we are meant to replicate them in ordinary, nonmiraculous ways.' 

Rosaria Butterfield, The Gospel Comes with a House Key, p.100. 

MIRACLES

'...a miracle was simply a break in the continuity of an order itself more miraculous.' 

Bruce Marshall, The Fair Bride, p.119. 

MIRACLES

'Whoever really has considered the lilies of the fields and the birds of the air and pondered the improbability of their existence will hardly balk at the turning of water into wine which was, after all, a very small miracle. We forget the greater miracle and still continuing miracle by which water with soil and sunlight is turned into grapes.' 

Wendell Berry, 'Christianity and the Survival of Creation' in Sex, Economy, Freedom and Community, p.103. 

THE INCARNATION

'....the Christian story is precisely the story of one grand miracle, the Christian assertion being that what is beyond all space and time, what is uncreated, eternal, came into nature, into human nature, descended into His own universe, and rose again, bringing nature up with Him. It is precisely one great miracle.' 

CS Lewis, 'The Grand Miracle' in CS Lewis Essay Collection: Faith, Christianity and the Church, p.3. 

MIRACLES

'Lazarus raised was a sign that Jesus was the resurrection and the life. The blind man given sight was the sign that Jesus is the light of the world. The people fed was a sign that Jesus is the bread of life. As a result, every dying person, every blind person, and every hungry person has been shown that something more powerful than death, disease, and hunger exists.'

Zack Eswine, Sensing Jesus, p.114. 

MIRACLES

'...this is what Christ illustrated when he healed the sick in his ministry on earth that men might see, as in an object-lesson - that provision was made in his substitionary work for the relief of every human ill. There is included in this, however, no promise that this relief is to be realized in its completeness all at once, or in this earthy life. Our Lord never permitted it for a moment to be imagined that the salvation he brought was fundamentally for this life. His was emphatically an other-world religion. He constantly pointed to the beyond, and bade men find their true home, to set their hopes, and to place their aspirations, there.'

BB Warfield, 'Is Christ Our Sickness-Bearer?' in Nancy Guthrie (Ed.), O Love That Will Not Let Me Go, p.41.

HEALING

'If you've prayed for healing, and not received it, take heart - you're in good company! Not only was Paul himself not healed, but he also had to leave Trophimus in Miletus because of sickness (2 Timothy 4:20). His beloved friend Epaphroditus was gravely ill (Philippians 2:24-30). His son in the faith, Timothy, had frequent stomach disorders, for which Paul didn't tell him "claim healing" but to drink a little wine for medicinal purposes (1 Timothy 5:23). Those who claim "anyone with enough faith can be healed" apparentely have greater faith than Paul and his ministry associates.'

Randy Alcorn, Money, Possessions & Eternity, p.81.

HEALING

'Here is one area where Christians have a wonderful opportunity to stand out as different from our contemporary culture. Our contemporaries are obsessed with healing and the extension of physical life at all costs. What a pity that we Christians imitate them in that! When we talk about the hope of healing and the relief of physical pain, our contemporaries love it and they flock to our "healing services" with high hopes. But when we talk about glory lying beyond the grave and our sure hope of eternal life they are brought up short and are forced to face their own eternal destinies.'

Mark Ashton, On my way to heaven: Facing death with Christ, p.11.

TRUE KINGSHIP

'"For it is said in old lore: The hands of the king are the hands of a healer. And so the rightful king could ever be known."'

JRR Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, p.894.

MIRACLES

'...Jesus did many other miracles like this. Things people thought couldn't happen, that weren't natural.

But it was the most natural thing in all the world. It's what God had been doing from the beginning, of course. Taking the nothing and making it everything. Taking the emptiness and filling it up. Taking the darkness and making it light.'

Sally Lloyd-Jones, The Jesus Storybook Bible, p.249.

MIRACLES

'The New Testament without the miracles would be far easier to believe. But the trouble is, it would not be worth believing.'

J. Gresham Machen, Christianity and Liberalism, p.103.

MIRACLES

'Somehow or other an extraordinary idea has arisen that the the disbelievers in miracles consider them coldly and fairly, while believers in miracles accept them only in connection with some dogma. The fact is quite the other way. The believers in miracles accept them (rightly or wrongly) because they have evidence for them. The disbelievers in miracles deny them (rightly or wrongly) because they have a doctrine against them.'

GK Chesterton, Orthodoxy, p.111.

MIRACLES

'In the light of the New Creation all miracles are like snowdrops - anticipations of the full spring and high summer wh. is slowly coming over the whole wintry field of space and time.'

CS Lewis in Walter Hooper (Ed.), The Collected Letters of CS Lewis Vol II, p.649.

MIRACLES

'We modern people think of miracles as the suspension of the natural order, but Jesus meant them to be the restoration of the natural order. The Bible tells us that God did not originally make the world to have disease, hunger, and death in it. Jesus has come to redeem where it is wrong and heal the world where it is broken. His miracles are not just proofs that he has power but also wonderful foretastes of what he is going to do with that power. Jesus' miracles are not just a challenge to our minds, but a promise to our hearts that the world we all want is coming.'

Timothy Keller, The Reason for God, p.96.