Daily Reading: 27 May
(from www.christianaid.org.uk)
Miracles do happen
Something to read
By faith Sarah herself also received strength to conceive seed, and she bore a child when she was past the age, because she judged Him faithful who had promised. Therefore from one man, and him as good as dead, were born as many as the stars of the sky in multitude - innumerable as the sand which is by the seashore.
- Hebrews 11: 11-12 .
Something to think about
Humanly speaking, Sarah and Abraham didn’t look as if they had much to offer. Sarah was childless and well past childbearing age, and Abraham was 'as good as dead'. The writer to the Hebrews certainly didn’t go in for flattery!
But God is at work and God is a God of miracles. And so this elderly couple became the parents of a nation with descendants more numerable than the stars in the sky, or the sand on the seashore.
Our society struggles with the idea of miracles. However, the reality is that we live with them every day. I don’t want to detract from the wonderful skills of health professionals, but the process of healing is always a reminder of God’s miraculous power.
It should never surprise us that healing often takes place in a way that amazes health professionals. But we also see God miraculously at work when we meet people who have found hope in the most hopeless situations.
In 2011, I visited Haiti with some other church leaders to see the wonderful work that Christian Aid partners are doing in that earthquake ravaged land. We saw endless miracles of God’s grace, as we met with people whose lives had been turned around and given hope after the appalling devastation of the 2010 earthquake.
For some people the miracle lay in the provision of a home or a job, and for others it lay in the fact that they had been given hope for the future.
Something to do
Let’s start with a fact – there will be lots of miracles in your life today! Make a short list of some of those miracles and then do two things – firstly, thank God for them and secondly, help someone else to see the miracles that are happening in their life.
Something to pray
Lord we worship you because you are the God of miracles. We give thanks for those amazing miracles that you perform every day and which we take for granted. We thank you for the miracle of each breath that we take; the miraculous beauty of the flowers and animals around us; and for the miracle of love and peace.
Lord, help us to open our lives more generously to your miraculous power. Help us to see you at work in all that we do, and help us to enable others to see how great you are.
We thank you that your Holy Spirit will be at work in our lives today, and pray that all that we do might bring glory to the name of Jesus our Lord. Amen.
Today's contributor is the Rev Jonathan Edwards, former General Secretary of the Baptist Union of Great Britain.