People often imagine God’s miracles as lightning bolts. A flash. A spectacle. A man wakes blind and goes to sleep seeing.
But there is another kind of miracle that receives far less applause because it happens so quietly that, for years, no one notices they are standing in one.
It is the miracle of the disappearing appetite.
God did not merely command me to stop biting my nails. One day I realized I no longer wanted to.
He did not simply forbid bulimia. He slowly untied the knot that made destruction seem comforting.
He did not wrestle drugs out of my hands only to leave my heart starving. He gave my heart something better to hunger for.
That is the peculiar thing about grace. It does not always begin by changing behavior. It begins by changing desire.
The world is full of people who have managed to chain themselves to better habits while secretly longing for the old prison. They call this victory because they are still standing. God aims for something far stranger. He does not merely loosen the chains. He changes the prisoner until the chains no longer fit.
Looking back, it is difficult to point to the exact day each miracle occurred. There was no trumpet. No audience. No dramatic announcement from heaven.
There were only thousands of ordinary days in which Christ was quietly renovating a ruined house.
A loose board repaired here.
A cracked wall strengthened there.
A dark room opened to the sun.
Then one morning I looked around and realized I no longer lived in the same house.
This is why Christians should never despise slow sanctification. An oak does not apologize for taking decades to become magnificent. God is rarely interested in manufacturing plastic flowers overnight when He intends to grow forests.
He has healed more than habits…he’s healed the loves beneath the habits. The fears beneath the addictions. The wounds beneath the compulsions.
That is the deepest miracle of all. Sin does not finally lose because the will becomes iron. Sin loses because Christ becomes lovely enough that the counterfeit pleasures of the world begin to taste like dust.
The Christian life is not merely learning to say no.
It is slowly discovering that, by the grace of God, the old “yes” has vanished.
B 🤍
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