What's Your Miracle? Part 2

This is Hans Schile from the Finishing Well Podcast.

On Finishing Well, we help you make godly choices about Medicare, long-term care, and your money. Your chosen Truth Network Podcast is starting in just seconds. Enjoy it, share it, but most of all, thank you for listening and choosing the Truth Podcast Network. Welcome to Man Talk, brought to you by TAWCMM, talking and walking Christian men's ministry, where they're devoted to breaking down the walls of race and denomination, and challenging men to take their God-assigned role. Here's our hosts Will Hardy and Roy Jones Jr., a black guy and a white guy.

Welcome to Man Talk Radio. It is so good that God has blessed us to be back once again in His house, and as a result of being in His house, you and I have something that we need to say to God today, if you hadn't said it already. We need to say that God is able to do exceedingly and abundantly above all that we ask or think. I think when it comes to God, we can't put any limitations on Him.

No limitations, and when we start putting limitations on God, I think what begins to happen is we begin to see God differently than how God wants us to see Him. So we talked about miracles, Roy, last week, and so we're going to continue with that conversation on last week, and I think you asked a question to the listeners. What is the miracle in your life? Yeah, what is your miracle? That was the question last week, and hopefully our listeners have identified a miracle in their life or the miracle that they need God to come along and perform. Because miracles do happen, and what we're saying today is anybody could say, and sometimes, Roy, I think what we do is we devalue the term miracle, and what I mean by that is we say everything is a miracle. In other words, after going around that parking lot five times, it's a miracle.

I found an upfront parking spot after going around five times. Or we say things like, oh, that's such a beautiful baby. It's just a miracle child.

Well, that's the natural orders of things. Men and women get together, create life in that sense, and a baby is born. If the baby is born healthy, then God... It's a blessing from God.

That's exactly right. It's not the miracle, it's the blessing. The miracle was creation in the beginning.

Exactly. Or the miracle could be... If somebody couldn't have a child and all of a sudden... Have a child. If that child just, say, is breached, you see, and then all of a sudden, God comes in and allows the baby to be turned within the womb, and the mother delivered that child out with the natural childbirth.

Well, I think it's always great to personalize our topics, and we can speak specifically to that right now. I've shared the story about my oldest son, Caleb. When he was born, it was a 12-hour labor, and when he finally came out, he got stuck in the birth canal. And they were having to try to make a decision about whether to go to emergency C-section or continue to try. Well, the doctor, praise God, decided, let me try one more time using suction to pull him through, because he was already in distress. Heart rate was down. It looked very critical.

It was very critical. But when they got him out, the cord was wrapped around his neck. He did come on through the birth canal, so if he had to go to emergency C-section, this is where God intervened. He nudged that surgeon's heart to say, hey, try one more time. Because had they delayed and went to emergency C-section, he would not have made it, because the cord was around his neck, he was blue when he came out, collarbone broke, lung collapsed. And as a father, it just breaks your heart.

And you know, your wife, first you're excited you got a son, then you realize there's a problem. Well, our miracle that day was, God impressed on my heart, says, Roy, you've got to let me have him. And that course, I surrender all, just started just reeling over and over in my mind. And when that happened, Will, the miracle, later we'll discuss that here in just a moment, but the first miracle was that the peace of God just washed over me. And I knew in that moment that it didn't matter, it mattered, but I knew I would be okay either way if God took him home or he allowed him to make it through. And so the miracle was that he ended up spending 10 days in intensive care and made it through that journey. And then we later on found out that he had, later on in his teenage years, there was another miracle that came through with that young man, which we'll share that on another program. But in that moment, the miracle was that God got him through, the surgeon did the extra effort, he saved him in that process, and he lived and is serving God today, which is an amazing thing. So the baby side has a very special place in my heart.

Amen, that's so wonderful. You know, I shared with our congregation several times to where, when we were talking about last week in Matthew chapter 12 about the demon-possessed man, and while I was in the military, I was stationed at Fort Bragg at the time, and I was sleeping in an eight-man bay, and for those who are in the military, you know what that is. So I was sleeping in an eight-man bay, and I was in the bunk that was nearest the partition, and as you come into the room on the far side, the upper left-hand corner as you walk into the room. And so I was over there reading the Word of God, and one of the individuals who were in the room all of a sudden came through the door, and literally, literally, listener, this individual, I looked at him, I turned from facing the window, because I heard him come in, and I looked at him, his eyes had rolled back into his head, and he literally started foaming from the mouth. And I was a young Christian. I was probably two, two and a half years into Christ. And this thing really, I was kind of amazed in the sense that I was so young in Christ, I really didn't know what to do. It was like, Lord, I don't know what to do. And so I'm looking at this individual, and so he's making all of these sounds, he's literally foaming from the mouth, his eyes rolled back into his head, and so I just sort of deduced from all of that that this individual was possessed. And so I just grabbed my Bible, and I started saying, in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, depart.

In the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, depart. Because that's all I could say. I didn't know the scripture like I know today.

I couldn't quote a verse or things like this. And all of a sudden, it was like there was a barrier that he could not cross to get on the other side of where I was located, because there was a divider in the middle of the room, but you could look over the divider if you stood up. And so he was walking down the aisle, and it was almost like he could not pass through the barrier between the partition to enter the area on where I was. And so I turned, and then I looked, and within myself I said, this individual is not advancing. He's not coming toward me. It must be God.

Again, I just deduced that, not knowing what I know today. And so I just kept saying that. All of a sudden, Roy, he passed out, and he hit his head. He had a pretty good-sized bruise on his head when he hit the floor, but this individual was at least like 6'1 or 6'2, so he had a long way to fall, if you know what I mean. And so he fell, when he fell, he hit his head on the floor, and he was there on the floor laid out. And so I went over there, and I started shaking him, and I was saying his name.

And, you know, you're okay, you're okay. And so he woke up, and he said, what am I doing down here on the floor? And I said, you don't remember anything?

He said, no. He said, my head hurt. So he put his hand on his forehead, he felt the bruise of when he fell down on the floor, hit the floor, and I said, you need to go to sick call. You need to go to the infirmary and get your head checked out to make sure you don't have a concussion. They need to do some x-rays or whatever it was back then at the time. And so he left, and he reported to the desk sergeant that was downstairs saying he was going to the infirmary.

When he went to the infirmary, they did send him over to the hospital, their own base at Fort Bragg, and they did a scan on him, and when they did the scan, they didn't find any internal bruising or bleeding into his brain. He came back, and so he said, I don't know what happened. And then he went, Hardy, did you hit me when I wasn't looking? When I wasn't looking, I said, no.

I said, you just fell out on the floor and hit your head on the floor. And so he was laying in his bed, and I could hear him after he got back, and of course there was other people in the room, but I could hear him saying, what was that? What was that? What was that? He was whispering like, what was that?

What was that? And I could hear him saying that. Of course, the other guys in the room, they didn't know what was going on, because it was only me and him in the room at the time it happened. So I believe at that time God intervened, because that individual could have done something, some bodily harm to me. He could have used him to do something, but I attributed all to God, and again, I've shared that with my congregation countless times. Well, I thought you were going to say he pulled a full metal jacket the way you were describing him coming in, that he was coming in with a gun armed to do some damage the way it first started, the way he first let into it, him crashing through the door. Folks, the real story is that Will thumped him on the head with the Bible and took him down. No.

I'm just picking at Will. What an amazing presence for you, Will, even as a young person, just to start calling on God, because you knew that was the only place to go, right? You're sitting there studying scripture and you didn't know what else to say, but in the name of the Father. In Jesus' name, in Jesus' name, and I think God heard that simple cry and intervened. Well, the faith, the faith of the cry, the faith of the cry, right? That was the whole point, was the faith of the cry.

Yeah, because I think when it comes to understanding what God is able to do, faith takes over and you stop looking at things in the natural, and then you switch over to the supernatural because what that does is it puts you in a position of faith. We'll be right back right after this. TAWCMM would love to have you join their community of men for breakfast every first, third, and fifth Friday of every month. They have Bible discussions and fellowship after the best breakfast in town. The meeting location is at their gracious Host Church, First Christian Church in Kernersville, 1130 North Main Street in Kernersville. It all starts at 630 and they have a hard stop at 8 o'clock. First time visitors eat for free.

Join your hosts, Will Hardy and Roy Jones Jr., a black guy and a white guy. Will, let's pick this conversation back up. As you were closing out, you had to cut off for break there.

I think you had a thought that you wanted to continue with us. Yeah, I think it's all about when we talk about God and we talk about what God is able to do supernaturally, we have to simply let go in the natural. We can't continue to hold on to the things of the natural or try to look for a natural explanation when it comes to God working something out in our life spiritually because he wants us to believe by faith. And it just reminds me of Gideon, you know, here Gideon, he wants this whole army and God said, no, no, you're only going to have so many people that's going to go to war with you and I'm going to show you who those people are. And of course, you know, Gideon, he looked at himself as a coward, you know, a man who just didn't have what it takes. Moses looked at himself as a person who was not an orator. Oh God, I'm slow of speech, I can't get in front of these people, they're going to look at me and laugh at me. But God said, okay, if you're using that as an excuse, I'm going to use Aaron to be your spokesperson.

So now, what else you got? And that's what we do, Roy, we come excuse after excuse and not putting our faith totally in God when that's exactly what God wants us to do. That'd be a great show topic, faithless. And the consequences of being faithless.

Yeah, and I think we open ourselves up for defeat when we do that. You know, when you were talking about last week, having the understanding of discernment, I think when, of course, discernment is one of the insight gifts of the Spirit. So when we talk about discernment, we're talking about, as it is stated in First Corinthians, I believe, chapter two, where it says, the natural man received not the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness unto him.

Neither can he know them because they are spiritually discerned. In other words, they can't determine when the Spirit of God is using them because they don't have the Spirit of God. So they are depending on their natural selves to be able to discern through natural reasoning why certain things have happened. So if you play in the natural realm with the natural reasoning, then you're going to miss out on the blessing of God.

Yeah, you're not going to recognize it as being a God thing, you're going to rationalize it out. And that's what we do. Yeah, all too often. And back to the excuses piece, we've talked about that quite a bit.

Men are the world's worst at excuses. Wouldn't you agree? Oh, absolutely.

Absolutely. Well, folks, again, we asked the question last week, what is your miracle? And we would just ask you to be posing that again to yourself. What is your miracle? And how have you seen God work in your life? We'd like to have some feedback. Send us an email. Let us know what's going on in your life.

Every person has a story. And I think that's one of the things we'd love to hear from you as our listeners. Drop us an email, tell us about your story, and we'll do our best to share that with your permission. And please just send your email to us. Let us know that it is okay to share.

We won't list your names. We'll just strictly refer to it as one of our listeners. This is their story. And you could send that to, go to the website, you could send it to TAWCMM. You could send it directly to Roy.

Roy at TAWCMM.com or Will, W-I-L-L, at TAWCMM.com. So either way, it'll get to us, and we would love to hear it and share that on the show. You know, Will, let's talk about the physical miracles, you know, where God's intervened, broke the natural order of physics.

Those kind of things are very visible. Some of the miracles that, in one of our close friends that you and I've talked about a few years ago, you know, we'd been praying for for many years, just to have the opportunity to accept Christ. And for, I think, and that sometimes I think we miss God's intervention in those moments, the fact we pray so faithfully for an individual to open their heart to receiving Christ. And then, of course, we lost that friend here just a few months back, and I think back about that, that being a miracle, because you knew where he was at prior to him making a decision to follow Christ.

And I think the prayers of the faithful, like you and I had been praying for him, and as many others had, God honored those prayers, and outside of those prayers, I don't think that would have ever been, would have ever changed. Exactly, Roy, because, you know, again, from the skeptics' perspective, you know, they'll say something like, well, if Jesus said, you know, in his word that whatever you ask, you know, he's going to give it to you, and if you pray, why didn't it happen? See, and that's one of the skeptic questions that Lee actually asked Dr. Shermer, who's a skeptic. He was a believer, and then he went to skepticism, and then he interviewed Dr. Craig Kenner, who was a skeptic, and he went to be a believer, so he covered both aspects in the course.

Lee, he's sort of like in the middle, you know, he was a skeptic, and then he came to faith. And that's the thing I like about his approach, the way he wrote, he wrote his books, and how he approached things, you know, in such a way that it doesn't leave the individual to rationalize naturally that this event that occurred was actually an event that God was involved in and only God alone. You know, because we don't understand, Roy, sometimes when we pray for an individual that that individual don't get healed. You know, I'm not putting myself in the position of God to say what a reason could be. No, no, I'm not going there, but what I will say is God knows why, and he knows what's best. And because he knows why, and he knows what's best, and of course, we're all gonna depart this natural life because no flesh and blood can enter into the kingdom of heaven, all of us gotta check out, you know, this body.

And there's days, Roy, when I get up and I feel so many aches and pains, I say, Lord, I'm ready to go right now. But I know that God has things that he wants me to do, so I don't wanna hurry myself away from here because I know that there are so many things, so many people that need to be taught the truth, so many people that need to understand who God is and what God is able to do for them. Well, too often people are, many of us, we get so tied up in our own walks, in our own day-to-day, we don't share the gospel, and that's a great lead-in for us. There's many people out there, folks, that need to hear about how Jesus loved them and how God loved them so much that he allowed Jesus to die for them, and that they, by that love, they can be saved if they will just accept him. And it's a simple story, but if you'll share your story and how God saved you, then that'll make a major impact in someone's life.

Especially over the last couple years, folks, I think it's unimaginable the numbers of people that are struggling with depression, that the person next door to you, the person sitting in the seat beside of you, may be contemplating doing something to themselves because they don't see hope, they've lost hope. The miracle for them may be that you share the gospel, and they're looking for that answer. So you may be that person's miracle, and God may use you as the miracle maker. And I think, Roy, that's a good response from the standpoint of reason why we're talking about spiritual gifts on Friday mornings. And if we understand what our gift is, and we know that the primary reason for God giving us those gifts is for instruction, for correction, reproof, and righteousness, that every one of us may be complete or mature in the gospel, thoroughly furnished under all good works. And that's just to say that everything that we do should be for the glory of God, but we need to understand what equipment God has given us in order for us to say, Lord, here I am, use me. And so when we come together, we come together to share those things and to let God bless us to use those gifts because we don't want the gifts to stay idle. And when that happens, I think, Roy, when we depart this life, we're going to be held accountable for the gifts that God gave us that we did not use.

Well, back in James where it talks about when a man knows the right thing to do and doesn't do it. To him it is sin. To him it is sin, that's right. So if you take it to a deeper level and God's given you these things and you know that you're supposed to be doing something with these things and you don't do it to your point, we will be held accountable. Is it a sin or not? I don't know, only God knows, but if you read the scripture, if I know the right thing to do, I've got the tools to do it and I refuse to do it, then God's going to hold me accountable.

Absolutely. And that's something I think many times we don't want to hear. We want to hear God is, he's faithful, he's just, he's true, but when it comes to judgment and justice, we don't want to hear that one. And in fact, let's see what the pastor's message is for next week. If he's talking about hell or justice of God, I'm not coming. I'll just wait until I hear one of those feel good messages and then I'll be back.

I'm not feeling well next week. So see, and we do this, we rationalize because we know that there may be something in our life that we need to let go. And we're still holding onto those things. So if we're still holding onto them and we're not giving it to God, and then that means that the thing that we're holding onto has a stronger hold on us than the word of God or God speaking to us to say, let that thing go.

Yeah, that's interesting. We want to hold onto the things we know aren't good for us and we won't, we won't grab hold of things we know are great for us. Exactly. And that's, see, that's just the natural human nature, human nature of man and why man looks at things the way that he does. Because he thinks that this thing that I'm holding onto, it's given me more immediate gratification and satisfaction than me spending time over here with a group of men talking about Jesus. But see, they missed the mark because they're not submitting to the Holy Spirit so that the Holy Spirit can show them what they need to be doing in the body of Christ.

Amen, amen. So we shudder to think about what we could have done in the name of Jesus, but as long as we continue to hold onto things that's not good for us, it's going to keep us in the valley. In essence, you're sitting on the sidelines because you're holding onto the things you want to hold onto instead of coming off the sidelines, giving it all to God and start living for Jesus. I knew that sidelines was coming eventually.

I knew that. But see, I think it speaks and talks to the things that we should be doing, Roy, in the body of Christ and not, you know, the things that we think we should be doing. The things that you know you should be doing should be coming right out of the Word of God.

The things you think you should be doing is simply attempting to rationalize what I think I'm best at instead of giving it over to the Lord and say, Lord, here I am, use me. Yeah, that goes back to the immediate gratification. And men are bad about not wanting to surrender all, right? I mean, they really are.

They just don't want to surrender all. Exactly. So, folks, we're coming up on the close of the program. We wanted to say thank you for listening. Hopefully you've gained something for this.

You've thought through what your miracle is and you're getting yourself in a position to expect that miracle and pray to God for it. God bless you all. We love you.

We love you. As we wrap up today's show, be assured that TAWCMM, Talking and Walking Christian Men's Ministry, is building a community of men that are Christ followers with the desire to be servant leaders in their homes, communities, churches, and work environments. Check out our website for upcoming events and regularly scheduled meetings. Drop us a note for topics that you would like to have us visit in the future. Thank you for joining us on Man Talk today. Visit us at www.tawcmm.com. Men walking the talk. This is the Truth Network.