About this series:

The Holy Spirit is fully God, eternally existing with the Father and the Son. Throughout the Old Testament, we see glimpses of the Spirit’s presence and work, but it is through the teaching of Jesus and the events of the New Testament that the church’s understanding of the Holy Spirit is revealed more fully.

About this talk:

God is the creator of all things, including the physics by which the world ordinarily operates. However, he is not restricted to those laws of physics and the Bible makes it clear that he frequently intervenes in supernatural ways. From the time of Moses to the prophets to the kings, especially in the ministry of Jesus and then in the early church, the normal life of God’s people involves him doing (or enabling people to do) things beyond the regular laws of nature.

So in the Book of Acts we regularly see what Luke describes as “signs and wonders” (see 2:19; 2:22; 2:43; 4:30; 5:12; 6:8; 7:36; 14:3; 15:12), occasionally joined also with “miracles” (see 2:22; 8:13).

Wonder: ‘A “wonder” arrests the observer with awe and compels recognition that God - or, in the case of deception, a rival spiritual power - is at work...The emphasis rests not on the phenomenon itself but on what it reveals about the character, authority, and purposes of the one who performs it.’
Sign: an event that points beyond itself to the reality behind it; evidence of the reality of something / someone.

There is, of course, huge debate among Christians as to how much the ministry of Jesus and the early church is normative (ie. it shows what we should expect as normal in our own experience) or merely descriptive of a special phase in history. Given that we are not cessationists and that we believe the Book of Acts provides a pattern for us to follow, we are convinced that we should pursue a church life that is closer to the signs and wonders recorded in Acts than we currently experience.

There is also much debate about the reasons why we do not see more miracles, signs and wonders. Christians are often uncomfortable with mystery and therefore can have a tendency to fill the ‘gaps’ with neat ‘answers.’ When it comes to dealing with the mystery of why we do not see more miracles, signs and wonders, Christians sometimes answer with: we need to have more faith, sin may be preventing God from working, God means for us to learn or grow while we are waiting, etc. All of which may have some truth about them, but none of which should be seen as a simple explanation. We need to be able to live with both certainty and mystery: resting on the certainty of who God is, which allows us to live with the mystery of what we do not see.

What we are certain about is that God is an intervening God, that he loves his children, that he is all-powerful and that he is working his purposes out on the earth. What we learn from the New Testament is that God frequently authenticates the truth with a demonstration of its power. As Peter tells the crowd on the day of Pentecost, “Jesus of Nazareth was a man accredited by God to you by miracles, wonders and signs, which God did among you through him” (Acts 2:22). In the same way, our longing is that God will similarly make our message about Jesus abundantly clear. All of which means that we want to press on in prayer and in faithful action to see more miracles, signs and wonders.