From the December 25, 2012 eNews issue
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"Everything was black as far as you could see. We looked out from the top of that hill and it was totally black, except for what was around Mr. Davies' house." -Sheri Munson
Today's secular scientists maintain a skepticism about miracles. They tend to discount the miracles of the Bible out of hand because of an anti-supernaturalistic bias, a bias that rejects the possibility that a mighty God intervenes in human lives in obvious, tangible ways. Yet, miracles did not only occur in the Bible; they continue to take place today.
In order to do their jobs, scientists have to depend on the natural world – these four dimensions (three dimensions plus Time) that we can directly experience with our five senses. Scientists are dependent on experimentation that can be repeated over and over and still give the same results. Science is an excellent tool for learning about this world around us, and scientists have freed the our understanding from much superstition by hunting down the natural causes of things previously attributed to the gods, things like sickness and lightning.
However, just because science depends on the "natural" world doesn't mean the physical realm is all that exists. It just means that science is limited in what it can explain through experimentation. And yet, physicists have already provided evidence that there are many dimensions beyond the four we know best.
What's more, things happen on this planet every day that defy naturalistic explanations. God still does miracles all the time. In honor of our amazing Savior, we will tell about modern miracles in the lives of people close to our ministry. In every case we have verified the miracles through two or more reliable witnesses.
MR. DAVIES AND THE IRON CANYON FIRE
It rained a lot in the desert north of Los Angeles during the spring of 1958, and the grass grew tall over the normally brown mountains. That fall, the hot Santa Ana winds came through and dried up that tall grass, priming the area for trouble. Southern California is known for its dangerous wildfires.
Doug Austin was 15-years-old in 1958, and he describes the fierce fire that swept through the desert from Saugus to Palmdale that fall. "We called it the Iron Canyon Fire because it started in Iron Canyon when lightning struck. My dad and I were driving down the road alongside it, and that fire was going just as fast as we were in my dad's truck."
Up on a lonely hilltop in that area lived an old black man known as Mr. Davies. "We'd take pies up to him on Thanksgiving. He was a nice old guy," Doug recounts.
Sheri Munson was just 9-years-old, but she also remembers Mr. Davies. "We would ride our horses up there to his house. His house was made out of nothing but cardboard and tin and pieces of wood that he'd found around. He had a few chickens and that was it. We'd ride up and sit on our horses and he would tell us stories about Jesus. "
That year when the Iron Canyon Fire raged through, Sheri remembers being very worried about Mr. Davies. As soon as the burned land cooled enough for their horses to pick through the hot spots, Sheri rode her horse out to see if Mr. Davies had escaped. She hoped that the old man had been able to get out before the fire destroyed his little patchwork house. It turned out that he had not been able to get out of the way of the fire after all.
"We came up the hill on our horses," Sheri tells, "and all of a sudden, when we got to the top, we were in tall grass up to our horse's shoulders.
There was Mr. Davies' house in the center of it all with his little chickens out there. We could see a long ways from that hilltop and it was black all around, as far as you could see.
"We said,'What happened, Mr. Davies! What did you do?' He said, 'I saw the fire coming,' and he went out there and pointed, and he said, 'and I went out and got on my knees and prayed, and asked God to spare me, and I saw the fire split and it went around me on both sides and it came back together over there.'"
"If you were to take half a football field and make it round, that's how big it was. Everything except what was around his house was burned black,"; Sheri said.
"There was no reason, no reason his house should have been standing." Austin commented, giving the same description of the blackened mountainous desert. "Mr. Davies was a religious man," he finished.
Sheri said, "It was fifty years ago, but I can still remember sitting on my horse with the grass clear up to his shoulders, talking to Mr. Davies. And the thing of it was, it just seemed so normal." She paused. "Mr. Davies was pretty excited."
God still does great things in this world. Science may have a hard time finding the true explanation, but just because science is limited, God is not. We see Him working constantly in the lives of His creation to show His great love and mercy and to demonstrate His power and glory in this
world.
GOD AND THE TEENAGE BOY
On Easter Day of 1994, 14-year-old Derek Munson informed God that he did not believe in Him anymore. For years he had stood up for God in the presence of unbelievers, but he hadn't felt like God ever showed Himself. The scientific evidence appeared to contradict the Bible. The testimonies of Christians he'd been reading seemed hokey, and he decided the whole Christian thing was empty and meaningless.
He told us, "I told God, 'If You exist, You're going to have to show me You exist. I'm tired of being the outcast because I'm a Christian. I'm going to go live my life the way I want to live it.'"
"I was going to make up for lost time. I was all of 14," he laughed.
Derek visited his mother in Idaho, and the Wednesday after Easter she made him attend a Wednesday night church service. Against his will. "That youth group service was the lamest service I had ever attended," Derek said. "All they did was sit around in a circle and ask each other their names and their favorite color or something. The only reason I remember it was because it was so lame. It stuck out in my memory because of its lameness."
"See," Derek said, "for those three days between Easter and that Wednesday, I had been angry at God. I was bitter, and I had a bad attitude about everything, and I was trying to change the way I had been thinking. Before this, I had always tried to approach things with a godly attitude. You know, 'How would Jesus handle this?' But, now, I was trying to approach things with a self-centered, me-first, whatever makes me happy attitude. I figured if there was no God, then I would live for me."
After the youth service, Derek returned to the main sanctuary, where a variety of people were lying on the ground. Derek had never seen anything like this before in real life. He'd seen it on television, but his Dad attended a Presbyterian church in Issaquah, Washington, and people didn't get knocked down there. They wore suits and ties and sang hymns and held respectable services.
"So, I went up to the pastor, interrupting his prayer for somebody else. I was completely rude. I didn't even realize I was interrupting him, that's how rude I was. I said to him, 'Would you do that to me?' I just wanted to know what it was like."
The pastor said, "Yeah, sure. " He explained to Derek that it was the Holy Spirit that did it, and not him. Then he patiently told Derek to wait his turn and returned to praying for the woman he was with before Derek interrupted. Derek stood by, waiting for his turn. His mother told us, "I actually didn't want to wait for him to get prayed for, because I was ready to go home. I wanted to go out to eat, get some food. You know."
While Derek listened to the pastor pray for the woman in front of him, "a tiny tiny fire" started to burn inside his chest. "Like a match, but smaller than a match. It started growing and growing and growing. It was weird, it started heating me up. I remember it felt good, and the bigger it got, the better it felt." It started pulsating. "You have to understand, he hadn't even started praying for me yet. I'm starting to sweat. My knees were starting to shake and my eyesight is starting to... everything is starting to get transparent."
While this is going on, the pastor approached him and asked why he needed prayer. Derek told him he'd been having doubts, and the pastor said, "Oh, that's no big deal. We all have doubts sometimes. I have doubts."
Derek told us, "I don't remember at what point he started praying for me or how long he prayed for me. I stopped paying attention to him, because I was concentrating on this strange, awesome feeling growing inside of me. It was a fire, and then I started seeing through things. I started seeing through the walls; I could see everything.
"The best way I could describe it, if you could stand on a railroad track with a train coming at you a thousand miles-per-hour, and you're blindfolded, and the electricity increases, increases, increases, and you know you're about to get smacked, but you don't know exactly when-"
Then, came the explosion. Derek's mother said, "I just saw him fall down. Then I thought, 'Oh no. We're going to be here all night.' You have to remember, I wanted to go 20 minutes ago."
Derek's brother Tyler said, "It looked like somebody hit him. Like he'd actually gotten knocked down." Big men couldn't pick up this skinny, 114 lb, teen-age kid. For two hours Derek lay there, held down by what felt to him like a massive hand, and nobody could pick him up.
"I didn't know what it looked like. It felt like there was an explosion of awesome power, and I was in the presence of God. I knew it. It was only a tiny drop, and I knew that."
The presence of God overwhelmed Derek that evening. Jesus spoke to Derek and told him certain things; his whole family would be saved. His sister Heather would do a great work for God. (At the time, Heather had no interest in Christianity. Five years later, she would wholeheartedly begin following Jesus, and she now works for a ministry in Bellevue, Washington.) Most importantly, the Lord told Derek, "I love you. You're forgiven. You're going to Heaven. Don't worry."
In fewer than five years, Derek would go on to join the Army. He fought in Kosovo and Iraq. He got a job as a tower climber, hand-over-handing it up 2000-foot-high towers to change the light bulbs at the top. Today, he works as a miner in the Silver Valley, drilling holes in the earth a mile under the ground. Despite his life experiences, he's never felt able to adequately describe the power and love and security of the presence of God using any earthly comparisons.
"You know how you go up a tall roller coaster, and there's that moment when you go over the lip of the roller coaster, and you see down?"
Derek tried to explain. "But, we're not talking about a scary ride here, we're talking about a really good feeling. It was so intense, it felt like you were being electrocuted. Super powerful, but it doesn't hurt at all. Then pretend that anybody that you ever really loved, people you've lost, suddenly walked into the room. Now, think of that great book, the greatest book you've ever read, when you finish it, you still don't want to put it down, you want to pick it up and start reading it again. Try to crunch all those feelings together. Now, jump out of an airplane..."
Derek interrupted himself, tears in his strong, full-grown man eyes. "You know... I've been on big roller coasters, and I've since jumped out of airplanes and climbed really tall towers and I've been shot at, and now that I've experienced all those things, I realize how insufficient they are to describe it."
"And now imagine that you're a kitten and you have your big bad lion dad standing there, and you're hiding behind his legs and nothing's going to get you. Absolute security. You feel solid, like everything is absolutely going to be okay. There is nothing to fear. Right? There's no fear. And you realize that all of this - this is why it has nothing to do with us. It's all because God is good. He is good. And I didn't feel any judgment for having been calloused or childish toward God. There was no condemnation at all. It was a complete reversal of what you'd expect."
Since that day when he was 14, Derek will tell anybody he can about the love of God and how it's not about our goodness. "It's all about Jesus - it's about his goodness and his righteousness, and his love for us," Derek loves to say.
Most of us never get the opportunity to get hit with a drop of the power of God, and yet we know the overwhelming love that God has for us does not depend on our feelings. It doesn't depend on our righteousness or our understanding. Derek didn't deserve a visit from the God of the Universe, but God gave it anyway. We are a body. When God touches any member, we all get a glimpse of His power and the incredibly gracious heart He has for each one of us.
Thank you, Father, for the miracles You do every day in healing and rescuing and saving us. Most importantly, thank you for greatest miracle of all, born in a stable 2000 years ago. We love you, Father.
Related Links:
• Faith And Miracles Part I: Faith in What? - K-House eNews
• Faith and Miracles Part IV: Expecting The Unexpected - K-House eNews
• Faith and Miracles Part VI: But If Not - K-House eNews
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