Any of you ever had a Supernatural Experience?

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MrMan
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Any of you ever had a Supernatural Experience?

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Have you ever had any supernatural experiences? Experiences that cannot be explained by a materialistic view of the universe as composed purely of atoms and energy that follow laws of physics?
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Yohan
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Re: Ever Had a Supernatural Experience?

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No, never. Supernatural experiences do not exist, but we are often unable to understand and explain them. As an excuse of our own inability to understand them, we call them 'supernatural' - but they are not supernatural.

In the past, very much which was going on could not be explained by those people living 500 or 1000 or 3000 years ago... so they said, it is all 'made by God'. However research made big progress, especially during the last 50 years, but still of course not all can be explained, but nowadays we consider many phenomenons which were 'made by God' in the past as something 'perfectly normal being around us by a materialistic view'.
MrMan
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Re: Ever Had a Supernatural Experience?

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I posted this elsewhere on the forum.

I believed in God before I saw any specific answers to prayer that I recall. In fact, believing that you have received what you asked for is a condition for one of the promises about receiving what you ask for in the Bible. Most of life as a Christian is kind of 'mundane', and that's okay. A lot of answers to prayer are mundane things. But they aren't all like that. If you hear Christians say, "God answers prayer", it's not only stuff like when they were in 6th grade they prayed to do well on a history test and got an A. Thank God for answering prayers like that. But many prayers are a lot more specific.

I will share a few things. I may be a bit stingy with exact details partly becuase I like to keep my identity secret on some forums, and on other forums, it is not secret. I'm not a celebrity or anything, but traveling in some countries it is good to be secret.

Anyway, I've had some pretty specific answers to prayer. Once my wife was going through a really moody phase when she was pregnant, and was very hard to get along with. She told me about something the Lord had told her about someone, and the girl later told her that same thing. That's something else I'll talk about later-- God telling people things. Anyway, my wife wasn't being very nice to me. She went to a friend's house, an older lady from church who was a good influence. I remembered my wife commenting on the Lord telling her something about that woman, and I thought if she is hearing God like that (still), then I'll ask God to speak to her about some things about our marriage, some blind spots she seemed to have about her own attitude. I did. I prayed maybe 6 or 7 things. So a few nights later, she comes back from this church program she was going to, and sits on the coach. She asks me to sit next to her. She starts apologizing for how she'd talked to me. She said the Lord had spoken to her about....then she goes through this rather detailed and specific list of things I'd prayed about. Except I'd just prayed a little, and it's like for every paragraph I prayed, she got a lot of detail I hadn't prayed about. It was so specific it was really amazing. I know I'm being vague. Part of that is because I've posted that on the Internet elsewhere, and part of it was because that was years ago. Pregnancy can make women moody, but after this, her attitude toward me changed, and the experience was good for our marriage.

My family was moving from one place to another after I finished a grad school program and didn't have a regular job. We were so low on cash, it was amazing we could move. Fortunately, I had more frequent flier miles saved up, and we could fly to our new destination. During a prayer meeting, my wife whispered to me that so-and-so had just given her a certain amount of money, several hundred dollars. I prayed and told God I'd like it if someone gave me that same amount of money. Not long after that, maybe an hour or so later, someone did. A woman we knew from church said she and her husband had discussed it and wanted to give us some money. I knew they weren't that well off financially, and I was going to give it back, but when I saw it was the exact amount I prayed for, I did not dare give it back. I told them I'd pray for God to provide for them.

Throughout the years, I have usually gone to churches that believe in spiritual gifts like prophecy and healing. When I was young, at one church, we'd pray for each other a lot after services. I'd start praying about people's personal experiences, private stuff, whatever. I did not always realize what the words I was praying meant to them, though. I was praying words or ideas I was getting to pray. I consider this to be in the category of 'word of knowledge' though some may consider it to be prophesying. A couple of young men I knew used to go out on the streets of this college town we lived near to share their faith. They'd been drug users before repenting of all that stuff. I was out with them. It was about 1:50 in the morning. I sensed that we should not go home yet. They hadn't prayed with anyone or really ministered much to anyone that night. The one guy wanted to go home, so I prayed that if the Lord wanted us to stay, that he'd send someone around the corner with a certain outfit, a certain color hat, certain color shirt, and certain color shoes. The guy next to me said that we'd be there all night. I continued praying, 'In the next two minutes' and set my stop watch. In about a minute and 50 seconds, a guy walked around the corner wearing that same outfit. I'd never seen him before as far as I know. We asked him what color shoes he was wearing, and he confirmed it was the color I said. It was hard to tell under the yellow lights. We told him what happened and talked with him. He'd thought about becoming a Christian.

I don't really prophesy, not the long messages. I have gotten what I consider words of knowledge from time to time. It happened a lot for a certain period of time when I was younger, probably because I was praying with people a lot. A few weeks, ago, I was at a church conference. The conference was about prophecy and we were asked to break up into small groups and prophesy over each other. That's not something I'd say to do or recommend. I did not prophesy, but I got a couple of words for people. One was about this young guy in the group of three we were in playing the guitar. I don't really think in pictures, but I could sort of see him playing the guitar. It's not as impressive as some of the other prophecies that people get, but Christians have different gifts, like the Bible teaches.

I've also witnessed a few healings. One was when I was in middle school where a girl at school was healed of severly crossed eyes and other vision problems. It was really obvious that she had been healed. I've heard people say in meetings their hearing was healed and things like that. I interviewed a old woman after she'd been prayed for once at a meeting who said she had not been able to walk without an oxygen tank before being prayed for. I have also had a few people tell me they were healed after I'd prayed for them, mostly leg and foot problems. Many years ago, I'd heard a preacher talk about hearing a knee pop when he prayed for it, and I prayed for that to happen. I was praying for this homeless guy who was staying with a relative whose leg was messed up. He'd gone to the emergency room and couldn't afford the specialist they said he needed. So I prayed for it, and it popped. He said it was better. The relative who'd introduced us said his leg was doing better afterward, but he went back to the town he came from and so I never saw him after I prayed for him.

My wife prophesies sometimes, and at times she has prophesied quite a bit. She's gotten lengthy prophecies for people who've talked to her about it later. She got all kinds of details about the problems one woman had in her marriage. Sometimes, she prophesies stuff and doesn't really know the significance of it like the individual receiving it does. That's how it works sometimes. I've gotten words of knowledge about people and she'd prophesy the same thing before I told the individual. I've had that happen before at another meeting, where my attention would be drawn to someone, I'd pray for the individual, get a word of knowledge for him, then someone prophesies for the person, including what I'd gotten for the individual. Some people who prophesy or interpret tongues I've talked to tell me there are times they get a prophecy or interpretation of tongues and someone else gives the same message before they do. I've experienced this myself and seen it with others, where I go one place and someone prophesies something about me or someone else, and I go somewhere else and someone else prophesies the same thing. This sort of thing happens when the person prophesying doesn't know who he's prophesying over, as has happened to me.

Some individuals get extremely detailed prophecies or words of knowledge that deal with personal details about the individuals life or situation that they could no naturally know. One man I saw could go on for hours and hours with complete strangers. That was back when I was young and still lived with my parents when I was in college. They'd been talking about building a house. He prophesied about that, describing some details of the property they would later have, talked a bit about my father's occupation. I worked with the assistant pastor's wife, and I was sitting behind her. She'd whisper some details to me on occasion. When he prophesied about the cruise one person was going on or the camp someone else would be working at, she said "He's working at a summer camp" or "He's going on a cruise" or stuff like that. I know the guy had never met my parents and I hadn't told those details to anyone there.

I've posted another thread about a guy prophesying specific details on this forum. I haven't met the guy in the video, but I have seen that sort of thing elsewhere. Most people I've seen prophesy don't go on with a lot of details like he does, except for the guy who prophesied over my parents, who seemed to get even more detailed and go on and on and on for hours like that.

I know I am just some guy posting on an Internet forum and you don't know anything about me. But you should consider that some of us Christians do experience God working in our lives and in our churches in ways where it really would not make any sense at all for us to suddenly become atheists. It would certainly go against good sense and reason for me to do that with what I've experienced.

If you had experienced the things I've described, what would you believe?

I've got some training in applying the scientific method. I have an earned doctorate with some social science training, including a bit of psychology at the PhD level. So I have some training examining evidence. From my perspective, a lot of what I have witnessed could not be explained with a materialistic Scooby Doo show view of the world.

Not all Christians have the same set of experiences I have with spiritual gifts. Not all churches are really into these things. But I think you'd find if you ask them that there are many Christians who have experienced God answering quite specific prayers if they've prayed with faith, if you asked around.

It's not just a case of people believing what they want to believe, based on whatever culture they are in and whatever books they were exposed to as a child, with no evidence to back up any beliefs. There is historical evidence, the writings of witnesses of Jesus Christ's life who witnessed that He rose from the dead after He died on a cross. And there is also contemporary evidence of the working of God in the lives of people today.
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