This winter, Jesus asked me to give a large first-fruit offering. First fruits was not a new concept for me—at our church we pray specifically for the Lord to reveal an amount He would like us to offer at the beginning of every year, much like Abel in Genesis. Yet this amount stretched me. When I first felt the number impressed upon my mind, I giggled as if we were sharing some great joke. Then He kept whispering it, until finally, the day before our annual First-Fruits Sunday, my Bible fell open with that number in the center of the page.
You can’t ignore a summons like that. In fact, it felt like an answer to prayer, though not the sort of answer that resolved my prayers. For days I had been contending with the Lord over my living situation. There were multiple paths open before me, and I needed both direction and provision. He issued an instruction.
Dr. Clark might liken such a summons to the servants filling wine vessels with water in John 2. They were perilously close to ruining a wedding and in desperate need of more wine. Brought to Jesus by His mother, they were asked to fill each vessel with water. They did so, wasting precious effort on a task that seemed pointless. Such obedience might be termed “radical.”
Like so many of us, the servants needed a miracle—a time-sensitive solution for an impossible situation. While their experience may have been Jesus’ first public miracle, they were not the last in demonstrating radical obedience before a breakthrough.
In fact, throughout Scripture and in our experiences at Global Awakening, we often observe that God’s power is released where faith expresses itself through obedience, even when that obedience doesn’t make sense.
OBEDIENCE AS PARTICIPATION
Miracles are miraculous. As such, the essential quality of a miracle, which is an act of divine power and will to do the thing we are not able to do, contradicts our ability to participate.
Why then would a miracle even necessitate our participation? Certainly God doesn’t need us to do miracles. He does plenty of miracles all on His own: creation, the flood, the dispersing of language, Lazarus, the visit to Paul on the road to Damascus, and many more.
Yet so many times God asks for participation, specifically, acts of obedience: wash in that river; walk around this wall so many times; cast the net on the other side of the boat.
The Gospel of John, in fact, records seven supernatural events, all of which followed a request from Jesus:
- Fill the jars with water (John 2:1–11).
- Go home and believe your son is healed (John 4:46–54).
- Get up and walk (John 5:1–15).
- Distribute five loaves and two fish for five thousand people (John 6:1-14).
- Cross the sea (John 6:16–21).
- Wash in the pool of Siloam (John 9:1-7).
- Remove the stone from Lazarus’ tomb (John 11:1-44).
Sometimes obedience makes sense in hindsight, like the enormous boat Noah constructed or the jars the widow collected for oil.
Other times such participation remains a mystery—like why the blind man needed to wash mud off his eyes in the pool of Siloam or why Jesus really needed that boy’s bread and fish when He knew how to create manna from the sky. Or why the Israelites needed to march seven days around Jericho, blowing trumpets and shouting.
I’m not quite sure what it is about obedience that our Father so desires before releasing a miracle. I know He tells us that if we love Him, we’ll keep His commands and that obedience is better than sacrifice (John 14:15, 1 Samuel 15:22). He is such a creative, wise God that I’m sure every command He gives us, however mysterious, still has a purpose and reason.
Yet it is clear to me that obedience often precedes miracles.
RADICAL OBEDIENCE
I’m not quite sure obedience is all that’s necessary, however. We can obey in deed but not in our hearts.
Consider King Amaziah of Judah in 2 Chronicles 25, who “did what was right in the eyes of the Lord, but not wholeheartedly.” Or what would have happened, I wonder, if all twelve of the disciples, not just Peter, got out of the boat? Peter may have sunk, but no one else walked on water.
One of the reasons why the first miracle of Jesus was radical was because of the heart posture of the servants: they filled the jars to the brim.
Dr. Clark reflects on this passage with his own memory of carrying water on his farm.
“I had to fill up two five-gallon buckets of water and carry them from the pond down to [the horses’] stalls. I never filled them to the brim because if I did, they would spill down my legs. Yet John is telling us that the servants filled stone water jars to the brim—an extravagant response to Jesus’ instruction, representative of complete, radical obedience.”
More than that, Dr. Clark has reflected that though we know the water turns into wine, we don’t know when. It may have transitioned as the servants poured it into the pots. Possibly it turned into wine after they brought it to the master of the banquet. If so, the servants obeyed Jesus to the point of carrying water to the master who wanted wine.
Their obedience was radical because it was wholehearted, and they got to witness Jesus’ first public miracle.
DO THE NEXT RIGHT THING
Dr. Clark believes that radical obedience is “a principle the Holy Spirit wants us to understand if we desire our intimacy with Him to lead to the miraculous… These requests are His points of contact for a release of faith, because faith needs to have an element of risk for it to be faith.”1
Such requests remind me of Anna’s song in Frozen II about doing “The Next Right Thing.” When we need a miracle, what is the next right thing the Lord is asking of us? It may come as a quiet whisper, a rhema word, or an opportunity that opens before us. Perhaps a door closes and we must work out the details, or we sense that we are to prepare ourselves for the miracle, though it has not already happened.
Clearly there is more to waiting on a miracle than waiting—and what a relief. Waiting can grow tiresome and feel powerless when we lack an assignment.
In some ways, although the First Fruits number the Lord gave me felt enormous and stretching, giving that offering encouraged me in the waiting. Though I didn’t have the answer I was praying for, God was on the move, and He wanted my participation.
And I didn’t have to wait much longer. Exactly seven days after I made this financial sacrifice, a beautiful home opened up out of nowhere for me, perfectly timed and perfectly set up for a peaceful transition.
I share this story not to say that financial gifts are necessary for God’s provision or that God is like a wishing well. I think it was the obedience He cared about. Miracles are radical, and sometimes they require radical obedience.
When we cry out for a miracle, we must ask ourselves “Is there something God has told me to do? What is the last clearest instruction He’s given?” Like Mary and the servants at the wedding, have we gone to Him for help? Are we willing to do everything He asks of us?
I think it’s safe to say God loves to do miracles. And as much or more than that, He loves our participation.
READ MORE:
Clark, Randy. Intimacy with God. Emanate Books, 2021.
- Clark, Randy. Intimacy with God. Emanate Books, 2021 (p. 61). ↩︎