It only took a few days for Peter and John to find the empowerment of the Holy Spirit that God provided on Pentecost. The text in Acts 3 finds them in a normal day of observing the practice of prayer at the 3:00 o’clock hour of the afternoon. God moves here through Peter to empower him with the Holy Spirit and to demonstrate that the power of God is available and effective anywhere not just in the temple where they had come to worship. The Church today can find some valuable examples of God’s purpose in these verses. We can see how God provides opportunity for us to share His word with others in the most taken for granted and normal parts of our day. Peter and John’s focus on the beggar’s potential purpose in life instead of the need the man sought to fill. It helps us see the purpose that we each live for Him as His Church in the world today. We look at Peter and John and can draw many parallels for our purpose today that would help us serve God in a more powerful way. The challenge with that thought is it can lead us to misplace our purpose in life by trying to bring our faith level to a healing level like Peter. Peter’s words are a great thought for us “ Silver and gold have I none, but  such as I have I give thee:“ The Church has many competing priorities and challenges today but the TRUTH comes to us from these words and the realization that the Church can no longer say it has no silver and gold. We also can no longer say “ Rise up and walk.” Instead of feeloing limited by this we might find a better start in our daily lives to look at how similar we are to the Beggar. We often are stuck in the same day to day normal life and we have been there so long it seems like the right place to be so we only look for our needs to be met by God. God however in the power of the Holy Spirit has a purpose for us and he would love to bless us today with a grace that exceeds all of our expectations. He wants to take this “cripple” life we have been living and make it one of power and influence. He wants to give us a life we never thought spiritually was possible so that we can tell others about Him. Remember before going out as the Church that we are beggar’s by our human nature. We stand in need of salvation and we can bring nothing to it from our lives but we have the promise of everything in Jesus. Some days we get what we want, some days we get what we need and every day in Grace we get far more than we ever imagined.