When You See the Miracle

The work of God is too powerful to deny.

The Holy Spirit is a purifying fire, and the cleansing of our hearts is a miracle.

In my experience, it’s often hard for Western Christians to get their head around the fact that God actually does things in this world. We can believe in God as an idea, as a rationale for our moral principles, even as one who has done mighty deeds in the past. But what about now? What about today—in your life and mine? Do we really think about God as an agent? Do we believe that the God revealed to us in Scripture is actually the same God in whom we live and move and have our being today?

Most Christians around the world today could answer these questions with a resounding YES! In the West, however, we are especially prone to expect little to nothing of God, even if we believe in God. We are, after all, the heirs of Enlightenment skepticism. When René Descartes (1596-1650) asked how he could know he even existed (I think, therefore I exist), he was giving voice to a shift in the way we would begin to think about knowledge and the ways we acquire it. Question everything. Reject the constraints of religious authority. Build your beliefs from the ground up. As it turns out, knowledge and our means of attaining it are far more complex than Descartes ever imagined. Yet if he hadn’t asked these kinds of questions—these epistemological questions—someone else would have. He was simply bright enough to perceive and write about them early on.

The Western philosophical traditions that followed have not been kind to our belief in God, much less in a God who actually shows up and does things. Rousseau, Nietzsche, Marx, Freud, Beauvoir, Foucault, and others effectively deconstructed the Christian narrative of a God who had divinely ordered the universe and instilled within it a particular moral structure. The horrors of the twentieth century didn’t help. Two World Wars, the atomic bomb, the Holocaust, multiple other genocides, the killing of tens of millions under communist regimes, and global extreme poverty raised the question of theodicy—if God is all-powerful and entirely good, why is there so much suffering in the world? Various forms of Christian theology emerged envisioning a powerless God, one who is incapable of doing very much other than “wooing” us toward his purposes.

The problem was, God kept showing up and doing things. All over the world, God has continued to heal the sick, guide the faithful through prophecy and wisdom, and provide unexpected provision. I’ve seen it myself. In other words, the concrete reality of God’s actions militates against the philosophical and theological constructs that tell us they aren’t real. Perhaps the most significant place in which the work of God is evident is in what is sometimes called conspicuous sanctity. God changes us. Once we were dead in our sins. “But God, who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us even when we were dead through our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ” (Eph 2:4-5). Have you ever encountered someone who was just different after an encounter with Christ? I have. That is God’s gift to us. It is called holiness.

Photo by Cullan Smith on Unsplash

Broadly speaking, the Wesleyan tradition is a “continuationist” tradition. That means we affirm that gifts such as healing, prophecy, and tongues continue into the present day. Different Wesleyan groups emphasize these gifts to different extents and in different ways. For example, some Wesleyan holiness churches are skeptical of more demonstrative gifts of the Spirit. The Church of the Nazarene does not affirm speaking in tongues. By and large, however, Wesleyan Christians are, at least in theory, open to the full range of spiritual gifts, particularly those described in Romans 12: 6-7 and 1 Corinthians 12:8-10.

And yet not all gifts are created equal. I love the way my friend Kevin Watson puts this in our book, Faith and Fire:

The balance in Methodism of hopeful expectation that the Spirit will both produce fruit and give us gifts comes from the Methodist commitment to the doctrine of sanctification. It is possible for people to operate in the gifts of the Spirit but not live in sync with the Spirit’s will for their lives. Methodism sees the Christian life as holistic and wholehearted. Methodists desire to follow people who are mature and surrendered fully to the lordship of Jesus Christ, who have power and authority for ministry combined with love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control (104).

The central gift of the Spirit is the gift of love. This is the basic logic of 1 Corinthians 12-14. In chapter 12, Paul discusses the spiritual gifts:

To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good. To one is given through the Spirit the utterance of wisdom, and to another the utterance of knowledge according to the same Spirit, to another faith by the same Spirit, to another gifts of healing by the one Spirit, to another the working of miracles, to another prophecy, to another the discernment of spirits, to another various kinds of tongues, to another the interpretation of tongues. All these are activated by one and the same Spirit, who allots to each one individually just as the Spirit chooses (1 Cor 12:7-12).

Notice the bracketing effect of the passages in bold: all the gifts come from the same Spirit, and God gives them for the common good. The reason Paul emphasizes this point is that some people within the Corinthian church are elevating tongues above other gifts. Christians weren’t the first people to speak in tongues. The idea of a spiritual language predates Christianity. Within Greco-Roman paganism, a spiritual language resulting from spirit possession was thought to be an exceptionally powerful form of religious experience. It was the domain of spiritual elites. At least some of the Christians in Corinth imported this idea into the church and used it as a way of elevating themselves over other Christians. Paul doesn’t like it.

That’s why he then takes up the topic of love. Chapter 13 isn’t about romantic love. It’s about ethics. “If I speak in tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal” (13:1). In other words, there is one gift that gives meaning to all the other gifts, and that is love. If we love, we live differently than we did before. Our desires are different. Our volitions change. We are not who we once were. “Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things” (13:4-7). Paul is showing us here what someone who has been given the gift of love looks like. It is an ethic in which the ego gives way to the wellbeing of other people. As Aquinas famously put it, to love is “to will the good of the other.”

In his sermon “The More Excellent Way,” Wesley puts it this way:

The way of love,—of loving all men for God’s sake, of humble, gentle, patient love,—is that which the Apostle so admirably describes in the ensuing chapter. And without this, he assures us, all eloquence, all knowledge, all faith, all works, and all sufferings, are of no more value in the sight of God than sounding brass or a rumbling cymbal, and are not of the least avail toward our eternal salvation. Without this [love], all we know, all we believe, all we do, all we suffer, will profit us nothing in the great day of accounts.

Now back to the other gifts…. Paul urges the Christians in Corinth to emphasize prophecy over tongues because, while the gift of tongues builds up the individual, prophecy builds up the church. “Since you are eager for spiritual gifts, strive to excel in them for building up the church” (14:12). Put differently, instil your understanding of the spiritual gifts with the ethic of love. After all, love is their source.

Love is not something we achieve. It is something we are given. It is the outworking of God’s sanctifying grace. Holiness—the transformation of our character to make us more like Jesus—is God’s gift to us, and he gives us this gift because he loves us. Again, I love the way Kevin puts this: “The Spirit sanctifies those who are in Christ. And it is God’s will that we be sanctified (1 Thess. 4:3). First Thessalonians not only tells us that God wills our sanctification, but that God is the one who will sanctify us entirely (5:23-24)” (105). Yes, God will even bring our hearts so into agreement with his heart that we will no longer defy him.

That is a miracle. It is every bit as much a miracle as the healing of the sick or prophecy. Sin isn’t simply something we do. It’s something that is rooted deeply within us. It even prevents us from seeing we are sinful. It has a snowball effect: the more we sin, the more prone we are to engage in sin, and the harder it is for us to see our own miserable condition. For God to heal us of this sickness—a sickness that leads to spiritual death—is a miracle on a par with the parting of the Red Sea or the raising of Lazarus. It is the mighty work of a mighty God. We must adjust our expectations accordingly.

The particular calling of the Wesleyan movement is to share this truth with the world. We are about both faith and fire. We believe in a living God. The Holy Spirit peers into our sin-sick souls and burns away the thoughts of our hearts that are in rebellion against the Almighty. That is a miracle, and the world needs to hear about it.