The Book of Acts in the Bible recounts the healing of a man who had been “lame from his mother’s womb” (see 3:1–8). His friends carried him each day to one of the gates of the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem so that he could beg. After Jesus’ ascension, his disciples Peter and John encountered this man as they entered the Temple to pray. When asked for alms, Peter responded, “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.” Peter then took the man’s hand and lifted him onto his feet. The Bible records, “And he leaping up stood, and walked, and entered with them into the temple, walking, and leaping, and praising God.”
From a material perspective, it may seem that Peter and John mentally performed some sort of surgical operation on the man’s lower legs, correcting the birth defect and giving him the strength to walk. But the healing was far more extensive than that. If the apostles’ prayers had merely corrected a physical deformity, the man would still have required months of what we now call “physical therapy” to develop the coordination and balance necessary to stand upright and walk—let alone to leap in the air and land on his feet. And yet this man was walking and leaping as though he had never been disabled.
The thoroughness and immediacy of the man’s healing negate the suggestion that the healing was accomplished through adjustment of material bones and tendons. Peter and John were clearly operating from a higher basis than physiology. They were following the example of their Master, Christ Jesus, who taught that “it is the spirit that quickeneth; the flesh profiteth nothing” (John 6:63). With that understanding of the supremacy of Spirit, they lifted the lame man into his rightful stature. This is the same method of healing that Christian Science employs today.
