See what Christ did for her. See the difference it made to her. Eighteen years bowed down, and immediately she was healed. Conversion is a crisis experience. It's not a lifelong procedure. You come to Christ. The laying on of hands was the symbol of imparted grace. Did she pay for her healing? No, of course not and she couldn't have done. There was no price set upon this. We can put no price on the value of a healing like this, and nor can we pay the Lord for conversion. This is by grace. We come to him. We tell him our need. We tell him we have sinned. We repent. We desire his converting power and he gives it to us for nothing. Only he can pay, and that is what he did on Calvary's cross.
We read that she was healed and made straight immediately. No hesitation, no delay and so with you. She had been eighteen years disabled. How many years have you been unsaved? All that time you have lived a life of unbelief, a life opposed to God, but when you come to him you are transformed immediately however long you have been in that state. Your deformed soul is made new. No person on earth could do it, priests could not do it, ceremonial acts could not do it. That is why we don't have any of those in the Christian church. In true Christian churches we don't have priests and we don't have ceremonial acts because they can accomplish nothing. Indeed no doctor could do it: he could not heal your soul and give you eternal life. No university faculty could do it. Only Christ could heal your soul through what he has done on Calvary in bearing away your sin.
When Martin Luther was 27 years of age, he had been an Augustinian monk from the age of 21. He had excelled academically, and had become a lecturer in the local Catholic university, teaching theology. But he was deeply depressed. He didn't believe he had communion with God, a relationship with him. What, as a monk? No, he was convinced that there was no life in his religion. He tried everything to please God and to earn his passage to heaven, and to gain the favour of God, to have some certainty that he belonged to the Lord, some evidence of divine power in his life, but he didn't get it. At the age of 27, he went to Rome on a longish visit. He felt this would be surely the moment when he would gain assurance, and he went round from chapel to chapel, from shrine to shrine, doing penance, doing all the things that those Catholics did in the hope that it would bring about forgiveness. He even went up the Scala Sancta on his knees, the 28 white marble steps in Rome that supposedly were taken from Jerusalem, the steps up which Christ was supposed to have ascended when he went to the praetorium guard drill hall to be abused and examined by the soldiers prior to his crucifixion. As Luther did so, saying, Our Father, on every step, he came to the top, and still felt no assurance that his sins were forgiven. This act was supposed to buy him many years indulgence, liberty from purgatory – another Catholic invention. But he had no assurance that there was any blessing for him, and he doubted the whole story.
It was shortly after that that he came to truly understand there is nothing you can do to earn the favour of God. The only way to have your heart changed and your life changed and to know communion with God and to become a Christian, is to receive as a free gift the pardoning grace of Christ. You cannot contribute to it. You cannot earn it. You can only fall on your knees and yield up your life, and trust in what Christ has done on Calvary to bear the punishment of sin. When he understood that, he became a true convert, a true Christian. Not so long afterwards, within the space of a few years, he was nailing his 95 theses to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg.