The Charismatic denominations are a funny place, and if you listen to what every teacher or preacher says about how to receive from God, how to operate in the gifts of the spirit, whether to seek after God’s face or his hand, how to receive answered prayer or see miracles, or anything similar, you are bound to get spiritual whiplash, because every time you turn around someone is going to be telling you something different. One person will tell you to intercede fervently to get your prayers answered. Another will tell you not to pray for them to be answered but to thank God that they are already answered until it happens. Yet another will tell you to “praise” God for it instead of praying—which at best I can assume means that you’re still thanking God but with music this time. It can get very difficult to know whether it’s okay to ask God for things or if asking Him for things is bad because different people will tell you different things. One will tell you to only seek God’s face, which in this context means to engage Him relationally and not ask Him for anything, and then you will receive everything in His hands that He is holding for you. Another will tell you to ask Him for what you need because the Bible directly states to do so, and so you should ask Him for what you need but also believe you have already received it or else you won’t get anything. This is all just plain confusing.
Most people want to know how to get their prayers answered, and some (like me) take it a step further and want to know how to operate consistently in the gifts of the Spirit and live a supernatural lifestyle. Some of us even believe that God wants us to be able to do these things at our command (I do an hour-long teaching about this called Miracles Today, available on Youtube). I want to help bring some clarity to this topic not by doing just one more teaching to give you even more whiplash, but by bringing some *context* to what the Bible says about seeking after signs, wonders, and miracles.
If we quote certain passages with no context and then match them with other passages that equally contain no context, then we can easily come to the conclusion that seeking after and operating in signs, wonders, and miracles is not the will of God for us. I have heard said multiples of times over the years in conversations I was personally in some variation of the idea that we should only seek intimacy with God and then everything else will automatically come to us. The idea is that whether spiritual gifts, financial provision, spiritual power, miracles, etc., so long as we “seek His face” and engage God relationally in love, then we automatically get everything else. I have yet to find that to be true, and challenge anyone to show me that practice consistently bearing the kind of fruit I am referencing. Sure, we can find a few people here and there where it worked out for them, but it doesn’t yield results consistently, which means ignoring spiritual power and assuming it’s going to head my way eventually isn’t actually a reliable means of operating in spiritual power.
It is extremely easy to find believers who love God and yet who also can’t even heal a headache in prayer. There is no special award for being a powerless Christian, but we collectively act like it is the pious stance to take, when in reality what Jesus both did and taught was to love the Lord our God with all our heart, mind, strength, etc. and also He went around doing good and healing all who were oppressed of the devil. He did miracles all over Israel and taught his disciples to do the same, then passed that mandate on to each of us as well (Matthew 28:20). It is impossible to do a sensible read-through of the Bible and come away with the conclusion that we are not meant to operate in the miraculous, but people manage to do it anyway. Jesus didn’t pick and choose one or the other, and He certainly didn’t teach his disciples to do so either. And if neither Jesus nor the early disciples held this belief, I suggest we shouldn’t either. But let’s take a look at some interactions Jesus had on this subject and see what the Bible says.
In John 6 we see Jesus feeding the five-thousand by multiplying bread and fish. This story is found in each of the gospels, but what is interesting (which you will hear me expound on this more if you go listen to my teaching on Youtube) is that in John 6:5-6 Jesus tests Philip on whether or not he knows how to perform a miracle. You see, the text tells us that Jesus had already pre-planned to perform a miracle, which is the only way He could have been able to test Philip on it. And when does a teacher test the students? When the teacher wants to see how well the students are learning the material. Jesus wasn’t expecting Philip to just love Him a lot and then have the bread multiply on its own with no influence on Philip’s part. No, Jesus was actively teaching His disciples how to perform miracles, which means He can’t be all that upset when we actually obey His teachings and seek out how to do the same things He was already teaching the disciples to do. No, I think Jesus would commend our obedience instead.
It goes a step further though. If we jump down to John 6:25-31 we see the people flocking after Jesus, and Jesus comments that they are not looking for him because of his signs, but because of the food. He cautions them about their motives, which is key to note, urging them to seek a different type of spiritual sustenance, and in response they ask Jesus an interesting question, which is quite telling. John 6:30-31 says, “So they asked him, ‘What sign then will you give that we may see it and believe you? What will you do? Our ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness; as it is written: ‘He gave them bread from heaven to eat.’’” They specifically expected Jesus to perform some kind of miracle in order for them to believe what He was saying, and then they referenced their ancestors eating manna in the wilderness under Moses as the example or template they were going off of.
For us to understand this passage and to provide Biblical/cultural context, it is important to note that the expectation the crowd had of Jesus was a sign, and that this was normal for Jews. Jews grew up hearing about all of the signs and wonders that God performed when bringing the Israelites out of Egypt, and the writers of the Psalms wrote about them often. Culturally, Jews expected to see signs and miracles because their belief in God was largely based on visible evidence and/or testimonies or stories from others of past evidence.
We see this same tendency of Jews to seek after signs noted by the Apostle Paul in 1 Corinthians 1:22-24. It says, “For the Jews require a sign, and the Greeks seek after wisdom. But we preach Christ crucified, unto the Jews a stumbling block, and unto the Greeks foolishness; But unto them which are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God, and the wisdom of God.”
Paul didn’t actually have a problem with the Jews seeking a sign, nor did Jesus. And God doesn’t reject wisdom just because Greeks sought after it. God is literally the embodiment of all wisdom, so it would be absurd for Him to be anti-wisdom. The issue was that without a sign the Jews were unwilling to believe, and unless you could logic your way to the Greeks, they were also unwilling to believe. Each of them had a predetermined set of cultural expectations under which God was expected to perform to their satisfaction in order for them to follow Him, and that’s just not how God does things.
We see evidence of this yet again in John 20 when Thomas does not believe that Jesus appeared to the other disciples unless he is literally able to touch Jesus’s wounds. We are going to look at all of John 20:24-31 because the entire passage has some relevance to this topic. It says:
Now Thomas (also known as Didymus), one of the Twelve, was not with the disciples when Jesus came. So the other disciples told him, “We have seen the Lord!”
But he said to them, “Unless I see the nail marks in his hands and put my finger where the nails were, and put my hand into his side, I will not believe.”
A week later his disciples were in the house again, and Thomas was with them. Though the doors were locked, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you!” Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here; see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it into my side. Stop doubting and believe.”
Thomas said to him, “My Lord and my God!”
Then Jesus told him, “Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.”
Jesus performed many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not recorded in this book. But these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name. (John 20:24-31)
Jesus’s issue with Thomas wasn’t that Thomas needed a sign—it was his heart condition of unbelief that was the problem. There is a blessing that comes for those who believe in Him without having seen a sign, but that doesn’t mean that Jesus was anti-signs. No, it is impossible for Jesus to be anti-signs because literally the next verse we read it says “Jesus performed many other signs”. Now, if Jesus was against his disciples having, doing, or seeing signs, would He have made sure to perform a bunch of them right after telling a disciple to stop doubting? Absolutely not. The issue wasn’t one of whether they could have signs or not, it was that they were Jews, and Jesus was trying to break them of the Jewish habit of having to see a sign in order to believe in a Kingdom where faith is one of the primary currencies.
If we were to read some of these passages above at face value without understanding the cultural context of Biblical Jews/Israel, we would think that seeking after signs is a bad thing, and that Jesus gets upset when we do this. In reality, what we find is that Jesus was teaching His disciples to perform miracles, to the point that the last thing Jesus said to His disciples in Mark 16 before He ascended was this:
He said to them, “Go into all the world and preach the gospel to all creation. Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved, but whoever does not believe will be condemned. And these signs will accompany those who believe: In my name they will drive out demons; they will speak in new tongues; they will pick up snakes with their hands; and when they drink deadly poison, it will not hurt them at all; they will place their hands on sick people, and they will get well.”
After the Lord Jesus had spoken to them, he was taken up into heaven and he sat at the right hand of God. Then the disciples went out and preached everywhere, and the Lord worked with them and confirmed his word by the signs that accompanied it. (Mark 16:15-20)
If you were Jesus and you were against signs, wonders, and miracles, then why would the very last thing you say to your disciples include a list of the signs they should expect to see if they believe in Him? That line of reasoning makes zero sense. Not only does this passage show Jesus telling the disciples the signs they should expect, but when they obeyed what He commanded them it says that God confirmed their preaching with signs. I think it is pretty safe to say that not only are signs permissible for the believer, but that it is perfectly find to seek after them. Again, the context of not seeking after signs was for non-believing Jews who were expecting a sign in order to believe, where for Jesus’s disciples who already believed, He was teaching them how to perform miracles. The context matters immensely.
There’s a big difference between seeking signs as a requirement to believe and seeking signs because you believe. In the former it is based largely, I believe, in a lack of trust in God. In the latter, it generally springs forth in context of the relationship with Him. In other words, signs are not only not a bad thing to seek, but they’re fantastic. In 1 Corinthians 12:31 Paul told people to eagerly desire the greater spiritual gifts and repeats himself again in 1 Corinthians 14:1. Like Jesus, Paul had no issue with there being visible manifestation of what we believe. The issue isn’t whether something should have a visible manifestation, because it should, but it’s the heart posture from whence that comes that matters most, which is why Paul devoted 1 Corinthians 13 to explaining the importance of tempering spiritual power and giftings with love. It isn’t that love is important and that gifts are not, or that we should only seek love and naively hope the gifts will end up flowing our way. No, we are meant to operate both in immense love and immense spiritual power as followers of Jesus, not choosing one or the other, but doing both in great measure!
If you are a follower of Jesus Christ and you want to see signs, wonders, and miracles, I encourage it! In fact, I have written multiple books designed to help the believer walk in and experience the miraculous, some of which are also in audiobook format.
The books Gemstones From Heaven and Feathers From Heaven are about miracle manifestations, and provide biblical understanding about these miracles, wisdom for discerning the nature of the miracles and what God could be communicating through them, as well as insights into how we can partner with Heaven to experience them.
The Power of Impartation gives practical insight into how we can engage God’s heavenly system to see the supernatural enhanced in our lives and in the lives of those around us through impartation and other related spiritual laws.
Faith To Raise The Dead is a bit self-explanatory as it is about raising the dead—seeing them restored back to life and back to their families by the power of Jesus Christ.
The Gospel of Life and Immortality takes that a step further to encourage us to never even taste death, as well as gives practical insights into how to begin walking that out.
The Beginner’s Guide To Traveling In The Spirit is a basic training manual to help equip the believer to engage the things of God in heavenly places, the result of which should be a greater manifestation of Heaven on the Earth.
