The Healing Was Just the Beginning

Pastor Pat opens with a question: do you believe in miracles? He cites a survey done with Lee Strobel in which about two-thirds of Americans said God still does miracles and 38 percent said they had experienced one. He quotes Augustine, who never had trouble believing in miracles after experiencing the change in his own heart.

Then he names the tension. Jesus healed many people, and he did not heal everyone. Pat admits he is no expert, but he warns against two mistakes. If we avoid miracles, we put God in a comfortable box. If we obsess over them, we turn grace into something we have to earn.

He tells two stories. At a worship night, a woman hobbled up the stairs doubled over in pain, and halfway through worship, with nobody touching her, she sat upright and moved freely. And his father: two older women from a church, Dorothy and Mildred, laid hands on him, and the effects of chemotherapy left in a moment, yet he later died of colon cancer. Pat says he will never understand that this side of heaven. He also says the whole family changed from that day: “I am where I am today because of two old ladies that prayed.”

In Matthew 15, Jesus sits down on a mountain by the Sea of Galilee, likely among Gentiles, and great crowds lay the lame, blind, crippled and mute at his feet. He heals them, and they praise the God of Israel. Pat explains why that mattered. In that culture, sickness meant exclusion. A leper rang a bell so people would run away. The blind and the mute could only beg. Many were treated as cursed, a “walking signboard” for divine disfavor. Healing meant friends again, work again and a place in worship again. Matthew echoes Isaiah 35, a promise of a nation restored, and Jesus is extending it to every people, all the way back to God’s promise to bless the nations through Abraham.

Every person healed that day has since died, Pat points out, so the real miracle is full restoration of mind, body, soul and spirit. He asks where we need healing: physical, emotional, relational or spiritual. Then he presses on our habit of trying to fix things alone with a good podcast. Restoration is communal, so he invites people forward for prayer without pressure and asks everyone else to worship and intercede for those who come.