Welcome to This Week’s Atheist Church.

Today's sermon continues to be from the Gospel of Luke:

"Now when the sun was setting, all they that had any sick with divers diseases brought them to him; and he laid his hands on every one of them, and healed them. And devils also came out of many, crying out, and saying, You are Christ the Son of God. And he rebuking them suffered them not to speak: for they knew that he was Christ. And when it was day, he departed and went into a desert place: and the people sought him, and came to him, and stayed him, that he should not depart from them. And he said to them, I must preach the kingdom of God to other cities also: for therefore am I sent. And he preached in the synagogues of Galilee" (Luke 4:40-44).

The Bible tells us in another place that "power" flowed from Jesus, and when people knew what was happening, they carried sick loved ones to Him so that he could touch them and be healed.

The imagination has the power to put pictures into the mind, so that we can mentally experience certain things. Imagine God healing your mom or dad of Alzheimer's instantly, or your blind cousin suddenly seeing for the first time in his life. Or imagine an amputee getting new limbs or a dead person being raised. Of course, all this is just imaginary, and not reality, but it would give us a sense of the excitement that must have been around when miraculous power flowed from the body of Jesus of Nazareth.

Recently, some twisted woman threw a cup of acid into the face of a pretty girl. It seems that the pretty girl was a Christian, who spoke of the fact that she had put on sunglasses just 20 minutes before the incident (when she normally didn’t wear sunglasses). She attributed that fact to a "miracle" from Jesus. Such a thought is open to serious conjecture. A "miracle" would have been the perpetrator's arm being paralyzed just as she was about the throw the acid into her face. A true miracle would have been divine protection from the acid. Still, it was very fortunate that it didn’t go into her eyes and cause blindness. For that she should rightly thank God, and perhaps that was all she was trying to do.

Whatever the case, the greatest miracle that any of us can experience from God, isn't physical healing. It's when God proves Himself to us through the new birth of John 3:3-6. The experience is as radical as the first time you were born, and it will mean that you can freely talk of the reality of divine miracles, because you have personally experienced one.

I hope you have a great week.

BTW. Thank you for asking about my relatives in Christchurch New Zealand, where they just had a huge earthquake. They are all shaken, but okay. There's nothing like an earthquake, to remind us who is in control.