1 Corinthians 12:8–11: “For one person is given through the Spirit the message of wisdom, and another the message of knowledge according to the same Spirit, to another faith by the same Spirit, and to another gifts of healing by the one Spirit, to another performance of miracles, to another prophecy, and to another discernment of spirits, to another different kinds of tongues, and to another the interpretation of tongues. It is one and the same Spirit distributing as He decides to each person who produces all those things.”

I am saying that Paul did not give us a definition here. We are hundreds of years removed from when this was first written, so I am giving you my best estimation.

I have talked about faith, and we need to understand the language here. It is not “word of faith.” It is message or word of knowledge, which I believe means communicating God’s word. Another one is word of wisdom, which I believe is also about communicating God’s word. One has to do with something to know; wisdom has to do with something to do, something focused on solution, something to do to resolve an issue, to resolve a problem.

And to another, gifts of healing by the one Spirit.

This is one of the clearest. It has to do with the work of God in people’s bodies. That is what we see here, and we see the operation of that in the life of Jesus Christ. We see Peter at the Beautiful Gate saying, “Silver and gold I do not possess, but what I have I give to you. In the name of Jesus Christ the Nazarene, stand up and walk” (Acts 3:6). You now see that it is a gift. He said, “What I have, I give you.” It is a gift operating through Peter.

So when you talk about gifts of healing, something is happening to your body, and it could be the mind. A lot of the time the operation of evil spirit and healing come together in the ministry of Jesus. Look at the woman who was bent over for years, and Jesus Christ said the devil had bound her for so-and-so number of years (Luke 13:11, 16). There was no casting out of a devil recorded there, but there was a freeing of that woman from whatever was binding her. That is the operation of a gift. So it is clear here, at the risk of repeating myself, that the gifts of healing here are talking about something happening to your body.

And the next verse is 10: “To another, the performance of miracles.”

So you may ask yourself, are healings not miracles? And you will be correct, because you see that it is almost linked together here. Look at the first part: message of wisdom, message of knowledge—in a way they are linked together. Then you have faith, then you have gifts of healing, and you have miracles, almost like faith and gifts of healing and miracles are going together.

Performance of miracles. Of Jesus Christ, we are told that He was given the Spirit without limits (John 3:34). So if you want to look at somebody who exhibited all the gifts to the max, you will need to look at Jesus.

A powerful example of a miracle—something that happened to benefit other people, but has nothing to do with the body—is what we see with the multiplication of food. That is clearly a performance of miracles, for people to eat (Matthew 14:19–21; Matthew 15:35–38). The turning of water into wine was clearly a performance of miracles (John 2:7–10). So we can begin to say, if it does not have anything to do with the body, but it benefits a lot of people, then we can call it the performance of miracles.

We do not want to mix it together. We do not want to say, “Okay, everything is just everything.” No. That is my estimation. I am just giving my estimation. We want to have a clear delineation that this is miracle. Miracle I am defining as out of the ordinary.

And we have miracles also in the Old Testament: the ax head floating (2 Kings 6:5–7), the widow whose food multiplied and lasted days (1 Kings 17:14–16). These do not have anything to do with the body or mind. In the case of the people, the lunatics, that Jesus Christ healed, we can call that the gifts of healing, because it is personal to their body, personal to the functioning of their mind, functioning of their senses, functioning of the body in different ways.

But miracle is not about the body. Do you get how I am making that distinction now? We cannot call it faith, because it is not just something spectacular like the tree drying up. That is faith in operation (Mark 11:20–21).

You can say to yourself, “Is it not faith also in all these things that is operating?” But we are trying to follow the technicality here. We are trying to make it narrow based on this list, trying to narrow the definitions based on this list. And I said this is just my estimation. This is how I am approaching it.

The performance of miracles is a powerful deed to benefit other people. The multiplication of food, water turning into wine—those are my examples.

God bless you.