# God is in Control

Key Passage: John 20:30
Date: June 7, 2024

I have a question for you. Do you believe in miracles? Do you think the Lord still works miracles? Or is that a gone, a New Testament deal?

Look at the verse in verse 30. “And many other signs or miracles truly did Jesus in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book. But these are written that ye might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing you might have life through his name.”

Now, here is the purpose of miracles. The Lord doesn’t work a miracle for me. He works it not for my benefit to help me physically when I need healing or to provide money when I need financing.

What he does is to work miracles in order that people might see miracles and believe, that I might believe when they work for me and other people who see it. Miracles are a fascinating subject in your Bible, and I want to deal with the subject of miracles tonight.

Notice many other signs. That means that Jesus worked more than the 35 recorded miracles in the Bible. Basically, there are 250 miracles that are listed and spelled out and presented to us in the Bible.

From Abraham all the way to Jesus, we have one miracle every eight years if you spanned it out over that time. So that really is not a lot of miracles. One every eight years from Abraham to Jesus would cover all the miracles that are recorded in the Bible.

The definition of a miracle is God overpowers a natural law. Now we have certain basic natural laws like the law of gravity. God put ten basic laws of nature into effect: the law of gravity.

You don’t have to pay any attention, you don’t have to believe it, but if you violate it, you’ll pay a terrible price. There is a law there that you are not going to change and I’m not going to change.

God put a second law called the law of centrifugal force. Now, you swing a bucket of water around with a rope on the end of it, and you could put it out there like that. And then finally you could work out to where that water is up, that bucket of water is upside down, the water stays in the bucket and doesn’t come down. That’s centrifugal force, an amazing force that is involved in the creation of God. That is a major miracle.

Then there’s the law of aerodynamics. You could take a 747 or one of the big B-1 bombers that my son works on in the Air Force, and you can take hundreds of thousands of tons and just fly right up into the air and float through the air like a little bird. That’s the aerodynamics—it’s a basic law of lift that God has put into creation.

There’s a fourth law called the first law of thermodynamics, and that is everything continues in its vein of existence. Puppies have—I mean, dogs have puppies, puppies, and cats have kittens, and people have babies, and so on. Now, those are basic laws that you’re not going to change that basic thing. And you could go into 25 or 30 different areas, but it’s called the first law of thermodynamics: that everything just reproduces after its own self, and it stays in its vein, and nothing switches over from one species to another.

Then there’s the law called the second law of thermodynamics, that everything is slowly winding down and everything is unvinding, and soon gradually it begins to rust or to rot.

I had a man in Washington D.C. He says, “Pastor Wallace, how’d you like to see a star that nobody’s ever seen before?” I said, “I really would.” He said, “I’ll tell you what, after church, if you only go with me. I work at the space center over in the Washington area.”

And he said, “They’re notifying me that there’s a star coming that’s going to cross over, and I have to clock it, and I have to write down some stuff on my pad about it and turn it in to the people who are studying this.” And so in a few minutes, he said, “Okay, and it should be showing up now. Here it comes. Here it is. You want to see it? Look.” And it was gone. He said, “Now you’re the only one besides me who will ever see that in the history of the world.” That’s amazing.

Now, number six, there’s the law of reproduction. We know about babies being born, puppies being born, kid. That’s the law of reproduction. And the Lord has given the basic law of certain connections: a seed here, and a little seed here. When the two touch, you have life. And that shows up in the various realms, and we’re all familiar with that.

And then there’s the law of sowing and reaping. When you put a grain of corn in the ground, you can expect to get grain. You can expect corn to come up and not wheat or barley or rice. It sticks in its family. So it’s called the law of sowing and reaping.

Then there’s the law of variety in regulation. Every oak tree has oak leaves on it, and all of them are identical. And I can come in here and say, “Class, hold, what is this?” And I can hold up an oak leaf and you would say, “That’s a leaf.” Yeah, okay. “What kind of leaf?” “It’s an oak leaf.” “All right, how you know it is?” “Well, it’s just like every other oak leaf’s ever been on an oak tree.” Okay, so that’s why it’s an oak leaf. But I want to tell you there’s never, ever been two oak leaves since creation that were identical.

Never two that are the same width, the same height, the same thickness, the same shade of color, the same membranes, or the same number of atoms or protons or protons or peons or atoms or none of that. It’s never been one the same. Same thing’s true with a hair on your head. Pull a hair off your head and that hair has a DNA count on it that will identify you. You’re the only one in the universe that never had that count, but no two hairs on your head have ever had the same length or the same radius or the same shade of color or never. You said, “My hair is all the same color.” No, no. Every hair on your head is a little different shade of color than any other hair on your head, and it’s different than any other shade of anybody else’s hair on anybody else’s head since Adam because of variety. God put a law of variety into recreation along with a law of regularity. Everything falls into categories and schools, but no two have ever been the like.

Talking about hair, one woman said to her husband, “Honey, do you think you’re going to love me when I get old and gray?” He said, “I don’t know why. I wouldn’t have loved you through three or four colors already.”

Then there is the law of evaporation and condensation. The sun shines on little ponds and pools and the lakes and evaporates the water up into the sky. That’s evaporation. But then the temperatures change up there, and it falls down in the form of dew or rain or snow or hail. The evaporation—that law is in the operation of nature, and it’s been going on since creation. It’ll continue until the Lord shuts it all down.

And then, of course, there’s the law of cause and effect, and that is that every cause has an effect, and everything we do will have some kind of result. And whatsoever man sows, that shall he also reap. Okay, and you can go on and on with that.

So basically, these laws. Now, when the Lord overpowers one of those laws, then that’s a miracle. If it doesn’t respond or react the way nature says it’s supposed to, that’s because, supernaturally, it was intervened by the hand of God.

Now, the number of miracles: Moses worked eight miracles, and so did Elijah. Moses saw the rod turned to snake. He saw the ten plagues and the sea divided, and the drowning of Pharaoh’s army, and the bitter waters returned to sweet, the water from the rock when he smote or spoke to it. The Amalekites, when his arms were up, they won the battle; when his arms were down, they lost. And then there was Korah. 250 men were dropped into the ocean or down into the earth because of sin. That was God’s miracle. And then the serpent on the pole and Aaron’s rod that budded. These were the eight recorded miracles of Moses.

Elijah had eight. And then when Elijah prayed for a double portion of his spirit, we have exactly 16 miracles recorded in the life of Elijah. When Jesus came on the scene, he worked 35 miracles.

Now, actually, he worked hundreds, maybe thousands of miracles. The Bible says in six places, and he healed the multitudes, okay? And then he sent his disciples out, and they came back, and they were flabbergasted that they had the power to work miracles.

But these are separate from the basic 35 recorded. But the Bible says, “Now, Jesus recorded these miracles and he had a reason.” “Many other signs did Jesus in the presence of his disciples.” He had let them see it in order that they might believe because they were going to write gospels and they were going to give testimony so that we could have the gospel.

Now the question is, does he keep working miracles?

Now, there are six categories of what people would refer to as miracles. One of them we call anomaly. An anomaly. What does that mean? I have no idea. Okay. But what is an anomaly? An anomaly is the fact that God hung the moon on nothing. He just stuck it up there. Okay? A bumblebee.

Anybody with any scientific knowledge knows that the law of aerodynamics will prove that a bumblebee could not fly. But he didn’t know it, and so he just goes ahead and flies. Okay? A bumblebee is not built to fly. His wings are too little, his body’s too big, he’s too heavy, and so forth. But this is an anomaly, a changing of the natural law, and there are many others of these. You could get hummingbirds involved. You study birds or study animals. You’ll see a whole lot of what we were referred to as an anomaly.

And then secondly, there’s the category of what we call magic. That is sleight of hand. It might be that a guy would pull a rabbit out of a hat. Is that a miracle? How about if he cuts a woman in two, and then in a few minutes she comes and waves and smiles and she’s all right. Okay, the magicians. That’s called magic. There’s nothing miraculous about that. That’s sleight of hand, and that is doing things by pulling cards out from the cuffs and all this sort of thing. Those are magic.

Then there’s third, what we call psychosomatic or imagination. Something that I think, and I didn’t really see it or I didn’t really feel or I didn’t really hear it, but I think I did. Now, for instance, your mind is very interesting. We have a professor in the seminary down at Dallas, Dallas Theological Seminary, but the name of Norseller. Some of you have read his book. He’s a Greek theologian. He’s just a well-known man. And he had an allergy. If he would get around a bouquet of flowers, he would start dripping, and tears would come out of his eyes and all to get choked up, couldn’t preach.

So he’s going to church. First thing you do, tell him you’ve got to move that bouquet. He went into the church. He said, “Great, big bouquet in the front.” And Geisler said to one of them, “You’ve got to move that, get that out of here, that thing.” And he was sneezing and coughing. And God said to Dr. Geisler, “They’re plastic.” But he imagined them to be real, and it had the same effect. That we call psychosomatic.

One fellow said something about, “I want to talk to you about psychosomatic,” and the guy says, “I want to talk about psychosuramics.” And the guy said, “Excuse me, didn’t you mean to say psychosomatic?” He said, “No. I said what I meant: psychosuramics. I’m talking about crackpots.”

Okay. Number four, we have what we call satanic signs. You remember when Moses got the rod turned into a snake, the Egyptian magicians did the same thing. How did they turn their rods into snakes? It was satanic power. How about all ten plagues that came on Egypt? If you had time to build a sermon or Sunday school lesson, all ten of the plagues were judgments on one of their thousands of gods. They worshipped cows in Egypt, and as a result, their cows were plagued with all kinds of sores and all. They worshipped people, and so little babies all died, and they worshipped the water, and the water turned to blood. Those ten plagues are curses on ten false gods of Egypt, and this is called satanic judgments on the on the on the on the on the Egypt’s gods. Uh, you know, the they had the frogs and the cattle and the sun and the firstborns and all these, all that sort of thing. So that we call the satanic kind of things that take place that nobody can explain.

Then there’s number five, what we call divine providence. Is this a miracle? Well, you’ll have to decide for yourself. There was a day when tens of thousands of soldiers were coming across the beaches of Normandy, and they were being slaughtered, killed by the thousands, and a fog set in on this in 1945 and just blanketed the whole area and allowed tens of thousands of American and British soldiers to make the invasion on the beach, and they won the battle against Germany at that place, and everybody who writes a history book says this is the strangest natural effect that has ever taken place in the world. We believe that was divine providence. I don’t know what you would think about it. If you’re a secular humanist, you probably would laugh at it if you read it in the book, and that’s why they don’t put it in books. But if you’ll get one of the Christian history books, at several appendants, you’ll find that kind of material.

How about the time when Napoleon decided that he would invade England, and he brought four or five hundred ships—armada, it was called—his armada. And they were going to invade Egypt and—I mean, England—and there was no question that he would be able to defeat them. Nothing could stop him, except some storms came up, and hundreds and hundreds of his ships immediately went to the bottom of the ocean, and finally in defeat, he turned around and went back to France. Total defeat. Every Christian historian says that was divine providence.

There was a time when Alexander the Great decided that he would conquer Russia. And so he loaded his army up. He’d already conquered countries all around. Russia was the holdout, and so as he invaded, he made the bad mistake of going up there in the wintertime because France is tropical, and the French soldiers are not used to 10, 15 inches of snow. And so when they got up into Egypt, there were blizzards of snow, and the Russians knew how to handle it because it was common. But the French couldn’t handle it. Then they died by the thousands, and the rest of them retreated in defeat. And all historians say that was divine providence.

How about we read in Sennacherib’s army where Jerusalem was surrounded by 185,000 soldiers, and there was absolutely no way they were going to be able to keep from being defeated, except the next morning I read in a book where 185,000 soldiers woke up dead. That’s a strange expression. But they were laying all over the battlefield dead. All of those are called divine providence, and we have many, many other cases where we might ourselves feel that same way about it.

So that’s anomalies and magic and psychosomatic imagination, satanic signs, divine providence, and then miracles. Now, miracles are different than all those others. When Noah built the ark, that was a major first-class miracle, and God helped him to do it. No question about that. When Jonah was belched up on the shore at Nineveh—you talk about a miracle, a three-day miracle in the belly of the fish. How about Daniel coming out of that lion’s den? And how about the Hebrew children coming out of the fiery furnace? And how about little David killing that big giant and on and on and on? Now, these are miracles, Old Testament miracles.

Now, there are also some things. Now, God couldn’t do anything he wants to do, right? Now really, can he? Except God cannot go against his laws. Can you go? Now, for instance, can God make a square circle? Could God make a one-ended stick? Can God have a married bachelor? Is there such a thing as an honest politician?

God cannot lie, God cannot change. That’s different. Now, if I had time, I’d give you 25 more of those little humor things, but that’s not our purpose tonight. But think about a one-ended stick. Think about a square circle and so on, so on. Okay, now on the basis of this, does God still work miracles? Do you believe what I believe? The Bible says that God is immutable and God changes not. He is the same yesterday, today, and forever. Now, what he did in Moses’ Day and what he did in Jesus’ Day, he can and does do in our day. He does work supernatural miracles. Now, there may be differences about how he does it. This beginning of miracles did Jesus in the land of Galilee, and his disciples believed on him. He worked there, and he might work some miracles.

Let me tell you that I believe God works miracles.

Now, I went to Bible College. I had built a brand new house when I was married at the age of 20 and married a beautiful lady by the name of Jan at the age of 20. And we saved our money for about a year and a half, two years before we were married. We’d get a date, and we would go out and spend her money at McDonald’s or at Burger King, or we actually didn’t have McDonald’s and Burger King. There was somebody else that was around. Okay. Now, I’m talking about 1950, okay, when we were courting. Okay?

Now, I would get my check from General Motors and give it to her, and she would go put it in her bank account, and then she would cash her check and give me enough money to pay my mother some board at our house, and she would give her mother some money at her house, and then we would use the rest of it to run my little jalopy car and go dating and buy hamburgers. Okay? Now, we had enough money so that we bought a brand new house, made a down payment on it. It was a brand new house built in a brand new subdivision. It was two bedrooms and one bath, and just a real good little starter home.

And listen to this, I paid $6,750 for it. Okay? Now, I sold it a year later for $9,650. So the price was going up. But boy, I wish I could buy 100 of them now and rent them all out. Okay. But we sold our house because the Lord said to me, “I want you to quit your job at General Motors, and I want you to sell your house. I want you to go to Bible College and learn to be a preacher.”

I said, “Lord, now, are you sure about this? Do you, Lord, you wouldn’t use me as a preacher, a pastor of the church, if I was divorced, would you?” And he seemed to say, “Well, no, I don’t guess it would.” “But why would you bring that up?” I said, “When I go home and tell my wife what you’re telling me, she can go and divorce me.”

And he assured me that he’s going to take care of that. Well, when we talked about it, the Lord had given her the peace that I had. We sold our house and I went to Bible College. And we had that difference between $6,750 and $9,600—a couple thousand dollars—to move 600 miles and then to pay the tuition and rent of a house and pay for the incidentals. And we had a little money left over, and so I got a job working for Dr. Lee Robertson as a church visitor. Instead of going to a factory and trying to work eight hours, trying to study, trying to raise the family, and all the things.

And I said, “Lord, if you’d let me, I want to be involved in the things that I’m going to be doing, not going to be learning while I’m out there knocking on the door and all. I mean, that’s what I’m here for. I want to learn that instead of going into the class and sit down, I want to put it—I’ll get on a bus route.” So I had a bus route. Now, we started working, and we started using our money, and I would go to school four hours in the morning, and then I’d come home and say, “Hurry, honey, hurry, get me something to fix. I want to go out. I got a visit four hours this afternoon.” I did that five days a week, and then I would come back and have supper with my wife, and then we’d go on an extension meeting that evening, and I did that on a regular basis.

And one day I ran home, and I said, “Hurry, honey, and get me something to eat because I need to get out and do my work.” And she said, “Honey, I’ll hurry and fix you something to eat if you’ll hurry down the store and get me something to fix.” I said, “Well, look, I’ll hurry down the store and get you something to fix if you’ll hurry up and give me a little bit of your money to get it with.” She said, “Now you know I don’t have any money.” I said, “Well, that makes two of us. I don’t have any either.” She said, “Is the money all gone?” I said, “Every penny of it.” She said, “What are we going to do?”

I said, “Well, I’ll tell you. How about if we play George Mueller?” She said, “How do you play that?” I said, “I read in a book in the library that George Mueller prayed down $9 million with food and clothing for his orphans over in England. And I also read in Acts 1:34 that God has no respect for persons. What he’s done for George Mueller, he’ll do for Tom Wallace and Jan Wallace.” And she said, “Well, yeah, I guess so. But right now, what are we going to do today right now?” Women can be practical, you know.

And I said, “Well, I don’t know, but we don’t have to worry about it because there’s a sign over at the school on the chapel wall that says, ‘Where God guides, he provides.’” I said, “Do you believe God guided?” She said, “Well, I’m sure he did.” I said, “Well, that sign, I believe that sign.” It says, and we had a preacher come up from Texas to preach in our chapel. His name was Get-off or Fall-off or Fall-off or Fall-off—no, Roloff. That’s what it was: Roloff. And Brother Roloff said, “Boy, like that, ‘Where God guides he provides,’ let me translate that in detection for you: ‘Where he leads, he feeds.’” I said, “Man, I like that translation.”

So I told her, I said, “You sit down there and I’ll sit here, and you let me hold your hand, and we’re going to pray God will feed us.” And I prayed, “Dear Lord, now I quit my job like you told me, and we sold our house like you told us, and we’re here now, and I’ve got to go out and visit for you this afternoon, and Lord, would you send us something to eat?” And so help me, I said, “Excuse me, Lord, there’s somebody at our door.”

And I got up and went to the door, and here was our little next-door neighbor lady. She’s about five foot tall. She’s from Georgia. And she’s standing there, and she said, “Brother Wallace, y’all like tuna fish?” Took her about five minutes to say that. They know Georgia people talk slow, you know. She had two cans of tuna fish. She said, “I’m over here cleaning out my cupboards, and I found these two cans of tuna fish, and we despise this stuff. Could you like to have these?”

I look down there, it looked like two great big fat turkeys. Boy, we opened up those cans and found some pickles, and we found some onions and some mayonnaise, and stirred it all up, and found a box of crackers, and drank a glass of water with it. And I went out that afternoon, hollering, “Jehovah Jireh, the Lord does provide!” And I quoted Philippians 4:19 to everybody I came in contact with: “My God shall supply all of your needs according to his riches and glory in Christ Jesus.”

And I ran into this big old guy. Man, he was big. He was about 5’ 27". He had his hands folded. He said, “Now, a young man, that’s very interesting that you told me about that, two cans of tuna fish and all that. But now let me ask you something: what are you going to eat for supper?” And suddenly I realized he was challenging me, but not me—he’s challenging God. And I put my little bony, skinny preacher finger right up in his face, and I said, “Mr., now you look here. The same God that handles lunch, he can handle supper just as well.” I think it’s the best sermon I ever preached.

He said, “Well, maybe so. Now, but maybe you better let me help you a little bit.” And he reached in his pocket and got a $10 bill, handed it to me. In 1950, a $10 bill was like a $100 bill today. And we could go to the store four or five times on $10 in 1950. And we just enjoyed it.

Well, that evening I went on an extension meeting, and a little white-haired man came up who was our bus director. We were having this bus meeting out on the lawns, and he said, “Tom Wallace, would you do something if I ask you to?” I said, “What do you want me to do? I believe I would.”

He said, “Tomorrow at 12:30, would you take your car and go park it at a certain place?” And he named two streets. He said, “Park right there, and there’s a big building on the corner there. You walk up a little alley behind that building, and there’s big metal doors there. You knock on one of those metal doors, and a girl’s going to stick her head out, and you grin and tell her, ‘I am Tom Wallace.’” He said, “Can you handle that?” I said, “I think I’m about the only guy around here who could.” He said, “Let me know how you make out.”

Okay, so I went over there, banged on the door. Sure enough, that girl stuck her head out. I grinned at her, I told her I’m Tom Wallace. She said, “You wait right there, Miss Wallace. I’ll be right back.” She came back and she handed me a big paper plate full of hot roast beef, and it had some hot gravy poured on top of it. And then there was a paper plate lid on top of it. And there’s another one sitting on top of that one. This one had mashed potatoes with gravy poured in that. And this one had a lid on it. And then there was another one sitting on top of that. And this one had some broccoli with some hot cheese on it. And there was a lid on that. And this one had these big three-inch rolls, the whole plate full of them, and a lid on that. And this one had banana pudding on it with a lid on top. See, there you are, Mr. Tom Wallace.

I put those on the seat of the car and drove home and set them on our table, and we took the lids off and set them down to eat out of. Don’t even have to wash dishes when God sends them. And we had plenty, plenty for lunch, and we had plenty left over for supper.

And I went out on another meeting that evening, and that little old man said, “Did you do what I asked you to do?” And I said, “I sure did. I want to thank you.” He said, “How’d you like to do that again sometime?” I said, “You name the time, man, I know the place.” He said, “How about you don’t try that again tomorrow?” I said, “I will.” He said, “How about the next day?” “I’ll do it.” “How about the day after that?” He said, “In fact, I got it worked out. He said, you can do that every day as long as you want to, seven days a week.” Guess what I did? I took him up on it. Two solid years, over 700 times I knocked on that door in answer to one prayer: “Lord, we sold our house. I quit my job. Now, would you feed us?” That is a miracle. Now, you call it whatever you want to, you think any way you want to, but in me, in my mind, I’m going to call that a miracle until I get to the throne and thank God personally, okay?

All right. Now, I was also… Dr. Lee Robertson stood up in chapel and he said, “You young men, you’re going to be pastors of churches and missionaries. I want you to start acting like it. I want you to wear a suit and tie. I want you to wear a clean shirt and come in here to these classes. Don’t go dragging in here looking like a bum now. Get dressed. Get dressed now.”

And I didn’t have any suits, and I was in trouble. So I prayed on Wednesday, “Lord, Dr. Robertson wants me to wear a suit, and I need a suit, Lord. I need suits, plural.” And then on Thursday I prayed, “Lord, please send me some suits.” And then on Friday I prayed, “Lord, don’t forget about my suits,” three times.

On Saturday, you got up, and I went out on the bus route for nine hours. And I didn’t think about a suit, didn’t pray for a suit, and didn’t wear a suit on a bus route—it’s different. Okay? And then on Sunday, I came in with a big load of people, and a fellow by the name of Bob Coburn walked up to me and he said, “Brother Tom, could I invite you to come over to my house for lunch today?” He said, “You know, my wife has gone away up into West Virginia to see her mom, and I’m kind of lonely and all.” And he said, “When you get through taking all your people home, would you bring your wife and your little baby, you come over to my house?”

And I said, “Well, Bob, who’s going to cook if your wife’s gone?” He said, “I’m going to cook.” I said, “Can you cook?” He said, “Man, I was a chef in the Navy.” He said, “First of all, I’ve got fried chicken.” I said, “Just don’t talk anymore. I’m a Baptist preacher. That’s as far as you need to go with that.” He talked about mashed potatoes and gravy and hot biscuits and pecan pie and out of it. And we went over there and it was delicious.

When we got through, he said, “Brother Tom, come on with me. The real reason I want you to come over here is in here.” And I got up and walked into a bedroom with him, and he opened the door, and there were eight beautiful brand new suits. And I said, “Wow, Bob, where’d you get those suits?” He said, “My brother has a clothing store down in South Carolina, and I went down there to visit him, and he gave me those eight brand new suits.” He said, “What size do you wear, Brother Tom?” I said, “That size right there—that size.” They were 43 regular, my size.

And I said, “By the way, I still wear 43 regular. Write that down somewhere so you won’t forget.” He said, “What are you thinking of this one?” He pulled it out. It was beautiful. I was holding up looking at it. He said, “Look at this one, Tom.” And I have one in this hand, one in this hand. He said, “Hey, you’ve got to see this one.” I’ve got two over here. Now I’ve got one here. He said, “Let me give you those three suits.” I prayed Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. I got three suits. You get something going, don’t quit. Okay. I don’t know about you, but I think that was a miracle. Okay. I’ve looked back on that for 50 years now, and that was a miracle.

I was visiting my people in Elkton, Maryland, in my first pastorate. I wore out a car, got to the place where it wouldn’t start. I’d go to somebody’s house, and I’d have to go, after I visited, I’d have to go knock on the door saying, “Do you all have some battery cables, or can you…?” And it was so embarrassing. And I just couldn’t get that car to run. And I went shopping, and I couldn’t find anything that I could afford that would run. Anything that I could afford wouldn’t run, and anything that I couldn’t afford, and I was hung.

Now, three years before that, I had been in a meeting in Norfolk, Virginia, and they put me in a man’s house as a guest with him, a man and his wife. And I was sitting around after church talking to the man. I said, “What do you do for a living?” He said, “I work for Ford Motor Company.” I said, “Well, I’m an executive.” And he explained what he did. And he said, “And by the way, you know, we have that executive car program, and we can buy cars, you know, a lot cheaper than you can get them any other way because we’re employees and we’re executives.” He said, “If you ever need a car, now you call me, and he said, ‘I’ll help you find one.’” Boy, he said, “Well, I guess maybe one needs days. I might need one. I might call you.”

And I went home from my meeting, and three years went by, and I had not given that one more thought. I had not thought of that for five seconds. And I went home from that day of frustration about my car. “I don’t have a car now. What am I going to do?” And I went home and I was praying, “Lord, I don’t know what to do.” And so help me, the phone rang.

And this guy said, “Bro. Wallace, you remember me?” I said, “No, I don’t really.” He said, “You remember you came to my home and we talked about it?” “Oh, I do remember.” He said, “I just thought about you today.” And he said, “You know, the factory manager of the Ford plant is turning in his car. It’s a Country Squire. That’s the one with those big wooden panels down the side of a station wagon. You know, two old boys up in Minnesota ordered a car on the internet, and they delivered it with those wooden panels on the side. And after a few days, one of them said to the other, ‘What do you think of our new car?’ He said, ‘Well, I kind of liked it better before we took that package off of it.’”

But this one had beautiful strips of wood down the side of it. It had six stereo speakers in it. It had the push buttons and all, everything—I mean, everything that a factory manager would have people build for him. And I said, “Well, look, don’t talk any further. You’re over my head. I can’t even get near what you’re talking about. I really appreciate you thinking about me. And God bless you.” He said, “No, wait, wait, wait a minute, preacher.”

He said, “I said, I know what those things cost.” At that time, you could buy that car for $5,500. But that was like paying $65,000 or $70,000 now. I said, “Well, look, that’s out of my category. I said, I’ve got to have a car. You wouldn’t believe how much I am in need of a car.” He said, “Yeah, but,” he said, “preacher, you know what? I can get that car for $3,300.” “Really?” He said, “Listen, the bank will loan you every penny of it, just a snap of the finger.”

And I said, “Really?” I’ll call you back to the bar. I went down to the bank, and I said, “I want to borrow some money.” “What are you going to do with it, preacher?” “I want to buy a car.” He said, “What kind of car?” I told him I want to buy a brand new Country Squire station wagon. He said, “Really?” He said, “How much money are you going to need for that?” I said, “I need $3,300.” “Really?” He said, “Man, here.” He wrote me a check, and I bought a brand new car, took it home, and I could make the payments on it.

Now, I don’t know, looking back on that, I can’t spell that anyway but “miracle.” I mean, here the guy called me the very day. He worked out to get me the biggest car on the market, really, for almost half price of what they sell for. You can run a car like that for three years and sell that for everything you had in it. And so that is a miracle.

Now, this one, you have a little trouble believing. One of my men walked into my office one day, and he said, “Here, preacher.” He had me a piece of paper. I said, “What’s that?” He said, “Our church now owns a camp.” Really? Right on the outskirts of Baltimore, Maryland. Great, big camp, with buildings and cottages all over it. You’re talking big, big stuff.

He said, “I went to the bank and borrowed some money, made a down payment on this, and I’m going to give that to the church. Oh, you got to do, get the church to make payments on it. We can start having camp for the kids in the summer, and we can take retreats over there and have all kinds of things.” Really? I said, “He said, ‘It’s one little problem.’ He said, ‘Now, we got together some of us, and we figured that we can have a big, big dinner on Saturday night, take all of our teenagers out of school as helpers and our people, our faculty and our people can go there, and they’ve got all the facilities. We can cook, and we put on this big Saturday night every week, and we get on the radio station and tell all the Baltimore and get word to all the churches, and we’ll be able to have this big dinner smorgasbord on Saturday night. We’ll make a lot of money, and we can get everything in shape, make all the payments and everything. It won’t cost a penny,’ really.”

He said, “One little problem. He said the big, big auditorium where you have all the chapel programs, where you have all of the banquets and everything, has a great big hole in the middle of the ceiling. And he said, you know, he said, that big hole, you know, got to be fixed before we can do anything. And they’re going to cost lots and lots of money.”

Well, we started praying. “Lord, we believe that you opened this up, and this is something different and interesting, and we can see a lot of people getting saved, and we can just have a great ministry. But, Lord, you’ve got to give us a way to get that hole fixed.”

And so help me, at Martinsburg, West Virginia, there’s a great big experimental air company, and they were flying one of their brand new jet lifters—kind of, you know, where you just sit still and the motor starts and it just lifts up in the air and it shoots off like that. And they’re doing some experimenting, and they were flying over our building, and one of the planes lost a wing tank. And guess where it went? Right through that hole.

And we called Marietta Aviation Company. We said, “You know, we believe we have a piece of your airplane.” “Oh,” they said, “we’ve been looking all over for that. Where is it?” We said, “Come over, we’ll show you.” And we got to look around it. He said, “Man, looks like we go ahead and put a new roof on this building for you, remember?”

Now, believe it or not, you know, Ripley is not the only fellow that knows about “believe it or not.” Okay. So we got a brand new roof on that thing, and my father-in-law told me later, he said, “You know, Tom, that place that you fellas bought or that you’re operating, that’s been in operation a long time around the Baltimore area because I was out of a broken home, and he said the county sent me to stay with different families as a welfare project, and they sent me up there to camp. And he said, I used to go to camp at that camp that you folks now operating for your church, and how special that was.”

Now, let me—I could go on all night. I’ve got 250 more stories. You want to stick around a while, but I’ll tell you one more. I was scheduled to go to Australia to a place called Rockhampton, Australia, and preach a pastor’s fellowship meeting. About that time, my wife was detected with some kind of a malignant growth behind her lung. When they checked it, they said it’s about the size of an orange or maybe a softball, and it’s right behind your lung, and we’ve tested it, and it is definitely malignant. They started working with her, you know, and we were taking $5,000 experimental treatments and all kinds of things, and I thought we were winning the battle.

And I took her over for one of her treatments, and the doctor sat down with us, and he said, “Now, in a case where you have a terminal situation like you have…” And I said, “Oh, whoa, whoa, whoa, dog, that’s the first time I’ve heard that word.” He said, “I thought you knew this is definitely terminal.” I said, “About that time, one of the nurses took my wife off in another room,” and I said, “Doc, you’re serious.” He said, “No question about it.” I said, “Can you give me a guess at how long? Do I have a year?” He said, “You’ve got about two months at the most.”

And we went home with that, and here I am, I’m supposed to go down to Australia in about six weeks. And I told her, “I’m going to cancel that out.” She said, “No, no, no, don’t do that.” She said, “Look, I really would like to have our youngest daughter.” Our youngest daughter is a pastor’s wife, and they were in North Carolina at the time. And she said, “I think that our Donna could get a babysitter for the three children for just about a week, just about the time you’ve gone. And if you could get her to come and stay with me, and I could have some special time with her.” She said, “I’m saved, and I know I’m going to heaven.” And so I have, you know, I’m not begging to stay alive. I just, I’d like to have the best that I can." I said, “We worked it out, and Donna agreed to it.”

And I talked to my wife, and I said, “Honey, now you’re sure that you’d be comfortable?” She said, “I’d be perfectly comfortable. You go ahead and fulfill your commitment. She said, ‘I’m not going to die while you’re gone. I’ll stay here till you get back, and we’ll have some time together.’” And so I felt that the Lord was in it, and she did too, and we were perfectly relaxed about it. And we sat down, and we found us a verse of Scripture in 2 Corinthians 4:1: “Therefore, seeing that we have this ministry, as we have received mercy, we faint not.” Mercy is equal to ministry. Ministry may not be preaching or teaching. It may be bearing a cancer or being a testimony through a trial. And that verse says, seeing that God’s mercy is equal, we say it this way in an old colloquial expression: God will never put more upon you than you can bear. Okay? So we’ve got to hold that verse, and it strengthened this.

And I took off to Australia and preached and kept in touch with her. And then came to the final night and closed out the meeting, going to fly home tomorrow. And 2 o’clock the next morning, my phone rang in the motel. And the Australian preacher said, “Brother Wallace, maybe you should get up and turn on your telly. They’re invading your country. 9-1-1.”

I got up and turned on the telly like he recommended, and they were flying airplanes into the World Trade Center. And I watched that next morning. I called a cab and went to the airport, walked up to the counter after standing behind about 150, 200 people. And I got up there and got my thing out there, and the guy said, “Oh, no, mate. Nobody’s flying to the States today.”

He said, “You know about that thing up there in New York? We’re not even going near that place. He said, ‘You have to come back tomorrow, maybe.’” I went back tomorrow. “No, no, mate.” I went back the third day. “No, no, mate.” The fourth day. “No, no, mate.” On the fifth day, the man said, “Maybe, maybe tomorrow.”

I got back and I said, “Lord, now if you have ever helped me, I really, really need to get a prayer answered. I know with this thing being struck out, my wife’s going to die before I get home, and I’ll never forgive myself.” And I got over there the next morning, and I was standing there behind about 200 people. It took me over an hour to work my way up. And the guy said, “Now, mate, you realize your ticket is for a plane that was going to leave five days ago. And you see, right now he says we already had a lot of people booked on this flight. We got to honor that. And we only have 15 or 20 seats standby. And you know, I can set you up for standby if you want to.” I said, “Man, put me on there.”

“How many standbys?” He said, “Maybe we’ve got 200.” And so he signed me up. In a few minutes, the speaker came on and said, “All of the standbys for the flight to Los Angeles, if you were gathered in the room…” And the room was maybe a little bigger than this room. And we all—all 200 of us—got in. And then the PA system came on. He said, “Now all of you, we’re going to load just a few, and the plane will be full. The plane is now loaded and ready to leave. And so we’re going to announce your name. And when we call your name, we want you, hurry, please, hurry, so we can get you on and get you on board and try to be on time.”

I got in the corner and I said, “Lord, you’ve answered a lot of prayers for me. You’ve worked miracle after miracle after miracle. And Lord, please, please let me get on that plane. Lord, I need a miracle.” And so they came back on and they said, “All right, all the standbys, listen carefully now, and don’t forget, we want you to hurry, please. First of all, Dr. Tom Wallace, number one.” Now, my name is W. Wallace. That means 194.

And I couldn’t hardly find the plane. And then when I got on a plane, I couldn’t find my seat. I couldn’t get the tears out of my eyes. God gave me the miracle. I got home, and I had two or three weeks with my wife before she went to heaven. And it was a sweet and precious time. But I believe in miracles.

Now, you’re getting ready to build a new building, and you need some miracles. And all of us are going to need miracles along the way. And I want you to know God is still a miracle working God. He is the same yesterday, today, and forever.

Original File: God is in Control - Bro Wallace