Signs and Wonders

"The preaching of the Word is so that there will be Signs and Wonders following it."

JESUS SPOKE THE WORD, and He healed the sick. His disciples were sent out to speak the Word and to heal the sick in His name. The only time He spoke the Word and didn’t heal was in Nazareth when the people, although amazed by His authority when He spoke, then started to say, “Isn’t this Joseph’s son?” Doubt robbed them of healing. But healing and deliverance from demons was part of everything He spoke. If a man buys a car, then parks in the garage and hangs up the keys, what good does it do him? He owns it. It’s getting older with time. But it isn’t driven. Or another picture, a man gets a college degree. He has the certificate saying he’s qualified for a position, but he never bothers to get a job practicing what he paid thousands of dollars to earn. Why attend college and take the tests and pass them and attend the ceremony then have no results? Why buy the car and never drive it and never get where you’re going?

What good is the Word of God spoken without any results? It’s poetic in places. I get that. It has stories about past generations that are sometimes interesting. There’s that truth, too. But the purpose of it being written was so we could read it and act upon it and be changed by it (get the college degree) then go out and use it (drive it like the car). The preaching of the Word is so that there will be Signs and Wonders following it. Salvation, healing, deliverance, financial blessing. It is a display of the eternal life of God, His abundant life available to men. We can build a house and put in the electrical wiring and even hook it up to the local electricity system but never plug one thing in, and we have a nice house that’s in the dark. But no man puts a candlestick under a bed or under a bushel. He puts it on a lampstand.

Jesus wanted us to know how powerful God is, how much He loved mankind, and that the Father would do anything for you when you turned your life toward Him. People had a wrong image of God, one painted in reds and golds that looked nice in the temple but provided nothing to the hurting or the lost. To them God was proud and arrogant and rich and neglectful. Jesus proved He was generous and kind.

The devil has robbed the church of the image of God, convincing so many that God doesn’t heal today. He says there are no spiritual giftings used by the Holy Spirit to rescue mankind. Oh, he’s clothed it in doctrine which seems right, but he’s turned the Spirit of God, who divided the sea from the sky, into a nervous dove, fluttering around and about to take off into the sky. The Spirit of God raised Jesus from the dead and poured Himself out at Pentecost, a few days later, but religiosity says, once the disciples died, He was done. Ask yourself this: Does the God of heaven and earth who pushed back the Jordan River six miles, God with the power to knock down the walls of a city, thick enough to ride chariots on top, God who breathed into the dust He’d formed into man and caused him to live, does that God’s eternal, abundant life have a short in it?

Suzanne, where’s your reverence?

Reverence for God isn’t fear-and-trembling if you’re washing in the blood of Christ. It isn’t nervous caution because God just might be swinging axes today. No, we are to come BOLDLY before the throne for help in time of need (Hebrews 4:16). We are given the armor OF GOD so that we can look like God and sound like God and defend ourselves and others like God asks of us. We are given wisdom liberally without any reproach (James 1:5). When Peter and John healed the man outside the Gate Beautiful, and everyone saw him leaping and praising God into the temple, they were called before the same religious crowd who mocked and berated Jesus then hung Him on the cross. And because these men couldn’t deny the healing (the formerly lame man was there in front of them), they settled for a warning to the church. Don’t speak that name again. Peter and John said, “We must do what God asks us to do,” then gathered with the other believers and prayed a magnificent prayer.

“And now, Lord, behold their threatenings: and grant unto thy servants, that with all boldness they may speak thy word, By stretching forth thine hand to heal; and that signs and wonders may be done by the name of thy holy child Jesus.” (Acts 4:29-30)

They asked for BOLDNESS to speak the Word and to lay hands on the sick in Jesus’ name, and it says God responded by shaking the place and filling them with His presence. There is a Christmas song by a couple called Lute & Lyre, which says, “The brightest star in history, love’s prophecy and mystery, Oh hear the angels voice in the wind. All glory in the highest, our born today Messiah. Let the signs and the wonders begin.” The Signs and the Wonders, the miracles were the heart of the Father on display. Jesus told us this (John 14:10). The Father did the works. When asked by Phillip to “show us the Father,” Jesus’ reply was the Father speaking. “What, Phillip, here am I, who have been all this while in your company; hast thou not learned to recognize me yet (John 14:9, Knox)?”

The Father hasn’t changed. Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever. All that God instituted when the church formed in Acts 2 is ongoing. The power of the Word of God to change lives, to heal the body and the mind, to give us a long, satisfied life is as much a part of the sharing of the gospel now as it was then. It is man’s overthinking that has limited God. God deserves our reverence, but He hungers for it as humility and obedience to the mandate of the church, which Peter spoke BOLDLY before a multicultural crowd that afterward asked how to be saved, and some 3,000 of them accepted Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior.

“But this is that which was spoken by the prophet Joel; And it shall come to pass in the last days, saith God, I will pour out of my Spirit upon all flesh: and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams: And on my servants and on my handmaidens I will pour out in those days of my Spirit; and they shall prophesy:” (Acts 2:16-18)

“Ye men of Israel, hear these words; Jesus of Nazareth, a man approved of God among you by miracles and wonders and signs, which God did by him in the midst of you, as ye yourselves also know … Whom God hath raised up, having loosed the pains of death: because it was not possible that he should be holden of it.” (Acts 2:22, 24)

LISTEN TO Lute & Lyre “Signs and Wonders.”

Image by Márta Valentínyi from Pixabay


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Suzanne D. Williams, Author
www.suzannedwilliams.com
www.feelgoodromance.com