Healing Prayer Is God’s IdeaSample

Churches across the world will do well to give the Acts of the Apostles a second look. In Acts, we discover the action of the Holy Spirit at work in the lives of believers. By receiving the Spirit of Jesus, they were empowered to carry out Jesus’s ministry after the ascension. It is the account of the birth of the early church, which was released into the world through men and women saturated in prayer. Jesus promised this very thing. He told those fearful followers to wait in Jerusalem for the promise—and the promise was the reception of the third Person of the Trinity.

Those first believers suffered from no illusions about who they were! The memory of Judas’s betrayal and even of their own abandonment of the Lord was very fresh. They knew the limits of their own power, and they did exactly as Jesus, the risen Lord, had told them to do. (Can you imagine having forty days of conversation with the Lord—after you watched Him die? It boggles the mind!)

That risen Lord told them to wait! So, they waited…

The actions of these early followers of Jesus, including His mother Mary, and members of His family, are described in Acts 1. You likely know what happened next!

We thrill at the way Luke the physician tells the story, as though he is grasping for words to describe what happened. And then, in a restrained way that seems to indicate that there was no ordinary way to describe what happened, Luke wrote it down. His words were crafted in a simple, straightforward fashion, in one of the most understated sentences in the whole Bible: “And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit.”

It was as matter-of-fact as that; they were all filled with the Holy Spirit.

Something astonishing and utterly new came into their experience. Out of those closed doors, these formerly timid, frightened men and women were transformed into bold proclaimers of the gospel. They started in the very city that had crucified Jesus only weeks before. They went to tell of His resurrection and His life-imparting power to everyone they met.

To say that this is one of the most critical stories in the New Testament does not do justice to the history. There would be no Christian church apart from the ministry of the Holy Spirit, poured out at Pentecost.