Hands On Somebody And Nothing Moving

There used to be a heat.

She is careful about how she describes it, because she has heard people be silly about this sort of thing and she has never wanted to be one of them. But there was a heat. Not always, and not to order, but often enough that she came to expect it: she would put her hand on somebody's shoulder or the back of their hand, and there would be a warmth that ran down her arms, and a kind of knowing about what to say, and afterwards she would be tired in a way that was pleasant.

That went in the spring and it has not come back.

She still prays for people. She prays for a great many people, more than she did five years ago, and she does it properly and slowly and she means it. She put her hands on a man in a hospital day room in June, a man who had asked her specifically, who had waited for her, whose sister had rung to make sure she was coming.

And there was nothing. Her hands were her hands. She said good and true words in her ordinary voice and her arms were the temperature of a room, and when she took them away she felt exactly as she had felt before she put them on.

She said amen and squeezed his hand and made a joke about the biscuits and went out to the car park and stood next to her own car for a bit without getting into it.

Here is what she has concluded, and she has told nobody, and she is aware it sounds superstitious and she believes it anyway at three in the morning. She has concluded that whatever she had has been withdrawn. Not punitively. She does not think God is angry. She thinks something has been quietly taken back, the way a loan is called in, and that she is now a woman doing from memory what she used to do from something real.

And she has started to be frightened, in a low and constant way, of the next time somebody asks.

What Peter said, and then what he said afterwards

There is a scene at a gate in Acts that everybody knows the first half of, and the second half is the half that will set you free.

A man who has never walked is at the gate asking for money. Peter looks at him and says a sentence that starts with an inventory of what he does not have.

Then Peter said, Silver and gold have I none; but such as I have give I thee: In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth rise up and walk.Acts 3:6

Notice the order of that. He begins by naming an emptiness. He does not hide it or apologize for it. He says out loud, at the decisive moment, what is not in his hands.

And then he names what is: not a feeling, not a sensation, not a heat. A Name.

Now read on to what happens after the man is up and leaping, because this is the part that has your name on it. A crowd comes running, amazed, and Peter turns round and asks them a question that he clearly finds urgent.

Why look ye so earnestly on us, as though by our own power or holiness we had made this man to walk?

He is not being modest. He is correcting an error he can see forming in real time, and the error is the exact one you have been living inside since the spring: the assumption that something in the minister is the thing that does it.

So hear this over you in that car park. Nothing was withdrawn in the spring. Not one thing. That is not my reassurance; it is what His word has Peter shouting at a crowd who were making the same mistake, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my sentence who takes a corrective like that and lands it in a woman standing next to her own car.

Now look at the heat.

It was real. I am not going to explain it away, because God is kind and He gives His people things that are not strictly necessary, the way a father puts his hand on a child's head. But it was never the mechanism. It was a kindness alongside the mechanism, and the mechanism is a Name spoken by somebody with the standing to speak it.

You still have the Name. It was not on loan. His word says the man at the gate was made strong through faith in that Name and puts nothing of it in Peter's chest, and the Holy Spirit is not less present in a room because the person praying has ordinary temperature arms.

And I want to reach the fear, because that is what is actually eating you.

You have become frightened of being asked. That fear says: they will come expecting something and I have nothing to give them. But that is precisely the sentence Peter opened with. Silver and gold have I none. He led with the empty half, and then gave what was actually his to give, and the man went into the temple walking and leaping and praising God.

You are equipped this morning exactly as Peter was equipped at that gate. Not by a sensation. By a Name that belongs to Christ and has been given to you to use, and Scripture never once conditions its use on what the one using it can feel, and the Holy Spirit does the moving at the far end of it.

That man in the day room in June was prayed for by a woman with the whole authority of that Name in her mouth. What he got was not less than what people got five years ago. What you got was less. That is the actual difference, and it is a difference in you and not in him, and it is worth grieving honestly rather than filing as evidence.