You'll never believe it...... if you don't want to

Today I was reading in the book of Acts, chapter two. It happened shortly after the death and resurrection of Jesus and it's the story of when the Holy Spirit first comes to the group of believers gathered in Jerusalem. The events of that day were pretty spectacular: there was the sound of a powerful wind storm; while still indoors, the believers saw something that looked like small flames on each others' heads; and then they spilled into the streets and began declaring the acts of God in lots of different languages. The people who heard them were amazed because they were hearing the gospel in their own languages, spoken by a crowd of Galileans who had never learned any of those languages. No wonder three thousand people responded to Peter's preaching and came into the Kingdom of God that day!

Yet, even when God manifests Himself as powerfully and obviously as He did in these first few verses of Acts chapter two, there are always going to be people who doubt it and dismiss it. Despite the miracle of hundreds of Galileans declaring what God had done in all the languages of the known world, and despite the fact that it was only breakfast time, there were still some in the crowd (vs 13) who said, "These people must be drunk."

It's not a very convincing perspective, in my opinion. I don't know if you've ever had the misfortune to have to make your way through the city centre after the pubs have closed. How often did you hear the neighbourhood drunks fluently praising God in other languages? The effects of too much alcohol generally tend to make people less coherent in their own language and not to make them speak clearly in a language they have never learned.

But it's a fact of life that, no matter how much evidence there is, human beings are unlikely to believe something if they are knowingly or unknowingly unwilling to. If you have decided in your heart that God no longer speaks directly to people today, you are probably one of those people who say that you have never heard God's voice. If you believe that prayer doesn't make a difference, that God doesn't hear and answer what we ask, then you'll dismiss all evidence of answered prayer as simply coincidence. If you choose not to believe in the existence of God, then you won't notice the things He does, even though the evidence of His existence is all around you. There's an element of truth in the old maxim that we believe what we want to believe... and we don't believe what we don't want to believe.

What are you unwilling to believe by faith? How tragic if that unbelief prevents you from seeing and experiencing the things that God has for you.