God can do anything; there is nothing that He cannot do.  But our reading on Mark 6:5 says differently, “He could not do any miracles there, except lay His hands on a few sick people and heal them.”  At the time, Jesus Our Lord was visiting His hometown Nazareth and as usual, He wanted to heal the sick and perform other miracles.  But He could not do what He intended to do because these folks who happened to know Him His entire life did not believe in His being the Anointed One of God. That’s the reason He could not perform any miracles, not because of His limited power but rather because of their limited faith.  God will not force us to believe Him.

In his book, Surprised by the Power of the Holy Spirit, John Deere, a former professor of theology in one of the most esteemed Bible schools in this country, recounts his spiritual journey from one who believed that the miraculous gifts of the Spirit had ceased to one who believes that the miraculous gifts of the Spirit are still at work. The change was not prompted by intellectual insights but by real life experiences of seeing the miraculous work of the Holy Spirit, which reminds me of Our Blessed Lord’s words to a couple disciples of John the Baptist when they contemplated of following Him, “Come and see” (John 1:39).  No debate, no arguments, just come and see.  

As a student of human behavior and family dynamics, I have seen that there is a difference between what we are trying to teach and what is being taught.  We try to teach by saying to people what we want them to know and change.  What is being taught is what they adopt from seeing us live our lives.  We can try to teach our children all the right things but what is being taught and learned might be different.  It turns out that the most powerful teaching tool is how we live our lives. It is when people “come and see,” they will be able to see the truth—about us, about them, about God—and change. 

Pastor Paul