Second thing that I want to talk about is a question that came up over break. Good questions over break. Question was essentially, what did you mean when you said that Jesus miracles did not prove him to be divine? What I meant by that is this. Jesus miracles by themselves don't prove him to be divine because there are many people that perform miracles. Miracles prove that someone is an agent of God they don't prove he's God and you know that people who performed miracles again were sometimes thought to be God because the miracle they say don't draw that conclusion. I'm an agent of God. The way Jesus miracles point to his deed is because of what he said when he did them. He alone said, I forgive you rise nobody Moses didn't do that. He also spoke about his miracles a different way he would say things like I am willing be clean. I will heal you. If Moses or Peter or Paul or John or Elijah or Elijah performed a miracle they were careful to say we're doing this by the power of God the God of Israel. Liz that you may know that there's a God of Israel but you may know there's no God but God that we do this by the power of Jesus and Nazareth whom you killed but God raised him from that. They're always interested in pointing to God. Jesus points to himself. So Jesus miracles in themselves wouldn't prove that he's divine. I'm not saying you know they're not going to do with his deity but it's what he says plus what he does. He talks about his miracles differently from the way anybody else does and that's how we have indicators of his deity. I want to pick up the themes of how we make use of how we understand miracles in our ministries and say just a few more things about that. Some people ask the question, do miracles, do you have to be a believer to receive a miracle? What's the answer to that? No you do not. Jesus sometimes healed large crowds. He sometimes healed unbelievers. God is gracious. He gives his good gifts to the just and the unjust. It is certainly true that sometimes Jesus uses miracles to elicit faith and sometimes he says do you believe that I have the power to heal you and so forth and he'll say as you have believed let it be for you. I have a couple of references along that line. For example Matthew 928 do you believe I can do this? Yes and then Jesus heals the man. I think also chapter 9 verse 22 you are faith has healed you. So sometimes there's a connection between faith and miracles but it's not an ironclad law. Sometimes the miracle stimulates faith. Sometimes every word faith. Sometimes they deepen faith. There's a connection but they don't exactly compel faith. So it is possible Jesus sometimes even doesn't perform a miracle for those whom he knows to be settled in their unbelief like it is trial. Some of the people say show us to be heard some miracles. Show us some stuff. He refuses or when the Pharisees ask him for a sign he doesn't give it he says no sign will be given to this generation because they're hard hard. Jesus has just given him plenty of signs they ask for another sign he says no you've had enough. So there's a connection. He won't perform miracles we might say that would only drive people further into their unbelief or at least wouldn't tend to do that. And he won't perform miracles to compel faith but the connection is not ironclad or some simple formula that we can spell out. What they do is point us to Christ. They point us to his comprehensive redemption. Savior of all things and not just Savior in one limited area or the other as we were saying just before in the last lecture. Savior of our souls, Savior now and Savior eternally. One of the things we haven't really talked about is the fact that miracles give some hint of what eternity will be like. They give us a picture of redeemed humanity when no longer be sickness and tears and darkness and blindness and various forms of suffering. Restoration. It's not restoration in full but it is a foretaste of his restoration. And if we are God's agents to day and I think I'm just going to say this and let you ponder it. If we're God's agents today then I do believe it is incumbent upon us to strive to bring at least some pale shadow of Jesus' universal healing. You even think back for a moment to the story of the leper who's healed. So that was a physical healing but also a social healing, right? We need to be in the business of social healing as best we can. I'm not going to tell you a program for it. Jesus did not neglect that aspect of the world and its brokenness and neither should we if we claim to be his agents in this world. I don't think that's pressing the story of the paralytic too hard. We have to be careful about the imitation of Christ. It's one of the most difficult questions for a Christian to consider is when Jesus model, you know he's modeling social healing, is something we should imitate and when it isn't. One man, John Murray, in a book called Principles of Conduct said this, to aspire to be like God in one sense is the essence of virtue. To aspire to be like him in another is iniquity. To preserve this line of distinction is indispensable to all right thinking on the truth and the right. And I quote it obviously because I think it is an apt and just remark about the nature of Christ's ministry. Let me see if I want to invite a question, one more question or comment, but I turn to the next section of my notes. I really don't want a question to say truth, I just want to install, but I turn to my notes. We need to draw some conclusions about miracles and about how to study them. One of the conclusions has to do with looking at the data of Scripture. Talk just a little bit in our class about observing what is there in the Bible. I've asked to do things like petition to who's there and little pronouns and things like that and touching and not touching in their faith versus his faith right. One of the things we need to do if we're gonna really be faithful to God's Word is to see what's there and if what's there upsets us then good. We'd probably need to be upset and if it if it confirms then that's good too because it's good to be confirmed. One of the little things that we notice as we study Matthew, Mark, and Luke that might upset us but it's there is that sometimes one gospel looks a little bit different from another. So that tonight didn't we? How many do Monty acts? One or two? Who came to ask Jesus for the healing of the Son of the Centurion? Centurion himself or Luke chapter 7 the representative Jewish leaders who wanted to put in a good word. Now I'm not upset by those things. If you asked me you know if a video camera was actually rolling I'd probably say probably the Jewish emissaries came on his behalf because we understand that when you ask somebody to do something for you or your representative does something you did it right? So let me say the general conducted a successful campaign again so and so well I mean the general didn't do it by himself he gave orders and his troops did it for him that's just the way we talk but sometimes it's not quite all that simple and we have to ask the question why exactly there are differences between one gospel and another at some point in this course and this is a good time to ask the question. Now when we do this we're not you know we're not presuming that the Bible is in error or presuming here is we have to look at the fact that the accounts are a little bit different. Now here's the way I explain the variations in the accounts. Here's the way some other people explain them. We tell you first how some other people explain the differences. Some people say that Matthew, Mark and Luke just to take those three together the synopics together have a lot in common because they share two sources. The two sources are Mark and what is sometimes called Q which is which is just a French word for source. It's kind of silly. The source meaning a source of the sayings of Jesus and they say Matthew, Mark and Luke all have one basic narrative. Jesus born, performed miracles, had ran into some opposition, performed some teaching taught in miracles, went to Jerusalem, was crucified and raised. That's in common and in fact the order of Matthew, Mark and Luke is very similar and they say the reason why they're similar is because Matthew and the Luke are essentially copying Mark and then they say the other thing that that Matthew and Luke have is some sayings of Jesus. That's why you have these things like the sermon amount where there may be 30, 40, 50, 60, 80 words in a row almost identical between Matthew and Luke. It aren't found at all in Mark or John. So they say Matthew and Luke are making use of somehow they got a whole set of quotations. Maybe it was memorized, maybe it was written down but quotations from Jesus. Now that's plausible and I don't want to say that's a ridiculous view but there is something that goes wrong when people say that. The thing that goes wrong is that a great number of times people then say Matthew and Luke when they differ from Mark simply changed Mark. They altered Mark. Mark was too rough or there was something that was difficult to understand or difficult to stomach like Jesus' emotional life is really much more prominent in the gospel of Mark and if you read about Jesus being upset or being troubled in his spirit that's always in Mark it seems. It's not in Matthew and Luke and so they say well you know that was troublesome to the church so Matthew and Luke just changed it. They just got rid of it. Now of course when you start saying that then we have Matthew and Luke making you know possibly arbitrary changes and maybe without any historical basis it implies then that Matthew and Luke aren't really all that reliable and it implies that maybe they had an agenda and acts to grind and it may even imply that they weren't so sure they trusted Mark but they could do much better so they just changed a few words here and there and that is a problem if you take that approach. Another approach in the one that I would like to take is that Matthew, Mark, Luke and John all had far more material than they needed to put into the four gospels. Of course Luke says pretty much the same thing. He says he investigates everything carefully from the beginning. John says that he is selected that he selected the things that would bring people of faith, believe in Christ. John says that he knows that all the books of the world could be filled with all the things you could write about Christ. I mean after all a quarter of John's gospel describes one meal, the conversation at one meal so you know you get the feeling that maybe John wished he had more time and could have written more or had some interest but he kept things short under God's guidance and under a plan he had. So I'd rather say that they had, they all had lots of information that we don't have two sources, Mark and Q. We also have lots of living witnesses, people who were healed, who are around, people who saw Jesus raised and that people who were in Jerusalem, lots of witnesses. One of the things that Matthew himself saw was Luke and his interaction with Paul and various members of his community and probably Luke traveling and talking to Peter and others. Many, many sources far more information than they could use and yet they do look similar, Matthew, Mark and Luke do look similar for very plausible reasons. One is that they're telling the truth, it's one story. You should expect their gospels to look similar because the story was similar. Another reason we should expect the gospels to look similar is because they told the story in each other's presence. We were told the story in front of somebody else and you're going through maybe it's a some great heroic football victory and you say and then on third down it says no no it wasn't third down it was fourth down. Yeah it was fourth down. It was on the 25 round. No it wasn't the 25 round. It was on the 20 yard line. Oh yeah you're right it was on the 20 yard line. Right and so as you tell a story in front of each other you start to tell it the same way. Now I'm not saying that's the way it was with Matthew Mark and Luke that they were running around correcting each other but the story of Christ was told over and over and it was treasured and so we should expect that story to look similar and yet since they were all telling the story for their own churches and for people in different parts of the world maybe Luke for Gentiles and Matthew for Jewish Christians and Mark for Roman Christians as the tradition goes and I think it's a good tradition. They would report somewhat different things that would be interesting to that community and they would they would add or subtract little details here and there that would make some points that they wanted to make or again be of interest to the people to whom they wrote. Now that's sort of the broad picture. One of the things you were free to do for today was to look at a story and to notice the differences between them. Right? The story of the stealing of the storm and let's turn to that story and read it. Which version did you work on as your main version? Looked it all three together, right? Okay we're going to take, we're going to use as our sort of our starting point since Matthew is our gospel. We're going to use Matthew and then maybe keep your finger in the pages for Mark and Luke and as we do always we're going to establish the context for our discussion first. The first question people have I suppose when they think about the stealing of the storm is how could this really happen? I mean how could Jesus fall asleep in a boat in the middle of a storm? Maybe it was all a trick. Maybe it was all fairy tale. How do you have been to Israel? Okay? Has anybody, if you've been there a couple of people have been there? Have you been there recently? Did you ride across the Sea of Galilee on the Jesus boat? All right let me tell you about the Jesus boat. Now I'll see you think I'm up to tricks but I'm not. Here's the true story. One of the things you need to do if you want to be a student of the Bible is get rid of your Sunday school pictures. One of the problems with the storm at sea is you get two little, two little Qt3, four Qt5 faces on a boat that's about and there's Peter and there's John and there's Jesus and you can hardly imagine that they didn't step on him 14 times because the boat is obviously seven feet long and four feet wide. A boat, a boat was found during a drought in Israel in the late 1980s. Little boy was digging around in the mud on the edge of the Sea of Galilee after three year drought. They saw a stick in the mud and he decided just to touch it or fool around with it and he knows the stick went straight up and down and there are also some coins there and they looked old and as they say in Israel everybody's an archaeologist in Israel and so he said dad look what I found and they started poking around and they found that that stick was the top of a mast of a ship that had sunk. They carbon dated it to 50 AD. Within 50 years so between the year more or less of Christ's birth and maybe maybe the year 100 AD. They pulled it up and they studied it. Among the things that they found were this was a fairly substantial boat. Now the one I went on was a little bit larger but about 30 feet long the boat was. Now 30 feet is not like that. It wasn't very wide. It was about only about 10 feet wide but you can fit I guarantee you thousands of fish in a boat that size and you can fit a number of people and you would have hold in the bottom and if Peter and John were, as the Bible says, fishermen and they own boats as it says. May very well been their boat and Jesus might have been since they weren't fishing anymore just going across the lake on their boat and so very plausible that he could fall asleep in a storm. Maybe also very tired maybe God also did have some purposes in it as well. Jesus fell asleep on the boat tired. He was a real man. God may have had some purposes besides that. As you look at the story in Matthew, Mark and Luke, I asked you to notice any differences in the way the stories told or some little differences that you noticed. I'm not going to write them in the board. Just call a few out. Yes. One said he had a pillow. The others didn't, okay? Yes. There were other boats with him. Yes. He was asleep in a stern. One says the others don't say exactly where. Yes. Okay. Okay. The timing is described somewhat differently in the accounts. You maybe get the idea that it was at the end of the day so you could call it day or evening and so forth. It's not called night, right? In any of them, but rather day and evening, right? So that's, you know, toward the end of the late afternoon or something. Okay, a lot of little differences. Do any of those trouble you or any of those striking or noteworthy? Not particularly. But I'm intrigued, and I think I asked you to pay attention to the way they talked, right? And did you think maybe that amounted to something? Well, maybe you did, maybe you didn't. But let's take a look at the way they talked. The way they talked to Jesus when they had their panic come over them is interesting. What do they say in Matthew as they come to Jesus for a rescue? What do they say? They say, Lord save us. Oops, I said Lord save. I'm going to tell you in the Greek, it's just three words. Lord save, and they can do this in Greek. We perish. It's all one word. Now, what do they say? That's Matthew. What do they say in Mark? Okay. Teacher. Is that right? Teacher? Okay. Don't you care. Sorry. Don't you care. Et cetera. If we drown. Luke, master. Hey, master master. And I'll tell you it's the same thing as here. It's master. Two times master. Master. Master. We perish. Total three words in Luke. Total three words of Matthew. Total five words in Mark. Now, these are all more than one step away from robust confidence, right? But let's characterize them in a little more detail. In which of these do they, do they seem to be really in the worst shape? Where do they come up looking the worst? In Mark, why? Because it seems like they're accusing him. It's like they say, in our last breath, we want to tell you where Matthew, don't you care that we're perishing. We are perishing. All we want to know is, how do you feel about it? Because we're ticked. You know, you could, you could heal all kinds of people, but here we are dying and get up. We just want you to know we're all going down and we're not happy about it. That's almost the way it sounds. All right. How about Luke? Is that just about as bad or is it a tiny bit better? What? Little better. Why is it a little better? It's not so accusatory. That's right. And master sounds just a little better, doesn't it? The word that they use and that Luke uses epistata means absolute Lord. It's a very, very strong word. That's a ruler. Mighty ruler. Something like that. Which has in it the idea that maybe you could do something about it. See, teacher suggests teaching. Doesn't suggest, you know, taking care of things, but this suggests power. So there's at least a glimmer of hope here. We're not just telling we're drowning, but we know you could. You are the mighty Lord. We know you could do something. But the fact of the matter is, we are perishing. How about Matthew? Little better, little worse. What do you think, Jennifer? Okay, it sounds like a humble and treaty. Lord save. So are they really in great shape in Matthew? No, they're still saying we're perishing. It's more like they're saying we're asking, but we're also telling you. I mean, in all three, they think they're going to die. In one, they're mad that they're going to die. In another, they're, I'm overdoing it here a little bit. In another, they know that God could do something about it. Christ could do something about it, but we're going to die. And here, we're going to die, but there's, we're not least going to ask. It doesn't hurt to ask. They're implying that he can do it, that he is the Lord and he could save. Now, that's there. That's just there. There's also a little something about the chronology of events. Did you notice the difference there in the order of things? What's the difference? And Matthew asks them first. What does he ask them? Okay, and Matthew, he speaks first, and then they speak. And what's the impact of that? Everybody just take a look at it in Matthew chapter. Sorry, you know, we actually, we said it backwards, didn't we? Let me say it backwards. Yes. Matthew was different from the other two. The disciples go down, they say, Lord, save. We're going to drown. This is what's different. And Matthew says, you have little faith. Why are you so afraid? And then he acts. And the other is he acts and then he speaks. Now, what's the difference in that? Is it, does it matter? It's obviously difference. Is there anything there? Linda? Okay, that's right. All right, both of these comments are saying it very differently, but both these comments are saying pretty much the same thing. Jesus is interacting with them and almost saying to them, okay, you called me Lord. Let's, you know, before I do something, I want to encourage you. I want to stimulate you. I want you to think about this. I want you to learn the lesson. I want you to realize that I can deliver you before I deliver you. I want you to think about what I'm going to do before I do it. And the others, he does it and so then it feels more like a rebuke. You should have known better. And Matthew, it feels more like, I think you can learn the lesson here even before I do it. Now, why would Matthew, Mark and Luke tell the story differently? We could even ask, you know, which of these things did the disciples actually say, well, let me give you my answer. First of all, they're speaking in Arabic almost certainly. So these are all translations. Second, I would imagine that they were saying lots of things. They were probably shouting and carrying on. And they probably said, don't you care if we perish and Lord save us, we perish and master we're perishing and the boats going down and God save us. And they probably said dozens of other things. I mean, they're 12, even more than 12. Maybe last doesn't really say that the 12 are there. Let's just imagine. I mean, a boat like this could hold 30 or 40 people without a problem at all. So it's just supposed there are 10 people or 15 people. They're probably saying all kinds of things. They probably said hundreds and hundreds of words, including all these words. And Matthew, Mark and Luke are selecting out. Now, what about Jesus, you know, when did he speak to the disciples? I think it's also extremely likely that Jesus said a wide variety of things before he healed them, before he calmed the storm and after he calmed the storm, right? I mean, would he just say five words and then go back to sleep? You know, he probably, you know, rebuked them and correct them and explained all sorts of things and said hundreds if not thousands of words. I mean, in one minute, you can use 125 words in the Matthew, Mark and Luke together, you've only got a couple of dozen words. Probably said much more than that. So what's happening is the Matthew, Mark and Luke are selecting things from this one episode that the main thrust is clear, Jesus is Lord. The main thrust is he will protect us from the destroying forces of nature. He's omnipotent. He can control nature by a word. But within that main point that he redeems us from the destructive powers of nature, run amok. He has other things to say. And one of those is found a little bit more, we might say, in the gospel of Matthew. And that is the idea. We need to progress in the faith. Notice what Matthew says, how Jesus words, or did you notice Jesus words when he speaks to them? He says, you of little faith. Isn't that exactly what they are in Matthew? They're of a little faith. They're of enough faith to say Lord, enough faith to say save, but not so much faith because they're still saying we're dying here, right? Men, let's keep walking. It's good that you know I'm Lord, but you shouldn't be panicking. You should know that there's no reason to fear because I'm here. Would you learn that lesson? The lesson of Luke, how does Jesus address the disciples and look? What does he say? He doesn't use the word little faith. What does he say? He talks about faith though. He says, where is your faith? Now what does that imply? It implies that they have faith, but it's not operative. Where is your faith? You have faith is implicit there. It doesn't say it in so many words, but you've misplaced it. You should be exercising it, but you're not. Where is it? That's a good faith question too, isn't it? A question that can often be applied to us. We've got faith. Why aren't you exercising? Now what about Mark? How does Jesus address them in Mark? Why are you afraid? Do you still have no faith? Or do you not yet have faith? It would be a very literal translation so you might have. Now what he's saying there is you disciples. We're going to talk about this about six weeks. You disciples, you know, class number 32 or something. You disciples, you're acting like unbelievers here. Don't you have any faith? And Mark is the gospel that is, we might say, hardest on the disciples, hardest on those who should know and don't. Still even in the harsh remark, he's still expressing some hope. Did you notice? He doesn't say, I'm mad at you because you have no faith. What does he say? Do you still have no faith? Or as I translated more literally, do you not yet have faith? Where's the hope even in that? It's coming. You will. You don't have faith yet, but you will have faith eventually. Face up to your lack of faith. Face up to your need for a real transformation. That's the message of Mark. We have in Matthew, Mark and Luke one story, one story of Christ's power, one story of his provision. Retold, again, I speak to you as teachers of others. Retold so that slightly different needs, slightly different challenges that come to disciples are expressed so that in a way, we can all identify with what's going on here. The person who's a real Christian, the person who's really torn and can't hardly locate their faith, the person who's almost nowhere can all identify. One of the things that we do, we're proud to do when we read the gospel, when we read any story, is look for somebody who's kind of like us, right? Matthew is the gospel written for people, especially for people who do have faith, but they're in the process of growing. They're little faith ones growing for more. Mark is the gospel you might say that is most apt for people who need to take a good stark look at the failure in their life. And maybe it's for people who look at the whole Christian story. Maybe it's a wonderful evangelistic gospel. Maybe it's for people who have seen something of the evidence, but no in their hearts, they aren't really believers. And they can look at the disciples and say, you know, that's me. I'm just not getting the point yet, but there's a word of hope, not yet. I'm not getting the point, but someday maybe. Maybe I will. Maybe what Jesus says to them is the word for me. And Luke, maybe a little bit in between, at least in this particular place, I'm not going to go into the whole theology of Luke, but Luke is, as this story is told, for us in those hours, and we know we're believers, we know we have faith, we know we want to walk, we've got to be a true disciple, but, you know, it just seems like we've mislocated it. Like we're not applying it at all. And Jesus puts the question to us as a rebuke, but it's also an encouragement. Where is your faith? Find it, practice it, apply it to the situation in hand, and encouragement. And again, through it all, not just, you know, get tough and go do it, but knowing that the Lord does have the power and the will to use it for our benefit. Let me say that if we want to understand the question, do miracles take place today? It's very important to get a definition, the definition that I have actually in your syllabus, in front of you, and my full definition goes like this. A miracle is a direct, unmediated act of God in the external world in which he works outside the common course of events to reveal himself, to authenticate his servants, to manifest his nature and redemptive purposes. Now, here's what I mean by that. First of all, it's a direct act. It is not the rising of the sun, the birth of a child are wonderful things. They're not miracles. They're wonderful providences. And you can say the miracle births if you want to, but that doesn't, it's not a miracle in the biblical sense. It's a time when God does something directly in the external world. So, somebody repents or says, you're sorry or there's an answer to pray, that's wonderful, but that doesn't make it a miracle. That makes it a wonderful act of God. It rules out private events, it demands attention. It's an external world. Everybody who's there sees it says something happened. All right. And when it happens, it, in Bible times, verified that somebody, a man or woman, was a man or woman, usually of course a man, or almost always a man, but a man of God. This is a prophet. He claims to be a prophet. He is a prophet. Look, he performs things only a prophet can do. Jesus makes certain claims about himself. They're verified by his miracles. Okay. Now, if that's what a miracle is, I'm going to call that a capital N, capital I, capital R, ACLE miracle. That's the real thing. They prove that God is redeeming his people, that this man speaks for God, that God is doing something new in human history. If that's the way you define a miracle, then then miracles like that don't take place today. Because there are no prophets or apostles who need to be authenticated as a servant of God. There is no one who is, Christ isn't around on the earth anymore to say, to prove that I have the authority to forgive sins and so forth. So, if people are healed and if miracles take place today, they're not identical to what the prophets and the apostles and Jesus did. In that, those always manifested a proof Jesus of the Savior or God is doing something new in history for his people. Something radically new, like leading them out of Egypt or delivering them from the oppression of the bail prophets or taking the gospel to the nations and so forth. Radical new things. However, I do want to say that what I call small and miracles do take place. And those are things that are in the external world. They demand attention and they're unmediated. I believe that they do not take place today through miracle workers. Rather, they take place through men and women whom God chooses to use. The way I put it is this, and as I was saying a minute ago, you know, you can be another story a minute. I put it this way, I have been there when several people are radically healed by God. I've been the guy who said, let's do this, let's ask God to heal and God heal then and there. But that doesn't make me a miracle worker. I don't claim the gift of miracles. I don't know if it'll ever happen again. I mean, I hope it doesn't happen to me. That was somebody who's sick. I hope it does happen again, but I have no idea. And when I go in, it's not the way Jesus says or the way John, you know, to prove that I have the authority to forgive sins or, you know, Moses, that you may know, there's a God in Israel and you know, he can defeat you and your armies. You know, Moses, Elijah on the mount with the bell prophets, we'll see who's God. You know, they were absolutely 100% sure that God had to do something to vindicate his name, his covenant, his glory, and themselves as his agents. If God had not sent down fire on Mount Carmel to just to burn up that sacrifice, Elijah would be radically discredited and the work of God would have been radically harmed. If I lay my hands on somebody or, you know, down at one of the churches in this area or in any other place in the country where people lay hands on for prayer and healing, and a person isn't healed, no discrediting occurs. All we're doing is you're saying, we hope that God chooses to bless. I'm not claiming anything. And in good churches, nobody claims to prove that God is alive in this church, I lay hands on you and boom. It's that sort of thing that produces abuses and that causes manipulations and setups. The people, not only the people, all the people who might know whether personally or through reading, who say that they've had a ministry of which people have been healed, will tell you there's no telling what will happen. We don't know if they'll be healed or not. We pray and we hope. Now I will tell you that I do believe that having given those qualifiers that God does radically heal and do astounding, visible things in the world today. The one that was most powerful in my life was a day when I had been teaching in a class just through the book of James, and I decided to study this pretty hard, and I had a friend who had a virus in his heart. He didn't have a heart attack, but it was destroying his heart muscle as surely as if he had and maybe even worse. And you know, he was ash in color, he could hardly walk, he'd lost strength and so forth. And I said, you know, think maybe we should just lay hands and pray for you. And he said, yeah, maybe we should. In about a month later, he said, you know, that conversation we had, why don't we do that? I'm thinking, what conversation, what earth are you talking about? And they said, you know, along we had the other, you know, by the bond fire and how we were talking, oh, yeah, remember that. And let's do that. Let's get the elders together. Let's do that. Well, it was in a church where they'd never done it. And so in good Presbyterian fashion, we studied it for two months. And of course, we hope they didn't die in the mean time. And after studying it, I'm exaggerating, changing details as I always do, just so if you never bump into them. We studied it for a while. And then we gathered to lay hands. And the pastor of the church, shoes, a man I deeply, deeply respect, had a right concern for false hopes, false expectations had never done it before in the church. And I presented the rationale on how we could really expect God to heal. James C5 seems to teach that. And his main thing was to sort of say, you know, let's not expect too much. Let's just ask God for healing. And maybe the main thing will be spiritual healing and encouragement. And in fact, I'll say that in my experience, the most common thing is radical spiritual encouragement. That happens just about every time. Maybe just one or two exceptions in my experience, the radical physical healing is less common. So he was wise. But I'll tell you what I was thinking while he was doing it. So I was thinking, you know, you don't need to lower expectations because I'm an A number one skeptic, you know. And don't take that wrong. But I mean, you know, I have a critical side, not in the sense of picking it people. But I can sort of see how things will go wrong. And I can see how things will unravel probably a little too well sometimes. And I'm sitting here thinking about all the things that can go wrong, the disappointments and how people be crushed. I'm thinking, you don't need to tell me, although are my expectations, believe me, they're already low. But we later hands in this guy is kneeling down, is a big man, over 200 pounds. And put our hands on his shoulder. And within seconds, I felt blazing pulses of fire running down my shoulder and down my hands and into my hands. And just I felt like lightning bolts were pouring into this man so far. And that was my, that was what I felt. I felt that I could have pinched him with my finger and my thumb and yo, you would have them up and down from the ceiling if I'd wanted to. And it took me, and believe me, that doesn't happen to me every day. And it took everything I had in me as we were going around, solemnly praying that God would do his bidding and do what he would will to keep from screaming out. Don't pray. Praise God. He's already healed. He's healed, you know. And when I came around my prayer center, a little different from the others, I don't know if anybody paid attention except him and me. And you know, a few days later, I went to the doctor, I'll tell you what happened, it's four days later, we went to the church and he kind of grabbed me by the shoulder and say, damn, watch this. And in our church, there was some very ingenious people who had built the church partly out of leftovers or salvageable items from a steel plant that had to be destroyed, it was taken apart. And it had a really steep set of stairs, 18 steps on it. He said, watch this. And he dashed up the stairs. Now, I mean, that just a walk 18 feet would have been hard on him before. He dashed up the stairs. And then I ran up afterwards and he said, and I'm not even breathing hard. Well, he was healed. A few months later, not months later, sorry, maybe a month later. And this is just, I tell you this for expectations sake. I did this, and a friend of mine was healed, another friend of mine around the same time was, was I'll say, unbelievably encouraged and slowly healed of a cancer. I don't know what we did how to do it or not. My own daughter was having severe skin problems at the same time. Now, I'll tell you what I mean by severe skin problems. We had to keep clothing on her from her ears to her toes, but only her face and her hands unexposed because she had such rashes and so irritated that every time we would take any clothes off the change or give her a bath, she would just tear out her skin the whole time. If you looked at her, she had hundreds of tiny cuts on her body. From, you know, baby fingernails being sharp, just hundreds of them all over her belly. And although I could do it for a friend, I found it hard to pull on everybody for baby rash, you know. I mean, you can think of it that way, even though it was really life-dominating for her and for us. And we laid our hands on her, and I was, I mean, I just confessed to you. I was probably, even though my friend had been radically healed just a few weeks earlier, I was probably no more confident when I did this than I was for my friend. And a couple hours later, my wife wasn't going to take her up for a bath. Now for a bath, to take to be a bath is to have just non-stop screaming the whole time of the bath. You just try to wash her as fast as you can and get her back covered up so she can't tear herself anymore. And I was waiting for the screaming to start. My wife was doing it. I was busy with something. I can't remember what it was. And I didn't hear it. And I heard a little quiet sound from the tub area and it sounded kind of like crying. And that's what it was. And my wife was crying for joy. And she said to me, simply, I walked up. She said, before I got there, she's playing in her bath. She is playing in her bath. She was 13 months old. And for the first time in her life, she was playing in her bath. I mean, God healed her. He healed her that day. I will not tell you that he healed her 100 percent. She had tiny little bits of rash off and on for the next two or three years. You know, it was sort of, it was about a 95 percent. And we were just so happy that God was pleased to do this in our life. So, does God heal today? He does. What he does is not identical to what Moses, Elijah, and Jesus, and John, and Paul did. It's still a great thing of God. And although it doesn't attach to his prophetic word, it does attach to his blessed power. Sometimes he does it physically. Sometimes he does it spiritually, no physical healing, but a radical joy and peace and change. Which, and I could tell you many stories, but our time is up, that I've had the privilege to be part of. So, there you are, when they see his powers. He is specifically shown by his miracles to be the Messiah. I'm not going to have turned to it with you, but simply to tell you, in Matthew 11, and in John, sorry, Luke 17, 719 and following. Remember, John the Baptist has doubts just to whether Jesus is a Messiah. Jesus says, you go tell John what you've seen. The lame walk, the blind sea, the deaf here. These restorations are all things that were predicted of the Messiah. Isaiah 35, especially, and also Isaiah 61. Jesus, miracles, prove he is the Messiah. So, to prove his God, to prove his Messiah, but they also tell us about, we might say, his human side back to that discussion. Why, if a motive is given, why does Jesus heal? What motive is stated in the Gospels? The answer is compassion. Repeatedly, we hear Jesus compassion, moved him to heal the crowds. He had compassion on the thousands of people who were falling for days without food, so he gave them bread. He had compassion on the blind man, it called out as he was on the road to Jerusalem. He had compassion on the widow whose only son had died. Think, a widow whose only son died. Luke chapter 7. He had compassion and went. The question, did Jesus always know what was going to happen? He always get the feeling that he said, I'm going to follow my emotions, my love for these people. And that was as much on his mind as any divine plan was. He's sheer love of this woman. Jesus, miracles are four men and four women. If you look at the miracles of the Bible, many of the miracles in the Old Testament are punitive. Think of the ten plagues. Think of fire coming down from heaven and burning up God's adversaries. The earth is opening up and swallowing up the enemies of Moses and so forth. The sea closing on Moses' adversaries' Pharaoh and the armies. Jesus' miracles are always four men and women, always bringing healing, always bringing restoration. They always point furthermore to the redemptive work of Christ. They're always suggesting that Jesus is the one who has the right to heal. He has borne our inequities. He has done what it takes to save us. Our salvation is global. We're not just saved from sin in the sense of punishment. We are saved entirely. There is no end to the scope of Christ's redemptive work. We don't get it all now. We only taste it often. But there is no limit to it. There's no realm of life where we say, God's love, Christ's redemption cannot touch that. That's too far gone. That's too secular. It's as broad as the world itself. So some points about Jesus' miracles. Let's take a break and we'll come back in 10 minutes.