In his sermon, Peter Allison explores the concept of true power in religion by examining the healings performed by Peter in Acts 9. The sermon outlines three types of healings: those by Christ, demonic healings, and fake miracles performed by tricksters. Allison emphasizes the authenticity of Peter's healings of Aeneas and Dorcas as genuine acts of God, contrasting them with the fraudulent practices and motivations of modern 'faith healers' and evangelical churches that focus on sociological techniques, self-esteem messages, and political activism. The sermon critiques these modern practices for seeking power without the true Gospel or the Holy Spirit's influence. Allison argues that true miracles are rare, occur by God's will, and are not guaranteed even with great faith. He encourages prayer for healing, recognizing the sovereignty of God in granting or withholding miracles.

Acts chapter 9, beginning at verse 32. This is a change in the topic. We've been looking at Saul and his conversion, the persecution that he started in chapter 8 and then his conversion in chapter 9 and his calling and equipping for the Gospel ministry. And last week, we looked in some detail at this summary verse in verse 31 about the church. And today, pick up in verse 32 with a new direction with Peter's ministry.

We'll be looking at Peter's ministry in the next chapter or so. Hear God's Word. Acts 9 verse 32. Now it came to pass as Peter went through all parts of the country that he also came down to the saints who dwell in Lydda. And there he found a certain man named Aeneas, who had been ridden eight years and was paralyzed.

And Peter said to him, Aeneas, Jesus the Christ heals you. Arise and make your bed. And then he arose immediately. So all who dwelt at Lydda and Sharon saw him and turned to the Lord." At Joppa there was a certain disciple named Tabitha, which is translated Dorcas. This woman was full of good works and charitable deeds, which she did.

But it happened in those days that she became sick and died. And when they had washed her, they laid her in an upper room. And since Lydda was near Joppa and the disciples had heard that Peter was there, they sent two men to him imploring him not to delay in coming to them. Then Peter arose and went with them. And when he had come, they brought him to the upper room.

And all the widows stood by him weeping, showing the tunics and the garments which Dorcas had made while she was with them. But Peter put them all out, and knelt down and prayed. And turning to the body, he said, Tabitha, arise. And she opened her eyes, and when she saw Peter, she sat up. Then he gave her his hand and lifted her up, and when he had called the saints and widows, he presented her alive.

And it became known throughout all Joppa, and many believed on the Lord. So it was that he stayed many days in Joppa with Simon, a tanner. Blessed is the man whose delight is in the law of the Lord, and on His law he meditates day and night. Heavenly Father, please open Your Word to us. Open our hearts to receive, our ears to hear, our minds to understand.

Please speak to us, Lord, through Your Word by Your Spirit this morning. I pray that You would sanctify my sinful lips and preserve me from error. In Jesus' name, Amen. Well, About 30 years ago, R.C. Sproul edited a book called Power Religion, The Selling Out of the Evangelical Church.

And it was critical of the modern evangelical church for seeking to regain power through either sociological church growth techniques or psychological self-esteem messages that made people feel good about themselves and want to come to church, or the power of political activism to get people motivated and moving to achieve some political purpose. Sociological techniques, church growth, could be like inviting an entertainer to perform in the church in order to draw a crowd so that you could preach a message to them. A few years ago, a work colleague of mine who attended a local, or at the time attended a local mega church in the woodlands, told me in very glowing terms, that his church would be having some famous motorcycle stunt man performing that Lord's Day. He'd be doing a motorcycle jump in the church. And then He said that would get the people into the church so that their pastor could give them a Gospel message at the end in the few remaining minutes that were left.

Or churches that proclaim a self-help message. How to feel better about yourself. It's very popular. Those kind of books usually sell quite well, especially if the authors are well known. And we have one of the best examples of that in the country right down the road from us in Houston.

You see, these are churches that are seeking to recover the power of the Gospel without the Gospel and without the power of the Holy Spirit who works through His Word. And I think we all can recognize that there's no power in that Gospel. There's no power in that religion. But there's a whole other movement that seeks to recover the power of the Gospel and the power of true religion by duplicating the miraculous healings of the apostolic church. And that we can call the faith healing industry.

And this is a little more complex question, because what they are trying to duplicate is real. It's not fake. Aeneas was healed. He arose. Dorcas was actually raised from the dead.

So as we look at this this morning, in this passage, I think we need to differentiate three different categories of healing. And then we'll look at three different responses to those categories. The three different types of healing, types of miracles. The first category are healings by Christ. People that are actually healed, such as we have in our text.

Healed Supernaturally. In other words, they are healed not through ordinary means. It's no more and no less the power of God in the healing whether the Lord uses ordinary means or whether He uses extraordinary means. They're both the power of Christ. But those are real healings, and the ones that don't use ordinary means, the ones that happen supernaturally, we call miracles.

Those are real. But there's a second type of miraculous healing, and that is by demonic power. And those are also real. They're just done by demons. People are actually healed, but by demonic powers.

Jose Pedro de Fritas, or Fritas, who is known from his youth as a Origo, just a jovial country bumpkin, I think that's what that means. He was a Brazilian peasant who possessed incomparable power of healing. And during a two-decade period from 1950 to 1970, Arrego, this Brazilian jovial country bumpkin, treated as many as two million patients. It may have been less, but only due to the fact that some returned more than once. He saw over 300 patients per day, five days a week, for almost 20 years.

He ran them through his clinic, quote unquote, for about six hours a day. He spent only about one minute on each patient. Diagnosis, treatment, and prescription or cure. His story was published in Reader's Digest in its March 1975 issue, which included a condensed version of John Fuller's book, Arrego, Surgeon of the Rusty Knife. And when the Brazilian authorities began an investigation of his healing ministry in order to convict him of that crime of crimes, practicing medicine without a license, they could find no one to testify that he had injured anyone or defrauded anyone of their money.

Not one. Not one person. That's really pretty astounding, I think, because even good doctors today, if they treated that many patients, would probably have somebody that's disgruntled and think they were gypped. They finally convicted him using only the testimony of people that he had healed, since this admission that he had healed them proved that he was indeed practicing medicine and he did not have a license. But see, the volume of patients that he saw is really only the tip of the amazing or implausible iceberg, as Gary North says.

And this is something that Gary North uncovered when he did a lot of work back in that day looking into these things. So this is in his book, Unholy Spirits. I should have mentioned that going into this. But his method was even more bizarre and amazing. His method of operation was to take a simple pocket knife, jab it into the body of the patient, usually the eye, twist it around violently, reach in and pull out a growth or whatever it was there, seal up the flesh in a matter of seconds without stitches, and send the patient on its way.

And unlike many today, he accepted no pay for what he did. He wasn't trying to make money. There was no pain on the part of the patient. There was no fear. There was little bleeding.

And if there was, he could command it to stop. There was no scarring. This process was recorded on movie film on numerous occasions, witnessed by physicians at close range who ran and re-ran the film many times in slow motion. No one ever detected a single sign of fraud, manipulation, or sleight of hand. On occasion, he would leave the knife stuck in a person's eye while he turned around to pick up tweezers or some other implement, returning to his jabbing and twisting a few minutes later.

You See, this was not repeatable. The doctors and people that went down to study this and filmed it would come back and try to rerun what he did, only to be stopped instantly because Patients would scream in agony the minute they got a knife close to an eye. You see, this was healing. People were healed. Whatever they had, they were better.

It was demonic healing. From his earliest years, Errico had experienced flashes of eerie light and hallucinations, but they were relatively infrequent, and he ignored them and refused to discuss them. But he would hear this voice. And finally the voice identified itself, and it claimed that it was the spirit of Dr. Aldolfo Fritz, a German physician who had died in 1918.

He announced that he intended to use Arrigo to complete his as yet unfinished work. And of course he didn't explain why he needed to use this Brazilian peasant to finish his work, but Arrego awoke from this dream or hallucination and ran screaming into the streets naked, and friends had to lead him home. And then headaches began, severe, severe headaches. Nothing could cure him, including the people trying to do an exorcism. And so finally he capitulated to this Dr.

Fritz, consenting to participate in his work. And when he did, his headaches ceased. And they came back only when he later temporarily agreed to discontinue His healing. See, I bring this up because these were real healings. Millions of people experienced something real.

So there was not one person who could say this was a fake. But this was demonic. It exists. It's real. So the first category are miraculous healings by Jesus Christ.

The second category, miraculous real healings by demons. But there's also a third category, and that's fakes. And there's probably more, definitely more in this category, way more orders of magnitude more in this category than in the other two categories of healings. Randy James was a professional prestidigitator. That's often incorrectly called a magician.

But prestidigitators are sleight of hand artists, experts at tricking people, making it appear they are doing something that they are not actually doing. Now, there are a few people who have acquired immense skill and can actually do some very hard and hard to believe things. And that's not to diminish the great skill that it takes to do sleight of hand. But sleight of hand artists are not doing what they want you to believe that they're doing. It's a trick.

It's all a trick and it's a gimmick. And some are very elaborate and clever, and they're very good at trick. And so because of his expertise at tricking people, Mr. James was often asked about faith healing, And so he actually investigated a number of so-called faith healers. And what he found was not surprisingly shocking.

Very shocking. He found people that believed even when the trick was revealed to them. He sent two student conjurers pretending to have psychic powers to a paranormal lab in the St. Louis area. And they convinced the researchers there that they had miraculous powers.

And that's evidenced by this lab's communications with other scientists and their lab reports and their records. But then when the conjurers revealed that this was all a hoax and they didn't have any powers and they were just all trickery, the researchers still insisted that it was real. That's a blind faith in this. And that might explain why these types of fake healers can have such large followings. Because people want to believe them.

And they are gullible and easily deceived. Jerry Straub, who spent a few years as a healer, as Pat Robertson's producer wrote in his book, Salvation for Sale, I am convinced that if Pat Robertson were proven to be a prankster and frauds, the vast majority of his staff would not drop their belief in his healing power. So this Mr. James investigated a number of faith healers. Catherine Kuhlman, W.E.

Grant, Peter Popov, and he found lots and lots and lots of tricks and refusal by people to acknowledge these tricks. People would claim to have a word of knowledge where they would know something about someone. He demonstrated that they happened to be reading information right through a shirt pocket that he was visible. He could just read it. In another case, another guy, he had his wife on electronic means and she would go around and get information and pass it to him on an earpiece so he could pretend to have knowledge.

W.E. Grant would hold up some fingers to a blind person and ask them how many fingers they were holding up. And then he would put the mic up to their mouth while he said the word. And they would just repeat his word and he made it seem like the blind person could tell how many fingers. It's all just fake.

After one healing, Randy James passed out 2, 000 leaflets to people who had attended a meeting on November 4, 1985, asking them to contact them if they were healed. And there wasn't one response. Nobody claimed to be healed. Of course, the other common factor is money. This is being done for money.

They ask and they receive incredible amounts of money and they live lives of opulence. So those are fake miracles. And we all know about those. And so the presence of these fake miracles has prompted some to say, well, it's all fakery and there are no such things as miracles today. And so there are a couple different positions that are around today.

One would be a complete cessationist. Say that all miracles have ceased and God is powerful and could do them, but God doesn't do them. God doesn't do any miracles. And of course, there are the charismatic position. And there's lots of different variations on that, but that these gifts of healing are intended for today and should be actively practiced.

There's different variations. Some would say the focus is more on baptism and speaking in tongues. Others would say it's less on speaking in tongues and so on. But there's the idea that these gifts are active today and they should be practiced. But I think that the Scriptures teach us a different position.

Not that they have ceased entirely and not that we should be seeking to practice them today, but rather the power of the Holy Spirit is undiminished. Revelation has ceased. The Scriptures are closed, but the Holy Spirit is powerful. And the Holy Spirit works when and where He will. And there are many credible accounts of miracles occurring that are documented.

And this account in Acts 9 is a historical account of the power of the Gospel rightly proclaimed and rightly practiced. So how do we know then what is the difference between the power of the Gospel rightly proclaimed and rightly practiced and the demonic Or the fake? Well, there are a number of things in this text that can help us to distinguish between the fake and the real. The real power and the fake, as well as the demonic. Of course, the demonic can be differentiated because It's not teachable.

If somebody is claiming to do something and it's actually happening, if it's demonic, they won't be able to teach you how to do it. That's why all those people could investigate and look at it and film it and see it, but they couldn't duplicate it. And Errico couldn't tell them how to do it because it was a demonic power that he had through a demonic inhabitation. But how do we tell authentic healing and a miracle, a counterfeit. And there are some things in this text that and Phil Kaiser has I think made some very good points in this regard in his coverage of this that I will draw on this morning.

But the first thing we see is that Peter is performing the signs and wonders of an apostle. These signs and wonders accompany the Apostles. They authenticated the message and the messenger as a messenger from God. They demonstrated the power of God over death and over sickness and over every other aspect of the natural world. It's not Peter that's healing.

It's Christ that's healing. And through This means God saves a whole town. Now that's a power religion. This whole town of Lydda. All who dwelt at Lydda and Sharon saw Him and turned to the Lord.

They All believed. So how do we differentiate authentic from counterfeit? Well, first of all, we see that Peter goes into where the people are. Peter goes to where they are. He went to Lydda and he saw Aeneas there.

He didn't have Aeneas come to some stage where he had everything cooked up and tricked. Where he was in control of the context. He went to where Aeneas was and he sees Aeneas. He found a certain man in Neus who is bedridden and paralyzed. Neus didn't come to him.

The same with Dorcas. They washed her body and they put her in this upper room and that's where Peter went. He didn't have them bring her somewhere where he was, where there was a large crowd, and where he could control the situation. He did it in that immediate context. So it's a lot harder to do a trick when you don't have access, when you don't control the stage in where you're working.

Because counterfeit or tricksters, prestidigitators depend on, for their trick, they depend on being able to control the environment to a certain degree. Secondly, these are people that are known by name to the community. Dorcas is well known for all her deeds, her work. People recognize her. The same with Aeneas.

He's known. And Luke names these people. See, that limits the ability to swap out a dead person for a live person or some other trick to make it seem like something has been done that hasn't been done. These people are known. Many of these fake things, they're unnamed people, or if they're named, nobody around them knows who they are because they're in some auditorium with thousands of people that don't know each other.

These two people are known. Thirdly, we see that the condition from which they are healed is confirmed by witnesses. Because these people are known, the conditions that they have are also known. Confirmed by witnesses, they took Dorcas' body and they washed her. And they put her in this upper room.

Now if she hadn't been dead, if she had been Merely in a coma, they would have noticed as they washed her body that she had a heartbeat or that she was breathing. So you have people that are washing the body. There's no way that they would be washing a body of somebody whose heart was still beating and who had circulation and respiration. If you've ever touched a dead body, you know that they're cold. They look normal.

From a distance you may be able to fool somebody. That was a practice in the last century is to take family pictures and they would have maybe a deceased person in them. You can't tell from a picture. But when you touch a person, you know for sure. So These people are touching Dorcas.

They are seeing Aeneas lying for eight years. Somebody might do a trick for a day or for a week or for a month, but it would be very rare for somebody to set up a trick for eight years and pretend to lie paralyzed on a pallet. So the condition from which these people are healed is confirmed by witnesses, as Luke records it. Fourth, the healing is immediate. There's no, well, you will be healed.

You need to have faith. Just go and believe that the healing has started and it will progress. And once I'm out of town, then you'll find out otherwise. No, the healing is immediate. It's evident.

Peter says to Aeneas, Jesus, the Christ heals you. Arise and make your bed. And then He arose immediately. Likewise with Dorcas. It's immediate.

And then there is evidence of the healing. It's not just, well, he said he was healed. No, Luke records evidence. When Aeneas is healed, he gets up. It doesn't just say and then Peter healed him and then go on.

No, there's evidence here. There's evidence of the healing. He takes up his bed. And see, everybody who saw this knew who He was, and they saw the evidence of the healing. Dorcas also.

As soon as she is brought to life, she sits up on her own. It's only after she sits up that Peter takes her hand and brings her out. So there's evidence. Healing is immediate and there is evidence of it. And that evidence is witnessed by people who are knowledgeable of the situation.

There's no secrecy or hiding here. Dorcas is presented alive to the very people who had washed her body while she was dead. She was secreted off the stage, never to be seen again. Aeneas gets up and people see it. But also, this evidence is documented in writing.

Luke wrote this account. And it's a very accurate kind of account. He names names. He names places. He describes in detail what happens.

You read the account with Dorcas. He prayed. He turned to her body. He said these words. She opened her eyes.

She saw Peter. She sat up. He gave her His hand. He lifted her up. See the detail with which Luke has recorded this account.

It's written. Anybody that thought it was fake could easily challenge any of these points when they are written down. The evidence here also stands up to experts. Luke, the Bible says, is a physician. And he is writing this as a historian who believes these things.

Now the other thing is that not everyone is healed. In fact, there are very few healings. Jesus, as I noted earlier when we looked at another miraculous event, Jesus doesn't heal everybody. That lame person that we saw in Acts 3 that Peter and John healed, he'd been sitting there for 40 years. That means he was sitting there when Jesus was going in and out of the temple.

Jesus didn't heal him. Relatively very few people are healed. Even in Jesus' day and in the Apostles' time. So it should be no less today. Where we see people walking across a stage and person after person after person after person is getting healed.

That's one evidence of fakery. Because even in the real situation, very few people are healed. There were occasions where Peter healed people when his shadow fell on them, or general accounts of him healing a lot of people. But in general, most people were not healed. The other thing we see is that Peter stays around.

He is in Lydda, and the whole town turns to him, and then in Joppa, when Dorcas died, people hear he's in Lydda and call him down. And then it says in verse 43, he stayed many days in Joppa after this healing. So if this was a fake, He would have been found out. He stayed with Simon at Tanner. Because it wasn't fake.

He could stay around and continue to preach the Gospel and teach. And he continued to have the authority of an apostle. If these things were fake, then he would have been known as a charlatan and people would be less inclined to listen to him. And also, there is no money. Even when Simon tried to buy, offer Peter money, remember he turned around and condemned him in the strongest of terms for seeking to give money for it.

Just like Elisha refused, absolutely refused to take any money for these healings. Unlike the people doing the fakes today who are taking millions of dollars and living these opulent lives of wealth. It's probably one sure sign of something being fake. And these are done by the power of God. They are done in Christ's name.

Peter does not do these miracles. He doesn't claim to do these miracles. Now there are some similarities to Jesus' healing of the ruler of the synagogue's daughter. And one of the similarities is that Peter, just like Jesus, put everyone out of the room. In Jesus' case in Mark 5, it says that He came to the house of the ruler of the synagogue and saw two malt and those who wept and wept loudly.

And when He had come in, He said to them, why make this commotion and weep? The child is not dead but sleeping. And they ridiculed him, but when he had put them all outside, he took the father and the mother and those who were with him, which was Peter, James, and John, and he entered where the child was lying. He took the child by the hand and said to her, Talitha Kumi, which translated, little girl, I say to you, arise. Immediately she arose.

And they were overcome with great amazement. Now why would Peter put everyone out here? He didn't put everyone out when He healed Aeneas. But He does in this case, in Dorcas' case, He puts everybody out of the room. And I think that one reason is he doesn't want people to try and imitate some technique that he is doing, that they see.

I think secondly, he doesn't want to draw attention to Himself. But I think the main reason here is that in this case, He does not have prophetic knowledge. I think in the case of the lame man at the temple And in the case of Aeneas, I think there was probably some prophetic knowledge. Peter had prophetic knowledge. The Holy Spirit revealed to him about Ananias and Sapphira.

The Holy Spirit revealed things to him. And he spoke as a prophet. He spoke prophetically. He spoke Scripture. And so I think in Aeneas' case, he may have had knowledge that the Lord would heal him, the Lord may have revealed that to him.

And so he could walk up and say, Aeneas, Jesus the Christ heals you. And he did that publicly in front of people. But when it comes to Dorcas, you see he doesn't do that. Because I don't think he had prophetic knowledge. Rather, he puts everybody out and then he kneels down and he prays.

He prays. And then turning to the body, he said, Tabitha, arise. He's praying and asking the Lord to heal this person. And the Lord grants that request. But He may have put people out because He may not have had that knowledge that the Lord would heal.

And so He went in and prayed by Himself. And then only after the Lord healed did He bring her out. I think this gives an example that we can follow and that we can pray for healing for people that are sick. We have to recognize that in many cases the Lord does not miraculously heal. And that's not because we don't have enough faith or we didn't give enough money to the right guy.

It's because the Lord in His sovereign will has decided not to heal that person and to allow them to die or to be sick. Sometimes sickness continues. Like Paul had a thorn in the flesh that he prayed, he said, three times for the Lord to heal, but the Lord didn't heal him. It wasn't because Paul didn't have enough faith. Rather, Paul says, God gave him that thorn in the flesh as a messenger from Satan to buffet him, lest he should be unduly lifted up.

So the Lord has His purposes, His good purposes, His holy purposes, when loved ones die or when He doesn't heal the sick. But He is able to. And at times He is pleased to. And so I believe it is right for us to pray as long as there is life. It is right for us to pray for the Lord to heal and for the Lord to raise up, just recognizing that it's His power and He may or may not, according to His good will.

And so what can we say about healings today then? They are rare. Just like they were in Jesus' day. We should not expect that if we did everything right, the hospitals would be empty. The people that teach that, you can ask them, why can't you just go and empty the hospitals?

Healings are rare. They always have been. But they still happen. The Holy Spirit is still able to heal. And we should still pray for that.

It is by the power of Christ and Christ alone. Every person that Peter healed, he did so by the power of Christ. It's in the name of Jesus Christ that He would heal. Not through anything that He had. And it wasn't through any special technique or trick.

It is the healings come by prayer. They come by prayer. Prayer to God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Prayer in Jesus' name. But prayer to raise the sick.

We have that promise in James 5. That if anyone is sick, let him call for the elders and let them anoint him with oil and pray for that healing. So that is right. We should never feel like We can't pray for the Lord to heal, no matter how severe or how extreme the illness or sickness is. We can pray.

I think sometimes healings are so infrequent and we think, well, the Lord won't do it, and so we don't bother to pray. I know I've been there. But we should pray. Because the Holy Spirit is still alive. And still working.

And the same power that raised Christ from the dead, raised Dorcas, and is able to heal. But then we need to remember that Jesus didn't heal everyone. The apostles didn't heal everyone. And We shouldn't expect that everyone will be healed. We shouldn't be upset if the Lord doesn't, or think that, or either be angry with God, or think that we did something wrong when the Lord doesn't heal, or that He has taken somebody because they did something wrong or they were sinning in some way.

Yes, sometimes that is the case. But we're all sinners and we all will die. And that includes even the most mature Saint will die. And sometimes get sick and die. And so when we do pray, and when the Lord doesn't grant it, we need to accept that as that is what He is doing for His own glory and for our own good.

And it isn't necessarily because we did something wrong, we didn't have enough faith, or they did something wrong, or they didn't believe, or something like that. God is sovereign. And He heals when and where He will. Let us pray. Heavenly Father, we thank You for The light of your Word.

There are so many counterfeits, but the mere existence of these counterfeits proves the reality that there is healing in you. You are the one who heals all of our diseases. We thank You that You are able and powerful to do so. We thank You that You hear our prayers. We thank You that You are wise.

And that you do always what is not only glorifying to you in accordance with your purpose, which, Lord, we acknowledge are far above our understanding. We cannot fathom or understand your ways, but we acknowledge that you are good in all of your ways, and you are gracious and merciful, and you are kind. And so we ask, Lord, for faith to believe, and for faith to pray, as you have taught us to pray for those who are sick, to pray for healing, believing that you are able to do so. In Jesus name, Amen.