And Peter directed his gaze at him, as did John, and said, “Look at us.”— Acts 3:4
It is the ninth hour, around three in the afternoon, the hour of prayer (Acts 3:1). Peter and John are going up to the temple. At the gate called Beautiful, a man is set down where he is set down every day. He has been unable to walk since birth, and people carry him there so he can ask for money from those going in (Acts 3:2).
Years of begging teach a person where to look, and it is rarely the face. It is the hand, because a hand moving toward a purse means bread tonight.
So when Peter and John pass, he asks, and he waits. Luke says he fixed his attention on them, “expecting to receive something from them” (Acts 3:5).
Peter looks back and holds the man’s gaze. Most of us know how easy it is to stop seeing someone we pass every day. Peter sees this man’s face.
Luke doesn’t tell us what went through Peter’s mind, and I find myself wondering. Only a few years earlier, Peter was a fisherman on Galilee with little reason to think his life would ever be larger than his boat. I imagine him seeing in this man someone he once was, a life that seemed already settled, waiting on whatever the next hand might give. He could no more have lifted himself out of it than this beggar could stand. And now here he was, on his feet at the temple gate. Perhaps that is what “Look at us” carried: look at what the Lord has done with a man like me, and see Him through me.
Then come the words many of us first learned as a Sunday school song:
“I have no silver and gold, but what I do have I give to you. In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, rise up and walk!”— Acts 3:6
Peter takes him by the right hand and raises him up (Acts 3:7). That detail stays with me, because Peter knew what it was to be pulled up by someone else’s hand.
One night on the Sea of Galilee, he had climbed out of the boat and walked on the water toward Jesus (Matthew 14:29). Then he saw the wind. He was afraid, began to sink, and cried out, “Lord, save me” (Matthew 14:30). Jesus immediately reached out His hand and took hold of him (Matthew 14:31).
Scripture often uses the sea for everything that threatens to swallow us, the chaos only God can hush (Psalm 107:29). Peter walked on it as long as his eyes were on Jesus. When he looked at the wind and the waves, he went under, and he did not climb out by trying harder. A hand caught him.
Now, at the temple gate, Peter reaches out the same way. The grip he once received on the water, he passes on.
The man’s feet and ankles grow strong. He leaps up, stands, and goes into the temple with them, walking and leaping and praising God (Acts 3:8). A man who had only ever been carried to the door walks through it.
“Look at us” is the kind of thing a humble person hesitates to say, and Peter seems to sense the risk. When the crowd gathers to stare, he asks why they look at him and John “as though by our own power or piety we have made him walk” (Acts 3:12).
So what were they meant to see? The Sanhedrin, Jerusalem’s ruling council, saw it the very next day. Peter and John were uneducated, common men, yet they spoke with boldness, and the leaders “recognized that they had been with Jesus” (Acts 4:13).
To be recognized that way is the life I want, and I’ll admit it is a challenge. Believing that Jesus changes people is one thing. Living so that someone sitting at the gate can look at us and actually see it is another.
Jesus once said, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick” (Mark 2:17). A doctor is known by the patients who walk out on their own feet, and the deeper the sickness was, the clearer the proof. The places in us He has lifted are nothing to hide. They may be exactly what someone at the gate needs to see.
Our faith is meant to grow until we can say, “Look at us,” and mean only this: what He did in our lives, He can do in yours.
Someone at the gate is watching our hands.
May they look up and find our eyes on Jesus.
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