It was my first day back at Bible school after a stubborn leg injury forced me to take two months’ leave. Unfortunately, through a combination of ignorance, bad medical advice, and my irrational fear of chronic pain, my injury had gotten no better and I still had to use a wheelchair to get around. As I wheeled up to a table in the campus cafeteria on that Friday afternoon, a staff member prayed for my leg to be healed. I prayed with her, but my faith was lacking.
A month before, a friend had asked if he could pray for God to heal my leg. It was my first Sunday in a wheelchair. The preceding hour and a half of sitting through the service and staring at everyone’s backs as they worshiped had been excruciating. Blame it on my sadness, or the fact that I was still processing what was happening, but I declined his offer of prayer.
I’m a continuationist who believes God still miraculously heals. But in these moments, I didn’t expect it. Why?
The Western church is divided about the role of miracles today. Many say miracles are obsolete or at least extremely rare; they were meant for the apostolic age, to proclaim the arrival of God’s kingdom and to help establish the church. But others, like me, believe God still blesses his church with miracles—even if, as Wayne Grudem says, they are “less common” ways God shows his power in a believer’s life.
Perhaps the seeming lack of miracles in the West isn’t a sign they’ve ceased but rather that our culture doesn’t expect them anymore. And as a Western believer, I sometimes don’t expect them either—even if I believe they’re possible in theory.
Two Reasons I Struggle to Expect Miracles
I’ve thought about the West’s unbelief and my own for a long time. I’ve come to see two factors that hinder my faith when it comes to expecting miracles.
1. Modern conveniences erode my faith.
Christians often claim there are more supernatural manifestations, including miracles, in the Global South than in the West. One reason for this may be that the West has outsourced bodily healing to modern medicine. As one of my Bible school professors said, “My most frequent reaction to a headache is Tylenol, not prayer.”
Of course, divine healing and a surgeon cutting a malignant tumor out of a believer’s body are both expressions of God’s merciful intervention. Only God can heal; modern medicine simply supports the body’s self-healing processes, which he sustains by the word of his power (Heb. 1:3). But should the fervency of my prayers be dictated by the availability of medicines or the pace of technological advancement? Would I be more desperate and expectant for miracles if I had no recourse but prayer?
The Bible seems to answer those questions for us.
Would I be more desperate and expectant for miracles if I had no recourse but prayer?
In Matthew, Jesus heals multitudes who brought him their sick and diseased (Matt. 4:23–24; 14:34–36; 15:30; 21:14). The first century was a time of scarcity. The average person spent 70–90 percent of their income on food. There was no social safety net or workers’ comp. If you injured yourself on the job, your family would have to scramble to find some way to make money, or, failing that, sell themselves into debt slavery. Furthermore, the lack of antibiotics and modern technology condemned many to an early grave: The average life expectancy in ancient Rome was less than 35 years.
Jesus performed miracles primarily to glorify his Father (John 5:36) and demonstrate his divinity (Matt. 9:6). But in his infinite wisdom, he did so at a time when the common person had no choice but to cry out to God for help.
2. I overintellectualize my faith.
Before coming to Christ, I was a secular intellectual. My intellect was still in bondage to sin. I had to contend with a level of cultural programming, having come of age in a Western, post-Enlightenment society. Unfortunately, I brought that worldview into my relationship with Jesus. After the staff member prayed for God to heal me, I wondered how much of my doubt was enculturated.
In Making Sense of God, Tim Keller points out there’s no “view from nowhere”: the scientific worldview has its own miracles (namely, the Big Bang) and faith assumptions, just as Christianity does. For example, the scientific worldview is biased against the miraculous precisely because its central tenet is the assumption that all phenomena must have a natural cause. In another forum, a Christian anthropologist points out that the concept of an ordered universe created by an intelligent designer laid important foundations for the scientific method because intelligibility and intelligent design are conceptually linked.
This was liberating for me. While scientific empiricism is a great way to sift fact from fiction, it isn’t Truth itself. We need not subject the God of the universe to Enlightenment skepticism at every turn. Even atheists don’t hold their truth claims to such a standard. With that in mind, it was easier for me to take God at face value and expect miracles. God isn’t at war with science—he created it.
What I’m Learning
It has been a long road since I rolled up to that table in the cafeteria. I’m finally out of a wheelchair, as God has blessed me with physical therapy, acupuncture, and medicines that have allowed me to get a lot better. I trust I’ll be fully functional one day.
God isn’t at war with science—he created it.
I joyfully accept the tension: God doesn’t always heal, but I can confidently pray for healing. I fully embrace it’s God’s prerogative to heal or not heal; and either way, he’s still sovereign and good. Still, I will pray earnestly for his gracious healing, echoing what the disciples said to their Lord: “Increase our faith!” (Luke 17:5).
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