Reading 1: Acts 9:32-43
Reading 2: Colossians 3:22-4:1
Sermon
Miracles don’t really happen anymore, do they?
Our passage this morning would certainly suggest that miracles were once common in the church.
In fact, the Bible is full of miracles.
You might even have your own favourite one.
Recently at the church I’m now a member of in Leeds we held a children’s event looking at miracles.
It was interesting to find out what peoples’ favourite ones were.
Some said the giving of sight to the blind, others the healing of lepers.
The most common favourites though, were the raising of people from the dead.
However, today, when we hear people use the word ’miracle’, we often become suspicious and doubt creeps in.
We’ve probably heard of some high profile evangelists who claimed to work miracles, but were found out to be frauds.
The scientific age has explained away most things, and so we understand how things happen now, don’t we?
So the question for us become, do we believe in miracles today?
I’m not going to address that yet, but do keep that question in mind.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Our passage today not only addresses the subject of miracles, but also suggests that many miracles take place in the ordinary events of our daily lives.
This reading would make a good film, don’t you think?
There’s a story line that involves the larger community.
There’s a hidden sub-plot of the ministry of the disciple named Tabitha.
There’s an additional, but related, drama involving her death.
There’s the mystery of her miraculous rescue by Peter, and, yes, even a happy ending.
Beneath the surface of our passage lie several hidden treasures.
Among these are doing good to the poor, the Christian and suffering, and finally miracles and their effect on the wider community.
Tabitha, or Dorcas as the name is translated into Greek, holds the distinction of being the only woman in the New Testament who is specifically referred to as a disciple.
There are a number of verses where disciples is used to refer to both men and women by implication, but this is the only example of an individual woman being called a disciple herself.
This is really amazing.
It’s a wonderful tribute to what this woman did.
Verse 36 says that her ministry was directed towards the poor and outcasts of the community.
Long before social action by the church became fashionable, Tabitha’s soup kitchen, clothes shop, and shelter for the homeless were in full operation.
Tabitha’s ministry was directed toward the poor widows in Lydda.
Culturally speaking, widows were the lost and least in society.
God had spoken through the prophets on a number of occasions to provide for the widows, but often the people had ignored this.
Here was someone, though who took these commands seriously.
Without her ministry to that community and the life giving power of her work with those widows a major community crisis could have occurred.
For those widows, Tabitha’s death meant their own death too.
For those widows, the loss of Tabitha meant the loss of their lifeline to survival.
Discipleship for those widows was revealed in the service and witness of Tabitha.
Her living witness demonstrated the love of Christ in a tangible way.
Tabitha stands as an example for us of how to live in the situations that God has placed us.
This is in terms of where we live, who our friends are, and also where we work.
Related to this is our second passage that I read from Colossians chapter 3, and verse 23.
There it says ’Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as though you were working for the Lord and not for human beings.’
If you think back to this morning’s children’s talk you can see how this works practically.
We can become very disillusioned with the work we do, whatever it might be.
As we do this we get into a frame of mind that thinks about doing as little as we can, with as little effort as possible.
When it comes down to it, though we are working for God.
Our whole lives are to be lived as worship.
It’s not just about what we do on a Sunday, or at church.
God cares about everything we do, say and think.
It all needs to be lived to His glory and praise.
Tabitha had grasped what it was to live like this.
Let’s try to follow her example then, with Christ’s help.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
The question for us, then, might become ’Do we spend all our time doing good and helping the poor, like Tabitha?’
This is an important question, but doing this doesn’t make us right with God.
It is only Jesus who makes us righteous.
It is His death on the cross and His resurrection that makes us right before God.
Yet, doing good and helping the poor are important.
They don’t save us, but as the letter of James says, ’Faith without works is dead’.
Jesus, Himself, says, ’By their fruit shall you know them.’
What does the fruit of our lives say about us?
Are we walking with the Lord daily?
Are we obedient to what God asks us to do in His word?
Do we do good and help the poor?
In my quiet times recently I’ve been reading through 1 Peter, and I came across these two verses from chapter 2.
’Dear friends, I urge you, as aliens and strangers in the world, to abstain from sinful desires, which war against your soul. Live such good lives among the pagans that, though they accuse you of doing wrong, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day he visits us.’ (1 Pet. 2:11-12 - NIV)
So this is why we are to live obedient lives to God, doing good to those around us.
It’s so that others might see that and glorify God.
Our good deeds, or our obedience to God’s ways for our lives, are done not to make us right in God’s sight, but instead to bring others to faith in God.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
In recent weeks when I’ve been preaching I’ve been looking to children’s television programs and songs to illustrate things.
It gives me an excuse to watch them anyway.
It’s not easy to justify watching such programs as ’the Teletubbies’ as cultural research, but I think I’ve finally found a good excuse with finding sermon illustrations!
Anyway, moving swiftly on, I came across a children’s story called, ’Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day’.
In the story a little boy named Alexander has an absolutely rotten day.
The story tells us about the traumatic experiences Alexander faces in his day.
He wakes up with chewing gum in his hair, and then he finds no prize in his box of cereal. He has no dessert at lunchtime, and then he has to go to the dentist to have a filling done.
His mother serves him the most awful food at tea-time, he gets soap in his eyes from his bath, and then to crown it all his pet cat choose to sleep with his brother.
And that was just one day!
I would think that we all feel as though we’ve had days like that.
But how do we overcome the real difficulties in life?
What help does our faith offer to us?
Perhaps the most telling part of the story found in today’s Bible passage concerns the brief description provided for Tabitha.
Tabitha was a disciple who got sick and died.
She was described as being "full of good works and acts of charity" (Acts 9:36).
This was a person who was faithful to the cause of Christ.
She was kind and gracious in her acts toward others.
She was just the kind of person the early church needed.
Why did she have to die then?
Of all people, why did the church have to lose this beloved saint to death?
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
There is one question that pastors and ministers get asked more often than any other.
Can you guess what it is?
’If God loves us so much, why does He allow suffering?’
Sometimes it’s a personal question, ’Why am I having to suffer so much?’ Or, ’Why is the person I love so much having to suffer like this?’
Sometimes, after a disaster, it’s more general, ’Where was God on September 11th last year when those planes flew into the World Trade Centre?’
I’ve asked my own fair share of this kind of question.
The most recent example was Friday morning when my computer died.
I was getting rather angry about it all and asking why this was happening to me.
I had university work on the computer that I hadn’t got backed up.
There was today’s sermon in outline waiting to be finished.
I was getting really annoyed, especially because I though it was a computer virus.
Thankfully it wasn’t and a quick trip to a computer specialist sorted it out.
Even so, I was still asking the why question.
More seriously, I asked this very question when my Great Aunt died unexpectedly two years ago.
’Why did God allow that to happen?’ I asked.
These are not casual questions that people ask to pass the time or make polite conversation.
Often those who are asking them, ask out of deep personal pain.
They are trying to align their faith that God does, indeed, love us, with whatever awful thing has happened.
If God is good, and God is all-powerful, why does God let this happen?
There are, of course, a variety of answers to this question.
Some are over-simple and ignore one end or the other of that equation of God being both all-powerful and all loving.
Or they side-step the question altogether by saying something like,
’I don’t know what God had in mind when He allowed your friend to have a serious illness, but it will all be made clear one day.’
God’s power is made clear in these statements, but where is the Love that took on our flesh and died on a cross so that we might know how much we are loved?
Other statements assume that everything that happens, both good and evil, is God’s will.
For example, ’God had something in mind for that young woman when He allowed her to be crippled in a car accident.’
Statements like this don’t take seriously the reality of sin, which means that we can do things God doesn’t want us to do.
If we can defy God, misbehave and do our own thing, how can we hold God responsible for the evil that we do?
It would be wonderful, of course, if children were never kidnapped, accidents never maimed or killed anyone, rape never occurred, weather never devastated or volcanoes never erupted.
But if we are to ask God to interfere every time someone has an idea to do evil, what kind of a world would we have?
The rapist might be stopped, killed at the command of God, but what would God do to us when we scream for the blood of the killer?
When vengeance is uppermost in our minds?
Probably none of us would be here right now!
God is both loving and powerful.
Sometimes it’s difficult for us to reconcile the two, but God is both.
From here we come back to our passage from Acts.
This wonderful woman, Tabitha, who did all those good things for people, became ill and died.
Why did she have to suffer like that? We might want to ask.
Did God want to teach her something through this?
Was it God’s will?
The answer to both those questions, I believe, is no.
However, God used her death.
God didn’t send her sickness, but He used it.
I was recently listening to a cassette tape of Paul Scanlon, the pastor of Abundant Life Centre, Bradford, talking about Romans chapter 8, in which he used this phrase, ’Everything is either God sent or God used.’
He went on to talk about all the blessings and opportunities that God sends us, and then followed this up by talking about other things.
He said that God still uses everything that comes to us, even if it doesn’t come from Him.
So God can use the most everyday of things for His own good purposes.
As it is written in Scripture, ’God works everything together for good, for those who love Him.’
This verse doesn’t say that God will only work together for good the things that He has sent to us, but instead everything.
Suffering, then, is probably best described as ’God used’.
It’s not something that God sends to us, but it is something that we should expect if we are following His ways for our lives.
It is something that God works together, and through, for good.
Where the church is most active, suffering is a part of everyday life.
Throughout the world, the church is becoming more and more active, and as this happens, more and more Christians are suffering, even to death.
Do you know how many brothers and sisters in Christ were martyred in 1999 alone?
Approximately, 164,000.
The most ever - that figure speaks for itself.
So we should expect to suffer, whether its ridicule from friends and family, illness or accidents.
Yet, in the midst of all this, great things can still happen.
God is not limited by illness or even death.
We can turn to God for hope in our sufferings, for He is our rock and our fortress.
He works everything together for good for those who love Him.
We love Him, don’t we, so we should expect Him to work everything together for good in our lives.
Dorcas loved the Lord and He worked everything, including her death, together for good in her life and in the life of the church.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
A few years ago, John Wimber the founder of the Vineyard Christian Fellowship was interviewed.
Wimber said that the first time he went to church he expected dramatic things to happen, but they didn’t.
After attending church for three Sundays, he became frustrated.
After the worship service, he approached a man who looked like someone with authority.
"When do you do it?" he asked.
"When do we do what?" the man replied.
"You know, the stuff," Wimber answered.
"And what stuff might that be?" the man asked.
"The stuff in the Bible," Wimber said, becoming more frustrated by the moment.
"I still don’t understand," the man replied.
"You know," said Wimber, "multiplying loaves and fish, feeding the hungry, healing the sick, giving sight to blind people. That stuff." "
Oh," the man said, apologetically, "we don’t do that. We BELIEVE in it, and we pray about it.
But we don’t actually DO it!
Nobody does, except for those crazy pentecostals."
That was 20-25 years ago, have many Christians have really changed?
Is the church today really doing the stuff, as John Wimber put it?
On the whole I believe that we aren’t.
There might be an odd healing of someone with a bit of a bad back.
We might possibly feed the hungry, if they’re well mannered.
But do we see the blind given back their sight?
Do we see the dead raised to life again?
The answer to these questions is no, so why is this?
Is it that miracles don’t happen today as I mentioned at the start of this sermon?
No, I believe that it’s because we don’t take God at His word.
We go through the motions saying that we believe in these kinds of things, but we don’t actually do them.
As we look at our Bible passage this morning we can see what happened when someone did the stuff.
Peter went into the room where Tabitha’s body was laid, he put out those who had accepted that she had died, and the he prayed.
Then he turned to her body and told her to get up, which she did.
This should be our pattern when faced with illness and injuries.
Now I’m not saying that we shouldn’t go to the doctor, but I am saying that we should pray for healing too.
God may well heal us through the work of doctors and other medical staff, but He may chose to heal us supernaturally instead.
When we look at verse 42 in our passage we can see why doing the stuff is important.
It says, ’The news about this spread all over Joppa, and many people believed in the Lord.’
It’s interesting to note at this point that doing good didn’t bring people to faith, but the raising of Tabitha from the dead did.
What does this say about our attempts at evangelism?
So often in this country, we, the church, reach out to our communities by doing good.
That’s not to say that we shouldn’t do that either, but rather than we should also do the stuff.
John Wimber described these actions as ’power evangelism’.
It’s evangelism by the healing of the sick, and the performing of signs and wonders in public.
We can see this happening right through the book of Acts, and even in isolated pockets of the church today.
Recently the question was asked by a leading theologian as to why power evangelism wasn’t working.
Why weren’t lots of people coming to faith?
Church growth expert, Eddie Gibbs, answered this question very truthfully.
He said that it hadn’t worked because people hadn’t tried it.
What a sad indictment of us that is.
We have not done the stuff and so relatively few people have come to faith.
Let’s not be like that any more.
Let’s be encouraged to pray for the sick, and the blind with the kind of faith that Peter had.
Let’s do the stuff.
Amen.
