he reminds me that the Holy Spirit truly DOES change our lives and is the Promise of our eternal life with Jesus. it is so sad to think that many Christians think that the Holy Spirit does not work in our lives the way He did in the first century.

i am desperate and needy. i need my precious Good Shepherd to guide me and i need the Holy Spirit to help me understand and i am so grateful for His gifts.

why anyone would spurn those gifts is beyond me.

In response to Craig Keener,

Cessationists do believe in miracles. They, in keeping with their theocentric beliefs, hold that God sovereignly heals when and how He chooses to. That may be the old lady in hospital diagnosed with cancer. It may mean the next door neighbor with a cold. When proven, no miracle worker was near the scene of the true life event. What they don’t believe in are miracles of the Schleiermacher order as Keener suggests we must accept them: based on the ‘experience’ of others. That is how the majority of miracles today are claimed to occur, yet for some inexplicable reason can never be proven. When insisted they be proven, no compelling evidence is brought forward. Instead of alleviating the suspicions of cessationists, it only succeeds in alarming them further. And the flourishing exposes of fake faith-healers courtesy of Youtube and Facebook does not calm our growing agitation, but rather ignites a holy fervor within us. This does not promote continuationist claims, but rather harms their cause.

That there should be an abundance of miracles as claimed by Keener runs contrary to the very definition of a miracle: an extraordinary event. Thereby it does not follow how faith-healers can claim to work mass healings to the tune of thousands of people – which they themselves insist happens. They!

I am happy that Keener has cleared up the fact that there is no cause-and-effect relationship between anti-supernaturalism and cessationism, and can even understand that on the surface there appears to be some kind of relationship. But Keener still needs to show why cessationists believe in the miracles of the Bible, while anti-supernaturalists do not. That he cannot explain it, except that he admit that two very different sets of presuppositions are at work, cannot justify the greatest difficulty Keener is yet faced with: that they reach very different conclusions, and, to borrow a favorite term from Keener, produce very different ‘experiences’. ‘Hard’ cessationism, grounded in Scottish realism, is indeed a very ‘hard’ case to crack. Ruthven and Keener may think they have wowed the crowds, but Bible-believing cessationists remain theologically unfazed.
– Jacques Schoeman