Today I want to talk about miracles and the power of God. More specifically, I want to talk about how we interpret the power of God. We are looking at Acts chapter 3 today, in which Peter and John decide to go to the temple, encounter a man who needs healing, heal him, and then explain to the crowd the meaning of this healing. And it turns out that the next chapter is also all about the meaning of this healing as well, since the temple leaders also have a stake in interpreting this extraordinary event. So the central event in this chapter is a healing—a miracle. There are many fascinating things that can be said about this chapter—and I’d like to encourage you to read or reread it for yourself—but today I’d like to use it as an opportunity to talk about our experience of and interpretation of miracles in the present moment.

The question of miracles and the power of God are near and dear to me in part because of the time I’ve spent in Pentecostal churches. You may not be familiar with Pentecostalism, but the Pentecostal movement is arguably the fourth great division of Christianity, alongside Eastern Orthodoxy, Roman Catholicism, and the Protestant churches. It is a modern movement, with its roots in the early twentieth century, and is presently responsible for the majority of the growth of Christianity around the world today. Pentecostalism is a global form of Christianity, not a fringe movement. And the posture of Pentecostal Christianity toward miracles today is a crucial part of the identity of that movement.

One thing I really appreciate about Pentecostal Christianity is the conviction that God is in fact real, present, and active in the world today. When Pentecostals pray, they don’t regard prayer as a form of self-talk or self-therapy. They expect that God hears and will in fact respond in power. At its best, Pentecostal Christianity insists that the reality of God is something that we should expect to encounter in our daily experience. Pentecostal Christianity is also very open to expecting miracles from God today—such as healings in the pattern of Acts 3. For Pentecostals the book of Acts is a top priority within the Bible because it serves as a genuine template for our Christian life and communities today.

At its worst, however, Pentecostal Christianity is vulnerable to a number of abuses, including widespread naive veneration of charismatic leaders and an unhinged fascination with the supernatural or extraordinary bordering on superstition. Of course, traditionalist and biblicist Christianities have their own vices, so it is unfair to dismiss Pentecostal Christianity because of the errors it so often falls into. We want to make the most of the modern Pentecostal conviction that God is actually at work in the world today in a tangible way. The key is to learn to be a good interpreter of the world around us—to learn to see things as God sees them, from the perspective of Jesus the crucified and risen one. Indeed, the primary miracle of the Christian faith is that God has raised and exalted Jesus, and that we can share in his resurrection life in a practical way.

Let’s begin with the most basic question: do miracles ever happen or are all alleged miracles just misunderstandings? This is a particularly modern (and Western) question and problem. In the ancient world, and in much of the world today, it is taken for granted that God or gods could interfere in the world so the mere existence of miracles is noncontroversial. For modern Western people, we understand the world in which we live as a world governed by laws of nature and we are somehow offended at the suggestion that a miracle might occur. Sometimes a miracle is described pejoratively as a violation of the laws of nature. All told, the Bible and other early Christian literature reports numerous miracles under the assumption that these events are an encouragement to the reader, but for the modern person a reported miracle often has the opposite effect. A reported miracle is easily a stumbling block for a modern person, rather than an encouragement. It reduces the credibility of the one who reports it.

Our chapter today reports a miraculous healing. In fact, it reports a miracle so undeniable that it attracts a large crowd of people who are perplexed by its meaning. No one denies that the miracle occurred, not even the temple leaders in the next chapter. So the book of Acts takes it for granted that this healing actually happened. What about us today? Personally, I have not witnessed anything that I would definitively label a miracle. I’ve lost my wallet, prayed, and then found it. I’ve even lost a child, prayed, and then found them. Are these miracles? I don’t know. Miracles are often slippery to pin down, especially when we insist that there is a perfectly reasonable explanation for everything! That said, if you spend any time in global Pentecostal circles you will certainly hear testimony about alleged miracles of all types.

I strongly doubt that every reported miracle that I’ve heard of actually occurred. But I also strongly doubt that none of them occurred. I leave open the possibility that some of the people who have reported miracles to me have indeed experienced something extraordinary. And I expect that even in our own church community, there is something within our own collective experience that counts as a modern miracle. At the very least, I’m sure that many of us have been in a tough position and found that we received help in our time of need. Many of us have had moments of profound gratitude when our needs were met in surprising ways.

The second question is this: What does a particular miracle mean? There is no reason to think that every extraordinary or explanation-defying event that we come across is necessarily a sign from God. I am reminded of Moses and Pharaoh in Exodus. Moses performs a number of miracles to convince the Pharaoh to let the people of Israel go. But Pharaoh then has his own magicians duplicate some of these miracles. So even within the Bible we have examples of miracles or signs that are not attributed to the work of God in the world. Indeed, the book of Acts later describes a number of Jewish exorcists who previously did their work without any appeal to Jesus. As modern people, we are brought up to disbelieve most miracles, so when someone can convince us to actually believe that a certain event is a miracle, we sometimes are so impressed that we simply take that as a sign from God. But we shouldn’t be so easily impressed. Miracles required interpretation, and the rest of this chapter (and the next one) is about the interpretation of this miracle.

Peter and John proclaim that this miraculous healing is on account of the power of the crucified and risen Jesus of Nazareth. This miracle is done in the name of this Jesus. It has a particular meaning, something beyond the fact that there is more to the world than the laws of nature. But so what if there is more than nature? Here’s what we want to know: What does the miracle in question mean? What does it signify? What does it represent or foreshadow?

In the book of Acts, one major theme is that Jesus was rejected by his people. Specifically, he was crucified by the leaders of the people. Even so, Acts proclaims that God has vindicated Jesus. The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone. The question is whether God is with the leaders who reject Jesus or whether God is with Jesus. The healing in this chapter is a sign that God is with Jesus, that God heals in the name of Jesus. Far from being discredited as cursed by God—that was the purpose of having him crucified since it was thought that all hung on a tree are cursed by God—Jesus is the one through whom God acts in the world. So the miracles of Acts, including this one, all have a theological meaning: that God has made God’s character and purposes known in the world through the crucified man Jesus of Nazareth, that the Spirit of God at work in the world today is the Spirit of this Jesus.

Put another way, the miracles of the book of Acts (such as this healing) point to the prior miracle of God’s raising Jesus from the dead and exalting him. The real miracle is that the Spirit of God present among the early believers has become the Spirit of this risen Jesus. The real miracle is the resurrection of Jesus, and the fact that the believers can somehow participate in a new life empowered by the same Spirit that raised Jesus from the dead. We see in Acts the power of God gathering people together from all types of backgrounds, transforming them into the likeness of the risen Jesus. Without this power of God at work in the early church, I suspect that the name of Jesus would by now have been long forgotten from the history of the earth.

My final question is this: Are miracles necessary today? Put another way, is my Christian faith dependent on my experience of the miraculous? In a sense the answer is clearly yes. Christian faith depends on my receiving the Spirit of God as the Spirit of the risen Jesus. This is a miraculous gift continuous with the miracle of the resurrection. But what does it mean if I am sick and not healed? What does it mean if I never see anything miraculous, in the extraordinary sense, while others report that they do? As I said before, reports of miracles have served as an encouragement in the ancient world but can serve as a stumbling block for many people today. And the Pentecostal movement often makes miracles mandatory by forcing the allegedly miraculous to a position of prominence and importance that it was never meant to occupy.

Let me put it this way: the center and foundation of the Christian faith is the cross and resurrection of Jesus, not merely the miracles he performed or the teaching he gave us. The miracles and the teaching of Jesus are both meant to support his primary purpose and accomplishment, an obedience unto death that manifests the character and purposes of his God and Father. Jesus manifests in his obedience the moral miracle of a human being fully empowered by and obedient to the Spirit of God. And God forever draws our attention to this particular moral miracle by raising Jesus from the dead and exalting him as our final authoritative image of God’s character and purposes. And the amazing thing is that the same Spirit that empowered the man Jesus is available to empower us today, to transform us so that we interpret our world and act according to the love of God made known through Jesus. We must certainly participate in this moral miracle of transformation by the power of the Spirit of Jesus, the miracle toward which all other miracles point.

Even so, other types of miracles (such as healing) are a gift that we do not control. I’ve seen people recover from significant illness in the context of a community praying for their healing. This is a wonderful thing that we should receive with thanksgiving. But I’ve also seen people who firmly believe in miracles, who firmly believe that God heals today, become deeply discouraged when they pray and are not healed, when their community prays and they still succumb to their illness. We should remember that we are praying to the God who led Jesus to his death. Miracles and healing in the name of Jesus are miracles and healing in the name of the one who was not healed, the one who died godforsaken. Our posture toward God in our times of deepest need must ultimately be the posture of Jesus: “Father into your hands I commend my spirit.” Our God can heal, yes, but more importantly our God can be trusted. And the power to entrust ourselves to God in this way is a moral miracle unto itself, a miracle continuous with the Spirit-empowered life of Jesus.

In the Gospels, John the Baptist is imprisoned and sends his friends to Jesus to ask whether Jesus is the expected Messiah or whether he should wait for someone else. Jesus replies by pointing to his miracles and healings, and then answering with an enigmatic phrase: “blessed is anyone who takes no offense at me” (Matt 11:6). Among the miracles of the book of Acts are more than one miraculous release from prison, and yet John will die in prison. And as Jesus dies, people mock him by suggesting that he who has healed others should heal himself. Perhaps the greatest temptation is that those who believe in miracles would be drawn into a theology of triumph, a perspective in which the power of God is regarded as at our disposal, to serve our own perceived needs and wants. The truth, however, lies with a theology of the cross, in which the power of God is manifest most clearly in weakness and in trust. The same Spirit that can heal us can also lead us through the worst, in the pattern of Jesus.

To conclude, my advice on the question of miracles and the power of God is to look for the character of God in the events, teaching, and leaders that we encounter, to look to the cross and resurrection of Jesus as the moral miracle to which all other miracles should point. We need to know that God is with the weak, and not just those healthy and healed, that God’s power is manifest in our weakness and frailty in surprising ways. We can receive power to trust God in our weakness, as Jesus models, just as God can also heal us in our weakness. We need to recognize that the power of God is not ours to appropriate and control, but is there for us to welcome and embrace as the power to transform us into the likeness and character of Jesus of Nazareth. We come to know the power of God in an intimate way as we are transformed, as our perspective turns from the strong to the weak, from that which the world adores to those who the world neglects.