The gifts of Acts

We are continuing our look at the book of Acts from the perspective of “gifts,” i.e. gifts to the church of today from the history of the earliest church.

This Sunday we are looking at the gift of “the miraculous.” It might seem strange that any religion that purports to serve a transcendent, omniscient, omnipotent, etc. God would have to spend any time at all thinking and talking about miracles and the miraculous but I think it is worth our time. It is all too easy for us to think that miracles stopped when Jesus returned to heaven, or that miracles stopped when the first disciples died, or when the earliest church morphed into the church of the councils and creeds, or, or, or . . . . The problem with that sort of thinking is that it is incorrect. There has never been a time when the church does not have access to the miraculous and we looked at the story of Peter raising Tabitha from the dead through the power of prayer accessing the resurrection power of God as a model of what can be.

From there we spent some time thinking about other miracles and trying to tease out why we think that “big” miracles are more important than “little” miracles; for that matter why we think that we are competent, or even allowed, to assess the relative size or greatness or whatever measure we might choose of miracles at all.

Knox Presbyterian The gifts of Acts: the miraculous