223 / 298
The Gifts of Healings
217
In chapter five we read about the signs and wonders of Peter’s shadow falling over people,
because in the fourth chapter, they all prayed, “Lord, stretch forth your hand to heal them and
grant that signs and wonders would be done in the name of your Holy Child Jesus.” (Acts 4:30)
Should we pray that way? Should we be believing for some special things too?
Why did we see those special things in Acts 5? Because they asked Him to do them in Acts 4:30.
They asked Him.
Remember after the healing of the lame man at the Gate called Beautiful in Acts 3, they
commanded them not to preach or teach anymore in the Name of Jesus, and they persecuted
them. (Acts 4:1-18) They went back to their own company. And they didn’t pray, “Lord get the
persecution off of us. Lord, help us, what are we going to do? We can’t preach anymore.” No.
They said, “Lord, make us bolder. Grant unto your servants that with all boldness we may preach
Your Word by stretching forth Your hand to heal, and come on, give us some more of those
signs and wonders. Give us some more of those special things!” (Acts 4:29-30)
And one chapter later, Peter’s shadow is falling across people, and they’re getting healed. (Acts
5:15) Then later, cloths are being taken from Paul’s hands, and people are being healed. (Acts
19:12) Special things.
In Acts 8, Phillip was preaching, and many who were taken with palsy and who were lame were
healed (verse 7). The Bible says they marveled at the miracles which he did. That’s because of
special faith, the workings of miracles, and gifts of healings. God is doing special things.
Peter went in to the woman who was dead and just knelt by her bed, prayed, stood up, and said,
“Get up from there. Rise.” And she did. (Acts 9:40) These all sound like things Jesus did, that
He’s continuing to do.
But then you look at something like this in Acts 14. Notice the difference. He’s confirming the
Word with these signs and wonders. In verse 7, what did they do? “And there they preached the
gospel. And there sat a certain man at Lystra, impotent in his feet, being a cripple from his
mother’s womb, who never had walked.” That sounds similar to Acts 3, and yet it is a world
apart in how it happened. How does this healing account begin? It begins in verse 7 with the
Word being preached. What happens when the Word is preached? Faith comes by hearing.
(Romans 10:17) The Amplified Bible, in 1 Corinthians 12, calls it “special faith.” Why? Paul, in
writing about Timothy, talks about “common faith,” faith we all have, faith from the Word. And
then special faith is a different thing.
He said, “The same heard Paul speak,” so he heard the Word, “who stedfastly beholding him,
and perceiving that he,” the man, “had faith to be healed.”
Some captions at the top of the page may say, “Paul healeth the cripple.” That is wrong. There is
a way you could understand it in Acts 28, but not here. This man was not healed by some special
manifestation through Paul. He was healed by his own faith that he got from hearing the Gospel.
If people today cannot get faith to be healed from hearing what people call the Gospel, then it’s
not the same Gospel Paul preached. If we have the same Gospel, we should be getting the same