The following program, sharing your faith, has been pre-recorded. All right, so Jesus of Nazareth. And so he says, rise up and walk. He had the faith. He says he took the guy by the right hand, lifted him up. Now, if we were to do that today, we better hope that the person gets healed, because if not, we're going to lift him up and the guy's going to fall. We're going to look like idiots, and the guy's going to get hurt. I've seen some of this sort of thing happen. Hi there, and welcome to Sharing Your Faith with Larry Dubois. Larry is an evangelist who's been sharing his faith in Jesus for over 30 years. As a street preacher, he has traveled the entire continental United States, preaching the gospel in over 200 cities. Taking from his experience in the Word of God, Larry hopes to encourage you in sharing your faith. And now, here's your host, Larry Dubois. Hello and welcome back to our Bible study program. We are broadcasting a Bible study continuing on, if you haven't been joining us, in the Book of Acts. This is at a nursing home or retirement center, if you will, up in Auburn, California. And I teach a Bible study up there and I decided to record it and put it up on the internet. Well anyway, we are in Acts chapter 3 verses 1 through 12 this week. It's going to be on the healing of the man that was lame at the beautiful gate. Peter and John came upon him and you're probably familiar with the story. We're going to go ahead and look at that in a moment. I did want to mention If you haven't been aware of some of the delay in these episodes, I've had a lot of problems with scheduling, a computer went down, we have the holiday approaching, all kinds of things that tend to interfere. So just hang in there and we will put these recordings up as soon as we are able and you can follow along. Thank you very much for listening. And so now Without further ado, let's go ahead and join our study. where 3,000 were saved, they were added to the church. You could say that was the official beginning of the church. I don't know if that would be the exact starting point day, but if there was one day, that was the day because that was the day the Holy Spirit had come. The Holy Spirit being promised by Jesus, it was a promise the Father would send the Holy Spirit and it came in the first part of Acts 2. by the sound of the mighty rushing wind and the tongues of fire, disciples there speaking in other languages. This drew a crowd, there was a little confusion, but then Peter stands up and begins to preach, explain that this is not something, that people aren't drunk, or the explanation was is that it was the Holy Spirit, he used prophecy out of Joel, started explaining to him that this was foretold by the prophets, that this was gonna happen, and this was the beginning of it, and then he started sharing about Jesus being crucified, being unjustly murdered by the Jewish people, being the Messiah, that God raised him from the dead, and he gave the whole gospel presentation to this group, and they basically said, well, you know, what do we do? And that's when Peter said, well, repent, be baptized, and so that's what they did. And then, but specifically last time, we looked at the discipleship and the life of a believer after they are saved and baptized. And what they were instructed is that they continued in the teaching of the apostles. which is something that we can do today because we have the apostles teaching in the Bible and the New Testament. They continued in fellowship with one another, breaking of bread, prayers, sort of simplified Christian life is the teaching of the Bible, prayers, fellowship, breaking of bread, whether you look at that as taking the Lord's Supper, communion or if you want to look at it as just sharing meals together. It said they had the fear of the Lord and the comfort of the Holy Spirit. There were signs and wonders being done amongst the people during that early period. They had all things in common. They were definitely unified and they had financial things in common as well, people sharing with one another. And in conclusion, it said the Lord was adding to the church daily after that. So it gives a general statement. So now we go into Acts chapter three, and I'll just start by reading the passage. We're gonna cover verses one through 12, and then next week, we'll finish off the rest of the chapter, 13 to the end of the chapter. And next week, the bulk of it is Peter's, again, a preaching sermon by him. So we're gonna go through that. The first part here says in verse one, Now Peter and John went up together to the temple at the hour of prayer, the ninth hour, and a certain man lame from his mother's womb was carried, whom they laid daily at the gate of the temple, which is called Beautiful, to ask alms from those who entered the temple. who, seeing Peter and John about to go into the temple, asked for alms. And fixing his eyes on him with John, Peter said, Look at us. So he gave them his attention, expecting to receive something from them. Then Peter said, Silver and gold I do not have, but what I do have I give you. In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, rise up and walk. And he took him by the right hand and lifted him up, and immediately his feet and ankle bones received strength. So he, leaping up, stood and walked and entered the temple with them, walking, leaping, and praising God. And all the people saw him walking and praising God. Then they knew that it was he who sat begging alms at the beautiful gate of the temple, and they were filled with wonder and amazement at what had happened to him. Now, as the lame man who was healed held on to Peter and John, all the people ran together to them in the porch, which is called Solomon's, greatly amazed. So when Peter saw it, he responded to the people. Men of Israel, why do you marvel at this? Or why do you look so intently at us as though by our own power or godliness we had made this man walk? We'll end there for this week, this portion, and just take a look. We'll go down verse by verse of what happened to this man, Peter now, and John. This is sometime after this day of Pentecost. I don't know how long after. It can't be very long after. But in chapter two, it did say that they were going to the temple daily still. That was the life of the Jewish person in that timeframe. Their religion surrounded their life in such a way that was their life. And that's why, like in the gospels, when people were threatened to be excommunicated out of the Jewish religion, If they confess Jesus as being the Messiah, that was a very devastating thing for them because it was their whole life. Here in America, if one church threatens to kick you out for some reason or another, it doesn't have as much of an impact because you can just go to another church. Or even if you had to move to another town, it's not a big deal. But in their time, it was a big deal. You would have been ostracized. We think of the man that was born blind in John chapter nine, who it said even his parents were afraid of being kicked out. So they, they didn't want to tell him about Jesus. They said, well, he's, you know, he's of age, ask him. So there was many times when the threat of them being kicked out. Well, these disciples early on, they still kept up with the temple life. And we see here in verse one, they were going to prayer. The Jews had basically three times a day that they would pray, and that was found, we have that in Psalm 55. It talks about praying in the morning, afternoon, and the evening. We know that Daniel, he prayed three times a day, opening his window, looking towards Jerusalem. He kind of got that, I think, from a prayer that Solomon had. Solomon had a prayer at the dedication of the temple, back in the book of Kings there, and Chronicles, I think, also covers that story where he prayed to the Lord and asked him to bless that temple. And it was the place on earth where God's presence would be. We know ultimately that God cannot be contained in a temple on earth because he fills the heavens and the earth and the whole universe. How can a little temple hold God? But that was, in fact, his place on earth where he would meet with the people. And so when Solomon dedicated the temple, he said, if someone's in a far country, that you would bless them. If they look towards this place and pray to this place, pray to you towards this place. And so I think that's where Daniel got the idea of praying towards the temple in Jerusalem. There were three times a day they prayed. The hour of prayer, the ninth hour would have been 3 p.m. Our time, if you want to do the calculations. The other two times would have been 9 a.m. and noon. So you have 9 in the morning, 12 noon, and then 3 p.m. Those were the times when they would collectively go into the temple area and pray. So Peter and John, they were going to the temple to be part of that. And one of the things I thought of pointing out, too, is we remember the title of the book is the Book of Acts of the Apostles. Very briefly, We do see Peter and John having a ministry together here. And they're two apostles. Later, it focuses on Peter. All of a sudden, John's out of the picture a little bit. And then after Peter, the story later next focuses mostly on Paul. And they're the primary apostles that the book is about. But early on, it's about all the apostles. And here we see Peter and John going together as a team, I guess you could say. So they enter the temple, and it says, a certain man, lame from his mother's womb, was carried, whom they laid daily at the gate of the temple, called Beautiful. The Beautiful Gate, it's a decorated gate. It was inside the temple mount on the east side, and it separated the court of the Gentiles from the court of the women. It would have been a good location for somebody that was begging for money. Alms, that's just another way of saying for money, but it would have been a good location for somebody to beg for money because that is where they came into the temple to give their offerings. And a lot of people they gave to show off. Remember, Jesus said, don't give your gifts to, you know, don't sound a trumpet. He was talking about the Pharisees. A lot of times they would, so if you were there begging, you could be the beneficiary of somebody maybe not really giving from their heart, but they're showing off that, hey, I could give to the poor here. And so you would at least get some money from, you don't care their motive, you're getting the money. Well, this man, it tells us that he was lame from birth, from his mother's womb, and he was carried. Now we don't know who carried him. if it was his relatives or friends, but he had enough family or friends that would be willing to do this each day. You know, it's kind of like they would drop him off in the morning and pick him up in the afternoon or something, and he would stand there and beg and get money to live on. And so he had to be carried because he couldn't walk. It's said that they laid him there daily. Daily, he would be begging there. Well, the people entering the temple would give him some money. Well, anyway, so now here come Peter and John, verse 3. They're about to go in the temple, and the man asks alms from them. What Peter does, it says he fixed his eyes on him. It says he's with John, but it sounds like Peter's doing the talking. And he says, look at us. And so he gave him his attention, and he thought, oh, hey, they're going to give me something, right? He's expecting something. Well, then Peter says, silver and gold I do not have. They didn't have money to give him. Maybe they really didn't have any money with them at the time. It wouldn't have been too far off if they would have said, oh, sure. Yeah, the Lord taught us to give to people. Yeah, here's some money. God bless you, sir. And they kept going. But obviously, Peter was inspired at that moment. And he had been with the Lord. And so was John, you know, they'd seen the miracles Jesus did. They learned from him. And then they were sent out during the ministry of Jesus for a short time on their own two by two, and they were doing miracles then. So they had experienced doing some miracles themselves and seeing Jesus do miracles. And then Jesus, when he departed, had promised them that they would have this power to do these miracles as well. For whatever reason, Peter decides that This is the time that he's going to invoke, if you want to use that term, the name of Jesus, and that's what he does. He says, hey, I don't have any money, but what I do have, I'll give to you. He says, in the name of Jesus of Nazareth, rise up and walk, okay? In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, rise up and walk. Now, probably the most title given to the Lord in the New Testament is Christ. is given to him so often, we often think that's his last name, Jesus Christ, but it's really Jesus the Christ or the Messiah. Christ is a form of a Greek word meaning Christos, and it's Hebrew form of Messiah. Jesus the Christ, and he was known to be of Nazareth, Jesus of Nazareth. And that was another descriptive term of him to identify what Jesus are we talking about. All right, so Jesus of Nazareth, and so he says, rise up and walk. He had the faith. He says he took the guy by the right hand, lifted him up. Now, if we were to do that today, we better hope that the person gets healed because if not, we're going to lift him up and the guy's going to fall. We're going to look like idiots and the guy's going to get hurt. I've seen some of this sort of thing happen. in modern times, and so it's an interesting thing. Again, it goes back to, we've discussed this before, of do these kinds of gifts of the Holy Spirit exist today? Does God heal in such a manner? And so there's a bit of a controversy over that. But in this case, they definitely had the real deal, and they said, rise up and walk, and so of course as he did that, God then, it says his ankle and feet His bones received strength, and so he stood up, but not only did he stand up, he was able to leap and walk. I saw a video where they reenacted this, and they had the guy that got healed. He was jumping all over, and I thought they did a pretty good job of depicting what it would have been like, because the guy was full of excitement, as we would be, right? the fact that ultimately that was better than any money he could have gotten anyway. You know, going back to what Peter said, hey, we don't have any silver or gold to give you, but we have this, what we can give you is we'll give you this healing. And that obviously is better than money. But he was, he jumped up, he was walking, he was leaping, praising God as we would have. In verse nine, it says, all the people saw him walking and praising God. And then it says, And verse 10, then they knew it was he who sat begging alms at the beautiful gate of the temple. They were filled with wonder and amazement at what had happened. Well, if we look back again to the description of this man, okay, this man, it said, first of all, he was lame. Okay. It said he was lame from birth. And then it said he was there daily at the gate. So anybody that frequented the temple during that time would know this guy. If they didn't know him personally, didn't know his name, they would know him by sight. They would have known enough about him to realize the guy can't walk. For example, in contrast, they have these healing meetings sometimes today, or they might be on TV. So someone comes into those meetings And maybe they're in a wheelchair or on crutches or whatever, and they go up forward and the man prays with them or he does something. And all of a sudden now they jump up out of the wheelchair and they're quote unquote healed. Okay. Well, first of all, sometimes they. They do these things and it's deception. They're trying to fool people because they want people to give them money. But what will happen is, and they've caught them doing this actually, some ministries, where it turns out the guy is in on it. The guy that comes in in this wheelchair, he's not really paralyzed. He's just, you know, he's fine. Okay. So he comes in, no one's seen him before. No one knows him. Doesn't know that he's not someone that's actually lame, but this man and the story here, they knew, you know, there was no question that he had this dilatating disease or whatever it was causing him to be lame. They knew he couldn't walk. They knew he, this wasn't a fake. That was why they were wondering, how did this happen? You know, he'd been like this from birth, and so now he'd never walked before, and now he's jumping, walking, praising God. And so this drew quite a commotion, and a lot of people were wondering what was going on, as we see in verse 10 there. And then in verse 11, it says, Now, as the lame man who was healed held on to Peter and John, All of them ran together in the porch, which is called Solomon's. Another term for this is the portico. It's just a portion of, it's a portico surrounding the temple's court of the Gentiles. It's, this is also where Jesus had taught on the good shepherd in John 10. That's the location that he was teaching that. So they were there and all these people, they came amazed. Of course, in verse 12 there, we says, so when Peter saw it, he responded to the people. And as next time we're going to see, this is how he introduces his speech he's going to be making. But he says, men of Israel, why do you marvel at this? Why do you look so intently at us as though our own power of godliness we had made this man walk? And so this is a good lesson, I believe, here, is Peter right away deflects any notion that this healing was because of him personally. It wasn't because he had the power. It wasn't because he was so godly or he was so righteous, but he wants to give the glory and the credit to God. Next time we're gonna see that when we get into the next verse there. He's going to want to give that to the credit of Jesus. It was by the name of Jesus, which represents the person of Jesus and the power of Jesus. And that he was very quick to say, look, it wasn't me. And it would be so easy for people to take credit for such a thing. And that's a very much a danger. And I think, I think of in today's world, because I've been out in streets, ministering with people. If someone got healed like that. Here's what would probably happen. We'd have it on YouTube. We'd have a video of it and we have it on YouTube and we'd say, look what happened down there at this ministry, so on and so forth. And next thing you know, we're making a, we're making a big public thing about it. And then all of a sudden now Jesus somehow gets left way over here and the focus is on the person that did the healing or whatever. And I could see that happening. I remember a long time ago. I was at church and I remember I was at a church that they did believe in the healing and that, but we were at a meeting and I remember I prayed for this lady. I was a fairly new believer at the time, but I prayed that she would get healed and whatever was ailing her in her feet, it wasn't a long-term condition like this man. It wasn't, it was something short-term. I remember that, or she could have gotten maybe better eventually, but anyway, she reported the next day that it was healed. Whatever was ailing her was gone. And she was much better. She was healed. Very quickly, of course, people were saying, Hey, did you hear about June? I think her name was June. Did you hear about June? Larry prayed for her and she was healed. And I'm thinking to myself, yeah, I did do that, didn't I? What happened was, I remember, it's almost like false humility, I guess I had, but I remember saying, Oh yeah, you guys, you know, that was the Lord. It wasn't me. But as people begin to tell the story, it's almost like I wanted to do this. I want to say, yes, it was the Lord who healed her, but just so you know, I was the one praying when it happened, just so you know that. I mean, it doesn't matter, I know, but I just kind of throw that in there. So there's a little bit of pride, there's a little bit of, you want this recognition. I guess the recognition that I wanted, and so many people may want, is It may not have anything to do with healing, but it just wants to be a recognition that you have a ministry that God is blessing, or you have been used by God, or God has done something in your life that shows that God has given you a pat on the back, or has given you a little endorsement, if you will, because it happened on your watch, or it happened when you were praying, or whatever it might be. And so we want to grasp a little bit of that glory, almost to validate our ministry or to give it some sort of credibility. Well, the fact of the matter is, how many times have I or other people prayed for people and they didn't get healed? In fact, they got worse. We can't think of it in those terms. We've got to think of the broader picture, but Peter, he gives, and you could even maybe go so far as to say, if you're not going to give the Lord credit, why would he even use you? It's almost like he would have to condition, he would want a vessel to use, I would think, that's not going to try to take the credit. He's going to want to use somebody like Peter who is very careful to say, it wasn't me, it was the power of the Lord. So that's an interesting aspect. It's not easy to draw a practical example out of the scriptures that we can apply to our life today. So it doesn't even have to be about a healing. You could, it's a broad enough application we could use for any aspect of being a believer in God is that believer in Christ is that anytime the Lord would use you to do something or any good deed or anything that we, we want to take the lower place. We want to not in a false sense of humility. Like I had back to the Acts there, Peter definitely gave the Lord the credit. And as we will see next time, he transitions us into. an opportunity to share about Jesus. This was part of the Great Commission. I mean, if we go back to, and I think it's worthy to look at this scripture here before we, we're almost out of time. At the end of the chapter in Mark 16, he has Jesus saying part of the Great Commission, and he had said different things to the apostles at different times. Remember when we start off in Acts where Luke tells us that he was on the earth 40 days and said he was teaching them things pertaining to the kingdom of God. Well, during that time, and right even from the day of his resurrection, he started giving them instructions about what they were supposed to be doing. And so there was a lot of times there wasn't any one sermon where he gave the whole thing. It was in bits and pieces a lot. But anyway, this is what Mark says that he had said. And it sounds like it was on the day of his resurrection. It says, This is on the day he rose from the dead. It says, later he appeared to the 11 as they sat at the table and he rebuked their unbelief and hardness of heart because they did not believe those who had seen him after he had risen. And he said to them, go into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature. He who believes and is baptized will be saved, but he who does not believe will be condemned. And these signs will follow those who believe. In my name, They will cast out demons. They will speak with new tongues. They will take up serpents. And if they drink anything deadly, it will by no means hurt them. They will lay hands on the sick and they will recover." And so this is really a fulfillment, Peter here, not only has he had the experience in the ministry when Jesus was on the earth with him, but he was told, that this was gonna be part of the ministry of them going into all the world, that they were going to be able to lay hands on the sick and they would recover. So it says in their name, and interesting enough, it says, In my name, they will do these things." Well, that's what Peter did. He said, in the name of Jesus of Nazareth, stand up and walk. We'll see it later on in the book of Acts 2, where Paul does the same thing. In fact, there's an interesting story in Acts, I think it's 19, where these Jewish exorcists were trying to cast out demons. And they said, I adjure you, or I charge you, they were speaking to this man who had a demon in him, I adjure you by the Jesus whom Paul preaches. And so the demon says, well, Jesus I know, and Paul I know, but who are you? They trampled the guy, the guy that the man had the demon, got overpowered with strength and beat him up. And so they, they basically botched their exorcism, but the point was they didn't really know Jesus. They were just trying to invoke his name without having a really a relationship with him. So that's a whole another lesson right there, but it's the idea that it's in the name. Again, I should probably mention this. It's not the name is to be like a, like a fetish. It's kind of like we pray, and I do it myself. We'll say a prayer, and then at the end of it, we'll say, in Jesus' name. And we tack it on, and it almost becomes so mechanical that we don't even think about what we're saying. It's just something that we say, and it's really more than that. To say, in the name of Jesus, it's not that saying that does it. It's the idea that the, what that represents. It's his name, which represents his personhood, who is God and the power he has. and the resurrection power, and the power to heal, the power to do all those things, that's the whole idea. And that's what Peter was doing there. It's a name that's above all names, and it's a name that has power, and used properly by the people that know him, and it has a great authority. Anyway, well, that's about all we have time for, and I'll go ahead and close in prayer. Father God, we pray that if nothing else, we can grasp the lesson. And this has been Sharing Your Faith with Larry Dubois. If you would like to listen to a past broadcast or ask a question that would be aired on a future show, simply go to sharingyourfaithradio.com. And then we trust you'll join us again next time for Sharing Your Faith on First Love Radio, your Christian Internet station.