Acts 9:31

PETER'S EVANGELISTIC TOURS

31. The miraculous conversion of Saul stunned and paralyzed the aggressive persecutors of the fallen ecclesiasticism, at the same time giving a great boom to the rising hopes of the gospel church. “And the church was multiplied by the exhortation of the Holy Ghost,” i. e., by the exhortation inspired and superinduced by the Holy Ghost. It is a significant fact, of which the popular church has utterly lost sight, and to which the holiness movement is not half awake, that sinners are not converted by the cultured sermonic preaching, but by the irregular, impromptu, spontaneous, ejaculatory utterances and effusions of the Holy Ghost. I am an old revivalist, and have seen this verified on a thousand battlefields. The preaching is for the revival, sanctification and enduement of the church, who, thus flooded and inundated with the Spirit, all turn preachers, not in the modern but the Apostolic sense (Acts 8:4), and literally encompass every sinner, pouring on him their red-hot exhortations, electrified with sympathetic tears and dynamited with prevailing prayers. I have actually witnessed revivals in which several hundred sinners, thus besieged by the irresistible exhortations of Spirit-filled saints, surrendered unanimously, all crowding the altar and crying for mercy. This beautiful and valuable passage is not translated correctly in E. V.; but such is its beauty and force and its inspiring testimony to the miraculous efficiency of the Pentecostal gospel, that I hope every reader will appropriate, utilize and proclaim it to others.

AENAES IS HEALED

Peter, in his rapid peregrinations throughout Palestine, inspiring the saints to grander conquests, arrives at Lydda, down on the Mediterranean Sea near Joppa. There he finds Aeneas, lying on a bed, held fast with the paralysis of eight years. He says to him: “Aeneas, Jesus Christ heals you: arise, take up thy bed; and he arose immediately.” Of course, Peter had preached to him, praying for him and expounding the plan of salvation, appertaining to both soul and body, and thus prepared him for the sudden inspiration of his faith, which took hold of Jesus Christ for the healing of his body. “As your faith is, so be it unto you,” is as true of the body as of the soul. With the spread of Scriptural holiness over the earth, divine healing is again everywhere becoming common, witnesses already innumerable and multiplying on all sides. The subjective reason why Aeneas was healed, was simply because he took hold of Jesus by faith and believed that He healed him that very moment. Faith is always in the present tense. A future faith is a misnomer; not faith, but hope. A true faith inspired by the Holy Ghost, either for soul or body, appropriates the very Omnipotence of God and becomes the medium of the supernatural and the miraculous, both spiritual and physical. We must remember, however, that while we are saved and sanctified through the grace of faith, bodily healing is through the gifts (1 Corinthians 12:9), which are not essential to spiritual salvation, but appertain to God's wonderful munificence in the interest of our bodies, as well as the souls and bodies of others. While the absence of faith for your soul forfeits salvation and heaven, because it is condemnatory (Mark 16:16), the delinquency of faith for bodily healing only forfeits the healing and brings no condemnation to the soul.