Challenging Skepticism about Miracles

Now, I don't want to put anybody on the spot, but how many of you pray in tongues? That's that's a lot of you. How many of you, in as far as you know—cuz sometimes things come later—but how many of you know that you have the gifts of healing? It's a smaller number. So I I pray in tongues also, but I also don't have the gift of healing, as far as I can tell. And not saying that just because I have a cold, but just to say, for those of us who who haven't experienced it as much—maybe we've experienced it some, but we haven't experienced it as much—this is just a real privilege to to look into some of the things that God has done. And I'll be talking more about some of them in in coming days. Tomorrow I'll be talking about examples of people being raised from the dead. Today, and to some extent we'll talk, probably on Thursday, about the theology of it, why it sometimes doesn't happen, and so on. But for now, today I'm going to be talking especially about challenging skepticism about miracles.

There was an Assemblies of God pastor who was a friend of mine who told me about a man in his congregation who was not really completely skeptical; he actually, I guess cautious would be the better word. Ed Wilkinson was trained in neuropsychology, and he pointed out that many use the hope of healing as a neurotic denial of reality. But when his eight-year-old son, Brad, was found to have atrial septal defect with two significant holes in his heart, he he had to think about what to do with this theology of healing, especially when Brad asked him, "Am I gonna die from the coming surgery?" He said, "Not everybody who had a surgery dies." He said, "Well, can Jesus heal me?" He said, "Oh, I'll get back to you on that," and spent some time praying and came back to him and he said, "Jesus can heal you, but whether he heals you or not, we have the hope of heaven." Well, they had prayer a week before going to University of Missouri-Columbia for the surgery. And when they got there and he was tested, there was no change. So the next day they took him into surgery, and they warned the father, "This is going to take two to three hours, and we'll be back to see you in 2 to 3 hours to let you know how it went." Well, instead, half an hour later the cardiologist, the pulmonologist, and the hospital's risk management officer showed up and said, "Come with us, please." Started showing him charts on the wall. By this point, I couldn't take it anymore. He said, "My son, where's my son?" And they said, "Well, he's in he's in recovery." "He's recovery? Yes, we opened him up; we didn't find any holes." And the cardiologist said, "I've seen this once in a while in infants; I've never seen this in an eight-year-old. You can call this a miracle." And the pulmonologist said, "You must have had somebody praying for you." And the risk management officer said, "This was definitely not a misdiagnosis." And so the there was nothing wrong with him. He had to be kept overnight because he'd been opened up, but it was allowed to go back to playing ball and everything. Brad is now in his early 30s, never had another heart problem. It's not to say that they didn't have any problems though, because the the insurance company called him and said, "What is a spontaneous closure?"

Today we're going to be talking about miracle reports, their plausibility in the Gospels and Acts. I started that as a footnote in my Acts commentary, and it grew, and after it's about 200 pages, we realized it wouldn't work as a footnote or even as a chapter, and so it's about 1,100 pages now, and I keep getting new information all the time. But the book's done now. Good. But we have we have significant amount of eyewitness testimony already in the New Testament. I mean, it was written close to the time that the the witnesses experienced it, so it's it's eyewitness testimony just like we'd have eyewitness testimony today. Luke, in my understanding of the book of Acts, Luke was a witness to some of Paul's miracles. Paul also tells the Corinthian church, he says, "You yourself saw the signs and wonders and miracles of an apostle when I was among you." So it's not just Paul attesting it himself that this followed his ministry; it's also Paul saying, "You yourselves are witnesses of these things; you saw it."

No, if you have even some basic research and ancient sources—I know this has been disputed, but I can't go into this in detail now—but just to say there's so much information that can show us that the way ancient biographies in ancient historiography worked, you're going to expect really a lot of substantial historical information. So even starting from a purely secular standpoint, you know, you go back and read the Gospels, you would think, "Oh, we have a lot of information here about Jesus." Unfortunately, not everybody has felt that way. In the 19th century, one scholar named David Friedrich Strauss said that the Gospels must be late legends because they obviously contain myth because they contain miracle stories, and he said, "We know that these couldn't have happened, so these must be legends that arose over time, over generations." Now what I find interesting is that David Strauss had a friend who was unable to walk, but he was prayed for by the German Lutheran pastor Johann Christoph Blumhardt, who had a ministry of healing, and the friend was healed and was able to walk. Now what that means is that Strauss himself should have known that it wasn't just a legend that people could be healed. In fact, Strauss Strauss said, "Well, that's just psychosomatic," but one thing he couldn't do was say, "This is just a legend that arose over generations," because he himself is a witness.

Jesus' miracles are attested historically; they appear in all the early Christian sources. Josephus talks about it in in his one passage about Jesus. In people think are the original words of that passage, the opponents of early Christianity, both Jewish and Gentile, acknowledged Jesus as a miracle worker. When you put all that together, most scholars today of the historical Jesus, whether they personally believe in miracles or not—that is, whether they believe God acted or not—believe that Jesus was experienced by his contemporaries as a miracle worker. It's it's so solid historically that basically nobody in the historical Jesus field, except a few people on the extreme edge, will deny that Jesus was experienced as a miracle worker.

The problem today actually goes back before Strauss, and that's to David Hume, and maybe I shouldn't be picking on him now that he's dead, because that's critique that's posthumous. Sorry, that was bad humor. Anyway, but the problem today views from from David Hume; he said that miracles are not part of human experience and therefore we we can't believe that there really is a God who's acting in history in this way. But if you look at belief in miracles today, most people in the world don't really hold Hume's view. About 80% of the people in the United States believe in miracles; nearly 3/4 of US doctors believe in miracles; most people in Africa, Asia, and Latin America believe in miracles or supernatural activity. And there've been a number of philosophers recently who have challenged David Hume on these points; pub works published by Cambridge, Cornell, and Oxford. In fact, the publication by Oxford, a reviewer complained and said, "Well, you just say this; you're just critiquing Hume on this because you're a Christian," to which he replied, "Actually, I'm not a Christian; I just thought Hume had a very bad argument." Hume regarded miracles as violations of natural law, as if to say, even if there's a God who made these laws, God is subject to these laws, which is kind of a non sequitur. And in fact, when he was talking about natural law, it doesn't fit modern options of natural law, which are mostly descriptive; it also didn't fit the conceptions in his own day because the English scientists on whom he depended, like Isaac Newton, actually believed in miracles. So this wasn't a scientific issue; this was a philosophic issue. But most who dismissed the possibility of miracles simply assume Hume's argument without knowing its source. I mean, most people today they'll say, "Well, everybody knows miracles can't happen," if they don't believe in miracles; many of them won't know that their argument goes back to Hume.

Hume's argument actually is: Hume says that uniform human experience shows us that miracles don't happen. Well, what happens when you have an eyewitness who claims that miracles happen, know that they saw a miracle happen? His response is, "Well, uniform human experience shows us that that can't be an accurate testimony." Do you see the problem with that? I mean, that's the that's if that's not a circular argument, I don't know what would qualify as a circular argument, because what is uniform human experience but the accumulation of human testimony? So if human testimony doesn't fit uniform human experience, then human experience isn't really uniform. He even dismissed testimonies from his own day. How many of you have heard of Blaise Pascal? He's the father of the modern computer. How many of you have heard of computers? Okay, well, that's that's closer. Pascal was very persuaded by this; his niece had a running eyesore that emitted a foul odor, and she was instantly and publicly healed in an act of faith, so much so that the Queen Mother of France sent her own physician to check on this and verified this medically. So what was Hume's response to this? Hume said, "Well, look, this is so much better documented than any miracle we have in the Bible, and we know this couldn't have happened, so why would we believe in those?" Do you see the way his argument works? He's simply dismissing things; he's not really offering an argument.

Now, the scientific method normally requires experimentation, depending on which which kind of science it is, but you can't experiment on events of history; you can't experiment on events of journalism; even certain kinds of science. I mean, if if somebody is dead and you think it was a murder, a forensic scientist can't go back and kill the person again to see if they correctly are interpreting it. So there are there are kinds of knowledge that are dependent, especially on eyewitnesses, and that's what we have to do. Each each appropriate subject has its own approach to knowledge, and the case of miracles is a case where we're looking at unique events in history, the same as we are with any other kind of historical event. So what skeptics respond at this point is they say, "Well, there must be the same kind of events as recorded elsewhere, and you know, with other kinds of things you have you have people dying and so on, but you don't have miracles." Well, they're presupposing that there aren't miracles, because if there are miracles, then you can't say that there are no other events like miracles, because actually they're probably a lot of them.

Do we have many claims of miracles today? Well, how widespread are the healing claims? They've been major academic studies that deal with this issue, such as a recent book by Oxford University Press and global Pentecostal and charismatic healing, but the I'm gonna look especially at the 2006 Pew Forum survey, which surveys Pentecostals and charismatics in just 10 countries and asked how many of them had witnessed healings, among other things. And if you add these up, the figures come out to about 200 million people. Now, how can we say that uniformed human experience rules out healing when we have at least 200 million people claiming the contrary? Now, keep in mind, this is just Pentecostals and charismatics in just 10 countries alone. More surprising is that you take the number of Christians who don't claim to be Pentecostal or charismatic—about 39% of them in these 10 countries also claimed to have witnessed divine healings. So we may be talking about over one third of Christians worldwide; we're talking about hundreds of millions of people who claim to have witnessed these things. There was a Western researcher in the Philippines who was shocked as he began to interview people who had been prayed for, where eighty-three percent of those had experienced serious healings. The point is not what proportion of these claims involve divine activity or miracles; the point is whether Hume can legitimately start from the premise that uniform human experience excludes miracles. You can't start from that premise. Moreover, you can't just say, "Well, these are Christians; they're biased, and therefore they hold this view because they're Christians," because we're talking about millions of people who were converted to Christianity precisely because they saw what they believed to be miracles.

China was not in the survey above; it wasn't one of the ten nations listed in the survey above, but a source from within the China Christian Council about 10 years ago claimed that in the previous 20 years of massive church growth in China, about 50 percent of all new conversions were due to what they called fake healing experiences, and in the house churches the figure that was estimated in rural areas was closer to 90%. Now, I can't tell you what percentage is exactly accurate, but in any case, we're talking about millions of people who were so persuaded that that the events that they witnessed or that their friends witnessed were so out of the ordinary that they were willing to abandon centuries of tradition and follow a new faith. In a in a survey that was done around 1981 in Chennai in India, 10% of a non-Christian surveyed reported that they had been healed through a Christian praying for them in the name of Jesus. Pastor Israel was one of my past seminarians from India, and through prayer for the sick, his Baptist Church grew from a handful of people to about 600, most of them converts from Hinduism. Now, where this picture was taken actually was he was doing doing security duty at the seminary that night, and I came in; I had a splitting headache, and he said, "Oh, brother, me, I pray for you," and he prayed for me, and nothing happened, and I said, "It's it's cuz I don't have any faith." He said, "No, brother, it doesn't work here; everybody I pray for in India gets healed. He said, "It's because God loves these precious Hindu people so much that he just lavish this is his love upon them so that they can so that they can know about him." It's not to say he doesn't love us at all, but it's just to say that God loves everybody so much that he wants these people who haven't really had a chance to get to know about it. He said, "If you come to India and pray for people to get healed…"

Another friend, a Moravian pastor at the time, Douglas Norwood; he was a Nickerie Surinam; this was a predominantly Hindu area within Suriname, and for centuries they've been trying to reach people with the gospel, and over the centuries they still had only a few hundred Christians; they were split among different denominations; they were competing with each other for the same members. And so one day they banded together, and Doug was my witness; he was there when this happened. They banded together to pray; God poured out his spirit; the Christians all repented of their divisions; they went out and started sharing the gospel; and that night there were a number of non-Christians who came, and one of the non-Christians was an aged man whose arm had been paralyzed all of his life, and and he started shouting against him, he said, "I give five is Christian God," and suddenly his hands shot up in the air, and he looked at it, and he was converted. The people around him were converted, and that was the beginning of a people movement in Nickerie Surinam. Over the next few years, tens of thousands of people came to faith in Christ. J.P. Moreland points out the rapid evangelical growth in the past three decades around the world that up the 70% of it is intimately connected with signs and wonders. Now this was also true in the past; many church fathers talked about how non-believers were coming to faith through miracles that these church fathers were claiming to be eyewitnesses of. In fact, in the third and fourth centuries, the leading cause of conversion to Christianity—this has been documented by Yale historian Ramsey MacMullen—the leading cause of conversion to Christianity were was healings and exorcisms. Now, not exclusively, but most often the more dramatic signs, cuz I mean, healing can come anyway; God can answer our prayer for healing gradually; he can do it through doctors; it's still an answer to prayer, but the more dramatic examples that really grab people's attention, especially occur—not always, but especially occur—in groundbreaking evangelism and new areas. So if you're eager to see signs and wonders, that's also be eager to preach the gospel to all people, but this is this is especially where we see them.

I'm going to give some examples at this point of accounts from people that I know and trust or people that I have very good reason to believe. One principle that I'm following is that a smaller number of eyewitnesses should count more heavily than a greater number of skeptical non-witnesses. We would apply that to most other kinds of claims; for instance, if there's a traffic accident and a police officer comes up and says, "Well, can you tell me what happened?" and the eyewitnesses are giving their story, and then somebody else comes up and says, "That's not what happened," and the officer is, "Well, can you tell me what you saw?" "Well, I didn't see anything; that's why I know nothing happened." Normally, we wouldn't take seriously the non-witness claiming something as opposed to the witnesses. I'm not claiming that everyone prayed for it gets healed, as you can see, I have male pattern balding; I need to wear glasses, and you know, even apart from my cold. But on a more serious note, my wife and I've been through miscarriages. It's not saying everybody gets healed, but the signs of the kingdom are a promise to us of a greater world to come, and they're a reminder that in this world, even though God doesn't always heal us in this world, God is with us, and God is active, and he hasn't forgotten us.

I'm going to start with a couple visible miracles. For example, I have a number of reports of goiters vanishing; many credible eyewitnesses for that. I have not seen that; I don't think I've ever seen a goiter, but in any case, once Hook and Julie Mom—once Hook is the director for the Oxford Center of Mission Studies—and they prayed for someone with a very large goiter, and the goiter instantly disappeared. That was a visible miracle. Danny McCain, with whom I worked in Nigeria, I I expected he was going to give me an account from Nigeria, but instead he said, "No, I can give you an account from from the US when I was growing up." His his baby brother had been scalded with with really hot water, and this the skin was so burned that they couldn't take his clothes off because it would tear the skin off; they were stuck to the skin, and he was sent home from the hospital; they said, "It's just gonna take take time; it's gonna take weeks to heal this," and they were having a prayer meeting, and his little baby brother was crying, and suddenly noticed that his brother had stopped crying, and he opened his eyes and peeked and saw his brother crawling across the floor; his skin was bright and pink, completely totally restored in that moment. Another case of burns, this one I'm just mentioning because it's a it's a doctor who attested this, and she she said it was after half an hour of prayer that burns completely disappeared, even though the skin had been peeling before that. We also have doctors attesting the the regrowth of missing flesh. Dr. Chauncey Crandall from Florida told me about that. Tonya Briggs, who I believe is a minister here—Minister is a doctor here in Texas right now—also gave me an account of of that. We have a number of accounts of deafness being healed; many many cases of that. Dr. Rex Gardner, in his book *Healing Miracles*, gives one of these accounts where there was a nine-year-old girl; she just seen the audiologist; it was you know, she was completely deaf in one ear, and she was deaf in the other without her hearing aid, but she was praying for for healing. The audiologist had said, "Okay, this is auditory nerve damage; it can get worse; it can't get any better." She she prayed; she was healed; they called the audiologist; he said, "This is not possible, but bring her in," and he tested her; he said, "I have no explanation for this, but her ears are completely better; she's luck; she's not deaf at all." Amen. There are eyewitnesses, some of whom I know, who have been in Mozambique and have seen deaf Muslims being healed in Jesus' name. Also, people who are blind in—led to massive church growth, so much so that in some areas that the government of Mozambique had classified as belonging to one religion, now they classify as being predominantly Christian because of the miracles that are taking place there. And Heidi and Roland Baker have been had been leading figures in this; it's now been documented with medical tests which were published in the *Southern Medical Journal* in September of 2010.

Now, some people have been saying, "Ah, there's no medical documentation for this." Well, finally medical documentation is published, you know, and because miracles aren't replicable, they're normal; they normally don't get into medical journals, but in this case they were able to do it. And some people said, "Well, the testing conditions weren't ideal." Well, no, they weren't ideal; there's kind of hard to get around that in most of these areas where the miracles are happening, like in real Mozambique. But Candy Gunther Brown, one of the authors of the study, a professor at Indiana University, has published a book, *Testing Prayer*, Harvard University Press, 2012, and she answers the critics, and I think if you read her account, she has much the better the better argument because she was there when people went from being deaf to hearing and from blind to seeing. Their number of additional accounts from doctors or those with medical documentation. There are entire books on this, some of them published by Oxford and other publishers. Richard Cowan Dorf, in a book that was actually published a few decades ago, he's an MD PhD, gave a number of accounts where there was medical documentation, and he included the medical documentation in the book. And one of these cases is the case of Liesl Arias, who was dying as a teenager; she was dying of of a bone disease, and her parents hadn't told her yet that she was dying, but she was in a wheelchair; she wasn't able to walk. They took her to a healing meeting; nobody actually prayed for her, but just God's presence was active there; nobody laid hands on her; suddenly she jumped out of the wheelchair and began running around. Now, that is not unheard of by itself, but in this case they got the medical documentation, and the x-ray showed that even where her bones had previously deteriorated, they were now healed and completely well, and that is something that is medically impossible apart from a miracle taking place. On another account given to me by a doctor who was a witness in this case was the healing of a broken back, which again doesn't normally go away on its own instantly.

Karl Cockerel, a member of an American Baptist congregation in Michigan, he was visiting Missouri, and he broke his ankle so badly that they had to keep him overnight in the hospital, and they put a cast on his on his foot, but that night he felt like the Lord appeared to him and told him that he was healed. So the next morning they discharged him; they said, "Okay, follow up with your doctor back in Michigan." His wife drove them back to Michigan, and he went to see his doctor who ordered some new x-rays. So here we have the radiology report on March 7th that his ankle is broken, and the discharge summary; here we have on March 15th, just over a week later, where the new radiology report comes back and says the ankle is not broken. His doctor said to him, "This this information shows not only that you don't have a broken ankle, it shows us that you've never had a broken ankle." And he said, "Well, here's the first radiology report." Doctor said, "No, that's a broken ankle." Joy Joy Wanna Fred was a student at Taylor University in Indiana; she had a condition called vertical heterophoria, where her eyes weren't evenly aligned, and it was it would cause her continual migraine headaches. She had a special prescription lenses to help deal with the the situation, and also this is a picture of her on the pamphlet advertising the condition because she was such a typical case of it that they actually put her picture on the pamphlet. And here's some of the medical documentation surrounding her condition beforehand. She was prayed for by one of the other students at Taylor University and a charismatic prayer group there, and she was instantly and completely healed of vertical heterophoria. She went back to the doctor because the doctor was…

Not a believer in miracles, this doctor said, "Well, I don't believe this is a miracle."

"Have you ever seen this happen before?"

"No, in hundreds of cases I've never seen anything like this happen before."

But even though the doctor didn't believe in miracles, what the doctor was competent to certify, the doctor did certify. She had vertical header for you before; she no longer had it now, and now, in fact, she had 20/20 vision, which I wish I had.

Another case is the case of Greg Spencer. There's a new video out on the internet called "Jesus of Testimony," and it gives Greg Spencer's testimony. I was able to get the medical documentation; I blocked out the names, cuz you know we're not supposed to let the doctors' names out in public and so on, but I have the original information. Greg Spencer had his eyes—they had been deteriorating to the point that in one of his eyes—I think it was not 20/20, but something like 420—his sight was rapidly deteriorating. He was legally blind. And what—what happened was actually nobody prayed for him. He was at a retreat; he had just recently become a Christian, and he wanted his mind to be cleansed. As he was praying, he felt God touch his mind and cleanse his mind of all the bad stuff he put in there years before, and he opened his eyes, and all of a sudden he saw the exit sign in this dark room, and he went outside, and he could see—he could see everything—and his eyes were restored. He had a remarkable return of his visual acuity, as the way his doctor put it. You can see the—the difference in the prescriptions, and this gave a new complication because he'd already—he already had begun receiving disability, and now he had to get off it and prove that he wasn't disabled anymore. And so the state required an investigation, and after the course of a year they said, "Well, it isn't fraud; it actually happened. We don't know why, but he can see now; he's not disabled anymore."

When we look at Hume's argument, one of Hume's arguments against miracles is he won't accept testimonies from other parts of the world, and that—that's important because some of the testimonies you'll be hearing in the next couple days are from other parts of the world as well as here. But Hume's range of considered experience is too narrow. If you look at this—this debate that was going back and forth between Hume and some of his critics, Hume told the story of a prince in a land that was very warm, and these Dutch visitors came and they talked about how in their country people could ride horses on rivers frozen as hard as stone. And the prince said, "That's impossible; that can't happen." And Hume said he was right to think that because in his world it can't happen. And Hume's critics said, "No, you're missing the point. In this case, the eyewitnesses are telling him that it happened; were correct, and he missed a piece of reality because he was limiting reality to his own experience and not listening to witnesses who had a different experience of reality." And that's what Hume's—was doing. Hume said that only ignorant and barbarous nations affirm miracles. Now, if somebody said that today, we call them an ethnocentric bigot, and that actually does apply in his case.

Now, please understand that what I'm—somebody quoted me out of context in this and said that I said that people who don't believe in miracles are 18th-century bigots. I didn't say that. But in Hume's racism is well known. Hume doubted exceptional persons of color. He said, "You know, we in the British Empire have had slaves for—for many generations now, and yet these slaves have never achieved any—any great learning or any great inventions, and all great civilizations in history have been white civilizations," and he went on and on about that and just showed his ignorance of world history. But in any case, he said, "Oh, there is this one Jamaican who can repeat poetry," but look, any—any parent can—with it. The Jamaican to whom he referred was Francis Williams, who composed poetry in English and in Latin, but Hume was so sold on his idea that he wouldn't accept any testimony from other parts of the world.

If any of you heard of Rudolf Bultmann—but maybe—maybe in some of your classes—in any case, Bultmann was a leading figure in the mid-20th century in New Testament, and here's how he dealt with miracles. Now, Bultmann, I don't think was deliberately ethnocentric, but here's how he dealt with miracles: He said, "Well, nobody in the modern world believes in miracles, so we don't need to make an argument against them because nobody believes them anyway." And in one of my doctoral classes where we were dealing with Bultmann, I—I pointed out, "You know, Bultmann just by his presupposition is excludes from the modern world while Orthodox Jews, Christians, Muslims, traditional tribal religionists, spiritists—two-thirds of the PhD students sitting around this table—basically all the world except his mid-twentieth-century Western academic elite." Bultmann said that mature modern people don't believe in miracles. Houston Gonzalez, sailing Latino churches, says that what Bultmann declares to be impossible is not just possible but even frequent. While young, the Methodist bishop of Malaysia said, "Nobody's going to take Bultmann seriously on this in Asia because we know that there are spiritual forces; we know that miracles take place." Bishop Laborde, a Cuban Lutheran bishop that I interviewed, said, "It's gonna be pretty hard to find Latin American Christians who don't believe in miracles," and he gave me his own testimony of being healed from a liver tumor. And there in the office working with him, a secretary used to be a psychologist at the hospital, and because of the way her internal organs were, it was physically impossible for her to ever have a baby, and her colleagues at the hospital—the doctors there—had been really sad, but they said, "This is—this is the way it is." So he—he prayed for her, and nine months later she had a baby. Even in the United States, the 2008 Pew Forum survey declared that 34 percent of Americans claim to witnessed or experienced divine healing.

Now, think—I'm about the end of these; we have a few more minutes, so I want to start into the next batch of slides if that's—if that's correct, just to give some examples of healings of blindness, which I was going to start into tomorrow, but if we get—if we move faster, it's even better because that way there's more that we can cover. But just some cases of healed blindness—this is attested through history too; it's in the early church fathers and so on. Early Methodists attested, 19th-century Lutherans, Johann Christoph Blumhardt testifies about it. Now, by the way, I mentioned Bultmann earlier, and Bultmann said that, "You know, I don't believe these stories about Blumhardt; they're just legends." Well, that fit his worldview. The problem is that today we have the journals and letters of Blumhardt; we have firsthand accounts. They exclude—weren't legends, and it's Bultmann that was mistaken on this. Early 20th-century Anglicans, James More Hickson was a leading figure in this—Anglican bishops from around the world who attested the—the miracles that were taking place. I found about 350 reports of cured blindness. Again, going back to Rex Gardner's "Healing Miracles," just for a couple examples: There was a medical trainee in North Wales; she was dying of meningitis. One of the things that was happening to her also was she—she experienced eye scarring. She was so completely healed after prayer that even the eye scarring disappeared. And there also other cases where that's attested. Well, that doesn't just normally go away on its own. There was a schoolteacher who had been blinded by an accident, and after he was healed he didn't even need the glasses that he'd worn for 20 years before that. We have cases where the eyes were white from cataracts. Now, if somebody's eyes are white from cataracts, you don't actually have to be a physician to recognize, you know, they're not going to be able to see through those very well, where the—the cataracts instantly disappeared in answer to prayer. One of my former students—he did his MDF and then his Doctor of Ministry degree at the seminary where I used to teach—was a Cameroonian Baptist by the name of Paul Mikake, and Paul actually had a number of accounts, so he—he didn't really focus on any particular one, but we had another student from our seminary who was visiting Paul and came back and gave an eyewitness report of being present where Paul prayed for somebody who was blind; the person received their sight. And I asked Paul about it afterwards; he said, "Oh, yeah, that—that happened," but there were just so many accounts he had that one wasn't really any more significant to him than some of the others. Flint McLaughlin—he's the director of Cambridge Business Institute—in 2004 he prayed for a blind man in northern India; the man was instantly healed. Here's the field where he ran in circles praising God, and this is where he told his story, and when it began to weep—one of the—one of the other people—this wasn't Flint—this was one of the other people I interviewed who was present at the scene—but that they asked him, "Why are you weeping?" And he responded, "Because I've always heard the sound of children, but I've never seen their faces before." I think probably that's a—hopefully that'll whet your appetite for what we'll be looking at tomorrow, and you'll be eager to come back, but I'm really grateful to be able to share some of these—these are just samples of the millions of things that God is doing around the world.