Month: June 2018

Recovering the Miraculous

Blog 89 June 23, 2018 MIRACLES NEVER CEASE – Robert Wise explores the world of Divine intervention from an objective point of view. Can 21st Century people believe that the hand of God touches people in today’s world? Read and you’ll find new insights.

ORFamily

    Quinton Moore grew up in Pentecostal land. His grandmother had been the baby sitter for Oral Roberts while the cotton pickers worked in the field. Today Jessie Moore would be thought of as an old time Pentecostal. She lived in a world that assumed miracles came with the Christian faith. Quinton grew up in rural Oklahoma where Pentecostalism was a major religious force.

Grandmother Jessie Hargrove, a full blood Cherokee-Osage Indian remains as one of his early memories. Quinton watched her pace back and forth praying in the Indian language and in tongues. Suddenly, she stopped. “Yes!” Jessie cried out. “I sees him!”

Eight-year old Quinton wasn’t sure what was going on, but watched his grandmother grab a shawl and run to the door.

“Come on, Quinton,” she demanded. “We got to get to your uncle quick. I now knows where he is now.”

Quinton piled into the pickup and they went flying down the road. He had no idea where they were going or where they were. Grandma Jessie seemed to have a map in her head and only she knew what was ahead. After a number of 90o turns on dirt roads he had never been on before, Quinton looked up and saw what was ahead.

“Hey!” he shouted. “That’s the cab to my uncle’s truck turned over!”

“Yes, son,” Grandma Jessie said. “That’s what the Holy Spirit showed me.”

They pulled up alongside the semi-trailer cab laying on its side. Jessie leaped out and climbed up the underside of the cab. “Just as the Spirit said! Your uncle’s down there out cold. He’s hurt. I’ll try to shake him loose. You run to that house over yonder and have them call an ambulance. Git with it!”

Quinton went running down the road to the nearest farm house. They were able to get his uncle to the hospital and saved his life. But Quinton couldn’t ever forget that experience. Without any knowledge of even an accident, through her prayers his grandmother Jessie had been able to discover the disaster and locate her son. She considered divine interventions to be simply part of her journey.

In the next several blogs, we will attempt to understand what was going on with people like Grandmother Jessie Moore. They will add another dimension to our insights in how divine interventions occur.

Remember we have a new website. You’ll find this helpful.
EARLY FAITH FOR TODAY
Surveying the first 3 centuries, we are examining the ancient Christian faith.
The focus is practical, relevant, and inspirational. TUNE IN

 

 

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WHAT DO WE LEARN?

Blog 88 June 11, 2018 MIRACLES NEVER CEASE

RMT holding up Host

Robert Wise explores the world of Divine intervention from an objective point of view. Can 21st Century people believe that the hand of God touches people in today’s world? Read and you’ll find new insights.

The last several blogs have related the amazing ministry of Father Rich Thomas, a Jesuit priest working in El Paso, Texas. A survey of the life of Fr. Rick Thomas reveals important clues for understanding how the miraculous occurred. Here is what he would tell us about principles that are highly important for our quest to understand divine interventions. 1

  1. Participate in the sacrament

Holy Communion is part of the service and imparts forgiveness and empowerment. Worshipers expect an important moment of renewal, but don’t often anticipate a divine intervention. Fr. Rick would suggest that we dig deeper in order to receive more.

The Rev. Margueritte Wise, a minister in the Communion of Evangelical Episcopal Churches, leads her congregation every week. Her brother Bob’s totally unexpected death and passing impacted her not only personally, but in a lingering way that stretched across the months. A year later, Margueritte still wrestled with heart-wrenching sadness. The struggle hung around her neck like a weight dragging her to the ground. She had prayed, struggled, sought a release, but the lingering impact would not go away. Seeking absolution and release, she went to the Revs. Mike and Beth Owen for help.

The Owens began praying and read Isaiah 53:4 to her. The words promised, “Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrow; yet we esteemed him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted… upon him was the chastisement that made us whole, and with his stripes we are healed.” As each line of the passage sunk in to her thinking and feeling, the Owens continued to pray over her. Finally, they consecrated the elements and served her Holy Communion. The sadness began to fade. Margueritte realized that not only her brother’s death, but the death of her parents and grandparents had lingered through the years. The impact of all of this grief disappeared as well. The heartache broke and has never returned. She was set free.

Fr. Thomas suggests that when seeking the miraculous, consider coming to Holy Communion on a regular basis.

  1. Believe the Bible

The emphasis is on what scripture means for this moment. Be precise. Be concrete. When the Bible says “do it,” –do it! Fr. Thomas’s ministry manifests the importance of precision. Their acceptance of and taking the Bible at face value tells us to follow exactly what it says.

With so much nonsense floating around about how passages should be interpreted, Fr. Rick instructed that it is important to make sure we are following a solid, reputable guide on the actual meaning of important verses. Such commentaries as William Barclay’s The Daily Study Bible Series on the entire New Testament available in 20 small volumes would be extremely helpful. The Westminster Press publication will keep a reader on a steady path.

  1. Be Concrete

Fr. Thomas’ ministry’s emphasis on performing specific tasks reflects the leading of the Holy Spirit. Often people rush to a chapel to pray during a crisis. Of course, this is appropriate and can be highly important. Unfortunately, once they get off their knees, their lives go back to exactly what they were before. Their hopes were abstract; their responses never specific.

Don’t pray, “Lord, I’ll do such and such if you’ll only —.” Make a life long commitment to getting your hands dirty while making the world a better place. You’re far more likely to run into the Holy Spirit when you’re doing the work you were created to do.

Asking God for direction remains essential. Jesus said, “… seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness and all these things shall be yours as well.” (Matthew 6:33) In the midst of a disaster or overpowering need, everyone struggles to look beyond the moment at hand. That’s normal, but remember our quest for God’s highest and best demands positioning ourselves to receive a divine intervention.

1 Many of the illustrations and insights in this blog are found in The Bible On The Border by Richard Dunstan, published by The Lord’s Ranch Press, Vado, New Mexico, 2009. This work details the work of Fr. Rick Thomas and the Our Lady’s Youth Center.

Remember we have a new website. You’ll find this helpful. EARLY FAITH FOR TODAY Surveying the first 3 centuries, we are examining the ancient Christian faith. The focus is practical, relevant, and inspirational. TUNE IN… Join us at earlyfaithfortoday.com

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AND HOW DOES IT HAPPEN?

Blog 87 June 4, 2018 MIRACLES NEVER CEASE

bibleontheborder

Robert Wise explores the world of Divine intervention from an objective point of view. Can 21st Century people believe that the hand of God touches people in today’s world? Read and you’ll find new insights.

In the last blog, I shared the amazing story of Father Rick Thomas feeding 500 people with food for 150. Quite a story! With a charismatic orientation, Fr. Thomas’s Youth center exists to reach need wherever it occurs. Volunteers work in the Juarez municipal jails and mental hospital. The men preach like Billy Graham with invitations to kneel and pray. Often half the prisoners do so.

The mental hospital offers its own challenge and many times the patients are resistant. Thomas’s volunteers don’t give up easily. After people are prayed for, many are released much earlier than expected. The ministry and miracles continue.

The point is simple. They all participate. Fr. Thomas’s ministry does what’s needed to help the poor and needy. He and his friends do God’s will. In the process of ministry, the heavenly Father provides what they need to do the work. Complicated? Actually, the procedure is simple. Do it and He takes care of the rest.

From 1969 to 1970, the Charismatic Movement swept through El Paso. A new emphasis on the Holy Spirit emphasized personal encounter and Thomas found a value in the scripture that he had not recognized earlier. His group began studying the scripture earnestly. From their deliberations came the principle that has guided their work ever since: Obedience. Everything from working in the city garbage dump to visiting the jails is guided by being faithful, not to any human authority, but to God alone. While many Christians recognize this principle, Fr. Thomas’s staff expect their obedience to take a specific form. Going to the jails or the city dump are examples of precise leading. When they follow these directions, the divine interventions show up.

Their response to the scripture has a specific orientation. Many fundamentalists groups take the Bible literally, but they do so with an eye to the past. They maintain certainty about what God did yesterday. Fr. Rick’s approach is to take scripture with equal seriousness but seeing it as a guide to today. The goal is to live out what is found in the Bible.

When the group studied Luke 14, they noticed that as Jesus was describing a banquet, he spoke of sharing. The word “sharing” suggested a different approach than “giving.” The scripture imparted the idea of sitting down together. Consequently, they set out not just to be the good guys but to do exactly what the passage described. Bingo! The multiplication of food followed. Fr. Thomas believed it is important to perform concrete expressions of the faith. Saying we believe in caring for the poor is fine but no one is fed. The act of actually sharing food makes the difference. The answer is in doing, not saying.

Fr. Thomas’s experience taught him the Bible is a source of God’s power. Consequently, the Bible is used to perform God’s will. Fr. Rick’s group found that the scripture can be like a chisel that keeps chipping away at a rock until a new shape emerges. Repetition of key passages seems to crack open the hardest rock.

Fr. Thomas discovered that scripture was extremely important when they dwelt with occult influence. Strange as it may sound to many middle-class Americans, when ministry reaches to the bottom of the human ladder where brokenness and poverty abound, there too the occult flourishes. Fr. Thomas found that Psalm 52 was important in these circumstances. Verses three and four say: “You love evil more than good, and lying more than speaking the truth. You love all words that devour, O deceitful tongue.” The entire chapter confronts the plans of evil and refutes them. Scripture can help break the hold of Evil.

Remember we have a new website! You’ll find this helpful.

EARLY FAITH FOR TODAY

Surveying the first 3 centuries, we are examining the ancient Christian faith.

The focus is practical, relevant, and inspirational. TUNE IN

Join us at earlyfaithfortoday.com

by Categories: Divine Intervention, MiraclesTags: , Leave a comment