By Gbenga Osinaike

It is incredibly easy to be swayed in the average church gathering today. The music, the message, and the mood are all carefully engineered to push you toward a state of self-realization, ultimately urging you to place a demand on God.

​But in doing so, the average churchgoer is pushed to an extreme—wearing a cap that was never prepared for them by God. The believer is tempted to assume too much, falling into the trap of thinking that the Almighty is at their beck and call.

​This illusion becomes normalized over time because people read scriptures through a warped lens that seems to align with this flawed mindset. What many do not realize, however, is that many of the scriptures bandied around in our churches—the ones used to claim we can level mountains by the mere words of our mouths—are actually saying the exact opposite of what we profess when read in context.

​This is where the vital disciplines of hermeneutics (the science of interpretation) and exegesis (critical explanation of text) come in. For instance, Isaiah 45:11, when read contextually, is not an invitation to command God according to the works of His hands. Yet, millions have been led to believe that exact interpretation.

​Consequently, people get deeply frustrated after repeatedly applying these scriptures only to find they do not “work.” They pray and receive no results because they have been caught in the web of a modern miracle craze.

They have been taught that whatever they desire in prayer, they will automatically get. In the process, they remain oblivious to the critical prerequisites of Christ’s promises, such as John 15:7: “If you abide in me, and my words abide in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you.” There are precursors to many of the Bible’s claims. Usually, the preceding verses give the true clue to what we have been ignorantly claiming.

The man who abides in God and God abides in him will not got out of God’s will when making requests. But the question that should first agitate our minds is this: What is the true purpose of miracles in the Church? Why does God perform miracles? Is it to impress His creation, or to point His creation toward a certain truth? If we cannot answer that question, we will keep groping in the dark, making claims to things God has never promised us.

​Too often, we view God as an errand boy who is obligated to answer the moment we call, believing He has no choice but to do our bidding. For instance, there are many people currently in captivity. We have been praying for their release, which is absolutely the right thing to do. But where our problem lies is in the assumption that God is strictly obligated to answer us “by fire and by force.”

​We must reach a point in our walk with the Lord where a miracle is not our primary expectation in the place of prayer, but rather something God does out of His own sovereign free will. Our fellowship time with God should simply be fellowship time—a space to worship and to pray for God’s will to pass, just as Jesus modeled in the Garden of Gethsemane: “Yet not my will, but yours be done” (Luke 22:42).

​We must come to the stark realization that we cannot manipulate God, and that there is no formula to Him. Until we arrive at that junction in our Christian walk, the feedback we receive from reality will continue to be unpleasant. Unfortunately, the contemporary Church has been conditioned to believe in a God who is at our beck and call. The acute danger in this mindset is that when things do not go our way, we lose faith in Him entirely.

​One of the first steps toward spiritual deliverance is understanding a fundamental truth: we are humans, and God is God. As Psalm 115:3 reminds us, “Our God is in heaven; he does whatever pleases him.” Without this understanding, you will be swept into a false narrative of your own ability to control the universe, veering dangerously into mind science or spiritism.

​We need to know that God does not try to impress anybody. We often make the mistake of asking God to “prove” Himself. We cry out to Him, pleading with Him to show the world that He is our God and that we serve a living God. As beautiful as that prayer sounds, God has no business proving His existence to onlookers.

​That is what atheists want. They wonder why a good God allows so much evil in the land, or why He allows those who serve Him to be decimated at will. Because they cannot reconcile God with the presence of suffering, those outside the faith find it difficult to subscribe to Him.

​But this tension is not unique to our times. Right from the days of the Bible, God has never set out to impress human spectators. No matter how much we try to twist it, He is not answerable to man. If God were in the business of performing to impress people, He would not have allowed Stephen to be stoned to death like an animal in the open square (Acts 7). Stephen was literally mauled, yet God remained in heaven, welcoming his soul rather than striking down his assailants.

​How do you explain John the Baptist? His head was chopped off on a tyrant’s whim (Matthew 14), yet Jesus did not intervene with a miraculous prison break. James, the apostle, was beheaded by Herod (Acts 12), and no thunder struck his executioners.

​Yet, right alongside these horrors, we also see God showing up miraculously at specific times. In that very same chapter of Acts, Peter was scheduled to be executed, but God sent an angel to rescue him. (Though later in history, Peter would ultimately pay the supreme price, being crucified upside down at the end of his ministry). Paul and Silas were thrown into the depths of a prison, and God broke their chains with an earthquake (Acts 16).

​Ironically, in the cases where God intervened, the recipients were not presumptuously demanding a miracle. Peter thought he was dreaming; Paul and Silas were so focused on worship that they didn’t even try to escape the moment their chains broke.

​The point here is that a miracle is fundamentally about God, not the recipient. We pray for miracles, but we must never act as though God is contractually obligated to carry out our bidding. Ours is to humbly make our requests known and trust the perfect judgment of God.

​The difference between prayer and magic is profound: In prayer, we ask for the will of God to be done. In magic, we demand that our own will be done. The moment we become vehement before God, insisting that He must answer us willy-nilly, He ceases to be our Lord and is reduced to an errand boy.

​Throughout Scripture, we do not see believers casually commanding God. Every miracle recorded in the Bible was initiated by God, not by the independent whim of the prophet or servant. The Lord would first lay the assignment on the hearts of His servants. If miracles were subject to human demand, every single sick person who ever crossed paths with Jesus would have been healed.

​But the Gospels show that Jesus did not heal everyone. At the Pool of Bethesda (John 5), a place crowded with a multitude of the blind, lame, and paralyzed, Jesus sovereignly chose to heal just one man before slipping away into the crowd. Jesus never made miracles the central focus of His message; they were signs pointing to a deeper spiritual reality.

​Unfortunately, today’s penchant for signs and wonders has driven the Church to an all-time low. Our services are saturated with the pursuit of the supernatural. Our songs are about getting a miracle, our crusades are advertised around them, and we chase them as if our very biological lives depend on it.

​But that is not the pattern of the Bible. If we take time to read through the Acts of the Apostles, the miracles God performed through them were strictly confirmations of the Word they were called to preach. As Mark 16:20 states, “the Lord worked with them and confirmed his word by the signs that accompanied it.” The signs followed the message; the apostles did not follow the signs.

​Nowhere in the New Testament do we see the early Church advertising a miracle service. In all of the Epistles written by Paul, he never promoted miracles. Instead, his consuming passion was the Gospel of Jesus Christ and the spiritual maturity of the believers. His messages focused on living a life of holiness, righteousness, and unyielding commitment to the cause of God.

​The modern Church will save itself an immense amount of embarrassment if it stops marketing miracles and making empty promises to its members that a breakthrough awaits them, only for them to go home experiencing breakdowns

​We need to understand this truth and finally find peace: God does not perform to impress people. He does what He pleases, in His own time, according to His sovereign counsel. He is obligated to carry out His own eternal will and purpose—not our selfish, material ambitions.

​We can absolutely call upon Him in times of trouble, just as He instructed. But He alone reserves the sovereign right to answer how He sees fit. If we are not humble enough to accept that reality, our Christian walk will be plagued by constant frustration.