Why Miracles Are Not Enough

Two amazing stories back to back.

I saw a kid completely healed from a terminal disease. A father and mother came to me on a Sunday morning in tears.

“This is our last hope,” he said. They recounted to me how their son had an unusual neurological disorder that had launched him into such chronic pain he no longer wanted to live. It had been going on for two years. His hair had fallen out (though this was not cancer, and there had been no radiation or chemo). Something about the connections between his eyes and his brain was going wrong too, and it was leading towards blindness. The doctors had given up hope and told him he was going to lose not just his sight, but his eyes.

So they asked for prayer.                      

One thing, at that moment, struck me as odd. I write my sermons two weeks in advance, so I already had the sermon for the following Sunday written. That coming talk was about the time a man came to Jesus and told him his son was dying. This guy told Jesus that he knew Jesus just had to give the word and the son would be healed. Jesus did and he was.

That was just kind of lingering on my mind as they told me the story. Their son was going to have some kind of surgery on Tuesday. So we prayed.

That week, they sent me a message. “The doctors cancelled the surgery! Something has changed! Keep praying!”

The next Sunday I read the story about the remote healing of a son. I had the whole congregation pray for that family. Within a month, the boy was back on his feet. His hair grew back. He kept his vision. It was a miraculous, life-saving thing.

The other amazing thing? The family stopped coming to church.

They weren’t mad about anything, they just didn’t think it was very important. The father, who had struggled with alcohol, returned to drinking. Later we had lunch and he told me he didn’t believe “in all that spiritual stuff,” though he said he still believed in God.

The son, who had been healed, never came to church at all.

In the face of an inexplicable medical turnaround after two years of trauma, they took it for granted and ignored it.

It’s not the only time

I’ve seen it happen more than once. Another time, I saw a guy get healed of an injury that was two decades old after someone prayed for him. He openly acknowledged that it was miraculous. He wasn’t receiving any medical treatment for it, and at the exact moment he was prayed for, he said, “I felt a warm sensation going all through my body. Then my injury just went away.”

A couple of years later, he had dropped out of church. He became lax and disinterested in faith. If you asked him, he would still tell you the story about his miraculous healing. It just didn’t mean much to him.

Jesus saw it too

There’s a story in the gospels in which Jesus heals 10 lepers of their sickness. Only one comes back to say thank you.

The most condemning fact is that the one who came back was a Samaritan, and not a member of the house of Israel. It was an outsider who recognized the Messiah. (Luke 17)

The upshot? People who are completely familiar with God may well take God for granted, even after seeing his miraculous works.

The rationale for blindness

At a pragmatic level, we’ve all seen this pattern of behavior before. You help a friend, they never say thanks. You bail someone out, later they get mad at you about something else and quit the friendship. You might even provide for a spouse and receive resentment in return.

We’re not sensible creatures. We’re not naturally grateful.

But you’d think the miraculous would be so awe-inspiring that we might rethink our lives.

Apparently not.

The rationale is simply that we are myopic and not particularly wed to the future or the past. There’s a news cycle, and then we forget. Time heals all wounds, because time does serious damage to our memories. We don’t save enough money for likely expenses. We get surprised by likely outcomes.

We say at my church that if we’ve planned 72 hours ahead, we’re probably ahead of 80% of the churches out there.

So the miraculous wows us for a moment, and then we file it away as little more than a pleasant memory.

Just bear these stories in mind when you insist that if God loved you he would do the miraculous, or that there must be no God because he isn’t doing the miraculous. Human history has shown that when God shows up to do the miraculous, its effects are temporary and it won’t be long before we’re again dissatisfied.

A humble suggestion

If you really want to see a miracle and decide to pray for it, perhaps make a conscious decision that you’re going to acknowledge its implications.

I knew a woman who was working in the department store in a mall. She decided to pray an outlandish prayer to see if God was for real. She prayed, “God, if you’re really there, make Elijah Wood walk into the mall today.” It was absurd.

But sure enough, he did.

I went to church with this woman. She shared her story with the whole congregation, because it was such a wild one. That she walked with Jesus for the greatest reason anyone ever has.