If you’re in need of a miracle today, God wants you to be confident you can have it. He doesn’t want you to wonder about it. He doesn’t want you to think, like many people do, that miracles are unexplainable—that they happen to some people but not to others, for mysterious reasons no one will ever understand.
No, God wants you to have the miracle you need, and He wants you to understand exactly how to receive it. He wants the same thing for every born-again believer. That’s why He revealed to us in the Bible everything we need to know. He showed us clearly what causes miracles to happen, and what we can do to make sure they happen to us.
Look at Acts 8:5 and you’ll see what I mean. It tells us very clearly the first thing that’s required to set a miracle in motion. Describing an outbreak of healings and miracles that took place among the people of Samaria in the days of the early Church, it says the miracles started when “Philip went down to the city of Samaria, and preached Christ unto them.”
What exactly does it mean to preach Christ? you might wonder.
The word Christ is the Greek word for anointing. According to Isaiah 10:27, it refers to the burden-removing, yoke-destroying power of God. That power is on Jesus, and when the miracles broke out in Samaria it’s what Philip was preaching about. He was preaching essentially the same message Peter preached that’s recorded in Acts 10:38-40: “How God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Ghost and with power: who went about doing good, and healing all that were oppressed of the devil; for God was with him. And we are witnesses of all things which he did both in the land of the Jews, and in Jerusalem; whom they slew and hanged on a tree: Him God raised up the third day, and showed him openly.”
This is, and always has been, the message that brings the miracle-working power of God on the scene. It’s the good news that Jesus is anointed—that He was anointed during His earthly ministry; that He was crucified, God raised Him from the dead, and He’s still alive and anointed today!
When the people at Samaria heard that message, they didn’t argue with it. They didn’t just shrug their shoulders as if it was no big deal. They “with one accord gave heed unto those things which Philip spake, hearing and seeing the miracles which he did” (Acts 8:6).
Notice, those people didn’t just see miracles, they also heard them. How did they hear miracles? Philip was an eyewitness to Jesus’ ministry, and he told them about all the wonderful things Jesus did. He told them about his own life and how Jesus had transformed it. He told them about people like blind Bartimaeus who got his sight, and the woman with the issue of blood who touched the hem of Jesus’ garment and got healed.
Philip told the multitudes in Samaria about miracle after miracle—and they paid heed to what he said. They chose to believe that Jesus is anointed and, as a result, the living, Anointed Jesus manifested Himself among them!
When Even Jesus Can’t Work a Miracle
“Yeah, but Brother Copeland, miracles don’t always happen in those situations. I’ve been in services where the gospel was preached and the minister talked about miracles, and yet, as far as I could tell, no one received much of anything at all.”
Then you’re in good company. Jesus had the same experience in His hometown of Nazareth. When He preached in the synagogue there, not one major miracle happened, even though the power of the Holy Spirit was on Him and He delivered the greatest sermon any group of people could ever hope to hear. Reading from Isaiah 61, He said:
The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised, to preach the acceptable year of the Lord. And he closed the book…. And the eyes of all them that were in the synagogue were fastened on him. And he began to say unto them, This day is this scripture fulfilled in your ears. (Luke 4:18-21)
If you think that message sounds a lot like what Philip preached, you’re right. Philip got that message from Jesus! He’d heard Jesus preach it time and again.
Everywhere Jesus went, He preached the same message: “The Spirit of The LORD is upon me. I’m here with the Anointing of God on Me to remove all the burdens and yokes the devil put on you through the curse. Poor man, you don’t have to be poor anymore! Sick man, you don’t have to be sick anymore! Blind man, you don’t have to be blind anymore! I AM THE BLESSING of The LORD, and I’m here!”
In Nazareth, however, unlike in Samaria, the people didn’t pay heed to that message. Instead, they got offended. They’d known Jesus since He was a child and they didn’t like what He was saying. “Who does He think He is going around claiming to be anointed by God?” they said.
As a result, “He could there do no mighty work” (Mark 6:5).
Look at that verse again. It doesn’t say that Jesus wouldn’t do any mighty work among the people in Nazareth; it says He couldn’t.
That goes crosswise to a lot of people’s theology. They think God can do anything He wants, anytime He wants. They believe that whether or not they receive a miracle is totally up to Him. But it’s not. Once we’ve heard the gospel, receiving our miracle is up to us.
“But Brother Copeland, what if I hear the gospel and believe it, but it’s just not God’s will to heal me?”
Why wouldn’t it be His will? What’s so special about you that He wouldn’t want to heal you? Multitudes of people came to Jesus to receive healing when He was on earth and “he healed them all” (Matthew 12:15). Not one time did He ever tell anyone it wasn’t His will to heal them. It didn’t matter who they were or what their condition was, Jesus was willing to work miracles for the worst of the worst.
Take the leprous man described in Luke 5, for instance. According to Luke, who was a physician, this man’s body was “full of leprosy” (verse 12), which means he was in the last stages of the disease. He had open sores all over him, and he was ready to just go somewhere and die.
Totally cut off from friends and family and rejected by society, if anyone ever had reason to wonder if God would heal him, this man did. But he went to Jesus anyway. Having heard about the anointing on Jesus, he fell on his face in front of Him and said, “Lord, if thou wilt, thou canst make me clean” (verse 12).
How did Jesus respond?
“He put forth his hand, and touched him” (verse 13).
Imagine it. This man probably hadn’t been touched in years. His disease was contagious. He was disfigured. He smelled bad. No one even wanted to get near him. Yet Jesus not only got close to him, He touched him, saying, “I will: be thou clean. And immediately the leprosy departed from him.”
Talk about a miracle! Suddenly, the killer disease that had been gnawing away at that man was gone, along with every demon that was behind it, and every foul thing that had happened to his body because of it. His whole life changed in an instant.
Why did it happen? For the same reason miracles happened to the people in Samaria. Because of the anointing. The man took heed to what he had heard and chose to believe.
Your Miracle, Your Choice
“But Brother Copeland, that happened thousands of years ago!”
So what? Jesus is “the same yesterday, and to day, and for ever” (Hebrews 13:8). He’s as loving and anointed today as He ever was. He still has the same power and He’s still speaking the same word to everyone who looks to Him in faith for a miracle. He’s still saying, “I will….”
That’s why you don’t have to wonder if He’ll do a miracle for you. He’s already made His choice where you’re concerned. He’s chosen you! He’s chosen to love you, redeem you, heal you and BLESS you with THE BLESSING of Abraham. He’s chosen to make His Anointing fully available to you.
Now the choice is yours. As God said in Deuteronomy 30:19: “I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing: therefore choose life, that both thou and thy seed may live.”
The power to release the anointing in your life is in the word choose. It’s when you choose to believe in the anointing on Jesus that the connection is made.
I’ll always remember the first time I saw this. It was many years ago, before Gloria and I went into ministry. One day, I came down with all the symptoms of the flu and I was hurting all over. I’d driven Gloria to the shopping center, and as I sat in the car waiting for her, I felt so sick that I didn’t think I’d be able to drive home.
My Bible was on the passenger’s seat next to me. I’d opened it to 1 Peter 2:24, “Who his own self bare our sins in his own body on the tree, that we, being dead to sins, should live unto righteousness: by whose stripes ye were healed.” I hadn’t been born again very long at that time and I didn’t know anything about living by faith. But I was praying that God would help me.
As I prayed, I sensed the leading of the Holy Spirit. I picked up my Bible, put my finger on that verse, lifted my eyes toward heaven and said, “LORD, I choose to believe this. I choose to believe that by Jesus’ stripes I was healed.”
Immediately, I could sense something tangible had happened on the inside of me when I said those words. I still had the symptoms of the flu, but I knew I was on the winning side. Something had taken hold in my spirit, and within minutes I started feeling a little better.
By the time Gloria finished shopping, I felt well enough to drive the car home, and when we got there I was feeling pretty good. That night I had a good night’s sleep, and by the next morning I was just fine.
Although it was a relatively simple healing, the impact of it has lasted for years because it showed me just how powerful my choices are. It helped me realize I can choose to believe God’s WORD. I can choose life. I can choose to believe in the power of His Anointing, and that power will manifest.
If you want to see a more dramatic example of what can happen as a result of such a choice, read in Matthew 14 about what happened to Peter one stormy night on the Sea of Galilee. You remember the story. He was with the other disciples in a ship and Jesus came walking toward them on the water. Initially, the disciples were frightened and thought they were seeing a ghost. “But straightway Jesus spake unto them, saying, Be of good cheer; it is I; be not afraid. And Peter answered him and said, Lord, if it be thou, bid me come unto thee on the water. And he said, Come. And when Peter was come down out of the ship, he walked on the water, to go to Jesus” (verses 27-29).
Notice Jesus didn’t initiate Peter’s miracle there. Peter did. He set it in motion by saying, “Bid me come.” Jesus said, “Come,” and the power to walk on water was in that word. Peter chose to connect with that power by faith and got out of the ship.
As you probably know, however, that wasn’t the end of the story. Peter’s water-walk didn’t end quite as gloriously as it started. While he was out there on the sea, doing what no man except Jesus had ever done before, he ran into a problem. “When he saw the wind boisterous, he was afraid; and beginning to sink, he cried, saying, Lord, save me. And immediately Jesus stretched forth his hand, and caught him, and said unto him, O thou of little faith, wherefore didst thou doubt?” (verses 30-31).
Let me ask you something. What did the boisterous wind have to do with anything? Apart from the Anointing of God, Peter couldn’t have walked on the water if it had been smooth as glass. So why was he worried about the weather conditions all of a sudden? Because he got his eyes off Jesus and started focusing on natural impossibilities.
Don’t let that happen to you.
Make the choice to believe The WORD of God. Connect by faith with the power of His Anointing. Then refuse to back off.
No matter how hard the devil tries to distract you, keep your eyes on Jesus, keep believing, and keep walking, because God wants to work a miracle for you.
*This article taken from February 2016 issue of BVOV Magazine. Read the PDF version here.
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