Miracles Can Be Yours Today

MIRACLES

CAN BE YOURS TODAY

MIRACLES

CAN BE YOURS TODAY

Pat Robertson

MIRACLES

Copyright © 2006 by Pat Robertson.

Published by Integrity Publishers, a division of Integrity Media, Inc. 5250 Virginia Way, Suite 110, Brentwood, TN 37027.

HELPING PEOPLE WORLDWIDE EXPERIENCE the MANIFEST PRESENCE of GOD.

All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations are taken from The New King James Version, copyright © 1979, 1980, 1982, Thomas Nelson, Inc., Publishers. Used by permission.

Other Scripture quotations are taken from the following sources: The Holy Bible, New International Version (NIV). Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan Bible Publishers. All rights reserved. The King James Version of the Bible (KJV). Public domain. The Holy Bible, New Living Translation ® (NLT ®). Copyright ©1996. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Wheaton, Illinois 60189. All rights reserved.

Cover Design: Christine Weidenbenner, CBN, www.cbn.org Cover Photo: JupiterImages Interior Design: Inside Out Design & Typesetting, Ft. Worth, TX

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Robertson, Pat.

Miracles / Pat Robertson.

p. cm.

Summary: Helping 21st-century believers walk in the power of the Spirit and look past their impossible circumstances to all the possibilities of Almighty God—Provided by publisher.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 1-59145-423-9 (hardcover) ISBN 1-59145-459-X (international paperback)

1. Miracles. I. Title.

BT97.3.R63 2006

231.7'3—dc22

2005031610

Printed in the United States of America

06 07 08 09 CHG 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. He Walked on Water

2. Increase Our Faith

3. The Lame Shall Leap with Joy

4. The Winds and the Sea Obey Him

5. A New Creation

6. Angels and Demons

7. The Dead Are Raised

8. Bread for Each Day

9. He Heals the Sick

10. Desire the Better Gifts

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This is my seventeenth book, and I want to publicly thank my dear wife, Dede, who has shared with me a life of miracles for the past fiftyone years and who, as a voracious reader of books, has faithfully read and critiqued each chapter of this book, as well as the sixteen that preceded it.

I am old-fashioned and prefer to write using a pen and a legal pad. Words fail me to adequately thank my secretary G. G. Conklin, who not only is able to decipher my left-handed scrawl but remained boundlessly enthusiastic about the contents of each page and the opportunity to bring forth out of countless legal pads a finished, typed manuscript.

I owe a debt of gratitude to three extremely gifted CBN vice presidents— John Turver, Carol Ann Marshall, and Edie Wasserberg—who kept cheering me on in my predawn writing vigils.

I also want to acknowledge the CBN television producers who assembled for our television audience some of the thrilling stories of those whose lives had been touched by the hand of God—Kristi Watts and Ken Hulme, for the death to life story of Connie Davis; Gorman Woodfin, the miraculous tornado rescue of Kim and Evan Bernhardt; Ken Hulme and Amy Reid, the healing of Alan and Lisa Knupp’s little baby; Rick Settoon, the creative miracle of Marlene Klepees; Debbie Harper, the story of Bob and Annie Arthur and the marriage from hell; Tim Branson, the story of Mark Gravell and the checkmate when the king had one more move; Kristen Cooney, the story of David Varon, whose blind eye became whole; Barbara Cornick, the story of Janet Taylor, the prostitute with addiction to crack cocaine; and Andrew Knox and Kristi Watts, the story of James Herring, who was freed from alcohol addiction.

Of course, I am grateful to the skilled team of sensitive literary professionals at Integrity Publishers—especially Byron Williamson, president and chief executive officer, and Joey Paul, senior vice president and publisher.

This book is dedicated to those men and women all over the world whose hearts are crying out to see in their lives the working of the miracle power of God.

INTRODUCTION

There is a longing in every human heart to feel that we are not alone in a vast imperial universe where distances are measured in billions of light years.

We worship. We bring gifts and offerings. We build temples, mosques, and churches. We bow down and cry out in hundreds of complex or simple rituals, all with one purpose: to demonstrate our belief in a being more powerful than we are, who is able to hear our supplication and then reach across the fathomless distances that surround us in order to guide us, comfort us, and take from us the dangers, diseases, and torments that are a part of our human existence.

Is all of this piety and religious zeal mere superstition? Is religion, as Karl Marx put it, merely the opiate of the masses? In short, is mankind’s quest to be in touch with a higher power merely collective delusion, or is it based on concrete reality? Did a divine being create our vast universe and the inhabitants of our planet Earth, and does He now respond to the petitions of His creatures to bring them blessings and relief from their griefs and sufferings?

The critics either say there is no God (the atheists) or it is impossible to know anything about Him if indeed He exists (the agnostics). To them, our vast and complex universe arose from natural causes and over billions of years evolved into what exists today. Since to them a Creator does not exist, it is therefore folly and superstition to believe that worship of a divine being can bring any intervention in the lives of human beings today or at any time in history.

There are others whose beliefs make them neither atheists nor believers in the intervention of a divine being. To those whose beliefs place them under the heading deists, God the Creator exists, but, like a supernatural watchmaker, He created the universe, assigned to it physical laws, wound it up like a watch, and then withdrew so that His creation could run on to infinity without any further intervention on His part. To the thoroughgoing deist, any interaction between God and man outside of the immutable natural laws is impossible.

Then there are Christian deists who believe that God has intervened in human affairs in a manner described in the pages of the Old and New Testaments, but these interventions were in accordance with specific dispensations. To the dispensationalist, the age of God’s specific demonstration of miraculous power toward humanity ended with the death of the last of the apostles of Jesus Christ. Thereafter was the Church Age, during which, they say, the Christian church was guided by the inspired Holy Scriptures without the supernatural interventions of God that had characterized the days of the apostles.

Despite the naysayers, there is a vastly larger number of people who believe in a power or powers beyond the realm of human intellect that cannot be known by the senses of seeing, hearing, touch, taste, or smell. To these people, there is a secret kingdom of vast potential that transcends human thought and ability. This is the realm of the spirit . . . the realm of the miraculous.

The purpose of this book is to show to you, the reader, beyond any doubt, not only the realm of the miraculous but the real-life stories of people who have experienced miracles in our modern day. Then I want to show you in simple terms what Jesus Christ, the Son of God, told His disciples about how they could experience miracles in their lives and ministries. For you, these will become the keys to open for you an entrance into the miraculous.

The dictionary defines miracle as a marvelous event manifesting a supernatural act of God. The Easton’s 1897 Bible Dictionary expands the concept as follows:

An event in the external world brought about by the immediate agency or the simple volition of God, operating without the use of means capable of being discerned by the senses. It is an occurrence at and above nature and above man. It shows the intervention of a power that is not limited by the laws either of matter or of mind, a power interrupting the fixed laws which govern their movements, a supernatural power. . . . God ordinarily effects his purpose through the agency of second causes; but he has the power also of effecting his purposes immediately and without the intervention of second causes, i.e. of invading the fixed order, and thus of working miracles.

Allow me now to introduce you to soul-stirring accounts of miracles in the lives of everyday people and the biblical basis upon which these miracles rest.

1

HE WALKED ON WATER

The Bible tells us that late one afternoon, Jesus Christ went up into the hills of Galilee by Himself to pray. Before He did so, He instructed His disciples to get into a boat and row across the turbulent Sea of Galilee to the other shore. As daylight faded into darkness, the disciples were struggling with their oars, only halfway across the choppy sea. Then, suddenly, Jesus came to them . . . walking on the water.

When the ever-impetuous Simon Peter saw Jesus walking on the water, he called out, Lord, if it is You, command me to come to You on the water. Jesus responded, Come.

Hearing that command, Simon Peter sat on the side of the boat, lowered himself over the edge, and began to walk on the water. This spontaneous miracle took place in a matter of seconds, and it ended abruptly. As soon as Peter became fully aware of what he was doing, his rational self took over and shouted to his subconscious, You can’t walk on water! You are going to sink and drown! As soon as this negative thought came, he began to sink beneath the stormy water.

At that moment, Jesus reached out, grasped Peter’s hand, and pulled him up. Then, miraculously, Peter was safe in the boat.

Did Jesus congratulate Peter for having enough faith to step out of a safe boat into a deep and stormy sea in the middle of the night and begin to walk on water? Not at all. His only comment was curt and to the point: O you of little faith, why did you doubt? (see Matthew 14:22–31).

Peter had obeyed the Lord’s command; he had committed his body to very deep waters and had actually done what no human, other than Jesus Himself, had ever done—he walked on water! Yet because Peter allowed his rational mind to create fear instead of faith, Jesus hurled a term of scorn at him: you of little faith.

So we observe that big faith enables us to walk on water, while little faith causes us to sink. Faith can indeed suspend the laws of nature so that a human body, which is denser than water, can, in fact, become so light that its footsteps do not penetrate the water. Instead, for the person of faith, the water becomes a firm pathway.

If this is indeed true, then we must ask ourselves two questions:

What is faith? And faith in what or whom? The Bible gives us the answers to both questions.

WHAT IS FAITH?

Faith, we are told in Hebrews 11:1, is the title deed to things we have hoped for and the evidence of things we have not yet seen. Let’s examine each of these aspects of faith more closely.

The Title Deed of Things Hoped For

How does a title deed work? Assume for a moment that the owner of a farm offers to sell it to you. You like what you have heard and agree to purchase the farm, sight unseen, at the specified price. You write a check, and the farm owner signs over to you a properly notarized title deed, which transfers ownership of the farm to you. Assuming no other conditions, the title deed gives you all of the privileges and rights of ownership to the farm. You can live on it, grow crops on it, raise livestock on it, plant trees on it, explore it for minerals, build barns on it, dig a fishing pond on it, rent it to tenants, subdivide it, or sell it. By the title deed, you have all these rights—yet you, if you so desired, would never have to set foot on or even see the farm. You have the title deed!

The title deed to the farm not only entitles you to a host of wonderful privileges, but it also brings responsibilities. The crops have to be tended, the livestock fed and watered, the forests managed, the houses and barns painted and repaired, and the land maintained according to the laws of man and nature.

In a similar way, faith is the title deed to the hopes and dreams that God has placed in our hearts. Inside each of us who knows Him is a destiny, along with all the rights, privileges, and responsibilities that accompany that destiny. Faith brings the privileges of material provision, healings, miracles, and blessings that accompany ownership of your God-ordained destiny. But faith also brings you the responsibility to keep the garden of your life free from weeds; to nourish your mind, soul, spirit, and body; and to care diligently for the people and material possessions that, over the years, become part of your destiny.

The Evidence of Things Not Seen

Faith, according to Hebrews 11:1, is the evidence of things not seen. What does this mean?

Years ago, I learned in my high school physics class that what seemed to be solid, visible matter was, in fact, invisible energy. The brilliant theoretical physicist Albert Einstein proposed the remarkable formula that forever changed our perception of the physical universe: E=MC2. According to Einstein, matter and energy are essentially part of the same thing, and when a uranium atom is properly bombarded with electrons, the energy released is so enormous that it is calculated as the mass of the uranium multiplied by the speed of light squared—hence, the incredible explosive force of the atomic bomb and the hydrogen bomb.

The power of the invisible world of the spirit (things not seen) is beyond calculation. We live in the visible world. We describe this visible world in terms of its limitations. Human beings are called mortal because we all live subject to death (in Latin, mort). There are limits to what we can do, so we say our horizons are finite. Our food quickly decays, so we say it is perishable. Our thought processes are subject to error, so we say we are fallible. We easily fall into sin, so we say we are corruptible.

On the other hand, theologians who have tried to describe God use terms that indicate the absence of human limitations. God is immortal, infinite, infallible, and incorruptible. Or they say that God is the sum of all human capabilities: We are powerful; God is allpowerful. We have some knowledge; God has all knowledge. We are limited in time and space; God is present everywhere.

Therefore, faith is a window into an invisible, not seen world where there are no physical limitations. There is no sickness, no disease, no death, no poverty, no failure, and no hatred or discord. It is a world of the spirit where there is perfect knowledge and no limitations of time and space. Granted, only One, who was sinless, could see it perfectly; we sinners, like the apostle Paul, see through a glass, darkly (1 Corinthians 13:12 KJV). Nevertheless, nothing should stop us from asking God to give us faith in the things not seen and then appropriating the incredible realm of the invisible, where all things are possible.

FAITH IN WHAT OR WHOM?

Where should our faith be centered? Should it be on ourselves and our abilities? Should it be on the circumstances that surround our lives? Should it be on our physical or financial strength?

In what I consider the best summary of how to receive miracles, found in Mark 11:12–25, Jesus tells us simply, Have faith in God (v. 22).

But in what God should we have faith? British scholar J. B. Phillips wrote a book entitled Your God Is Too Small (Touchstone, 2004), in which he recalled asking a group of students during World War II if they believed that God understood radar. The almost unanimous answer was that no, God (who, by the way, put radar in the