Untitled Sermon

Jesus the God of the Miracles

Jesus the God of the Miracles

Last week we dove into and we talked about how this passage gets at the heart of our theology of Jesus. And that it shows a tenant of our faith - that Jesus was both fully God and fully human.

We also talked about how shows that something different happened in Jesus’s death, vs what happened in his resurrection. That there is a difference between what happened on the cross vs what happened 3 days later in the empty tomb. And that there is a difference between what was accomplished in the everyday normal life of Jesus who was fully human, living and breathing, and eating and sleeping and dying; and what was accomplished through the divine miraculous aspects of Jesus, who was fully God performing miracles and rising from the grave.

Last week we talked about the human side of Jesus – his life & teachings - and what it might look like to let Jesus be the God of our everyday. We also looked at what Jesus’ death did for us in bringing us back into friendship with God.

This week we are coming back to and we are looking at the fully God aspect of Jesus – our approach is going to be a little different this week, because we are talking about something that is so far beyond our understanding that we need to engage our imaginations to comprehend the miraculous Jesus. So let’s dive in and learn a little more about Jesus the God of the miracles.

What is a miracle?

A miracle is an event that is outside the normal human experience, it stands out from the everyday because it doesn’t quite fit. Another way to put it is that a miracle is an event that shows us God’s involvement in our lives – that God interferes in our world.

· There are 264 miracles recorded in the Bible.

· The Book of Matthew contains the most miracles of any book of the Bible (43), followed closely by Luke (41), then Mark (35), then Acts (34), then the books of Exodus & 2 Kings both with 22 miracles.

· The majority of them (104) are performed by Jesus (most are told more than once in multiple gospels).

· Although many others are attributed generally to God or specifically to the HS.

· We also see God performing miracles through humans like Moses, Elisha, and Paul

Miracles play a central role in the story of Jesus’ life and the Book of Acts. And they play a central role in the Christian faith. Our sacred book, the Bible, tells stories of a God who provides manna from heaven, speaks to Moses from a burning bush, parts the Red Sea, gives sight to the blind, heals the sick, and walks on water.

Throughout history people have debated the validity of Christianity because of its claims of miracles. (pause) Because miracles are impossible. They can’t fully be grasped by reason. Miracles seem impossible to us because they are outside our normal experience. But as Christians, we claim that these impossible miracles happened.

As author Madeline L’Engle has said,

“Unless we practice believing in the impossible daily and diligently, we cannot be Christians -- those strange creatures who proclaim that the Power that created the entire universe willingly and lovingly abdicated that power and became a human baby”.

I want to challenge us this morning that the Christian faith requires not only that we pursue God intellectually, with our minds, but also that we grow spiritually by broadening our imagination. Imagination is important to spirituality. Which might be why some of the best Christian thinkers also write stories. (cs lewis, L’engle, Dorothy Sayers, George McDonald.

And I’m going to take a page from a well known children’s story, about a little girl named Alice who travels through a looking glass to find a Wonderland. Alice meets the white queen and is challenged to believe impossible things.

Alice replies: "one can't believe impossible things." "I daresay you haven't had much practice," said the Queen. "When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."

This morning I’m going to try to paint an impossible picture and challenge us to think about 3 miracles in Jesus’ life and what they might teach us about God. Because as Free Methodists, we believe the miracles in the scriptures and we believe that our God still does some impossible things today.

1st impossible thing – the miracles of Jesus’’ Birth – Loving God

The first is Jesus’ birth. As Christians we believe that Jesus chose to leave Heaven, give up his privilege & comfort & rightful place, and come down to Earth as a human. We believe that the creator of the world chose to become like the creation – to experience the human condition growing up from a baby to an adult.

This is weird. It’s a weird religious thought. Many religions believe in a Holy and set apart god, and some even believe this god interacts with people sometimes, or even that a god might appear in the form of a human to interact with people, but they aren’t actually human. But it is not common for a religion to teach that an eternal god would willingly subject themselves to the human condition, taking on a decaying body that can suffer from hunger, and weakness, and death.

Why would God do that? What does this miraculous event of God leaving the divine to become human teach us?

In the beginning of the book Life of Pi, a young boy, Pi is searching for truth among various religions. And Pi is introduced to Jesus through Father Martin. But Pi can’t wrap his head around Jesus, and so he says to the priest, Father Martin,

“This Son who goes hungry, who suffers from thirst, who gets tired, who is sad, who is anxious, who is heckled and harassed, who has to put up with followers who don’t get it and opponents who don’t respect him – what kind of a god is that? It’s a god on too human a scale, that’s what…This Son is a god who spent most of his time telling stories. This Son is a god who walked with a stride like any human…This Son is a god who died in three hours, with moans, gasps and laments. What kind of a god is that?...Why make dirty what is beautiful, spoil what is perfect?...Love, said Father Martin.”

What does this show us? That God is a loving God – not just a loving God through words, but a loving God through action. Jesus becoming human, taking on flesh, shows us that our God didn’t just create us and then step aside, watching from afar. This shows us that our God is one willing to be affected by us, our God cares about what happens here in this world, and would go to extreme lengths to show us love. This is a God willing to share our pain, to give up Heaven to come closer to us and know us intimately. The miracle of Jesus’ birth shows us that God loves us… impossibly.

2nd impossible thing - Jesus’ miracles

The second impossible consideration are the miracles that Jesus performed in his earthly life. The book of Matthew records Jesus performing 33 miracles, Luke 31, Mark 27, and .

Why does Jesus perform these miracles? Some say to show that Jesus is God. Some say to fulfill OT prophecies. Some say as signs that Jesus is the messiah coming to save us. There is a lot of mystery to the whole thing. Some of Jesus’ miracles seem to show God’s power – like Jesus calming the storm; some show God’s compassion- like Jesus healing the bleeding woman; some are confusing like Jesus shriveling up a fig tree.

For me the miracles are a reminder that there is a lot we don’t know about God. Jesus doesn’t fit into a nice and pretty box, he’s complicated: sometimes relatable sometimes mystical, sometimes compassionate sometimes angry, sometimes confined by his humanity and sometimes not at all.

One of our core distinctives here at Wellspring is “Unboxing God” – Simply that we welcome the tough questions, even admitting that we may not always have the answers. We try to practice a theology of humility that recognizes the vast greatness of God and our limited ability to fully understand and articulate who God is and how God operates in this world.

We don’t know why Jesus heals some and not others, we don’t know why some people today experience miracles and some do not. We know that it isn’t a merit based system – that if you are good enough or close enough to God you get a miracle as if we put the quarter in the gumball machine. We also don’t know why some see miracles and still don’t believe.

Some of us would like a nice neat Jesus, one that doesn’t offend our reason. Still some others would like a holy and sovereign Jesus, one who isn’t touched by this world. But the truth of the Gospel is that Jesus isn’t just a human teacher or rabbi, and Jesus isn’t just an awe inspiring god– Jesus is both. Jesus is complicated and messy. God can’t be contained by these categories. Jesus performing miracles on this earth is evidence that God is impossibly big and cannot be boxed in.

Impossible thing #3 – Jesus’ Resurrection – God has the power to save us

The third impossible thing I want us to consider this morning is the miracle of Jesus’ resurrection.

Much more surely then, now that we have been justified by his blood, will we be saved through him from the wrath of God.

10 For if while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death of his Son, much more surely, having been reconciled, will we be saved by his life.

As we covered last week, Jesus’ death justifies and reconciles us to God – it brought us back into friendship with God. Jesus death was like an OT sacrifice, except it was greater. It covered not just certain types of sin but all of them & not just a few people, but all who would believe.

But Jesus’ resurrection does something different – it gives us life. According to the book of Romans, and the NT, without Jesus being raised from the dead, we wouldn’t be either. Without the resurrection, we wouldn’t have the promise of eternal life. We would have been in friendship with God and then we would have died.

Both the death and resurrection were required. Death itself wouldn’t have fixed everything that sin had broken. For although we were brought back into friendship with God through Christ’s death, we are only saved through his life. Our lives are directly connected to Jesus’ life. Because Jesus is raised, we will be too. The word that Paul uses to describe this “saving” is σωθησόμεθα and it indicates “continuous action”. Not only are we saved through Christ’s life, we are continuously saved. Jesus’ one sacrifice saves us over and over and over again. So that it doesn’t need to be repeated. We don’t need to keep going back to the alter to sacrifice, as the people in the Old Testament did. We merely go back to partake in and remember Jesus’ final sacrifice through communion, with a spirit of thanksgiving.

Not so that we can go on sinning, but so that we can strive to be made more and more into the image of Christ and live more and more fully in Christ’s risen life. As we strive to make Jesus the God of our everyday, like we talked about last week, the miracle of the resurrection actually empowers us to do that. Because another piece of the resurrection is that we actually become a new creation. God helps us, does a work in us to restore the image of Christ in us.

If last week was a challenge to live the way Christ called us to, then this week is an encouragement that God empowers us to do just that, and that we have hope for life after this one.

The miracle of Jesus’ resurrection teaches us that God is powerful enough to save us.

Ending

“Unless we practice believing in the impossible daily and diligently, we cannot be Christians…”

Let us recognize the impossible things God does in scripture and the impossible things God does in our lives. And may the miracles in Jesus’ life be a reminder to us that God actively loves us, that God is bigger than we know, and that God is powerful to save us. For Jesus is not only the God of the everyday, but also the God of the miracles.