Acts 3: "Such As I Have, I Give You"
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✝ Passage: Acts 3
A man lame from birth is carried to the temple gate every day to beg — a fixture of the landscape, the kind of person crowds learn to walk past without seeing. Peter and John stop. “Peter, fastening his eyes on him… said, ‘Look at us’” (3:4). The healing that follows starts with something smaller and rarer than a miracle: attention.
Read it in the terminal:
bible acts 3
No silver, something else
Peter is upfront about what he doesn’t have: “Silver and gold I don’t have, but what I have, that I give you. In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, get up and walk!” (3:6). He takes the man by the hand, and strength floods into feet and ankles that had never held weight. The man doesn’t just walk — he goes into the temple “walking, leaping, and praising God” (3:8).
The sermon after the sign
A crowd gathers, amazed, and Peter immediately redirects their astonishment away from himself: “Why do you fasten your eyes on us, as though by our own power or godliness we had made him walk?” (3:12). The miracle is the hook; the sermon is the point — another call to recognize the Jesus they handed over to Pilate.
Times of refreshing
Peter’s appeal ends with an image worth lingering on: “Repent therefore, and turn again, that your sins may be blotted out, so that there may come times of refreshing from the presence of the Lord” (3:19-20). Repentance here isn’t framed as punishment avoided but as refreshment arriving.
Questions for study
- Peter’s first act is attention — “Look at us” — before any miracle happens. What would it cost you to actually see the people you usually walk past?
- “Such as I have, I give you” — what do you actually have to offer, minus the things you wish you had instead?
- Peter deflects credit immediately after the miracle. What guards against taking credit for what God does through you?
- How does “times of refreshing” reframe repentance compared to how you usually think about it?