Inspired: Slaying Giants, Walking on Water, and Loving the Bible Again

by Rachel Held Evans

“Each of these healings,” he wrote, “is, of course, a demonstration of Jesus’ healing power and compassion for the individual, but that is not the main point. Uppermost in the evangelist’s mind—and far more relevant to us—is the miracle’s universal significance: the overturning of social and religious barriers; the abolition of taboos; and Jesus’ declaration of God’s love and compassion for everyone, expressed in the systematic inclusion of each class of the previously excluded or marginalized.”

The apostles remembered what many modern Christians tend to forget—that what makes the gospel offensive isn’t who it keeps out but who it lets in.

Dallas Willard put it: “We don’t believe something by merely saying we believe it,” he said, “or even when we believe that we believe it. We believe something when we act as if it were true.”5 So perhaps a better question than “Do I believe in miracles?” is “Am I acting like I do?”

Activist Shane Claiborne likes to challenge Christians to not only believe in miracles but to “live in a way that might necessitate one.”6

(For the record, Paul told Titus to find among the Cretans leaders who were “blameless,” “hospitable,” “self-controlled,” and “disciplined,” so obviously he didn’t apply the stereotype to all from the island.)

“scandal of particularity,”

And as we consider the application of Paul’s teachings in our various contexts today, the question is not, Should women be allowed to preach? but Do women preachers help or hurt the advancement of the gospel and the preservation of unity? Paul was smart enough to know the answers to these questions would vary from church to church and person to person, so surely he was smart enough to also know they would vary from culture to culture and century to century.

In explaining the significance of the resurrection, N. T. Wright put it like this: What you do in the Lord is not in vain. You are not oiling the wheels of a machine that’s about to roll over a cliff. You are not restoring a great painting that’s shortly going to be thrown on the fire. You are not planting roses in a garden that’s about to be dug up for a building site. You are—strange though it may seem, almost as hard to believe as the resurrection itself—accomplishing something that will become in due course part of God’s new world. Every act of love, gratitude, and kindness every work of art or music inspired by the love of God and delight in the beauty of his creation; every minute spent teaching a severely handicapped child to read or to walk; every act of care and nurture, of comfort and support, for one’s fellow human beings and for that matter one’s fellow nonhuman creatures; and of course every prayer, all Spirit-led teaching, every deed that spreads the gospel, builds up the church, embraces and embodies holiness rather than corruption, and makes the name of Jesus honored in the world—all of this will find its way, through the resurrecting power of God, into the new creation that God will one day make.