Begging for Lesser Glory

Acts 3:1–10

“One day Peter and John were going up to the temple at the time of prayer—at three in the afternoon. Now a man who was lame from birth was being carried to the temple gate called Beautiful, where he was put every day to beg from those going into the temple courts. When he saw Peter and John about to enter, he asked them for money. Peter looked straight at him, as did John. Then Peter said, “Look at us!” So the man gave them his attention, expecting to get something from them. Then Peter said, “Silver or gold I do not have, but what I do have I give you. In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, walk.” Taking him by the right hand, he helped him up, and instantly the man’s feet and ankles became strong. He jumped to his feet and began to walk. Then he went with them into the temple courts, walking and jumping, and praising God. When all the people saw him walking and praising God, they recognized him as the same man who used to sit begging at the temple gate called Beautiful, and they were filled with wonder and amazement at what had happened to him.”

God is awesome! And with His desire to have many come to know and love Him, He has accompanied the testimony and ministry of Jesus Christ and His Apostles with signs and wonders suspension of the regular laws of nature that we may believe and recognise. Our LORD rabbinically told His disciples, “Truly, truly, I tell you, whoever believes in Me will also do the works that I am doing. He will do even greater things than these, because I am going to the Father. And I will do whatever you ask in My name, so that the Father may be glorified in the Son (John 14:12-13).” Let us be expecting of miracles in life, because life itself in (and ‘and’) the cosmos is a miracle. Eminent British molecular biologist Francis Crick co-discoverer of the double helix model of the DNA in 1953 wrote in 1981, “an honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state that in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have had to have been satisfied to get it going. But this should not be taken to imply that there are good reasons to believe that it could not have started on the earth by a perfectly reasonable sequence of fairly ordinary chemical reactions. The plain fact is that the time available was too long, the many microenvironments on the earth's surface too diverse, the various chemical possibilities too numerous and our own knowledge and imagination too feeble to allow us to be able to unravel exactly how it might or might not have happened such a long time ago, especially as we have no experimental evidence from that era to check our ideas against.” Isn’t that amazing?! What’s also amazing in this episode is the lame beggar sought for something less than what God offers, God gives us the right things at the the right time, indeed the best things, even without us expecting it, we can rest in His faithful fatherly goodness. Indeed some lines from a song that I’ve been contemplating on says, “turn my eyes away from searching for lesser glory, turn my eyes; and teach my heart, with all Your wisdom to live for heaven, o teach my heart”. We’ll just keep on coming back to God’s word, “seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things will be added unto you (Matt 6:33).” And so, may His Spirit touch us with His power, that we are stricken, smitten with the blessing and miracle of life, and that we may, like the Apostles, courageously share the love and power that comes through the might name of Jesus of Nazareth (v. 7) to those in need, may it also be so because people see us, possibly even literally, but in our own way, “walking and jumping, and praising God (vv. 8-9)!”