Should We Live a Lifestyle of Receiving Miracles?
No!
God has better for us.
Since this book is about healing, consider what must be the case if you are always receiving healing miracles. It means that you keep getting sick all the time! But God’s explicit will is for us to be IN HEALTH, not just to make brief visits to health between sicknesses!
3 John 2:
Beloved, I wish above all things that thou mayest prosper and be in health, even as thy soul prospereth.
When I was a younger Christian, I rode around northern New England in a bus with a traveling evangelist. I mostly played the piano and sang for him, though he would occasionally “turn me loose.” We were living dirt poor and I thought it was the ultimate of “living by faith.” I remember having nothing to eat in the bus and no money to buy anything and we proceeded to “say grace” to thank God for the food we were about to eat. Then someone showed up at the bus door with a bag full of groceries the Lord told her to buy for us and we ate well. We kept seeing God come through when we were in dire straits.
At one point, I had saved up some money but I remembered a book I’d read that was quite popular back then that made it seem like it was a sin to have anything when so many people were starving in Africa. So I took everything I had (which wasn’t an enormous amount) and gave it to an organization that feeds the hungry in Africa. Then I was back to “living by faith.” I remember having an old car that was in bad shape and someone who checked it said that I should have been killed in an accident while driving it because it was completely unsafe. The steel belts in the tires were poking through the rubber and making a racket. But God kept me safe when I had no money to fix the car. And after all, the hole in the back seat floor (you could see the road through it) shouldn’t have been a big deal because I drove in the front seat, not the back seat, right?
At another time, I had no money coming in due to a severe slowdown in the business I ran. My business was related to the stock market, which crashed in 1987 and left people very disenchanted with the market. Business contracts dried up all over the place and a major job I was about to do was canceled with no notice. I had no money for groceries or Christmas presents, and someone showed up at the door with groceries and Christmas presents.
Ah, the days of “living by faith!” Some Christians I knew thought that this was the ultimate way to live – from one miracle to the next. But I don’t miss those days at all! I like things much better now when I get a bill and I just pay it and that’s the end of it. You can be a lot less money-minded when you aren’t juggling bills to see which ones you can pay today. Some people think that if you have more money, you must be “money-minded,” but the opposite is true. You think about money less when you can just pay your bills without batting an eyelash.
I learned to trust God in those earlier days, but having money does not mean that I’ve stopped trusting God – I got the money by trusting God and being led by the Holy Spirit. God says plainly that He gives us the power to get wealth.
Deuteronomy 8:18:
But thou shalt remember the LORD thy God: for it is he that giveth thee power to get wealth, that he may establish his covenant which he sware unto thy fathers, as it is this day.
He doesn’t say that He will miraculously hand you millions by the means of magical mystical mailbox money. In other words, He does not promise one financial miracle after another. Financial prosperity is better than living from miracle to miracle. We can see that a blessing is better than miracles because even under the law, God said that He would bless your storehouses.
Deuteronomy 28:8:
The LORD shall command the blessing upon thee in thy storehouses, and in all that thou settest thine hand unto; and he shall bless thee in the land which the LORD thy God giveth thee.
You don’t need storehouses for your wealth if you are living hand-to-mouth from miracle to miracle!
So it is evident that God doesn’t want you to live from miracle to miracle. If that’s where you are right now, believe to enter into abundance – financial, physical and otherwise. Abundance is explicitly God’s will for you (John 10:10).