(63) Signs and Wonders

    (Note: This blog entry is based on the text for Signs and Wonders, originally shared on November 9, 2020. It was the sixty-third video for our YouTube Channel, Streams of Living Water (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB7KnYS1bpHKaL2OseQWCnw), co-produced with my wife, Rev. Sally Welch.)

   Do you ever wonder what you have to offer your church to help it survive and thrive during this pandemic? Did you know that you are gifted just for that?

   New cases of the coronavirus are spiking upward, and 1.2 million people around the world have died. But, Pfizer has announced that phase of trials for their vaccine has pointed to a 90-plus % rate of effectiveness. That’s huge, and it’s a very hopeful sign.

   We likely have elected a new president. Politicos and pundits, economists and everyday people, will all be looking for signs of what our next president will do first. We want to know, because those actions will have a great effect on how we live our lives for many years.

   The early Christians, after Jesus had died, rose, and ascended into heaven, after the Day of Pentecost when the Holy Spirit, God’s personal presence for good in the world, was showered upon the very first members of the Christians church, didn’t know what to do next. The Holy Spirit moved through them to give signs and wonders pointing to the origin of this new Christian Church, and the book of Acts, the record of these first year of the Christian church is pepered with them.   For example,

*Acts 5:12-15

   Signs and wonders are the extraordinary acts of God, like divine healing, words of knowledge, and speaking in tongues, that characterized the ministries of the early apostles, the disciples of Jesus and Paul, who had been send into the world to share the good news of Jesus Christ.

   They were gifts of the Holy Spirit. They were not given to the apostles, but through them for the building up of the Body of Christ, the Church. The Body of Christ is the principle metaphor for the Church, the sum total of all baptized believing Christians, with Christ as the head of the body, and all the members (a part of the body) providing certain functions for the sake of the whole Body.

   These functions are all the gifts of the Holy Spirit, so that each member, or part of the Body, can accomplish the work God has given to the church at every level.

   We receive our gift, or gifts at our baptism. It’s not clear whether we get one gift or multiple gifts that are expressed one at a time. They give us our spiritual job description. They are not special talents, related to our work, or based on our hobbies. There is a distinction between gifts and roles.

   Peter Wagner, from whom I have read and taken a course on Spiritual Gifts, tells the story of taking a class in seminary from a professor who apologized for getting to class late one day. He explained that his car wouldn’t start, so he had to take the bus. But, he said, when he boarded the bus there was only one seat left. He sat next to a sad young man and, by the time the professor arrived at his stop, the young man had opened his heart to Jesus and received the gift of faith. He had the gift of evangelism. Young Peter Wagner was so inspired by this story that, the next day, he intentionally to the bus to school. As he boarded, he scanned the bus. He sat next to someone who looked like they needed to know Jesus, and by the time Peter Wagner arrived as his stop, they were mad at him. He didn’t have the gift of evangelism.

   We all have roles as givers, teachers, and evangelists, etc, but all of us have a special gift or gifts. I served as a pastor for almost 41 years. The gift of pastor wasn’t even in the top three when I tried to discover what my spiritual gift or gifts might be. Preaching, administration, and teaching were my top three possibilities. They all served my contributions in the role of pastor. One with the gift of pastor sees a group of people as individuals. My wife Sally can walk into a gathering of people and in 10 minutes knows their names, their birthdates, their children’s names, where they were born, etc. I look at a gathering of people and I see groups. Sally is an ordained clergyperson. That is not necessarily a requirement for those with the gift of pastor. Pastor is their gift, not necessarily their role.

   The signs and wonders gifts are different. These gifts were given to get the ball rolling.

   If someone came to your door, and you asked, probably through the door, what they wanted, and they said, “I’d like to tell you about a new religion.” You probably wouldn’t open the door.

   But, if they walked down the street and a neighbor’s child got run over by a car and this person prayed over them and healed them, or raised them from the dead, word would get around!

   God created us for a living relationship with God, and eventually God did not want people to believe in him because they were forced to by a suspension of the laws of nature, but by open hearts receiving God’s gift of that meaningful relationship: faith.

   The vast majority of Christians today and throughout history have believed that the signs and wonders gifts went out of existence with the death of the last apostles.

   That is, until 1906 when William J. Seymour, an African-American Preacher began the 3-year Azusa Street Revival in which people began speaking in tongues and healing the sick, right here in LA; the Pentecostal Church, that is, Signs and Wonders gifts of the Spirit movement was founded from that revival.

   In 1913, a radio evangelist named Aimee  Semple McPherson began a ministry that included the signs and wonders gifts and it resulted in the formation of the Angelus Temple and the Foursquare Church Pentecostal denomination.

   Other Pentecostal denominational churches, like the Assemblies of God, were founded in the aftermath of the ministries of these two individuals.

   In the 1960’s, a movement formed within the historical churches that claimed that the signs and wonders gifts were still active today. It was called the Charismatic Movement, after the word charis, of “gift” in ancient Biblical Greek.

   Most Christian churches still believe that the Signs and Wonders gifts are not a contemporary reality, that they are only a counterfeit of the real thing. The more secular minded dismiss them as the product of mass hysteria or hypnosis.

   One aspect of what are called the spiritual gifts is less controversial, however, and that is the historical view that there are many spiritual gifts and the vast majority of them would not be called signs or wonders.

   In fact, there are many places in the New Testament where spiritual gifts are described, and they are mostly non Signs and Wonders type gifts, but there are three principle passages: 1  Corinthians 12:4-10,28, Ephesians 4:11 and

*Romans 12:4-8

   Do you see how many are not what we would ordinarily call Signs and Wonders?

   Yet, we all receive Signs and Wonders as gifts from God.

   What is a wonder? It is something beyond ordinary experience. What is a sign? It is something that points to something else.

   What are the things in the Christian life that are beyond ordinary experience and that point to something else, some deeper reality, today?

   The Word of God: the Bible centered on the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ for our salvation, but most importantly, the primary place of encounter in which God speaks to us, and we are given the gift of faith.

   The Sacrament (sacred event) of Baptism, of God’s gift of inclusion in the Body of Christ.

   The Sacrament (sacred, that is Holy, event) of Holy Communion: God’s gift of communion, or immediate relationship, with God in the common forms of bread and wine.

   The signs and wonders of God are all around us.

   With the Word and the Sacraments, we do not need extraordinary experiences or the suspension of the laws of nature. We have everything we need as gifts from the hand of God.

   God has given us an eternal sign, and God has filled us with wonder in the Word and the Sacraments, the places where God comes near to us.

   We are a changed people, changed from the inside out.

   We are a servant people who God has served in the death of Jesus on the cross.

   We are a people who have been made a new creation, a people set apart, saved from Sin, that old separation from God, and born again into a living relationship with the one true living God that begins now and extends for eternal life.

   This is all God’s doing.

   Here are the signs. Here are the wonders. Streams of living water.  

   You are gifted! Do you know what your gift or gifts may be? Try them out, look for confirmation from others and a feeling of satisfaction in your work for the Church. Go online and look for an inventory, or quiz, to help you discover your gift. Pray about it. Study how the gifts are used in scripture.

   You are gifted for service in your church, your part of the Body of Christ. You have received the Signs and Wonders of the Word and the Sacrament.  

   You have everything you need to be a contributing member in the pandemic mission of the Church, The Body of Christ.

   Be that.