Acts 2.22-36 describes how Jesus was approved of God through the miracles, wonders, and signs that God performed through Him. The Power in the Gospel is indelibly linked with the miraculous. Throughout Jesus' ministry in the Gospels, and then with the disciples in the book of Acts, we read that it was the miracles which was the evidence of the message they preached. In 1994 I was preaching in Khabarovsk, Siberia. The Crusade on the Saturday night saw us under a powerful anointing of the Holy Spirit, and many hundreds crowded into the open-air of the football stadium as the praise and worship team ministered. Then when I made the appeal almost every person came forward, so many, that surely everyone who had come into that stadium, lonely, lost, without faith or hope, and without Christ, found Him that night. Their hopelessness and despair had changed into the glory of the reality of knowing Him who loved us with a dying and undying love.
In October 2003 I was evangelising in Almaty, the commercial capital of Kazakhstan. Someone told me that a missionary friend of his was dying in a hospital there, would he please go and pray? This was the year in which God had miraculously healed me from lung cancer – without any medical intervention. Doug Boyle, an Australian missionary, was dying alone in an intensive care unit. I went to pray with him. 16 years later, who greeted us on arrival in Georgia, but this same man!
Speaking of his conditon, Doug said, "I'd been in the ministry since I was 21, 20 years as a missionary in Kazakhstan. My faith was good, the ministry was going great, planting churches, I’d started the first drug rehab centre in the Soviet Union, we had eight centres by then. Life was good. God was doing miracles. I’d never been ill. Now I was 51. Turned out I had three diseases of the pancreas all with fatal outcomes, the final one was 100 percent necrosed pancreas. I was too ill to be flown home to Australia. I was given emergency surgery in Almaty. But I died in the recovery room, they turned off the machines, waiting for the body to go cold."
The Bible says that faith is substance and evidence. My faith is in the Word of God, that is why I have the confidence to see miracles in my own life and in the lives of others. Jesus said that the same works He did, we shall do also. I read that promise, and act on it, because I believe in every Word Jesus spoke.