Acts 3:4-24

⁴Peter and John looked straight at the man, and Peter said, “Look at us.”

⁵So the man looked at them. He thought, “I reckon these 2 will give me some money.”

⁶But Peter said, “I haven’t got any money. No silver. No gold. But I have got something good for you. Jesus Christ, the man from Nazareth, has the power to make you better, so I’m talking to you with his power, and I tell you, get up and walk.”

⁷Then Peter grabbed the man’s right hand and helped him to stand up. Straight away the man’s feet and ankles got strong.

⁸He jumped up and started to walk around. He went with Peter and John into the yard of God’s ceremony house. That man was walking and jumping around and telling everyone that God is really great and really good.

⁹All the people that were there saw him walking and they heard him telling them that God is really great.

¹⁰They knew he was the man that used to sit near the Beautiful Gate and ask them for money, and they were really surprised. They thought, “How did this happen to him?”

¹¹The man didn’t want to let Peter and John go away. They were at a place in God’s house called Solomon’s shade area. All the people were really surprised, and they ran to that place.

¹²Peter saw them and said to them, “Hey, all you Israel people, why are you surprised like this? Why are you looking at us? Do you think that we are really powerful and we made this man walk? Do you think that we are so good that we can do that? No. We are not.

¹³God made this man better, so that everyone will know Jesus is really great. But you mob grabbed Jesus and gave him to the soldiers, for them to kill him. The judge, called Pilate, he wanted to let him go free, but all you mob kept shouting, ‘No, don’t let Jesus go. You have to kill him. You have to let another man go free instead, even though he is a murderer.’ Jesus was a properly good man that lived God’s way, but you said he wasn’t. But Jesus was God’s special workman, and God made him come alive again and God made him really powerful. This is the same God that our grand-fathers of a long time ago respected. They were called Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob.

¹⁵So you killed Jesus, the one that gives life to people. But God made him alive again. Yes, both of us saw him alive again with our own eyes.

¹⁶Now you are looking at this man here and you know he used to be crippled. But we believed that Jesus can make him better, so Jesus made him better. You mob saw that with your own eyes.”

¹⁷Peter kept talking to them, he said, “My friends, I know you and your leaders didn’t understand about Jesus. You mob didn’t know he was the one that God sent to us.

¹⁸But a long time ago God told his men to write about Jesus, and it is in God’s book. They said that God was going to send his special man, and that people were going to kill him. And now God has made all that happen.

¹⁹So listen. You mob have to change the way you live and turn back to God, so that he will not blame you or pay you back for the bad things you did.

²⁰Then God will make your spirits happy and strong. You see, God picked Jesus to be his special man for you. Jesus will stay in heaven until the right time comes for God to make everything new and right again. Then God will send Jesus to you again. God told everyone about this a long time ago, and he got his men to write about it in his book.

²²One of those men was Moses. He said, ‘God, the one that is your God, he picked me to tell you his messages, and just like that he will pick one of your own people later to be his special man, to tell you his messages. You have to listen to everything that man tells you.

²³If anyone will not listen to him, that person will not belong to God’s people, and he will die.’

²⁴Samuel was another of God’s men a long time ago. He also told people that all these things were going to happen. And all God’s other men that came later, they told people the same story.