Each summer, our Shine Disabilities Ministry team hosts Camp Freedom, which is an action-packed weekend where campers with intellectual, developmental, and physical disabilities experience summer camp in a way they most enjoy. The blessings and the memories and the logistics from the event always leave me asking “How did we do that?” But as we see through the ministry of Peter and John in Acts 3-4, we didn’t do any of it. The Holy Spirit did it!
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Transcript:
Hey there friends! Welcome to this week’s episode of Key Ministry: The Podcast. My name is Garett Wall and I’m delighted to be back as your host this week. Today, I’ll share with you about one of the most anticipated events every year in our ministry, how God always shows up, and the Biblical lesson we can learn from Acts 3-4. Thank you for listening in this week and joining our conversation.
Last month, our Shine Disabilities Ministry team hosted our favorite weekend of the year as 300 of our best friends joined us for Camp Freedom 2023. This year’s event marked the 20th edition of Camp Freedom, which is an action-packed weekend where campers aged 10 years and older with intellectual, developmental, and physical disabilities experience summer camp in a way they most enjoy. Over the course of three days at Country Lake Christian Retreat in Southern Indiana, our campers engage in exciting outdoor activities, including a zip line, archery, fishing, horseback riding, crafts, and swimming in the pool and lake. Campers and volunteers also spend time growing in their faith through worship and Bible study.
The spiritual growth, Christ-centered community, and lifelong friendships that are created each year during Camp Freedom leave me and our entire team in awe of God’s love and goodness every single time.
An event that began with 13 campers and 13 volunteers in 2004 had its largest group ever in 2023 as about 150 campers and 150 volunteers and staff came together for the best weekend of the year in the life of our ministry and our church.
There really aren’t enough adjectives to accurately describe the emotions and thankfulness that occur across our three days together at Camp Freedom. Our campers and volunteers experience a level of community and friendship and love that can only be attributed to our good and gracious God. From the enjoyment of the numerous activities to the authentic and sincere worship of our Creator to the vulnerability and trust while experiencing life together across three days, the genuine love of Christ and his church is displayed in such a way that brings powerful glory to our Savior.
I’m so proud of our Shine Ministry team for all the time and energy and planning that is poured out before we ever arrive on site. I’m grateful for the sacrificial servants who volunteer each year to help make Camp Freedom possible. Our volunteers arrive the night before camp begins and they work selflessly to provide the best camp experience for all our Shine friends. And while our campers are experiencing their favorite weekend of the year, their families and caregivers are blessed with a weekend of respite and renewal, something they rarely receive.
There are so many images and moments each year that are permanently engrained in the minds of our staff and volunteers that serve as snapshots of the pure joy for our campers. Whether it’s seeing one of our friends experience the thrill of the zip-line for the first time or all the smiles produced from the intentional community and discipleship to being left in awe at the sight of so many empty wheelchairs along the beach as our friends who would typically be in those chairs are instead in the lake experiencing freedom and community like never before.
When I reflect on Camp Freedom and consider all the people and the planning and the coordination required to make it happen, I’m typically left asking one question:
How did we do that? But I’m quickly reminded that we didn’t do that. The Holy Spirit did it!
As much as I love our staff team and our volunteers, we’re not good enough or creative enough or smart enough, or strong enough to pull off any of that on our own abilities. Our strategies and our planning and our organizational skills and our worship abilities and our Bible knowledge are certainly blessings and gifts from God, but they aren’t good enough to create what happens across those three days at Camp Freedom. It is, without question, my favorite thing we do as a ministry but like everything we do at Shine—from our weekend worship classes to our café to our community and fellowship events, ultimately, it’s the Holy Spirit who does the work to make all of it possible.
It's pivotal that we as a ministry and that we as believers and followers of Jesus Christ recognize that though God chooses to include us in what He does, it is He and He alone who gets the glory for it! And all of it would be impossible without the presence and movement and power and love of the Holy Spirit.
The truth of that reality is spelled out clearly throughout the book of Acts and one of my favorite examples of the power of the Holy Spirit and the impact of following Jesus is in Acts 3-4. As chapter 3 begins, we see Peter and John on their way to the temple when they encounter a man who was disabled and was being carried to one of the temple gates so that he could ask for alms, which were gifts of money or goods that were given to the poor. This man had been unable to walk since birth and we learn in chapter 4 that he was more than 40 years old, so he had likely been begging outside the temple gates for a long time, possibly even for much of his life.
As Peter saw this man, the Bible says he and John “directed their gaze at him” and told the man to “look at us.” The man then fixed his attention on them, and he was most certainly expecting to be given a tangible gift of money or food. “But Peter said, ‘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!’” And in that moment, the man’s lifelong physical disability was removed. His feet and ankles were made strong.
Verse 8 reads “And leaping up he stood and began to walk, and entered the temple gate with them, walking and leaping and praising God.” We see the word leaping twice in that single verse, which should help us understand the energy and excitement the man was feeling at that moment to have the ability to do something he had never done in more than 40 years of life. Even though God may not be giving us the power to physically heal, what He gives us is the hope of Jesus to share with all people and the community of the church to include all people so that our friends and families impacted by disability can not only encounter God but experience eternal life change.
I also don’t want to overlook the importance and the impact of the man entering the temple gate with Peter and John and his choice to praise God. As I mentioned in episode 56 of this podcast last month, one of the realities of having a disability in the first century was that it prevented the person from entering the temple. It was highly unlikely this man, who spent much of his life begging for gifts and donations outside of the temple, would have ever imagined he would be able to enter the temple because his disability was believed to have made him ritually impure and unworthy of experiencing the forgiveness of sins. But the access to salvation and the forgiveness of sins changed with Jesus and his disciples were fearless in how they lived out the Great Commission.
In verses 9 and 10, we read that all the people inside the temple saw the man walking and praising God and they recognized him as the one who was typically outside the temple gate asking for alms. When they connected all of that, they were filled with wonder and amazement at what happened. Peter and John had done something in the name of Jesus that was miraculous and life-changing. And after they entered the temple and as the man praised God, verse 11 says he “clung to Peter and John” which left all the people utterly astounded. Wonder, amazement, and utterly astounded. We know that Peter and John weren’t this good in their own power. So how did they do it? You probably know the answer to that, but let’s continue to follow what happened next.
As the people in the temple ran to Peter, John, and the healed man, Peter began to preach. From 12 to verse 26 at the end of chapter 3, we read about Peter’s sermon which focused on the power of Jesus Christ. He was courageous and clear on the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, and that faith in his name is what healed the disabled man. He challenged everyone to consider the eternal importance of the repentance of sins and how all the holy prophets from long ago were pointing to Jesus as the Savior and the hope for this fallen world.
As chapter 4 begins, we learn that the priests and the captain of the temple, and the Sadducees were greatly annoyed because of what Peter and John were teaching the people, so they arrested them but not before about 5,000 men believed in what was preached. After a night in jail, Peter and John were brought before the Jewish high court and asked by what power and by what name had they healed this man and preached to the people. Verse 8 reads “Then Peter, filled with the Holy Spirit, said to them…” where he once again explains that the healing of the disabled man was done through the power of the name of Jesus, who was crucified and raised from the dead and is the only pathway to salvation.
So how did Peter and John heal the disabled man?
How did they have the courage and clarity to preach the Gospel of Jesus to everyone in the temple? How did they have the confidence to stand before the Jewish high court and once again proclaim the healing and saving power of Jesus Christ? They did it because they were filled with the Holy Spirit. In chapter 12 of 1 Corinthians, we read that the gifts of the Spirit are “empowered by one and the same Spirit, who apportions to each one individually as he wills.”
As Francis Chan says in chapter 3 of his book Forgotten God, that verse is a reminder to all of us who is really in control. Just as we don’t get to choose which gifts, we are given, we also don’t get to choose what God intends for us or for the church. The Spirit has a plan for our lives.
We can see the planning and the power of the Holy Spirit in the words and actions of Peter and John. We know from their lives learning and following Jesus that in their own powers and abilities, they weren’t equipped to heal a disabled man and to confidently proclaim the name of Jesus.
But with the power of the Holy Spirit, everything was different.
I love what Chan says of himself in chapter 7 of Forgotten God when he writes,
“I don’t want my life to be explainable without the Holy Spirit. I want people to look at my life and know that I couldn’t be doing this by my own power. I want to live in such a way that I am desperate for Him (God), to come through.”
That is what we see in Peter and John in Acts 3-4 and that is how we are designed to do every type of ministry, including special needs ministry. If God doesn’t show up and if God isn’t in the center of what we’re doing in our church and our ministry and what you’re doing in your church and your ministry, then we’re going to fail, which is why it’s pivotal that He is at the center of all that we plan and do.
So how does that happen? How do we do that? Let’s look one more time at Peter and John in Acts 4. After Peter finished answering the question of by what power and by what name they had done these things, verse 13 explains how the members of the Jewish high court responded when it says “Now when they saw the boldness of Peter and John, and perceived that they were uneducated, common men, they were astonished. And they recognized they had been with Jesus.” They all knew that Peter and John were not smart enough and articulate enough and trained enough to have the boldness and the abilities to do what they had been doing and that left them astonished. But they also knew that Peter and John had been with Jesus and that made them different.
They were filled with the Holy Spirit, and they had been with Jesus. That’s how the power of a loving God is seen in the lives of imperfect and otherwise uneducated and common people.
We spend time with Jesus by reading the Word and talking with him through prayer and listening for the whispers of the Holy Spirit to guide us and work in us. For us as followers of Jesus to be equipped for ministry and for the work of the Great Commission, we must be connected to Him through the scriptures and prayer and listening to God. As Jesus reminds us in John 15:5, He is the vine, and we are the branches. Whoever abides in Him and He in them, that is who will bear much fruit and apart from Him, we can do nothing!
Whether you’ve been doing special needs ministry for 20 years or you’re just starting the conversation in your church on how you can better minister to the disability community, none of it will be sustainable without the power of the Holy Spirit moving through it.
The Holy Spirit does the work, and he chooses to use us by sharing his gifts and abilities with us. Make prayer and time in the Word a priority for your ministry and your church. Don’t allow the reasons why it’s difficult or challenging or the fears of the unknowns to prevent you and your church from being bold in the ways that you take the Gospel of Jesus to our friends and families in the disability community. There was nothing logical to the human mind about what Peter and John were doing in Acts 3-4, but they knew God had to show up and they trusted that He would. And when He did, because he always does, the people around them were left with wonder and amazement and utterly astounded. Your church can be that for the disability community and I assure you God wants to do that through your church if you’re willing to allow Him to move in ways that only he can.
After we read of the response of the high court to the boldness of Peter and John, I love what it says in verse 14. “But seeing the man who was healed standing beside them, they had nothing to say in opposition.” Our guy who had been disabled for more than 40 years and had no hope of ever entering the temple and was left to beg alone outside the temple gates, was not only healed physically and praising God inside the temple, but he was arrested and standing arm in arm with Peter and John. And that left the high court with nothing to say in opposition.
When God moves through you and your church with the Gospel of Jesus Christ and by empowering you and your people with the Holy Spirit, lives are changed forever.
We see it in the life and ministry of Jesus, and we see it in the life and ministry and the disciples, and for all of them, there was an intentional focus on including those with disabilities in what God was doing. You and your church can do that. Not because you’re theologically smart enough or because your church is big enough or has enough resources or because you have all the best training materials and an abundance of volunteers but instead it’s because the Holy Spirit will do it. And when you faithfully pursue special needs ministry and caring for those impacted by disability, you’ll find yourself asking the question, “How did we do that?” And you’ll know you didn’t do it. The Holy Spirit did it!
Thank you for listening in to this week’s episode of Key Ministry: The Podcast. You can find a full transcript as well as helpful links and notes connected to today’s conversation at keyministry.org/podcast. I’m thankful for our conversations and for all the ways the Holy Spirit is equipping our churches for special needs ministry. Have a blessed day and I hope we can talk again soon.
