Hebrews 11:12

And so a whole nation came from this one man who was as good as dead—a nation with so many people that, like the stars in the sky and the sand on the seashore, there is no way to count them.

The writer to the Hebrews described Abraham as being “as good as dead”. That’s not flattering, but he was describing a 99-year-old man who was married to Sarah – a woman decades past child-bearing years. The whole situation looked hopeless. But God had promised that Sarah would have a baby from whom a mighty nation would be born. In human terms this was laughable nonsense. But God was at work, and so something which was humanly impossible was exactly what happened. Isaac was born and the nation came into being with descendants as uncountable as the stars in the sky or the grains of sand on the seashore.

We are continually tempted to domesticate God. We try to make him fit into the world that we understand and make him like us. Long ago Voltaire, the French philosopher, expressed this powerfully when he said: “God made mankind in his own image, and mankind has been trying to get its own back ever since.” That is to say, we are tempted to make God like us, and we don’t do miracles. Reading the Bible confronts us with a God who is in the business of doing miracles and so we need to be ready for them. This will only happen as we get closer and closer to God in prayer and as we spend time reflecting on the Bible. By doing so, our limited ways of thinking and our cramped expectations will be challenged to embrace God’s way of looking at the world.

I love the dramatic contrast between the apparent deadness of Abraham and Sarah, and the unquenchable vitality of God’s life that was unleashed when they obeyed God and stepped out in faith with him. Let’s allow God to start shaping our thinking so that we enter each day with a confident expectation that he will act miraculously as we trust ourselves to him.

Question

What miracles have you seen and what miracles are you praying for at the moment?

Prayer

God of miracles, we worship you. We praise you for the way in which you moved in Abraham and Sarah’s life and ask you to touch our lives today with your miraculous power. Amen