Here's an email from the inbox, good afternoon, Pastor John.

I am Jane from South Africa, a born again Christian.

How do you respond when people who sit next to you in church who are attending church

by their own admission because they want to experience miracles?

What should we think of people who attend church for this express purpose of experiencing

the miraculous?

What would you say?

Well, before I can answer what I think about that person's motive or what's going on

there, I need to number one, define a miracle and number two, distinguish kinds of miracles

and number three, get at the purpose, God's purpose in the Bible of what miracles are

for.

And then I think if we do that, we'll be close to our answer.

A miracle is an event in the heart or the mind or the body or nature in the world that

would not have come about if God had not supernaturally intervened in the ordinary process

of natural cause and effect.

And I realize as soon as I say that definition, it runs the risk of treating the natural

world as though it were not sustained and guided by the hand of God in everything.

It is sustained and guided by God in everything.

Jesus said, not a bird falls to the ground apart from your father, Matthew 1029.

And what could be more natural than the fall of a bird, the death of a bird in the jungle

or the forest?

So when I define miracle as the supernatural intrusion into the ordinary course of natural

...