What does First B Jackson teach about miracles?
Drawn from the messages where it was actually addressed: the words said from the front, the passages taught, and where to hear the whole thing.
At First B Jackson, teaching on miracles begins not with the New Testament but with the Old. Ray opened a message by walking through two stories before touching a word of the Gospels: Elijah praying over a widow's dead son in Zarephath, and Elisha restoring a Shunammite woman's boy to life. In both cases Ray drew attention to the same phrase: the child was given back to his mother. He wanted those images and that weight sitting in the room before Jesus appeared in the text, because the point is that this pattern of God intervening with life where there was death did not begin with Jesus. It runs through the whole story of God's people.
From there Ray moved into the healing accounts in Matthew and Luke, tracing how Jesus demonstrates the very mercy he had just finished preaching about in the Sermon on the Mount. He touches a man with leprosy, someone every person in that culture would have avoided, and rather than Jesus becoming unclean by the contact, the man is cleansed. The centurion's servant is healed at a distance. A widow's only son is raised outside the gates of Nain. Ray kept returning to the pattern: Jesus's compassion crosses every line people normally maintain, between clean and unclean, insider and outsider, the prominent and the destitute.
The thread Ray drew through all of it is that these miracles are acts of compassion before they are anything else. Jesus does not hesitate, does not lecture, does not make the recipients earn it. The miracles in these accounts come out of seeing people in their need and moving toward them.
Taught from Luke 7:11-17 · Luke 7:1-10 · 1 Kings 17 · 2 Kings 4 · Matthew 8:1-2
The passage taught · 1 Kings 17
1 Elijah the Tishbite, who was one of the settlers of Gilead, said to Ahab, “As Yahweh, the God of Israel, lives, before whom I stand, there shall not be dew nor rain these years, but according to my word.”
2 Then Yahweh’s word came to him, saying,
3 “Go away from here, turn eastward, and hide yourself by the brook Cherith, that is before the Jordan.
4 You shall drink from the brook. I have commanded the ravens to feed you there.”
World English Bible
The messages that teach on it
- February 20, 2022 God Has Visited His People Jesus heals a widow's son in Nain, echoing Elijah and Elisha's miracles, showing God's compassion reaches everyone who turns to Him in faith.
Mentioned along the way
- December 12, 2024 Sunday, December 8, 2024 - 9 a.m. Contemporary Service - The Acts of the Apostles Peter and the apostles are jailed, freed by an angel, and hauled before the Sanhedrin again. Acts 5 shows why the gospel could not be silenced.
- May 3, 2022 Always Working Even When You Don't Feel It Carl teaches James 4:1-12 at First Baptist Jackson, exploring God's will, surrendering self, and trusting that God is always at work even when we cannot see it.