So, I’m a bad blog owner and didn’t deliver to put this post up on Friday like I said I would. To compensate for this, I would like to extend the offer of a free hug from me to you next time I see you if you so chose to accept this offer.

Now to the good stuff…

This is part three of the paper I wrote this fall about inner healing. You can read part I here and part II here. Now for part III: healing in the early church.

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After Jesus was taken up into heaven and his disciples remained on earth, the Holy Spirit came upon them in power in an event known as the Pentecost (Acts 2:1-4). From there the disciples were filled with the power from God to continue the work Jesus had started. The apostle Peter healed a crippled beggar and witnesses were amazed by what they saw (Acts 3:1-10). As more and more people began to accept and believe what Christ had said, people were being brought out into the street in the hope that Peter’s shadow would fall upon some of them as he walked by and they would be healed (Acts 5:12).

After Paul, the writer of most of the New Testament, accepted Christ, he began doing the same works that the other apostles had been doing.

Once when we were going to the place of prayer, we were met by a slave girl who had a spirit by which she predicted the future. She earned a great deal of money for her owners by fortune-telling. This girl followed Paul and the rest of us, shouting, “These men are servants of the Most High God, who are telling you the way to be saved.” She kept this up for many days. Finally Paul became so troubled that he turned around and said to the spirit, “In the name of Jesus Christ I command you to come out of her!” At that moment the spirit left her (Acts 16:16-18)

The apostles and those the apostles ministered to were seeing first hand the miraculous works that those who believe and follow the words and teachings of Jesus are capable of. In fact, healing was such a big part of the early church that in the book of James, it was written that healing is something that we are supposed to do. It says, “Is anyone of you sick? He should call the elders of the church to pray over him and anoint him with oil in the name of the Lord” (James 5:14). This passage makes it seem that healing should be a very common part of what the Church is all about because everyone could use healing to some extent or another from evil oppressions and influences.

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This is the shortest excerpt of the series and we’ll hit the home stretch next week with part IV. Again, check back next Friday (I’ll actually put it up on Friday this time) for part IV of this series where we’ll look at the fall off and resurgence of healing in the Church.

Dustin

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 27th, 2008 at 3:41 pm and is filed under God, Prayer. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.