All Roads Lead to Jesus (English)
Part 1: Introduction
As I have been studying Jesus these past few months, I have become convinced that when it comes to this issue of us finding Jesus, it’s really more the other way around. We don’t find Jesus, Jesus finds us. Throughout the Bible, the stories and the teachings show that God is the seeker and that, left to our own devices, we are either ignoring God entirely, actively resisting Him or, in some cases, actually running from Him. In any case, we’re always the ones being sought, and God is always the one who is seeking. It’s never the other way around.
And I can hear the protests and the pushback from that last statement coming already, especially from the church goers. What about the stories in the Gospels, those eyewitness accounts of the events surrounding the life of Jesus, where that doesn’t look at all like that’s the case? What about Nicodemus, the guy you just spent the last six weeks writing about, Roach? Jesus didn’t initiate contact with him, it was the other way around. Or what about that synagogue leader named Jairus? He came to Jesus, he initiated contact first. Or what about the poor woman who is injected into the Jairus story who had the issue of blood. Jesus, because He had laid down His divine powers in order to come to earth, may not have even known her name. What about her? Or Zacchaeus, that vertically challenged tax collector who was so short that he had to climb up in the tree in order to just get a look at Jesus? If he doesn’t get his sorry hide up in that sycamore tree, Jesus never would have seen him and we wouldn’t even be having this conversation. What about all these people?
Yes, what about these people? On the surface it looks like the naysayers raise a valid point but consider this. At the time when these people lived, Jesus was doing public ministry and was riding a wave of popularity that could best be described as rock star status. He was doing miracles on a scale that no one else had ever done them. We’re talking about healings on a colossal scale. The lame walked, the blind suddenly had 20/20 vision, the deaf could now hear and lepers were healed. Oh yeah, and about those lepers. Jesus was not afraid to touch them, an action that would make Him ceremonially unclean. He touched them anyway and, instead of those lepers making Jesus unclean, the lepers became clean.
There were also stories of people who were demon possessed at the time. Jesus was publicly calling these demons out and casting them out. Rabbit trail alert. There’s this lie that’s been circulating in society that Jesus and Satan are equals kind of, that there’s this major struggle going on between the two of them and the outcome of that struggle is up in the air. Nothing could be further from the truth. News flash. When it comes to this question of which one of the two of them is more powerful, it’s not even close. If God really wants to do something, Satan is powerless to stop Him and Jesus, God the Son, proved it when He was on earth…again….and again…and again. Search the four gospels. Read the stories. Never was there a time when Jesus told a demon to do something and a demon was able to tell Him no. His disciples, yes, there at least once when the demons told the disciples to stick it but Jesus, never. And He was doing this on a public scale and people were noticing.
Then there was His teaching. What the crowds were saying was that He was teaching like one who had authority, not like the other teachers of the law. Here’s what the people saw. Most rabbis who were Jesus’ contemporaries and teaching at the time would say something like this in their teachings. “Rabbi so and so teaches…” and would refer back to a previous rabbi who was considered to be an authority on whatever subject they were teaching on. Never would they say, “Therefore, I say to you…” Jesus did though. In fact, He would take it a step further sometimes and say something like this. “You have been told, or it has been said…. but I say to you…” And He was saying these things like He was the authority and not Rabbi Whatever his name was. And He wasn’t quiet about it either. He was doing this on a grand public scale. If Jesus would have had Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and TikTok back then, He would have had millions of followers on each one of them.
The point that I’m making with all of this is that Jesus’ public ministry WAS the calling that these people got. Again and again, Jesus’ fame preceded Him and the masses flocked to Him. These people at the time when Jesus lived had needs and suffering that would devastate most of us, and when they heard of this Jewish rabbi from Nazareth who could meet those needs and relieve their suffering, when their opportunity came to see Him, or when they decided to take matters into their own hands and create their own opportunity, they took it. Yes, they did come to Jesus, that is true, but they came in response to the very public ministry of Jesus of Nazareth. There’s one other thing as well. It seems to me as I read the Bible or when I look at life for all that matters, that Jesus often used a megaphone rather than a private one on one to get people’s attention. Yes, there’s the story about the Samaritan woman at the well but she’s more the exception rather than the rule. Usually, it was the public platform that people had to respond to.
So, what does all of this have to do with us? Well, with the exception of five scars on his body and the fact that He’s now risen and reigns in power at God the Father’s right hand, Jesus hasn’t changed at all since then. His character is the same and His method of operation is the same. Granted, the technology at His disposal has gotten an upgrade, the printing press, airplanes, and the internet are revolutionary game changers in that regard, for example, but He still operates the same. His message is still repent and follow me and one of His primary means of calling people to Himself is still to use the public platform and the responsibility for the response is still on the individual hearing the message. Regarding that public platform, I’m not wrong. Just now I googled a search, “how many references to Jesus are there on the internet today?” According to Google, the answer is 112,000,000. Those references include everything from articles to You-Tube videos to websites, including this one. (Yeah, I just said that. 😊)
Here’s something else that hasn’t changed since then either. The amount of suffering and the devastating needs that people are experiencing is still the same and Jesus is still reaching out to meet people right at their point of need. C.S. Lewis called pain, “God’s megaphone that He uses to rouse a deaf world.” According to Lewis, “Pain insists on being attended to. God whispers in our pleasures, speaks in our consciences, but shouts in our pains.” Your pain probably looks different from my pain and vice versa, but it’s still there. And it’s demanding our response.
What I want to do over the next couple of months is to take a look at the lives of ten people whose stories are recorded in the Gospel accounts who reached out to Jesus and see how Jesus responded to them. I’m going to tell you straight up, you’re going to learn some things about Jesus, and you’re going to learn some things about us and you’re especially going to learn that while Jesus claimed to be the only way to God, there are many roads leading to Him and it’s a level plain. You’re going to meet people from all walks of life. There’s a couple of religious guys in that group. There’s a tax collector. There’s sick people, there’s a prostitute and a notorious thief and…there’s guy who turned Jesus down. Yeah, there’s a guy in that list who flat turned Jesus down. He saw the offer that was on the table, he counted the cost and said…nope, not gonna happen. As a writer who is just a fellow student of this stuff, just like you, I’m looking forward to it.
In closing, especially if you are reading this and you’re finding yourself at a place in life where it just doesn’t feel right, like there’s something missing, it may not be all you. It could be that God is making you painfully aware that there’s something missing and that missing piece is Him. You know all the adverse stuff that’s going on in your life right now and you’re thinking that God must be testing you. Maybe He is but have you considered that something else might be going on? Perhaps, He’s not testing you with this, He could be calling you instead, gesturing for you to come to Him. And maybe, just maybe, you’ve tried everything BUT Him and maybe, just maybe, it’s time to at least see what this Jesus is about. And you know, if that’s where you’re at, maybe it’s time to just pray something like this. “Jesus, with where I’m at in life right now, with what I’ve got goin’ on, I’m ready to at least hear what you have to say. Tell me what you got. Show yourself to me.” And to help yourself with that search, go online to www.biblehub.com and just start reading some of the Gospel accounts, especially that are in a modern translation, that just give a thought for thought translation, like the NIV, the NLT or the CEV versions. Just read it like you would any story. Just see how it flows. Pay special attention to the red print because that’s when Jesus is speaking. See what Jesus has to say to you.
Next week we’re going to begin our study of how all roads lead to Jesus with the first person on our list and he’s a guy who you’ve met before. We’re going to take one last look at Nicodemus and all of you good kid rule followers might want to pay attention to this one. See you next week.
In the meantime, if you want to reach me directly, I can be reached at [email protected]. I do monitor that email account regularly.
Copyright 2022 by Sam Roach
And I can hear the protests and the pushback from that last statement coming already, especially from the church goers. What about the stories in the Gospels, those eyewitness accounts of the events surrounding the life of Jesus, where that doesn’t look at all like that’s the case? What about Nicodemus, the guy you just spent the last six weeks writing about, Roach? Jesus didn’t initiate contact with him, it was the other way around. Or what about that synagogue leader named Jairus? He came to Jesus, he initiated contact first. Or what about the poor woman who is injected into the Jairus story who had the issue of blood. Jesus, because He had laid down His divine powers in order to come to earth, may not have even known her name. What about her? Or Zacchaeus, that vertically challenged tax collector who was so short that he had to climb up in the tree in order to just get a look at Jesus? If he doesn’t get his sorry hide up in that sycamore tree, Jesus never would have seen him and we wouldn’t even be having this conversation. What about all these people?
Yes, what about these people? On the surface it looks like the naysayers raise a valid point but consider this. At the time when these people lived, Jesus was doing public ministry and was riding a wave of popularity that could best be described as rock star status. He was doing miracles on a scale that no one else had ever done them. We’re talking about healings on a colossal scale. The lame walked, the blind suddenly had 20/20 vision, the deaf could now hear and lepers were healed. Oh yeah, and about those lepers. Jesus was not afraid to touch them, an action that would make Him ceremonially unclean. He touched them anyway and, instead of those lepers making Jesus unclean, the lepers became clean.
There were also stories of people who were demon possessed at the time. Jesus was publicly calling these demons out and casting them out. Rabbit trail alert. There’s this lie that’s been circulating in society that Jesus and Satan are equals kind of, that there’s this major struggle going on between the two of them and the outcome of that struggle is up in the air. Nothing could be further from the truth. News flash. When it comes to this question of which one of the two of them is more powerful, it’s not even close. If God really wants to do something, Satan is powerless to stop Him and Jesus, God the Son, proved it when He was on earth…again….and again…and again. Search the four gospels. Read the stories. Never was there a time when Jesus told a demon to do something and a demon was able to tell Him no. His disciples, yes, there at least once when the demons told the disciples to stick it but Jesus, never. And He was doing this on a public scale and people were noticing.
Then there was His teaching. What the crowds were saying was that He was teaching like one who had authority, not like the other teachers of the law. Here’s what the people saw. Most rabbis who were Jesus’ contemporaries and teaching at the time would say something like this in their teachings. “Rabbi so and so teaches…” and would refer back to a previous rabbi who was considered to be an authority on whatever subject they were teaching on. Never would they say, “Therefore, I say to you…” Jesus did though. In fact, He would take it a step further sometimes and say something like this. “You have been told, or it has been said…. but I say to you…” And He was saying these things like He was the authority and not Rabbi Whatever his name was. And He wasn’t quiet about it either. He was doing this on a grand public scale. If Jesus would have had Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and TikTok back then, He would have had millions of followers on each one of them.
The point that I’m making with all of this is that Jesus’ public ministry WAS the calling that these people got. Again and again, Jesus’ fame preceded Him and the masses flocked to Him. These people at the time when Jesus lived had needs and suffering that would devastate most of us, and when they heard of this Jewish rabbi from Nazareth who could meet those needs and relieve their suffering, when their opportunity came to see Him, or when they decided to take matters into their own hands and create their own opportunity, they took it. Yes, they did come to Jesus, that is true, but they came in response to the very public ministry of Jesus of Nazareth. There’s one other thing as well. It seems to me as I read the Bible or when I look at life for all that matters, that Jesus often used a megaphone rather than a private one on one to get people’s attention. Yes, there’s the story about the Samaritan woman at the well but she’s more the exception rather than the rule. Usually, it was the public platform that people had to respond to.
So, what does all of this have to do with us? Well, with the exception of five scars on his body and the fact that He’s now risen and reigns in power at God the Father’s right hand, Jesus hasn’t changed at all since then. His character is the same and His method of operation is the same. Granted, the technology at His disposal has gotten an upgrade, the printing press, airplanes, and the internet are revolutionary game changers in that regard, for example, but He still operates the same. His message is still repent and follow me and one of His primary means of calling people to Himself is still to use the public platform and the responsibility for the response is still on the individual hearing the message. Regarding that public platform, I’m not wrong. Just now I googled a search, “how many references to Jesus are there on the internet today?” According to Google, the answer is 112,000,000. Those references include everything from articles to You-Tube videos to websites, including this one. (Yeah, I just said that. 😊)
Here’s something else that hasn’t changed since then either. The amount of suffering and the devastating needs that people are experiencing is still the same and Jesus is still reaching out to meet people right at their point of need. C.S. Lewis called pain, “God’s megaphone that He uses to rouse a deaf world.” According to Lewis, “Pain insists on being attended to. God whispers in our pleasures, speaks in our consciences, but shouts in our pains.” Your pain probably looks different from my pain and vice versa, but it’s still there. And it’s demanding our response.
What I want to do over the next couple of months is to take a look at the lives of ten people whose stories are recorded in the Gospel accounts who reached out to Jesus and see how Jesus responded to them. I’m going to tell you straight up, you’re going to learn some things about Jesus, and you’re going to learn some things about us and you’re especially going to learn that while Jesus claimed to be the only way to God, there are many roads leading to Him and it’s a level plain. You’re going to meet people from all walks of life. There’s a couple of religious guys in that group. There’s a tax collector. There’s sick people, there’s a prostitute and a notorious thief and…there’s guy who turned Jesus down. Yeah, there’s a guy in that list who flat turned Jesus down. He saw the offer that was on the table, he counted the cost and said…nope, not gonna happen. As a writer who is just a fellow student of this stuff, just like you, I’m looking forward to it.
In closing, especially if you are reading this and you’re finding yourself at a place in life where it just doesn’t feel right, like there’s something missing, it may not be all you. It could be that God is making you painfully aware that there’s something missing and that missing piece is Him. You know all the adverse stuff that’s going on in your life right now and you’re thinking that God must be testing you. Maybe He is but have you considered that something else might be going on? Perhaps, He’s not testing you with this, He could be calling you instead, gesturing for you to come to Him. And maybe, just maybe, you’ve tried everything BUT Him and maybe, just maybe, it’s time to at least see what this Jesus is about. And you know, if that’s where you’re at, maybe it’s time to just pray something like this. “Jesus, with where I’m at in life right now, with what I’ve got goin’ on, I’m ready to at least hear what you have to say. Tell me what you got. Show yourself to me.” And to help yourself with that search, go online to www.biblehub.com and just start reading some of the Gospel accounts, especially that are in a modern translation, that just give a thought for thought translation, like the NIV, the NLT or the CEV versions. Just read it like you would any story. Just see how it flows. Pay special attention to the red print because that’s when Jesus is speaking. See what Jesus has to say to you.
Next week we’re going to begin our study of how all roads lead to Jesus with the first person on our list and he’s a guy who you’ve met before. We’re going to take one last look at Nicodemus and all of you good kid rule followers might want to pay attention to this one. See you next week.
In the meantime, if you want to reach me directly, I can be reached at [email protected]. I do monitor that email account regularly.
Copyright 2022 by Sam Roach
Part 2: The Sincere Religious Rule Follower
The first example that I want to look at in this series is a man who we’ve met before, Nicodemus. He’s first mentioned in the Bible in John 3 and John introduces us to him like this. “Now there was a Pharisee, a man named Nicodemus who was a member of the Jewish ruling council. He came to Jesus at night….” And we’re just going to stop right here because this sentence and a half speaks volumes to some of us, especially those of us who were raised in the “going to church” culture in the United States.
Now, while we aren’t told anything about Nicodemus’ family based on his lot in life, especially how influential he was when he came to see Jesus, we can make some educated guesses. For example, in Deuteronomy 11, Moses used phrases like this to describe how God’s words were to be treated. “Fix these words of mine in your hearts and minds; tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads….Teach them to your children…24/7…write my words on the doorframes of your houses and on your gate.” In other words, what God was telling them to do was to weave what was written in the Mosaic Law, and later what was written by the prophets and the psalms, into the very fabric of their culture and it’s safe to assume that Nicodemus’ parents did just that. He wouldn’t have gotten where he got in life if they hadn’t.
Looking at Nicodemus’ childhood in this light, I have a question for my church going readers who were raised in a church. Assuming that we have Nicodemus pegged correctly in that previous paragraph, as you reflect on your growing up years, how many of you can relate to his experience? I can. I was raised in a similar environment albeit in Protestant America that was a lot like that in many ways. Allow me to give you some snapshots of what life looked like in our home. We were a practicing Christian family that attended church regularly. Mom was a pianist, actually a pretty good one at that, and I can remember hymns being sung regularly in the house. Dad had a good baritone voice and he liked to sing. Prayer before meals was always practiced. And both of my parents had times when they would read their Bibles on their own. I can remember Dad often reading his Bible in the evening sitting in his chair after he’d come home from work. I also remember waking up early one morning, coming down the stairs to the living room and seeing Mom on her knees with an open Bible and praying.
It wasn’t just private Christianity either. As I said, Dad and Mom were regular attenders at church on Sundays as well, both the morning service and the evening service. As kids, we were regular Sunday School attenders and, once we were old enough, we also attended youth group too. And, although this wasn’t my personal experience, because I wasn’t born yet when she did it, but Mom actually hosted a children’s Bible club in our home after school each week. According to my oldest sister, each week there were 10 to 12 children meeting in our home after school being served oatmeal chocolate chip cookies and learning Bible stories that were taught on flannel graph. The bottom line, like Nicodemus’ faith, this was not a lip service faith, this was a practiced faith that permeated our daily lives.
Now for those of you who were never raised in this kind of an environment, I have to be honest with you, this upbringing has both its positive and negative aspects. Positively, I was exposed to Biblical truth from an early age and it laid the foundation so that God could call me to Himself many years later. And the volume of knowledge that I was taught both by my parents and the churches that I attended are still beneficial to me even to this day. Frankly, I would be lying if I said that I wasn’t grateful for what my parents did for me.
There’s also some negative aspects to a background like this, however. In the first place, if you don’t own the faith that you’re being taught as your own, it can just become a culture or a family system of the way that you just do things. The best way to describe it is, you know the drill and you know how to act. You know the religious words and phrases and, even if you don’t know exactly what they mean, you know how to respond and, in the event that how to respond is unclear, you sort of do what everyone else is doing and you’ll be okay.
There’s also something else going on too. It has to do with the standard of behavior outside of church that’s expected to be practiced in this environment. Perhaps the best way to describe it is that there’s a lot of external expectations, rules, do this, don’t do that, that become the norm and it’s a tough standard to maintain sometimes because it runs counterculture, especially as you get older, to what everyone else is doing. In fact, at times the church standard is in direct conflict with the non-church standard and, even if it isn’t, it’s in direct conflict with what you want to do. And this is where things get dicey. Even if you agree with the rules of conduct and comply with them, because you know that following these rules is not only the right thing to do but also the smart thing to do, you’re still left feeling dissatisfied, like there’s something off, something’s missing but you can’t put your finger on what it is. And about the time that you start thinking that this off feeling is normal, that that’s just the way it is, you come in contact with someone for whom that isn’t the way that it is. They’re doing all of the same things that you are, except, they seem to be satisfied. And they aren’t weird either. In fact, they’re normal but there’s something different about them. They’ve got something that’s different, it’s intriguing and it like there’s this unspoken invitation for you to get close and at least examine what it is that they have going for them. So you take a step of faith and put them on your radar. You start to examine them more closely and that brings us back to Nicodemus. He did the same thing with Jesus.
This is just my opinion, but, interpreting the evidence, I see Nicodemus as a man who genuinely wanted to do the right things for the right reasons. He wasn’t a religious hypocrite, he sincerely tried his best to obey the Mosaic Law, not because of how it may have looked to other people but rather because it was the right thing to do and it pleased God. At least he hoped that it pleased God because that’s what he was trying to do. Still, in spite of his best efforts, he too felt that something was missing. He too felt as if something was off, and when he saw Jesus, he saw what everyone else saw, and what he saw was both intriguing and enticing. He came to Jesus by night because he honestly wanted to know what Jesus was about.
“Rabbi,” he said. “Everyone knows that God has sent you because no one could do what you do if God wasn’t with him.”
And, in response, Jesus went right to the heart of the issue. “I’m telling you the truth. Unless a person is reborn, born in his spirit, in other words, they can’t enter the Kingdom of God.” Was Jesus blunt and direct? Absolutely, but Jesus understood where Nicodemus was coming from and He knew that He had to cut through a lifetime of religious error. Here’s what I mean. All of his life Nicodemus had been taught the Mosaic Law and had practiced everything that the Mosaic Law prescribed. For example, he carefully observed the Sabbath and he offered all of the appropriate sacrifices. On the eighth day of his life, he had almost certainly been circumcised, an important ritual in the Hebrew faith and he carefully tithed from his income. And he did all of this because he thought that if he did this and placed his faith in God, that God would accept him. It was an erroneous belief that he had most likely been taught as a child. It was a religion based on performing good works, works that were in and of themselves, good things but not valuable for obtaining eternal life and Jesus corrected him on it.
I won’t take the time to go through the entire discourse here, it’s recorded in John 3:1 – 21 but, in a nutshell, what Jesus told Nicodemus was this. Totally paraphrasing here, Jesus said, “Nicodemus, using an analogy that you will understand, you need to be spiritually reborn because your spirit, that part of you that connects with God, that part that communicates with God, is dead, it’s unresponsive. And Nicodemus, you know that it’s your inability to meet God’s perfect standard that’s caused this. Here’s the thing though, the only way that you can be spiritually reborn is if you place your faith in Me and not in your good works. If you don’t, you’re condemned already, not because of anything you’ve done but because you haven’t placed your faith in Me.” I’m not sure if that paraphrase did John 3 justice, but the gist of what Jesus said was that in order to enter into God’s kingdom a person had to be reborn spiritually and the only way a person could do that was by placing their faith in Jesus.
In street English, what Jesus told Nicodemus and what He’s telling all of us is that no amount of good works, religious or otherwise, is sufficient to make anyone right with God. He’s telling us that we’ve all missed the mark when it comes to meeting God’s standard and that’s what’s got us in so much trouble. To fully explain this, I need to do something that I don’t usually do in this website, I need to use a churchy term. I don’t know any other way to do it so hang on, I’m going to use a churchy term and then I’ll explain what it really means.
I need to use the word sin. Now sin is one of the words that appears a lot in the New Testament and it’s an important word. It’s something that God doesn’t have any of and does not allow it to be in His presence. It sounds really bad and, because of its consequences, it really is. But, because it’s hardly ever used anymore outside of religious contexts, it’s also a misunderstood word so let’s break it down.
Sin originally was not a religious term at all but was an old archery term they used about the time when the New Testament was written. In archery competitions, when the archer shot at a target and missed it completely, it was called a sin. How it got tied into religious terminology looked something like this. At the time when Jesus was alive, religious people took this archery term and adopted it to describe what happens anytime a person’s attitude or conduct missed God’s standard. Now the problem here, as I see it, is not in the definition of sin but rather in the visualization of the application because, unlike at the time when Jesus was alive and archery was a thing, it’s now 2022 and archery isn’t a thing anymore. So, let’s update the definition with some illustrations from modern day athletics that might clarify the definition that the original writers of the New Testament were trying to get across. Because sin just means to miss the mark, then, in the context of a basketball game, if a basketball player misses a free throw for example, that’s a sin. In baseball, if a pitcher tries to throw a curveball and tries to just hit the outside corner of the plate so it would be a strike but misses the plate instead and throws a ball, that’s a sin. If a soccer player tries a shot on goal and the ball doinks off either one of the posts or the cross bar, that’s a sin. Or, if a quarterback throws a pass and it falls incomplete for whatever reason, that would also be a sin…exceptions here being when the quarterback is spiking the ball or when he’s throwing the ball out of bounds intentionally so he doesn’t get sacked. Bottom line, God is perfect in all areas, word, deed, motive and attitude, and the standard that He expects from us is that we have to be perfect like that too. All. The. Time. From start to finish, that’s the standard. God’s moral code has to be our moral code and we can’t deviate from it.
So, what’s the remedy? How do we fix this? Let’s start with where Jesus started that night with Nicodemus. Let’s start with what Jesus didn’t say to Nicodemus. He didn’t tell Nicodemus to do more religious stuff. That would have been ridiculous because to have this idea that somehow obeying a religious system of behavior perfectly in order to pay for your own sins is insane. It would be like taking a trip from Seattle to Hawaii (I know – fun!) but instead of flying out of Sea-Tac Airport, we try and swim it instead. There’s no way that’s happening. Granted, there’s no sharks in Puget Sound that would eat you but the pigeons would definitely sit and your head. And, even if they didn’t, there’s no way that a person would make it as far as Whidbey Island before they drowned from exhaustion. They just don’t have it in them to sufficiently swim to Hawaii from Sea-Tac and, in the same way, we don’t have it in us to pay for our own sins.
But God knew all of this and here is the remedy. It’s Jesus. He did live a sinless life, i.e., a perfect life. Going back to our definition of what sin was and what it wasn’t, every time Jesus took the mound, He pitched a perfect game. He only faced 27 batters. He batted 1000. He made every shot on goal. He completed every pass that He ever threw. He met the impossible standard and then, in an act of extravagant grace, He did the unimaginable, He offered Himself as the remedy for our dilemma. When Jesus went to the cross and died for us, He took the consequences of our rebellion on Himself. He paid the penalty for our sin, every incomplete pass, every brick free throw, every ball, every doink, it didn’t matter whether it was a big doink or a little doink, He paid for it all. And after God the Father raised Him from the dead, He made this over the top, blockbuster trade for whoever would place their faith in Him. He exchanged His perfection for their imperfection. He made it so that whoever would place their faith in Him and end their rebellion, that God the Father, using an economic example, would see the debt they incurred against Him and look at the ledger and see the words, “Paid in Full,” next to the offense. To use current verbiage, God would see that and say, “We’re good. Come on into My presence.” If you try and pay it yourself though, yeah, good luck with that. It’s not going to happen.
Now, in conclusion, I want to talk to the people like me who were raised in a religious environment for a minute. Does any of this strike a chord? Have you been living this religious life, doing religious stuff but it always seems like something is missing? There’s always this nagging feeling, this emptiness, this hole that never seems to go away. You still have these habits, even socially acceptable ones that you can’t break, even though you know that you should. Or maybe you’re living this religious life but you really don’t want to anymore because while it looks good on the outside, it’s not really satisfying. Or, maybe, just maybe, you’re not even sure if you’re a Christian at all. You’re doing all of the right things but, is it really enough? Are these pointed questions? Yes, they are but you know why I am asking them? Because I was there too. Up until 19 years ago, this paragraph was my story too. Let me tell you what happened to me.
It was a late night and I was in my living room reading a book written by a guy named Ray Comfort. I don’t recall the name of the book but I do remember what Comfort’s point was. He framed this issue of sin around a legal idea. According to Comfort, the Ten Commandments were like ten basic laws that God had issued for humans to follow if they wanted to be accepted by Him and, if anyone broke one of them, that made them a law breaker. Interesting concept, I thought, and quite convicting for me at the time. You see, this was my God moment if you will, because God had set up the perfect storm. A week earlier I had been studying the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5 – 7 where Jesus had defined sin not as merely acts of rebellion but of motives behind the acts of rebellion. For example, according to Jesus, even if a person doesn’t actually lust after a woman or a man, but if they only go as far as to get all worked up and hot and bothered over them, they have committed adultery with them because they have committed adultery in their heart. In other words, what Jesus did was raise the bar regarding what was sin and what wasn’t by taking it to the motive level. I remember as I studied this that this concept stood out to me. Fast forward one week later. That night, as I contemplated each of the Ten Commandments and then tied them in with what Jesus said about what sin was in the Sermon on the Mount, I came to the conclusion that I had broken every one of the Ten Commandments. If the purpose of life was to see how many of the Ten Commandments I could break, I was batting 1000. That made me a law breaker, an outlaw on the run from God and none of the religious stuff that I had done or was doing could fix that, only Jesus could.
That night I prayed as I often did, but on this night, I prayed a different kind of prayer than any other that I had prayed before. I had prayed for forgiveness before but this time when I prayed, I agreed with God and called my sin what it was, a direct violation of God’s laws. I admitted to God that because of my attitudes and actions, that I had broken every one of His laws and that made me a lawbreaker, an outlaw (I think that I actually used that term) and I needed a savior. That night, I accepted Jesus’ offer that was on the table and I not only asked for forgiveness but also turned control of my life over to God, once and for all. After 48 years, my rebellion was over and it was like a light turned on in my entire being. I too experienced a rebirth.
Now I have to tell you, my life didn’t change overnight. I had a lifetime of issues stuffed away inside of me but God began the process of unpacking them and changing me, making me more like Himself. It’s a process that’s still ongoing by the way. The transformation from the person I was to who God wants me to be isn’t finished yet but, I can tell you this much. I’m not the person I was before it started and I’m not the person who I will be when God’s finished, in the same way that a kid grows, I’m growing.
For those of you reading this, especially those of you who were raised in a church, if I have described things from my experience that resonate with you and you want to talk, get a hold of me. Email me at [email protected].
Next week I want to take a look at a woman who interrupted Jesus on a mercy mission and see how He interacted with her. It’s an interesting story. See you next week.
Copyright 2022 by Sam Roach
Now, while we aren’t told anything about Nicodemus’ family based on his lot in life, especially how influential he was when he came to see Jesus, we can make some educated guesses. For example, in Deuteronomy 11, Moses used phrases like this to describe how God’s words were to be treated. “Fix these words of mine in your hearts and minds; tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads….Teach them to your children…24/7…write my words on the doorframes of your houses and on your gate.” In other words, what God was telling them to do was to weave what was written in the Mosaic Law, and later what was written by the prophets and the psalms, into the very fabric of their culture and it’s safe to assume that Nicodemus’ parents did just that. He wouldn’t have gotten where he got in life if they hadn’t.
Looking at Nicodemus’ childhood in this light, I have a question for my church going readers who were raised in a church. Assuming that we have Nicodemus pegged correctly in that previous paragraph, as you reflect on your growing up years, how many of you can relate to his experience? I can. I was raised in a similar environment albeit in Protestant America that was a lot like that in many ways. Allow me to give you some snapshots of what life looked like in our home. We were a practicing Christian family that attended church regularly. Mom was a pianist, actually a pretty good one at that, and I can remember hymns being sung regularly in the house. Dad had a good baritone voice and he liked to sing. Prayer before meals was always practiced. And both of my parents had times when they would read their Bibles on their own. I can remember Dad often reading his Bible in the evening sitting in his chair after he’d come home from work. I also remember waking up early one morning, coming down the stairs to the living room and seeing Mom on her knees with an open Bible and praying.
It wasn’t just private Christianity either. As I said, Dad and Mom were regular attenders at church on Sundays as well, both the morning service and the evening service. As kids, we were regular Sunday School attenders and, once we were old enough, we also attended youth group too. And, although this wasn’t my personal experience, because I wasn’t born yet when she did it, but Mom actually hosted a children’s Bible club in our home after school each week. According to my oldest sister, each week there were 10 to 12 children meeting in our home after school being served oatmeal chocolate chip cookies and learning Bible stories that were taught on flannel graph. The bottom line, like Nicodemus’ faith, this was not a lip service faith, this was a practiced faith that permeated our daily lives.
Now for those of you who were never raised in this kind of an environment, I have to be honest with you, this upbringing has both its positive and negative aspects. Positively, I was exposed to Biblical truth from an early age and it laid the foundation so that God could call me to Himself many years later. And the volume of knowledge that I was taught both by my parents and the churches that I attended are still beneficial to me even to this day. Frankly, I would be lying if I said that I wasn’t grateful for what my parents did for me.
There’s also some negative aspects to a background like this, however. In the first place, if you don’t own the faith that you’re being taught as your own, it can just become a culture or a family system of the way that you just do things. The best way to describe it is, you know the drill and you know how to act. You know the religious words and phrases and, even if you don’t know exactly what they mean, you know how to respond and, in the event that how to respond is unclear, you sort of do what everyone else is doing and you’ll be okay.
There’s also something else going on too. It has to do with the standard of behavior outside of church that’s expected to be practiced in this environment. Perhaps the best way to describe it is that there’s a lot of external expectations, rules, do this, don’t do that, that become the norm and it’s a tough standard to maintain sometimes because it runs counterculture, especially as you get older, to what everyone else is doing. In fact, at times the church standard is in direct conflict with the non-church standard and, even if it isn’t, it’s in direct conflict with what you want to do. And this is where things get dicey. Even if you agree with the rules of conduct and comply with them, because you know that following these rules is not only the right thing to do but also the smart thing to do, you’re still left feeling dissatisfied, like there’s something off, something’s missing but you can’t put your finger on what it is. And about the time that you start thinking that this off feeling is normal, that that’s just the way it is, you come in contact with someone for whom that isn’t the way that it is. They’re doing all of the same things that you are, except, they seem to be satisfied. And they aren’t weird either. In fact, they’re normal but there’s something different about them. They’ve got something that’s different, it’s intriguing and it like there’s this unspoken invitation for you to get close and at least examine what it is that they have going for them. So you take a step of faith and put them on your radar. You start to examine them more closely and that brings us back to Nicodemus. He did the same thing with Jesus.
This is just my opinion, but, interpreting the evidence, I see Nicodemus as a man who genuinely wanted to do the right things for the right reasons. He wasn’t a religious hypocrite, he sincerely tried his best to obey the Mosaic Law, not because of how it may have looked to other people but rather because it was the right thing to do and it pleased God. At least he hoped that it pleased God because that’s what he was trying to do. Still, in spite of his best efforts, he too felt that something was missing. He too felt as if something was off, and when he saw Jesus, he saw what everyone else saw, and what he saw was both intriguing and enticing. He came to Jesus by night because he honestly wanted to know what Jesus was about.
“Rabbi,” he said. “Everyone knows that God has sent you because no one could do what you do if God wasn’t with him.”
And, in response, Jesus went right to the heart of the issue. “I’m telling you the truth. Unless a person is reborn, born in his spirit, in other words, they can’t enter the Kingdom of God.” Was Jesus blunt and direct? Absolutely, but Jesus understood where Nicodemus was coming from and He knew that He had to cut through a lifetime of religious error. Here’s what I mean. All of his life Nicodemus had been taught the Mosaic Law and had practiced everything that the Mosaic Law prescribed. For example, he carefully observed the Sabbath and he offered all of the appropriate sacrifices. On the eighth day of his life, he had almost certainly been circumcised, an important ritual in the Hebrew faith and he carefully tithed from his income. And he did all of this because he thought that if he did this and placed his faith in God, that God would accept him. It was an erroneous belief that he had most likely been taught as a child. It was a religion based on performing good works, works that were in and of themselves, good things but not valuable for obtaining eternal life and Jesus corrected him on it.
I won’t take the time to go through the entire discourse here, it’s recorded in John 3:1 – 21 but, in a nutshell, what Jesus told Nicodemus was this. Totally paraphrasing here, Jesus said, “Nicodemus, using an analogy that you will understand, you need to be spiritually reborn because your spirit, that part of you that connects with God, that part that communicates with God, is dead, it’s unresponsive. And Nicodemus, you know that it’s your inability to meet God’s perfect standard that’s caused this. Here’s the thing though, the only way that you can be spiritually reborn is if you place your faith in Me and not in your good works. If you don’t, you’re condemned already, not because of anything you’ve done but because you haven’t placed your faith in Me.” I’m not sure if that paraphrase did John 3 justice, but the gist of what Jesus said was that in order to enter into God’s kingdom a person had to be reborn spiritually and the only way a person could do that was by placing their faith in Jesus.
In street English, what Jesus told Nicodemus and what He’s telling all of us is that no amount of good works, religious or otherwise, is sufficient to make anyone right with God. He’s telling us that we’ve all missed the mark when it comes to meeting God’s standard and that’s what’s got us in so much trouble. To fully explain this, I need to do something that I don’t usually do in this website, I need to use a churchy term. I don’t know any other way to do it so hang on, I’m going to use a churchy term and then I’ll explain what it really means.
I need to use the word sin. Now sin is one of the words that appears a lot in the New Testament and it’s an important word. It’s something that God doesn’t have any of and does not allow it to be in His presence. It sounds really bad and, because of its consequences, it really is. But, because it’s hardly ever used anymore outside of religious contexts, it’s also a misunderstood word so let’s break it down.
Sin originally was not a religious term at all but was an old archery term they used about the time when the New Testament was written. In archery competitions, when the archer shot at a target and missed it completely, it was called a sin. How it got tied into religious terminology looked something like this. At the time when Jesus was alive, religious people took this archery term and adopted it to describe what happens anytime a person’s attitude or conduct missed God’s standard. Now the problem here, as I see it, is not in the definition of sin but rather in the visualization of the application because, unlike at the time when Jesus was alive and archery was a thing, it’s now 2022 and archery isn’t a thing anymore. So, let’s update the definition with some illustrations from modern day athletics that might clarify the definition that the original writers of the New Testament were trying to get across. Because sin just means to miss the mark, then, in the context of a basketball game, if a basketball player misses a free throw for example, that’s a sin. In baseball, if a pitcher tries to throw a curveball and tries to just hit the outside corner of the plate so it would be a strike but misses the plate instead and throws a ball, that’s a sin. If a soccer player tries a shot on goal and the ball doinks off either one of the posts or the cross bar, that’s a sin. Or, if a quarterback throws a pass and it falls incomplete for whatever reason, that would also be a sin…exceptions here being when the quarterback is spiking the ball or when he’s throwing the ball out of bounds intentionally so he doesn’t get sacked. Bottom line, God is perfect in all areas, word, deed, motive and attitude, and the standard that He expects from us is that we have to be perfect like that too. All. The. Time. From start to finish, that’s the standard. God’s moral code has to be our moral code and we can’t deviate from it.
So, what’s the remedy? How do we fix this? Let’s start with where Jesus started that night with Nicodemus. Let’s start with what Jesus didn’t say to Nicodemus. He didn’t tell Nicodemus to do more religious stuff. That would have been ridiculous because to have this idea that somehow obeying a religious system of behavior perfectly in order to pay for your own sins is insane. It would be like taking a trip from Seattle to Hawaii (I know – fun!) but instead of flying out of Sea-Tac Airport, we try and swim it instead. There’s no way that’s happening. Granted, there’s no sharks in Puget Sound that would eat you but the pigeons would definitely sit and your head. And, even if they didn’t, there’s no way that a person would make it as far as Whidbey Island before they drowned from exhaustion. They just don’t have it in them to sufficiently swim to Hawaii from Sea-Tac and, in the same way, we don’t have it in us to pay for our own sins.
But God knew all of this and here is the remedy. It’s Jesus. He did live a sinless life, i.e., a perfect life. Going back to our definition of what sin was and what it wasn’t, every time Jesus took the mound, He pitched a perfect game. He only faced 27 batters. He batted 1000. He made every shot on goal. He completed every pass that He ever threw. He met the impossible standard and then, in an act of extravagant grace, He did the unimaginable, He offered Himself as the remedy for our dilemma. When Jesus went to the cross and died for us, He took the consequences of our rebellion on Himself. He paid the penalty for our sin, every incomplete pass, every brick free throw, every ball, every doink, it didn’t matter whether it was a big doink or a little doink, He paid for it all. And after God the Father raised Him from the dead, He made this over the top, blockbuster trade for whoever would place their faith in Him. He exchanged His perfection for their imperfection. He made it so that whoever would place their faith in Him and end their rebellion, that God the Father, using an economic example, would see the debt they incurred against Him and look at the ledger and see the words, “Paid in Full,” next to the offense. To use current verbiage, God would see that and say, “We’re good. Come on into My presence.” If you try and pay it yourself though, yeah, good luck with that. It’s not going to happen.
Now, in conclusion, I want to talk to the people like me who were raised in a religious environment for a minute. Does any of this strike a chord? Have you been living this religious life, doing religious stuff but it always seems like something is missing? There’s always this nagging feeling, this emptiness, this hole that never seems to go away. You still have these habits, even socially acceptable ones that you can’t break, even though you know that you should. Or maybe you’re living this religious life but you really don’t want to anymore because while it looks good on the outside, it’s not really satisfying. Or, maybe, just maybe, you’re not even sure if you’re a Christian at all. You’re doing all of the right things but, is it really enough? Are these pointed questions? Yes, they are but you know why I am asking them? Because I was there too. Up until 19 years ago, this paragraph was my story too. Let me tell you what happened to me.
It was a late night and I was in my living room reading a book written by a guy named Ray Comfort. I don’t recall the name of the book but I do remember what Comfort’s point was. He framed this issue of sin around a legal idea. According to Comfort, the Ten Commandments were like ten basic laws that God had issued for humans to follow if they wanted to be accepted by Him and, if anyone broke one of them, that made them a law breaker. Interesting concept, I thought, and quite convicting for me at the time. You see, this was my God moment if you will, because God had set up the perfect storm. A week earlier I had been studying the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5 – 7 where Jesus had defined sin not as merely acts of rebellion but of motives behind the acts of rebellion. For example, according to Jesus, even if a person doesn’t actually lust after a woman or a man, but if they only go as far as to get all worked up and hot and bothered over them, they have committed adultery with them because they have committed adultery in their heart. In other words, what Jesus did was raise the bar regarding what was sin and what wasn’t by taking it to the motive level. I remember as I studied this that this concept stood out to me. Fast forward one week later. That night, as I contemplated each of the Ten Commandments and then tied them in with what Jesus said about what sin was in the Sermon on the Mount, I came to the conclusion that I had broken every one of the Ten Commandments. If the purpose of life was to see how many of the Ten Commandments I could break, I was batting 1000. That made me a law breaker, an outlaw on the run from God and none of the religious stuff that I had done or was doing could fix that, only Jesus could.
That night I prayed as I often did, but on this night, I prayed a different kind of prayer than any other that I had prayed before. I had prayed for forgiveness before but this time when I prayed, I agreed with God and called my sin what it was, a direct violation of God’s laws. I admitted to God that because of my attitudes and actions, that I had broken every one of His laws and that made me a lawbreaker, an outlaw (I think that I actually used that term) and I needed a savior. That night, I accepted Jesus’ offer that was on the table and I not only asked for forgiveness but also turned control of my life over to God, once and for all. After 48 years, my rebellion was over and it was like a light turned on in my entire being. I too experienced a rebirth.
Now I have to tell you, my life didn’t change overnight. I had a lifetime of issues stuffed away inside of me but God began the process of unpacking them and changing me, making me more like Himself. It’s a process that’s still ongoing by the way. The transformation from the person I was to who God wants me to be isn’t finished yet but, I can tell you this much. I’m not the person I was before it started and I’m not the person who I will be when God’s finished, in the same way that a kid grows, I’m growing.
For those of you reading this, especially those of you who were raised in a church, if I have described things from my experience that resonate with you and you want to talk, get a hold of me. Email me at [email protected].
Next week I want to take a look at a woman who interrupted Jesus on a mercy mission and see how He interacted with her. It’s an interesting story. See you next week.
Copyright 2022 by Sam Roach
Part 3: A Mission of Desperation
Have you ever been so desperate for something that you were willing to do darn near anything to get something that you wanted? I’ll bet that we all have at least once in our lives. For some of us, maybe it was something kind of trivial, like we wanted to meet someone so we did whatever that was just to get to know them so that either we could ask them out or maybe they would ask us out. Maybe it was something a little more important like taking on a second job, however degrading it was, in order to scrape up enough money to buy something that we wanted or needed. Or, maybe it was swallowing our pride and asking for help for something because, we couldn’t do it for ourselves and we’d come to the realization that if we didn’t ask for help, we were never going to get what we needed. Was what we did risky? Well yeah. And was it necessary? Yes, it was but we’d tried everything else and nothing had worked so we bit the bullet and just went for it. Now some of us can relate to a story like that, and some of us can’t. Today however, I’d like to tell you a story about a woman who could definitely relate to that story because it was her story. And to tell you the story, why don’t we pretend that we’re watching an online interview of the people who were either there when it happened or had talked to the people who were there and let them tell the story. It’s kind of a panel discussion with four people sitting on stage with a moderator.
As we tune in, the discussion has already started and Peter has the floor. “It was the thirteen people, Jesus and the twelve of us disciples, packed into this boat on the Sea of Galilee and we had just landed it on the beach when we immediately drew a crowd. Now, that was nothing new to us at that time. In fact, we had kind of come to expect it, after all, this was Jesus we were talking about. He was in the prime time of his popularity doing all sorts of miracles. He was making blind people see, He was making deaf people hear, He was making the lame walk, and He was healing the sick of whatever diseases they had. And nobody was keeping their mouths shut about what He was doing either, in spite of the fact that He told them not to talk about it, so, on this day, for us to land the boat and to immediately draw a crowd, well, that was just status quo. In fact, looking back on it now, if we had landed and not drawn a crowd, that would have been unusual.”
“Anyway, about the time we landed and the crowds started gathering, this man named Jairus, a really important guy who was a leader of the local synagogue in town came up and fell at Jesus’ feet and started pleading with Jesus to save his only daughter’s life. He asked Jesus to come and lay hands on his daughter so that she could live and Jesus, like He always did, agreed to go with Jairus so, off we went, with the crowd in tow, to Jairus’ house. It was a slow process though because people were pressing in from all around us.”
“And then He did it again, something so Jesus like that at the time, just like whenever He would do it, it would just drive us crazy. We’re moving through, making progress, albeit slow progress toward Jairus’ house, when all of a sudden Jesus stops dead in His tracks, turns around and asks, ‘who touched my robe?’”
“And we’re like, ‘Really!? Really!? Who touched You!? Who didn’t touch you?’ I mean, I’m doing a 360 with my hand as if to say that they all did. A better question might have been to ask who didn’t touch Him?”
About this time, Luke the historian who is sitting next to Peter, chimes in. “Peter, if I could interrupt you, for a minute. A couple of people who I have interviewed who were there, didn’t just say that Jesus asked who touched Him but He actually made a distinction about this touch because He said that He felt healing power go out from Him as a result of this touch. It was really obvious that He wasn’t going any further until He found out who had touched Him and while, yes, I could tell you the rest of the story, one of the people who I interviewed when I wrote about it in my gospel account is sitting right here next to us, so why don’t we let her tell the story.”
Sitting next to Luke is a woman. She gathers herself and takes a deep breath. From where we’re sitting it’s quite evident that she has a story to tell. “That was the day that my life changed forever. It had been twelve years since anyone had touched me. Twelve years, I’d had this issue of blood coming out of me and it was horrible. Aside from the physical aspects of it, the laundry, for example, was this cruel reminder that I wasn’t physically well, but the social and religious ramifications were even worse. The Mosaic Law spelled it out. I was ceremonially unclean. I couldn’t go to the temple. I couldn’t get married. Everything that I touched was unclean – furniture, people, everything. I couldn’t hug anybody and they couldn’t hug me so nobody had touched me for twelve years. I’d gone to every doctor out there and I’d spent every dime that I had, just trying to get well but nothing had helped. In fact, instead of getting better, I was getting worse.”
She pauses for a moment as she remembers. “Anyway, that day I heard a commotion outside of my house that was out of the ordinary and I stuck my head out the door and asked what was going on. Jesus of Nazareth, yes, that Jesus of Nazareth, the rabbi who was doing all of the miracles, had just landed outside of town on the beach is what I was told. At that point, right then and there, I realized that this was probably the only chance that I was going to get to be healed so I just went for it. I’d heard that He valued faith in people so I figured that if all I did was just touch His robe that that would be enough, I’d be healed.”
“Getting to Him was both easy and hard at the same time. It was easy because He wasn’t moving very fast at all because of the people who were in His way. But it was also hard for the same reason. There were so many people that getting close to Him was almost impossible but this was my only chance so I did what I had to do and pushed my way through the crowd. If people knew who I was or what my condition was, I don’t know what they would have done to me but at that point I didn’t care. I had to go for it and it paid off. I was able to come up behind Him and touch His robe and when I did, I felt the bleeding stop instantly. I was healed!”
At this point, the woman’s voice breaks just a bit and she begins to tear up. Luke, sitting next to her, hands her a box of tissues. She dabs her eyes and composes herself as she continues. “Then He did the one thing that I never thought that He would do. He stopped and asked, ‘Who touched my robe? I felt healing power go out from Me.’ As He was panning the crowd and looking at all of the faces, I knew that I’d been made and that I couldn’t stay anonymous so, as terrified as I was, I just fell to my knees at His feet and told Him everything. I had no idea how He was going to react. I mean I was ceremonially unclean and everything that I touched was unclean so that meant that technically, because I had touched Him, so was He now. But then He got this huge smile on His face and He just said, ‘Daughter,’ I mean, daughter, not woman but daughter, He called me by a family name, a name that said I belonged, He said to me, ‘Daughter. Your faith has made you well, go in peace.’ And from that day forward, I was healed. My life that I thought was over, was restored to me.”
About this time, Peter picks up the story again, “Do you remember though, that wasn’t the only thing that He said to you? He also said that your suffering was over. And you went your way in peace and we pressed forward to Jairus’ house….”
Now next week we’ll pick up the rest of the story about what happened once they got to Jairus’ house but for the remainder of our time today, I want to focus in on four things about the woman’s story. First, notice how Jesus wasn’t put off by the things that the religious people would have been put off by. Technically, by her touching Him, He was ceremonially unclean but that didn’t matter to Him and I think that this speaks volumes to two groups of people today. To those of us who are Jesus followers, are we so worried about our reputations with other church going people that we’re afraid to get close to those people who are, for whatever reason, outsiders of the church community? Jesus wasn’t. We can all read. It’s right there in black and white and red. And to those of you reading this who feel like you are the outsiders here. Notice how Jesus didn’t let the woman’s backstory and/or circumstances stop Him from reaching out to her once He realized that healing power had left Him. I think that this especially puts the argument, “Jesus wouldn’t want me because of…” whatever that is, to rest. Jesus came to redeem the world and bring people to Himself and that includes you, complete with whatever junk and baggage you’re bringing to the table.
The next thing that stands out to me is what the woman did bring to the table and it’s not only what enabled her to receive the healing that only Jesus could bring but also what got Jesus’ attention. It was her faith. I don’t know that she had a lot of faith, but what faith she did have was in the right place. She had her faith in Jesus and that was enough. The lesson for us is pretty simple. If faith in Jesus was what made the difference for her, it will make the difference for us too.
The third thing to notice here is the contrast between two people in the story. Jairus was really important. He had clout and status. We know his name. When the story begins, he is the mission. Then there’s the woman. In terms of clout and status, she has none. She’s the poster child for the people we would classify as, “the least of these.” We don’t even know her name. You know what else? Jesus didn’t care. Her faith would be honored and her need would be met just like, as we will see next week, Jairus’ needs would be met. There’s a lot of places we could go with that but reinforcing the point I was making two paragraphs back, I want to talk to the person who looks at themselves in the mirror and doesn’t see someone who is important enough for Jesus to love. Jesus is holding out his hands, pointing to his feet, and loosening his robe just in case you want to see them for yourself. There’s five scars on his body that say that in the same way that Jairus mattered, and the woman mattered, so do you.
The last thing that I want to focus on also deals with the woman’s faith. Notice how the thing that brought her to place her faith in Jesus was the fact that nothing else she’d tried had worked. Maybe you don’t have a physical ailment but what you do have is a condition where you have no lasting peace and satisfaction in your life. Is that your story? Have you been chasing peace and satisfaction but no matter what you’ve tried, peace and satisfaction has eluded you? Don’t get me wrong, you’ve tried a thing or two, or three, or twenty, or a hundred, or so many that you’ve lost count and maybe a few of them have given you some relief but, at the end of the day, after time has passed, that emptiness still comes back. Is that where you’re at? And maybe you’ve actually come to the conclusion that you know that peace is only found in Jesus and you also even know that in order to experience that peace that you’re going to have to take a step of faith and place your faith in Jesus and surrender to Him? Is that where you’re at? If I could ask a pointed question, what’s stopping you from placing your faith in Jesus? Are there barriers? They can’t be any worse than the barriers that the woman faced but she wanted so desperately to be healed that she navigated through them to get to Jesus. Let me be honest with you. For most of us, the greatest barrier is between our ears and it has to do with that part of our brain that controls the decision making mechanism for our lives. It’s our volition and it has to do with control. It really comes down to one simple question. Who is in charge of the control of our lives? Are we in charge or is Jesus? It’s that simple and it’s also that complicated because, not only do we live in a world that says that we should be the ones who are in control of our lives, it’s our natural inclination to affirm that way of thinking as well. The problem is however that if this is true, and it is, then we’re living in rebellion against God and the peace that we so desperately desire and that only God can give, will always elude us. We will never experience it. So, what’s it going to be? Are we going to take that step of faith or not? Personally, I took that step of faith and I have never regretted it.
So, how do we do this surrender? God’s more concerned with our attitude than He is with our words so that means that even a prayer as simple as, “God, I have no peace and I know that it’s because I have rebelled against you. I surrender. From this day forward I will quit rebelling against you and allow you to have control of my life. I need a savior because of my rebellion and I believe that Jesus is it. I believe that Jesus paid the price for my rebellion and that God has raised Him from the dead. God, like the woman in the story, I put my faith in Jesus and I thank you for making me right with you. In Jesus name, amen.”
For those of you reading this, if I have described things here that resonate with you and you want to talk, get a hold of me. Email me at [email protected].
Next week I want to take a look at the other half of this story, Jairus and examine what happened in his house. See you next week.
As we tune in, the discussion has already started and Peter has the floor. “It was the thirteen people, Jesus and the twelve of us disciples, packed into this boat on the Sea of Galilee and we had just landed it on the beach when we immediately drew a crowd. Now, that was nothing new to us at that time. In fact, we had kind of come to expect it, after all, this was Jesus we were talking about. He was in the prime time of his popularity doing all sorts of miracles. He was making blind people see, He was making deaf people hear, He was making the lame walk, and He was healing the sick of whatever diseases they had. And nobody was keeping their mouths shut about what He was doing either, in spite of the fact that He told them not to talk about it, so, on this day, for us to land the boat and to immediately draw a crowd, well, that was just status quo. In fact, looking back on it now, if we had landed and not drawn a crowd, that would have been unusual.”
“Anyway, about the time we landed and the crowds started gathering, this man named Jairus, a really important guy who was a leader of the local synagogue in town came up and fell at Jesus’ feet and started pleading with Jesus to save his only daughter’s life. He asked Jesus to come and lay hands on his daughter so that she could live and Jesus, like He always did, agreed to go with Jairus so, off we went, with the crowd in tow, to Jairus’ house. It was a slow process though because people were pressing in from all around us.”
“And then He did it again, something so Jesus like that at the time, just like whenever He would do it, it would just drive us crazy. We’re moving through, making progress, albeit slow progress toward Jairus’ house, when all of a sudden Jesus stops dead in His tracks, turns around and asks, ‘who touched my robe?’”
“And we’re like, ‘Really!? Really!? Who touched You!? Who didn’t touch you?’ I mean, I’m doing a 360 with my hand as if to say that they all did. A better question might have been to ask who didn’t touch Him?”
About this time, Luke the historian who is sitting next to Peter, chimes in. “Peter, if I could interrupt you, for a minute. A couple of people who I have interviewed who were there, didn’t just say that Jesus asked who touched Him but He actually made a distinction about this touch because He said that He felt healing power go out from Him as a result of this touch. It was really obvious that He wasn’t going any further until He found out who had touched Him and while, yes, I could tell you the rest of the story, one of the people who I interviewed when I wrote about it in my gospel account is sitting right here next to us, so why don’t we let her tell the story.”
Sitting next to Luke is a woman. She gathers herself and takes a deep breath. From where we’re sitting it’s quite evident that she has a story to tell. “That was the day that my life changed forever. It had been twelve years since anyone had touched me. Twelve years, I’d had this issue of blood coming out of me and it was horrible. Aside from the physical aspects of it, the laundry, for example, was this cruel reminder that I wasn’t physically well, but the social and religious ramifications were even worse. The Mosaic Law spelled it out. I was ceremonially unclean. I couldn’t go to the temple. I couldn’t get married. Everything that I touched was unclean – furniture, people, everything. I couldn’t hug anybody and they couldn’t hug me so nobody had touched me for twelve years. I’d gone to every doctor out there and I’d spent every dime that I had, just trying to get well but nothing had helped. In fact, instead of getting better, I was getting worse.”
She pauses for a moment as she remembers. “Anyway, that day I heard a commotion outside of my house that was out of the ordinary and I stuck my head out the door and asked what was going on. Jesus of Nazareth, yes, that Jesus of Nazareth, the rabbi who was doing all of the miracles, had just landed outside of town on the beach is what I was told. At that point, right then and there, I realized that this was probably the only chance that I was going to get to be healed so I just went for it. I’d heard that He valued faith in people so I figured that if all I did was just touch His robe that that would be enough, I’d be healed.”
“Getting to Him was both easy and hard at the same time. It was easy because He wasn’t moving very fast at all because of the people who were in His way. But it was also hard for the same reason. There were so many people that getting close to Him was almost impossible but this was my only chance so I did what I had to do and pushed my way through the crowd. If people knew who I was or what my condition was, I don’t know what they would have done to me but at that point I didn’t care. I had to go for it and it paid off. I was able to come up behind Him and touch His robe and when I did, I felt the bleeding stop instantly. I was healed!”
At this point, the woman’s voice breaks just a bit and she begins to tear up. Luke, sitting next to her, hands her a box of tissues. She dabs her eyes and composes herself as she continues. “Then He did the one thing that I never thought that He would do. He stopped and asked, ‘Who touched my robe? I felt healing power go out from Me.’ As He was panning the crowd and looking at all of the faces, I knew that I’d been made and that I couldn’t stay anonymous so, as terrified as I was, I just fell to my knees at His feet and told Him everything. I had no idea how He was going to react. I mean I was ceremonially unclean and everything that I touched was unclean so that meant that technically, because I had touched Him, so was He now. But then He got this huge smile on His face and He just said, ‘Daughter,’ I mean, daughter, not woman but daughter, He called me by a family name, a name that said I belonged, He said to me, ‘Daughter. Your faith has made you well, go in peace.’ And from that day forward, I was healed. My life that I thought was over, was restored to me.”
About this time, Peter picks up the story again, “Do you remember though, that wasn’t the only thing that He said to you? He also said that your suffering was over. And you went your way in peace and we pressed forward to Jairus’ house….”
Now next week we’ll pick up the rest of the story about what happened once they got to Jairus’ house but for the remainder of our time today, I want to focus in on four things about the woman’s story. First, notice how Jesus wasn’t put off by the things that the religious people would have been put off by. Technically, by her touching Him, He was ceremonially unclean but that didn’t matter to Him and I think that this speaks volumes to two groups of people today. To those of us who are Jesus followers, are we so worried about our reputations with other church going people that we’re afraid to get close to those people who are, for whatever reason, outsiders of the church community? Jesus wasn’t. We can all read. It’s right there in black and white and red. And to those of you reading this who feel like you are the outsiders here. Notice how Jesus didn’t let the woman’s backstory and/or circumstances stop Him from reaching out to her once He realized that healing power had left Him. I think that this especially puts the argument, “Jesus wouldn’t want me because of…” whatever that is, to rest. Jesus came to redeem the world and bring people to Himself and that includes you, complete with whatever junk and baggage you’re bringing to the table.
The next thing that stands out to me is what the woman did bring to the table and it’s not only what enabled her to receive the healing that only Jesus could bring but also what got Jesus’ attention. It was her faith. I don’t know that she had a lot of faith, but what faith she did have was in the right place. She had her faith in Jesus and that was enough. The lesson for us is pretty simple. If faith in Jesus was what made the difference for her, it will make the difference for us too.
The third thing to notice here is the contrast between two people in the story. Jairus was really important. He had clout and status. We know his name. When the story begins, he is the mission. Then there’s the woman. In terms of clout and status, she has none. She’s the poster child for the people we would classify as, “the least of these.” We don’t even know her name. You know what else? Jesus didn’t care. Her faith would be honored and her need would be met just like, as we will see next week, Jairus’ needs would be met. There’s a lot of places we could go with that but reinforcing the point I was making two paragraphs back, I want to talk to the person who looks at themselves in the mirror and doesn’t see someone who is important enough for Jesus to love. Jesus is holding out his hands, pointing to his feet, and loosening his robe just in case you want to see them for yourself. There’s five scars on his body that say that in the same way that Jairus mattered, and the woman mattered, so do you.
The last thing that I want to focus on also deals with the woman’s faith. Notice how the thing that brought her to place her faith in Jesus was the fact that nothing else she’d tried had worked. Maybe you don’t have a physical ailment but what you do have is a condition where you have no lasting peace and satisfaction in your life. Is that your story? Have you been chasing peace and satisfaction but no matter what you’ve tried, peace and satisfaction has eluded you? Don’t get me wrong, you’ve tried a thing or two, or three, or twenty, or a hundred, or so many that you’ve lost count and maybe a few of them have given you some relief but, at the end of the day, after time has passed, that emptiness still comes back. Is that where you’re at? And maybe you’ve actually come to the conclusion that you know that peace is only found in Jesus and you also even know that in order to experience that peace that you’re going to have to take a step of faith and place your faith in Jesus and surrender to Him? Is that where you’re at? If I could ask a pointed question, what’s stopping you from placing your faith in Jesus? Are there barriers? They can’t be any worse than the barriers that the woman faced but she wanted so desperately to be healed that she navigated through them to get to Jesus. Let me be honest with you. For most of us, the greatest barrier is between our ears and it has to do with that part of our brain that controls the decision making mechanism for our lives. It’s our volition and it has to do with control. It really comes down to one simple question. Who is in charge of the control of our lives? Are we in charge or is Jesus? It’s that simple and it’s also that complicated because, not only do we live in a world that says that we should be the ones who are in control of our lives, it’s our natural inclination to affirm that way of thinking as well. The problem is however that if this is true, and it is, then we’re living in rebellion against God and the peace that we so desperately desire and that only God can give, will always elude us. We will never experience it. So, what’s it going to be? Are we going to take that step of faith or not? Personally, I took that step of faith and I have never regretted it.
So, how do we do this surrender? God’s more concerned with our attitude than He is with our words so that means that even a prayer as simple as, “God, I have no peace and I know that it’s because I have rebelled against you. I surrender. From this day forward I will quit rebelling against you and allow you to have control of my life. I need a savior because of my rebellion and I believe that Jesus is it. I believe that Jesus paid the price for my rebellion and that God has raised Him from the dead. God, like the woman in the story, I put my faith in Jesus and I thank you for making me right with you. In Jesus name, amen.”
For those of you reading this, if I have described things here that resonate with you and you want to talk, get a hold of me. Email me at [email protected].
Next week I want to take a look at the other half of this story, Jairus and examine what happened in his house. See you next week.
Part 4: Mission Impossible
Last week we looked at a hijacked mission and, in terms of the story, you readers were kind of left hanging as far as how the original story turned out. To bring you and any first time readers back up to speed, Jesus and His disciples had landed a boat on the Sea of Galilee and soon after they landed, Jairus, a leader of the local synagogue came to Jesus with a request that Jesus please heal his daughter who was dying. Jesus of course agreed but, on their way, this mission got hijacked by an anonymous woman who intentionally touched Jesus’ robe because she too had a disabling ailment. Her thinking had been that if she could just touch Jesus’ outer garment that she would be healed and, according to eyewitnesses and her own testimony of the event, that’s exactly what happened. She touched his robe in faith and she was instantly healed, just as she had counted on. What she hadn’t counted on though was Jesus noticing that she had done that and stopping to find out who touched Him. Long story short, Jesus stopped until the woman came forward, told her story and then Jesus, pleased with her act of faith, dismissed her in peace. So now, let’s pick up the story from there. As you’ll recall, it was a panel discussion with four people and a moderator who was telling the story. Peter has the mic.
“After Jesus had sent you on your way in peace,” he said, nodding to the woman who was sitting on the other side of Luke, “we were just about to start on our way to Jairus’ house again when all of a sudden, a couple of guys who knew Jairus came up to him and told him that his daughter had died and it was useless to bother the teacher at that point. They raised a valid point but Jesus overheard them and, like He always did, took the bull by the horns and exercised control of the situation. He walked right over to Jairus and told him, ‘Don’t be afraid, just have faith.’”
About this time, the fourth person on the panel, Matthew, another disciple of Jesus, spoke up. “Yeah, and then He turned to the crowd and basically forbid them to go any further with Him. In fact, He even left nine of us disciples behind. He ended up only taking Peter here, and James and John and Jairus with Him for the rest of the way.”
The moderator raised his eyebrows. “Was that normal?” asked the moderator. “Was it normal for Jesus to leave some of you behind when He was doing things in His ministry?”
Peter and Matthew looked at each other and then nodded their heads. “Yeah, sometimes” replied Matthew. Looking over at Peter, he continued, “in fact, there were quite a few times when He would take the three of them, Peter, James, and John for more intensive training and what not and leave the rest of us behind. I mean, take the transfiguration. Peter, James, and John were the only ones with Him when it happened. He left the rest of us behind. The only reason that we even know what happened up there is that they told us about it later.”
Picking up the story, Peter continued. “Yes, so once it’s just the five of us, we made really good time and we got to Jairus’ house in short order. When we got there though, it was a mess. It was your typical Jewish mourning death scene at this point, nothing quiet about it. There was a lot of loud weeping and wailing and then Jesus said to everyone, ‘She’s not dead, she’s only sleeping.’ Of course, that kind of just threw gas on the fire and everyone just laughed at him so he kicked everyone out of the house except the girls’ mom and dad and the three of us disciples. They took us to the room where they’d laid her and there she was. She was definitely dead. Not sleeping. She was stone cold dead. And Jesus took her lifeless, unresponsive body by the hand and told her to get up and she popped right up to her feet. Just like that, one minute she was dead, and the next minute she was alive. He had them give her something to eat and the girl was famished so she woofed it down pretty quickly. He then told the parents not to tell anyone what had happened and we were out of there.”
“Don’t tell anyone? Yeah, fat lotta good that did Him.” Matthew chimed in laughing. “It was too late for that. People knew she’d died and then she was alive. People wanted answers. They asked the parents what happened so they probably talked.”
“Actually, I talked to the parents several years later,” Luke said, “when I was doing my research for my Gospel and, if they were the ones who leaked the story, they never owned up to it.”
“Well, somebody talked, because the news of this miracle ended up plastered all over Twitter. It was tweeted and retweeted so many times it was ridiculous.”
“Hey, I didn’t tweet it.” Peter said.
“Well, I wasn’t even there.” The woman said. “I didn’t even know Jairus had a daughter. I was the living in isolation girl for twelve years, remember.”
“Twitter?” The moderator asked.
“The original carrier pigeon version. It was cumbersome at times, not always reliable especially if the pigeon ran into a predator and the retweets were subject to exaggeration sometimes, but it was all we had.” Luke explained.
At this point the panel members have a good laugh as they move on to another topic so, for today, how about if we leave them there and see if we can glean this story for something that we can apply to our own lives today.
I just want to focus our attention on one thing for our application, the impossible. Look at what Jesus did with an impossible situation. He fixed it. Faced with a situation that looked impossible, He didn’t put a religious spin on it, He didn’t just reassure the parents that someday they would be reunited with their daughter in heaven, He fixed it. He essentially told Jairus to choose to have faith in response to his fear and then Jesus delivered. Notice that Jesus didn’t deny the existence of fear. It was right there in front of Him. When Jairus got the news that his daughter had died, although the text doesn’t explicitly say it, he was probably overwhelmed with grief, fear, and despair. Yet Jesus told him to respond, especially to that fear, in faith, which Jairus obviously did, because they kept going. And, once they arrived where the girl was, Jesus reversed the natural processes and raised the girl back to life. He delivered. He proved again that He, Jesus, was Lord of the impossible situation.
And that brings us to our situation whatever circumstances that we might be facing. Let me ask you this. Whether you’re a church going person or not, what’s that impossible situation that’s on your plate right now? Not hypothetically, I mean for real. Is it a habit that you know you have to break, but it has such a stranglehold on you and has for years that now it seems like there’s no way you can break it? Is it a relationship that’s just spiraling out of control or, on the flip side, is just dying from the steady poison of self-centered agendas, neglect, an infinite number of lies and deceit? Maybe it’s a heartache, an event that’s happened that has left you with a broken heart, a wound that never seems to heal. Or perhaps it’s a past, a period of time, a sequence of just poor choices that, if you could do things over again that you would do them differently but now, the die has been cast, permanently, and there’s seemingly nothing that will ever change that. What happened, happened. That’s the fact. And now you are stuck with the consequences from those choices that logic dictates are not only irreversible but also irredeemable.
And that’s where Jesus comes in, whispering in your thoughts, “hey, don’t be afraid. Have faith and trust Me.” Throughout the gospel accounts, what the eyewitnesses reported about Jesus was there was no situation too difficult for Him to fix. Nature, disease, grief, you name it, there was nothing beyond His ability to redeem. In fact, the only thing that hindered Him really was when people chose not to believe Him. There’s at least one recorded instance when, because people chose not to believe Him, He did very few miracles even though the needs were probably just as great in this town as they were everywhere else at the time.
How about it? What are you going to do about your impossible situation? Are you going to take a step of faith and trust Jesus, are you going to take a step of faith in spite of your fear and give Jesus a shot? You say that there’s no guarantees? From where we sit, from a human perspective, you’re right. But you know what? There were no guarantees where Jairus sat either. Actually, let me take that back. There was one guarantee. If Jairus would have done nothing, he would have gone home and planned a funeral because his daughter was dead. It was game over for her. Jesus, however, said that if Jairus would exercise faith that it was game on. Jairus had to take that step of faith though and, in light of whatever our impossible situation is, so do you…and so do I.
There’s one other thing to remember about all of this as well. As I read the Bible, what becomes quite apparent is that Jesus was driven by at least two things here. On the one hand, He was driven by compassion for people who were suffering because that wasn’t how things were supposed to be. There was one other thing too however that was driving His actions. He was giving the world firsthand evidence that He was the promised Messiah, God in human flesh, who would be their savior and He was giving them sufficient evidence to respond to Him and to follow Him in faith with their very lives.
So, coming back to the 21st Century, what are you going to do? What are you going to do with “it,” your impossible situation? That situation that you can’t fix no matter how hard you try. How about taking a baby step, just say a couple of sentences to God. “God, this looks bad, really bad, but I’ll tell you what, I’ll give you a shot at it, a chance to fix this on Your terms. As an act of faith, I’ll believe you. I’m scared, but I’ll believe you anyway. I’ll exercise faith in spite of my fear. To me, it looks like it’s game over, but You’re saying that, if You get involved, it’s game on. Okay, Jesus, you wanted a shot at this, you’ve got it. I’m placing this in your hands. Thank you for being trustworthy. In Jesus’ name, amen.” That, by the way, was a sample prayer written in street English. If you like the way that it sounds and it expresses where you’re at right now, go for it. God loves to get those kinds of prayers because it gives Him an invitation served on a platter, to demonstrate His power and do what He does best…. fix the unfixable and change lives.
Next week we’re going to take a look at another impossible situation that happened right on the heels of this one. We’re going to look at the story of a couple of blind guys who reached out to Jesus to heal them and regain their sight.
“After Jesus had sent you on your way in peace,” he said, nodding to the woman who was sitting on the other side of Luke, “we were just about to start on our way to Jairus’ house again when all of a sudden, a couple of guys who knew Jairus came up to him and told him that his daughter had died and it was useless to bother the teacher at that point. They raised a valid point but Jesus overheard them and, like He always did, took the bull by the horns and exercised control of the situation. He walked right over to Jairus and told him, ‘Don’t be afraid, just have faith.’”
About this time, the fourth person on the panel, Matthew, another disciple of Jesus, spoke up. “Yeah, and then He turned to the crowd and basically forbid them to go any further with Him. In fact, He even left nine of us disciples behind. He ended up only taking Peter here, and James and John and Jairus with Him for the rest of the way.”
The moderator raised his eyebrows. “Was that normal?” asked the moderator. “Was it normal for Jesus to leave some of you behind when He was doing things in His ministry?”
Peter and Matthew looked at each other and then nodded their heads. “Yeah, sometimes” replied Matthew. Looking over at Peter, he continued, “in fact, there were quite a few times when He would take the three of them, Peter, James, and John for more intensive training and what not and leave the rest of us behind. I mean, take the transfiguration. Peter, James, and John were the only ones with Him when it happened. He left the rest of us behind. The only reason that we even know what happened up there is that they told us about it later.”
Picking up the story, Peter continued. “Yes, so once it’s just the five of us, we made really good time and we got to Jairus’ house in short order. When we got there though, it was a mess. It was your typical Jewish mourning death scene at this point, nothing quiet about it. There was a lot of loud weeping and wailing and then Jesus said to everyone, ‘She’s not dead, she’s only sleeping.’ Of course, that kind of just threw gas on the fire and everyone just laughed at him so he kicked everyone out of the house except the girls’ mom and dad and the three of us disciples. They took us to the room where they’d laid her and there she was. She was definitely dead. Not sleeping. She was stone cold dead. And Jesus took her lifeless, unresponsive body by the hand and told her to get up and she popped right up to her feet. Just like that, one minute she was dead, and the next minute she was alive. He had them give her something to eat and the girl was famished so she woofed it down pretty quickly. He then told the parents not to tell anyone what had happened and we were out of there.”
“Don’t tell anyone? Yeah, fat lotta good that did Him.” Matthew chimed in laughing. “It was too late for that. People knew she’d died and then she was alive. People wanted answers. They asked the parents what happened so they probably talked.”
“Actually, I talked to the parents several years later,” Luke said, “when I was doing my research for my Gospel and, if they were the ones who leaked the story, they never owned up to it.”
“Well, somebody talked, because the news of this miracle ended up plastered all over Twitter. It was tweeted and retweeted so many times it was ridiculous.”
“Hey, I didn’t tweet it.” Peter said.
“Well, I wasn’t even there.” The woman said. “I didn’t even know Jairus had a daughter. I was the living in isolation girl for twelve years, remember.”
“Twitter?” The moderator asked.
“The original carrier pigeon version. It was cumbersome at times, not always reliable especially if the pigeon ran into a predator and the retweets were subject to exaggeration sometimes, but it was all we had.” Luke explained.
At this point the panel members have a good laugh as they move on to another topic so, for today, how about if we leave them there and see if we can glean this story for something that we can apply to our own lives today.
I just want to focus our attention on one thing for our application, the impossible. Look at what Jesus did with an impossible situation. He fixed it. Faced with a situation that looked impossible, He didn’t put a religious spin on it, He didn’t just reassure the parents that someday they would be reunited with their daughter in heaven, He fixed it. He essentially told Jairus to choose to have faith in response to his fear and then Jesus delivered. Notice that Jesus didn’t deny the existence of fear. It was right there in front of Him. When Jairus got the news that his daughter had died, although the text doesn’t explicitly say it, he was probably overwhelmed with grief, fear, and despair. Yet Jesus told him to respond, especially to that fear, in faith, which Jairus obviously did, because they kept going. And, once they arrived where the girl was, Jesus reversed the natural processes and raised the girl back to life. He delivered. He proved again that He, Jesus, was Lord of the impossible situation.
And that brings us to our situation whatever circumstances that we might be facing. Let me ask you this. Whether you’re a church going person or not, what’s that impossible situation that’s on your plate right now? Not hypothetically, I mean for real. Is it a habit that you know you have to break, but it has such a stranglehold on you and has for years that now it seems like there’s no way you can break it? Is it a relationship that’s just spiraling out of control or, on the flip side, is just dying from the steady poison of self-centered agendas, neglect, an infinite number of lies and deceit? Maybe it’s a heartache, an event that’s happened that has left you with a broken heart, a wound that never seems to heal. Or perhaps it’s a past, a period of time, a sequence of just poor choices that, if you could do things over again that you would do them differently but now, the die has been cast, permanently, and there’s seemingly nothing that will ever change that. What happened, happened. That’s the fact. And now you are stuck with the consequences from those choices that logic dictates are not only irreversible but also irredeemable.
And that’s where Jesus comes in, whispering in your thoughts, “hey, don’t be afraid. Have faith and trust Me.” Throughout the gospel accounts, what the eyewitnesses reported about Jesus was there was no situation too difficult for Him to fix. Nature, disease, grief, you name it, there was nothing beyond His ability to redeem. In fact, the only thing that hindered Him really was when people chose not to believe Him. There’s at least one recorded instance when, because people chose not to believe Him, He did very few miracles even though the needs were probably just as great in this town as they were everywhere else at the time.
How about it? What are you going to do about your impossible situation? Are you going to take a step of faith and trust Jesus, are you going to take a step of faith in spite of your fear and give Jesus a shot? You say that there’s no guarantees? From where we sit, from a human perspective, you’re right. But you know what? There were no guarantees where Jairus sat either. Actually, let me take that back. There was one guarantee. If Jairus would have done nothing, he would have gone home and planned a funeral because his daughter was dead. It was game over for her. Jesus, however, said that if Jairus would exercise faith that it was game on. Jairus had to take that step of faith though and, in light of whatever our impossible situation is, so do you…and so do I.
There’s one other thing to remember about all of this as well. As I read the Bible, what becomes quite apparent is that Jesus was driven by at least two things here. On the one hand, He was driven by compassion for people who were suffering because that wasn’t how things were supposed to be. There was one other thing too however that was driving His actions. He was giving the world firsthand evidence that He was the promised Messiah, God in human flesh, who would be their savior and He was giving them sufficient evidence to respond to Him and to follow Him in faith with their very lives.
So, coming back to the 21st Century, what are you going to do? What are you going to do with “it,” your impossible situation? That situation that you can’t fix no matter how hard you try. How about taking a baby step, just say a couple of sentences to God. “God, this looks bad, really bad, but I’ll tell you what, I’ll give you a shot at it, a chance to fix this on Your terms. As an act of faith, I’ll believe you. I’m scared, but I’ll believe you anyway. I’ll exercise faith in spite of my fear. To me, it looks like it’s game over, but You’re saying that, if You get involved, it’s game on. Okay, Jesus, you wanted a shot at this, you’ve got it. I’m placing this in your hands. Thank you for being trustworthy. In Jesus’ name, amen.” That, by the way, was a sample prayer written in street English. If you like the way that it sounds and it expresses where you’re at right now, go for it. God loves to get those kinds of prayers because it gives Him an invitation served on a platter, to demonstrate His power and do what He does best…. fix the unfixable and change lives.
Next week we’re going to take a look at another impossible situation that happened right on the heels of this one. We’re going to look at the story of a couple of blind guys who reached out to Jesus to heal them and regain their sight.
Part 5: Lessons in Objective Faith
Today’s story is a bonus story in that originally when I planned this series, I hadn’t planned to write it, but as I did my research, it was right there, so we’re just going to roll with it. Let’s pick back up with our panel discussion that we’ve used for the past two weeks. Matthew has the mic.
“You know, when it came to Jesus staying anonymous, after He healed Jairus daughter, things just got worse. After Jesus had raised the little girl from the dead, and you guys got back to us, Peter, do you remember what happened next?”
Peter chuckled and nodded. “How could I forget?”
Matthew continued. “There’d been these two blind guys who had kind of been on the fringe of our crowd and as we started toward the house where we were staying, they’re following behind us, literally screaming, ‘Son of David, have mercy on us.’ They were loud and persistent, so much so that when they got to the house, even though Jesus was already inside, kind of throttling everything down for the day, they came right into the house looking for Him.”
“And once they were inside, of course, like John said in his account, Jesus, who was so full of grace and truth, stopped what He was doing and asked them what they wanted. And they told Him that they wanted to see, He did something just a little bit different. He asked them if they believed that He could do this, and they said they did. He then said, ‘According to your faith,’ the blind men’s trust and confidence in His power and His ability to heal, in other words, ‘it will be done to you.’ And instantly, they had 20/20 vision, they were healed.”
“And then He sternly warned them not to tell anyone about what had happened. They kept their mouths shut at least until they got out of the house and down the street maybe but after that, forget it. They told everybody they saw what had happened.”
From his stool on stage, Peter began to laugh, shaking his head. “Sorry guys, I was just thinking about how those two guys just barged into the house. It reminds me of the time that we were on our way to Jericho. Remember that one? We were on our way to Jerusalem and, of course like always, we’ve picked up a multitude of people because Jesus was just a crowd magnet. Now, sitting on the side of the road, was this blind guy named Bartimaeus, and he’s not really moving, which was probably just as well because, even though he really wanted to see Jesus, if he had tried to navigate that crowd, he probably would have been trampled. So, he used the one thing to get what he wanted that he had, his big mouth and he’s just calling out to Jesus, calling Him the Son of David, and asking for mercy, just like the other two guys who followed us out of Jairus’ pad had. Except, he was even louder than the two guys who followed us out of Jairus’ house were. He was so loud that everyone was telling him to shut up but all that did was make him amp up the volume even more. He ended up being so loud that even Jesus heard him so Jesus stopped the crowd and told them to bring him to Him. Once he got there, Jesus asked him what he wanted Jesus to do for him and when he told Him, Jesus said, ‘go, your faith has healed you.’ The healing here was immediate and after that, as we continued toward Jerusalem, we had one more follower.”
“Interesting,” the moderator on stage said, breaking in. “What do you think made the difference in these cases, why were they able to be healed?”
The woman who had been healed from her issue of blood quickly picked up her mic. “Faith.” She said. “I can’t speak for the blind guys but I know for me, it was faith. And specifically, it was faith in Jesus. I believed that He had the ability to heal me and if I could just get close enough to Him, that He would. What did surprise me though, was how willing He was to do it, how much He wanted to. I don’t know what exactly I was expecting, but it wasn’t that.”
Luke, the fourth member of the panel nodded. “I agree. That was my conclusion too with my research. Again and again, the people who I talked to said this about Him, that He never turned anyone away. When He recognized faith from someone, when they would ask Him for healing, He would do it. And because the needs were on such a large scale, He was healing on a large scale. Look, in the Old Testament, the prophecies regarding the promised Messiah were that that person would be able to do all of these things, on a scale never seen before. In part because of His compassion for people living in their suffering. I think that, because Jesus really was God in the flesh, God in the bod in other words, that by doing this, Jesus showed the compassion that God the Father really feels for people in their suffering. If you really want to see how God feels about people, look at Jesus. I mean, He demonstrated that love isn’t a feeling, it’s an action verb and in Jesus, we see that love in action, over and over again. I think sometimes, especially as we look at the life of Jesus, we overlook that….”
The panel discussion proceeds to move on to more stories but for today, I think I would like to stop right there and just look at a couple of things that can be gleaned from these two stories that we can apply to our lives today in the 21st century.
The main thing that all of the blind men did was that they had faith that Jesus could and would heal them. They placed their faith in Him and He honored it. Notice that we aren’t told how much faith they had and this is just my opinion, but, in this case, the amount of faith they had wasn’t nearly as important as who they had their faith in. They had an objective faith and the object of that faith was Jesus. As we contemplate this, the question that we have to ask ourselves is, when it comes to our lives, our self-identity and our sufficiency, how we live our lives, especially when the wheels start to come off and things start to go south, spiraling out of control, who is our faith in? Is it Jesus or is it something or someone else? Who or what are we relying on…really? Is it our resume? Our portfolio? Our friends or family? Or is it Jesus? Who is it…really? It’s a question that I can’t answer for you and you can’t answer for me. We have to answer it for ourselves.
The other thing that stands out is just how willing Jesus was to meet the needs, not necessarily wants, of the people who came to Him. In the case of the woman with an issue of blood and Bartimaeus, Jesus was on His way to complete another mission and these people interrupted Him and He allowed it. He asked them what they wanted and when they told Him, He granted their request. And with the two blind men who followed Him after He had healed Jairus’ daughter, they came right into the house where He was staying and it didn’t bother Him. He healed them. And not begrudgingly either. He was happy to do it.
So, what does that mean for us? It’s pretty simple really. Look at the pattern. If Jesus was willing to meet their needs, He’s probably happy to meet our needs as well. And, according to what is written in the Bible, if we will make Him the object of our faith, and come to Him on His terms, He promises that He will.
That, however, is the rub, the coming to Him on His terms part. For many of us, we just want to give Jesus lip service, make Him kind of this accessory in our lives while we place our faith in something else. If we’re honest with ourselves, our faith is often our career, our resume, our strength, our religious activity, maybe another relationship, it could be anything depending upon what floats our boat. And, at the end of the day, it comes down to this issue of control over our lives and who has it, us or God, that’s the real potential deal breaker. We’re quite willing to believe the right things about Jesus maybe, but follow Him, with things like our checking accounts and our attitudes and day to day conduct…well, another matter entirely. Looking at the woman with the issue of blood, Jairus and all of the blind men, one of the things that stand out is, when it came to fixing their problem, just how bankrupt they were. All of them wanted to fix their problem, the desire in each of them to fix it was strong. But they lacked the means to do it and they recognized in Jesus, the One who could. For many of us though, we haven’t come to that point in our lives yet, or at least we don’t think that we have and so, nothing changes really. We live in a world where we have this feeling of emptiness, a subtle notion that something is off, softly playing in the background of our lives. Lasting joy is always just out of reach and permanent satisfaction is close perhaps, but not quite there. Someday maybe but not yet. Newsflash…someday never comes. And so, there we stand, with legitimate needs that we are unable to meet and there stands Jesus with outstretched arms and an invitation for us to come. So, what are we going to do? Are we going to pursue Jesus on His terms and pursue Him, even follow Him into His house after He’s packed it in for the day, or are we going to try to keep doing it on our own? It’s our choice. What are we going to do? The blind guys had faith based on the evidence of what they’d heard that Jesus could deliver so they went for it. For the record, we have the evidence of an empty tomb and 2000 years of testimony of people whose lives were changed when they placed their faith in Jesus, so what are we going to do with what we’ve heard? How will we respond?
If we come to Jesus on His terms, He will change our lives. Speaking from personal experience, that I can guarantee. When I surrendered my life to Jesus my values changed but He also gave me a peace that is permanent and is not based on circumstances.
If you’re reading this and are thinking that this surrender to Jesus might be a good idea for you because honestly, nothing else you’ve tried has worked, at least not in the long term anyway, the way you do it can be summarized in two words, repent, and follow. Repent simply means to change your mind about things, do a mental 180 here and agree with God’s assessment of you. It means that you agree with God that you have rebelled against Him and that, in order to make things right, that you do need a savior and that savior is Jesus. It means that you agree with God that Jesus’ death on the cross and not anything good that you can do, was sufficient to satisfy God’s justice for your rebellion. It means that you believe that Jesus did rise from the grave. And follow means that you are willing to allow Jesus to dictate how you live and to determine what is right and what is wrong. It means that you live life the way that He would live it if He were in your shoes. The easiest way to do this, by the way, is to tell God in prayer what you want to do. Go ahead and use modern English, He is fluent in it.
Next week I want to look at a guy who really understood what Jesus was capable of. He had a faith that actually stopped Jesus dead in His tracks and caused Him to marvel. See you then.
“You know, when it came to Jesus staying anonymous, after He healed Jairus daughter, things just got worse. After Jesus had raised the little girl from the dead, and you guys got back to us, Peter, do you remember what happened next?”
Peter chuckled and nodded. “How could I forget?”
Matthew continued. “There’d been these two blind guys who had kind of been on the fringe of our crowd and as we started toward the house where we were staying, they’re following behind us, literally screaming, ‘Son of David, have mercy on us.’ They were loud and persistent, so much so that when they got to the house, even though Jesus was already inside, kind of throttling everything down for the day, they came right into the house looking for Him.”
“And once they were inside, of course, like John said in his account, Jesus, who was so full of grace and truth, stopped what He was doing and asked them what they wanted. And they told Him that they wanted to see, He did something just a little bit different. He asked them if they believed that He could do this, and they said they did. He then said, ‘According to your faith,’ the blind men’s trust and confidence in His power and His ability to heal, in other words, ‘it will be done to you.’ And instantly, they had 20/20 vision, they were healed.”
“And then He sternly warned them not to tell anyone about what had happened. They kept their mouths shut at least until they got out of the house and down the street maybe but after that, forget it. They told everybody they saw what had happened.”
From his stool on stage, Peter began to laugh, shaking his head. “Sorry guys, I was just thinking about how those two guys just barged into the house. It reminds me of the time that we were on our way to Jericho. Remember that one? We were on our way to Jerusalem and, of course like always, we’ve picked up a multitude of people because Jesus was just a crowd magnet. Now, sitting on the side of the road, was this blind guy named Bartimaeus, and he’s not really moving, which was probably just as well because, even though he really wanted to see Jesus, if he had tried to navigate that crowd, he probably would have been trampled. So, he used the one thing to get what he wanted that he had, his big mouth and he’s just calling out to Jesus, calling Him the Son of David, and asking for mercy, just like the other two guys who followed us out of Jairus’ pad had. Except, he was even louder than the two guys who followed us out of Jairus’ house were. He was so loud that everyone was telling him to shut up but all that did was make him amp up the volume even more. He ended up being so loud that even Jesus heard him so Jesus stopped the crowd and told them to bring him to Him. Once he got there, Jesus asked him what he wanted Jesus to do for him and when he told Him, Jesus said, ‘go, your faith has healed you.’ The healing here was immediate and after that, as we continued toward Jerusalem, we had one more follower.”
“Interesting,” the moderator on stage said, breaking in. “What do you think made the difference in these cases, why were they able to be healed?”
The woman who had been healed from her issue of blood quickly picked up her mic. “Faith.” She said. “I can’t speak for the blind guys but I know for me, it was faith. And specifically, it was faith in Jesus. I believed that He had the ability to heal me and if I could just get close enough to Him, that He would. What did surprise me though, was how willing He was to do it, how much He wanted to. I don’t know what exactly I was expecting, but it wasn’t that.”
Luke, the fourth member of the panel nodded. “I agree. That was my conclusion too with my research. Again and again, the people who I talked to said this about Him, that He never turned anyone away. When He recognized faith from someone, when they would ask Him for healing, He would do it. And because the needs were on such a large scale, He was healing on a large scale. Look, in the Old Testament, the prophecies regarding the promised Messiah were that that person would be able to do all of these things, on a scale never seen before. In part because of His compassion for people living in their suffering. I think that, because Jesus really was God in the flesh, God in the bod in other words, that by doing this, Jesus showed the compassion that God the Father really feels for people in their suffering. If you really want to see how God feels about people, look at Jesus. I mean, He demonstrated that love isn’t a feeling, it’s an action verb and in Jesus, we see that love in action, over and over again. I think sometimes, especially as we look at the life of Jesus, we overlook that….”
The panel discussion proceeds to move on to more stories but for today, I think I would like to stop right there and just look at a couple of things that can be gleaned from these two stories that we can apply to our lives today in the 21st century.
The main thing that all of the blind men did was that they had faith that Jesus could and would heal them. They placed their faith in Him and He honored it. Notice that we aren’t told how much faith they had and this is just my opinion, but, in this case, the amount of faith they had wasn’t nearly as important as who they had their faith in. They had an objective faith and the object of that faith was Jesus. As we contemplate this, the question that we have to ask ourselves is, when it comes to our lives, our self-identity and our sufficiency, how we live our lives, especially when the wheels start to come off and things start to go south, spiraling out of control, who is our faith in? Is it Jesus or is it something or someone else? Who or what are we relying on…really? Is it our resume? Our portfolio? Our friends or family? Or is it Jesus? Who is it…really? It’s a question that I can’t answer for you and you can’t answer for me. We have to answer it for ourselves.
The other thing that stands out is just how willing Jesus was to meet the needs, not necessarily wants, of the people who came to Him. In the case of the woman with an issue of blood and Bartimaeus, Jesus was on His way to complete another mission and these people interrupted Him and He allowed it. He asked them what they wanted and when they told Him, He granted their request. And with the two blind men who followed Him after He had healed Jairus’ daughter, they came right into the house where He was staying and it didn’t bother Him. He healed them. And not begrudgingly either. He was happy to do it.
So, what does that mean for us? It’s pretty simple really. Look at the pattern. If Jesus was willing to meet their needs, He’s probably happy to meet our needs as well. And, according to what is written in the Bible, if we will make Him the object of our faith, and come to Him on His terms, He promises that He will.
That, however, is the rub, the coming to Him on His terms part. For many of us, we just want to give Jesus lip service, make Him kind of this accessory in our lives while we place our faith in something else. If we’re honest with ourselves, our faith is often our career, our resume, our strength, our religious activity, maybe another relationship, it could be anything depending upon what floats our boat. And, at the end of the day, it comes down to this issue of control over our lives and who has it, us or God, that’s the real potential deal breaker. We’re quite willing to believe the right things about Jesus maybe, but follow Him, with things like our checking accounts and our attitudes and day to day conduct…well, another matter entirely. Looking at the woman with the issue of blood, Jairus and all of the blind men, one of the things that stand out is, when it came to fixing their problem, just how bankrupt they were. All of them wanted to fix their problem, the desire in each of them to fix it was strong. But they lacked the means to do it and they recognized in Jesus, the One who could. For many of us though, we haven’t come to that point in our lives yet, or at least we don’t think that we have and so, nothing changes really. We live in a world where we have this feeling of emptiness, a subtle notion that something is off, softly playing in the background of our lives. Lasting joy is always just out of reach and permanent satisfaction is close perhaps, but not quite there. Someday maybe but not yet. Newsflash…someday never comes. And so, there we stand, with legitimate needs that we are unable to meet and there stands Jesus with outstretched arms and an invitation for us to come. So, what are we going to do? Are we going to pursue Jesus on His terms and pursue Him, even follow Him into His house after He’s packed it in for the day, or are we going to try to keep doing it on our own? It’s our choice. What are we going to do? The blind guys had faith based on the evidence of what they’d heard that Jesus could deliver so they went for it. For the record, we have the evidence of an empty tomb and 2000 years of testimony of people whose lives were changed when they placed their faith in Jesus, so what are we going to do with what we’ve heard? How will we respond?
If we come to Jesus on His terms, He will change our lives. Speaking from personal experience, that I can guarantee. When I surrendered my life to Jesus my values changed but He also gave me a peace that is permanent and is not based on circumstances.
If you’re reading this and are thinking that this surrender to Jesus might be a good idea for you because honestly, nothing else you’ve tried has worked, at least not in the long term anyway, the way you do it can be summarized in two words, repent, and follow. Repent simply means to change your mind about things, do a mental 180 here and agree with God’s assessment of you. It means that you agree with God that you have rebelled against Him and that, in order to make things right, that you do need a savior and that savior is Jesus. It means that you agree with God that Jesus’ death on the cross and not anything good that you can do, was sufficient to satisfy God’s justice for your rebellion. It means that you believe that Jesus did rise from the grave. And follow means that you are willing to allow Jesus to dictate how you live and to determine what is right and what is wrong. It means that you live life the way that He would live it if He were in your shoes. The easiest way to do this, by the way, is to tell God in prayer what you want to do. Go ahead and use modern English, He is fluent in it.
Next week I want to look at a guy who really understood what Jesus was capable of. He had a faith that actually stopped Jesus dead in His tracks and caused Him to marvel. See you then.
Part 6: Faith that Stopped Jesus Dead in His Tracks
Have you ever wished that you could do something good, something so good that it would stop Jesus dead in His tracks, make Him turn around and go, “Whoa!”? It happened once. A Roman Centurion did it. Yeah, a Roman military man, go figure. And, fitting enough I suppose, Luke, the only Gentile writer in the New Testament, wrote about it. Let’s go back to our panel discussion where Luke is talking.
“Jesus had just entered Capernaum, when He got this request from a Jewish delegation on behalf of a Roman Centurion who had a servant that he really loved but was so sick that he was about to die. I mean, this guy, according to the Greek verbiage, had it really bad. If he had been Catholic, they would have been sending for the priest to read him his last rites. Anyway, this Jewish delegation that was made up of the Jewish elders came to Jesus asking Him to do this. ‘Jesus,’ they told Him, ‘We know this guy is a Roman but he’s different. He loves our nation. He even built our synagogue with money out of his own pocket, so he deserves to have you do this.’”
And Jesus didn’t have any problem going along with them so, off He and the people who were with Him go to the Centurion’s house. About the time that they’re getting close to the place though, apparently another someone had gotten word to the Centurion that Jesus was coming so he dispatched another group of friends to intercept Him with a message. "Jesus," they said on behalf of the Centurion, "don’t trouble Yourself and come any further because I am not worthy to have you come under my roof. That’s why I didn’t consider myself worthy to come and present this request to you in person. But I know how power and authority work. If you have it, you don’t have to actually be there, you just have to issue the command and stuff gets done. You see, I too am under authority and I have people under me who are under my authority so if I want something done, I issue a command, and the people under me get it done. I don’t have to be there; my word is enough. So, Jesus, just say the word, and my servant will be healed’”
And Jesus, when He heard this, stopped right there. His jaw dropped and then He said to those people who were there with Him, "I’m telling you; I haven’t found this kind of faith even in Israel." So Jesus went on His way, and the second delegation headed back to the Centurion’s house and when they got back there, the Centurion’s servant was fully healed.
You know, as I look at this passage, I am kind of wondering what’s here that I can learn about faith and prayer and Jesus. There’s any number of application trails that I could go down I suppose but I’m going to go down one that, especially in the United States in 2022, is a road that is fairly well traveled and I am going to enter it by asking a pair of questions. How strong do I think that God really is and does prayer really work?
Yes, how strong do I think that God really is and does prayer really work? Those are two fundamental questions that everyone, regardless of their faith position has to field sometime in their lives because, all of us, at one point or another, find ourselves in a place where prayer is the only option that’s left. Seriously, in this crazy poker game we call life, there either has been a time or will be a time when the hand we’re dealt is a set of circumstances staring us in the face that has only two possible responses open to us. We’re either going to have to pray and ask God to intervene in our circumstances or we’re going to have to ignore that card, fold, and face the bitter truth.
I want to talk to the people reading this who choose the first option. When faced with these set of circumstances, you pray. That’s the first step, and it’s a good step but I think there’s another question that we have to ask ourselves when we take this first step though. How audacious are our prayers and do we really believe that God can deliver when we ask. Look at the Centurion. He had a problem that not only did he know that he was powerless to fix but also that unless Jesus intervened and got involved, wasn’t going to be fixed. His request can be summarized in four words, “heal my servant, please.” And he had faith to back that request. The Centurion expected Jesus to deliver. This prayer wasn’t one of those prayers that sounded like, “Jesus, if you can heal my servant, please send him down the road to recovery and, if it turns out that you can’t deliver, thank you so much for trying. I do appreciate it but I also know that this disease is pretty nasty so I get it that there wasn’t anything that anyone, including you, could do.” No, this was one of those, “I know that you have the power to do this, and it’s a good thing so please do this for me,” kinds of prayers. (When it comes to prayer, I am not being facetious in my description of that first prayer, that is how some of us pray. Oh, we dress our prayers up in religious jargon perhaps and we pray these wimpy prayers that sound really churchy and pious but, in the end are faithless and powerless.) So, the question is, how audacious are our prayers and are we addressing the problem…really.
The second question that we need to ask ourselves as we pray is, do we believe that God is able to deliver…really? The Centurion believed that Jesus could deliver the goods and…that He could do it simply by saying the word. Here’s a question we need to field though. What did he base that assumption on? Why did he think that? He checked out the evidence. He’d heard eyewitness testimony from people who saw Jesus work in circumstances just like his, maybe he was even one of them, and he logically asked himself, “why not?” Guys, nothing has changed in 2000 years. I don’t care if you’re a devout Jesus follower or an atheist reading this, the testimonies are out there and we’ve all heard them. Life was this way, I prayed, and life changed. But that’s all subjective evidence, you argue. You can’t trust that. Oh really? I don’t know how to break this to you but most evidence in a court of law these days is subjective rather than objective. So, the question stands. As you look at whatever situation you’re facing right now, based on the evidence, do you believe that Jesus can deliver the goods or not?
Now if you’re honestly not sure about whether He can or not, because, well, you don’t know what you don’t know, and because, perhaps, you have never seen prayer in action, there’s still something to be learned here. First, notice that the barriers that should have stopped the Roman Centurion from making the request of Jesus didn’t stop him. He was technically an enemy…a Roman occupier in Jesus’ home country…an unwanted presence…so what? He asked anyway. Secondly, he was a Gentile…not Jewish…oh well, that didn’t stop the Centurion. And lastly, the situation was bleak with the chances for success looking less than favorable. However, the Centurion understood something. When Jesus is involved, you might as well just tell the bookies to throw the odds out the window because Jesus, the God of the longshot, is going to do whatever He wants to do regardless of how impossible things look.
So, where are you at right now in your life? Is your life in dire straits? Do you need a miracle? Is this your story? You’ve tried all kinds of things to fix whatever the problem is and nothing seems to help. In fact, not only have things not improved with everything that you’ve tried, but they’ve actually gotten worse. So, what are your options? Let me spell them out for you. You can do nothing….and nothing will change…. You can pray some safe religious churchy sounding prayer, never mind that you don’t really believe that anything will change and frankly, I have no idea how things will play out. This is God we’re talking about and He is merciful and faithful and His reputation is on the line so things might change. Or…you can be bold and honest. Go big or go home. The Centurion recognized that Jesus had power and that Jesus got involved with people’s lives right at the need level. He also recognized his own unworthiness but he asked in faith and he expected results. And you know what? His faith was rewarded.
Now I do need to clarify one thing here, one misconception that could possibly arise if I don’t and that’s this. God is not the genie in Aladdin and you don’t just rub the lamp and get three wishes. That character is actually fiction. So, I am not saying that we can ask for anything. Our chances of winning the lottery for example are probably as random as they have always been. We can’t ask for things just so that we can selfishly lavish them on ourselves or if our motives for asking just stink. The Apostle James dealt with that very subject in James 4:2 – 3. But rather, we need to frame our requests around the Lord’s Prayer, specifically the line that says, “Your kingdom come, your will be done, let me repeat that, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” Or in English, “God, what are You trying to do here and how can I cooperate with You? I have a problem, and it looks like this is the way things should be done so would you please fix this in a way that lines up with what You are trying to do. I know that you have the power to do this, that’s not the question, but, unless You have a better idea, would you please answer my prayer and fix this.” In other words, combine the pattern of the Lord’s Prayer with the faith of the Centurion in Luke 7 and watch what happens.
Or maybe you’re really not sure about this. I get it. Praying bold prayers with the bold faith of the Centurion, the kind of faith that made Jesus stop and go “Whoa! That’s awesome!” may not exactly be in your resume…yet. Then try this one. “God, if You’re real, please show up and fix this because I can’t. I don’t have a lot of faith. In fact, I have just enough faith to ask what I just did. Please help. Amen.” If that’s where you are sincerely at, don’t be surprised when God shows up.
Next week we’re going to take a look at a Gentile woman who made a request to Jesus and see how things played out for her. See you then.
“Jesus had just entered Capernaum, when He got this request from a Jewish delegation on behalf of a Roman Centurion who had a servant that he really loved but was so sick that he was about to die. I mean, this guy, according to the Greek verbiage, had it really bad. If he had been Catholic, they would have been sending for the priest to read him his last rites. Anyway, this Jewish delegation that was made up of the Jewish elders came to Jesus asking Him to do this. ‘Jesus,’ they told Him, ‘We know this guy is a Roman but he’s different. He loves our nation. He even built our synagogue with money out of his own pocket, so he deserves to have you do this.’”
And Jesus didn’t have any problem going along with them so, off He and the people who were with Him go to the Centurion’s house. About the time that they’re getting close to the place though, apparently another someone had gotten word to the Centurion that Jesus was coming so he dispatched another group of friends to intercept Him with a message. "Jesus," they said on behalf of the Centurion, "don’t trouble Yourself and come any further because I am not worthy to have you come under my roof. That’s why I didn’t consider myself worthy to come and present this request to you in person. But I know how power and authority work. If you have it, you don’t have to actually be there, you just have to issue the command and stuff gets done. You see, I too am under authority and I have people under me who are under my authority so if I want something done, I issue a command, and the people under me get it done. I don’t have to be there; my word is enough. So, Jesus, just say the word, and my servant will be healed’”
And Jesus, when He heard this, stopped right there. His jaw dropped and then He said to those people who were there with Him, "I’m telling you; I haven’t found this kind of faith even in Israel." So Jesus went on His way, and the second delegation headed back to the Centurion’s house and when they got back there, the Centurion’s servant was fully healed.
You know, as I look at this passage, I am kind of wondering what’s here that I can learn about faith and prayer and Jesus. There’s any number of application trails that I could go down I suppose but I’m going to go down one that, especially in the United States in 2022, is a road that is fairly well traveled and I am going to enter it by asking a pair of questions. How strong do I think that God really is and does prayer really work?
Yes, how strong do I think that God really is and does prayer really work? Those are two fundamental questions that everyone, regardless of their faith position has to field sometime in their lives because, all of us, at one point or another, find ourselves in a place where prayer is the only option that’s left. Seriously, in this crazy poker game we call life, there either has been a time or will be a time when the hand we’re dealt is a set of circumstances staring us in the face that has only two possible responses open to us. We’re either going to have to pray and ask God to intervene in our circumstances or we’re going to have to ignore that card, fold, and face the bitter truth.
I want to talk to the people reading this who choose the first option. When faced with these set of circumstances, you pray. That’s the first step, and it’s a good step but I think there’s another question that we have to ask ourselves when we take this first step though. How audacious are our prayers and do we really believe that God can deliver when we ask. Look at the Centurion. He had a problem that not only did he know that he was powerless to fix but also that unless Jesus intervened and got involved, wasn’t going to be fixed. His request can be summarized in four words, “heal my servant, please.” And he had faith to back that request. The Centurion expected Jesus to deliver. This prayer wasn’t one of those prayers that sounded like, “Jesus, if you can heal my servant, please send him down the road to recovery and, if it turns out that you can’t deliver, thank you so much for trying. I do appreciate it but I also know that this disease is pretty nasty so I get it that there wasn’t anything that anyone, including you, could do.” No, this was one of those, “I know that you have the power to do this, and it’s a good thing so please do this for me,” kinds of prayers. (When it comes to prayer, I am not being facetious in my description of that first prayer, that is how some of us pray. Oh, we dress our prayers up in religious jargon perhaps and we pray these wimpy prayers that sound really churchy and pious but, in the end are faithless and powerless.) So, the question is, how audacious are our prayers and are we addressing the problem…really.
The second question that we need to ask ourselves as we pray is, do we believe that God is able to deliver…really? The Centurion believed that Jesus could deliver the goods and…that He could do it simply by saying the word. Here’s a question we need to field though. What did he base that assumption on? Why did he think that? He checked out the evidence. He’d heard eyewitness testimony from people who saw Jesus work in circumstances just like his, maybe he was even one of them, and he logically asked himself, “why not?” Guys, nothing has changed in 2000 years. I don’t care if you’re a devout Jesus follower or an atheist reading this, the testimonies are out there and we’ve all heard them. Life was this way, I prayed, and life changed. But that’s all subjective evidence, you argue. You can’t trust that. Oh really? I don’t know how to break this to you but most evidence in a court of law these days is subjective rather than objective. So, the question stands. As you look at whatever situation you’re facing right now, based on the evidence, do you believe that Jesus can deliver the goods or not?
Now if you’re honestly not sure about whether He can or not, because, well, you don’t know what you don’t know, and because, perhaps, you have never seen prayer in action, there’s still something to be learned here. First, notice that the barriers that should have stopped the Roman Centurion from making the request of Jesus didn’t stop him. He was technically an enemy…a Roman occupier in Jesus’ home country…an unwanted presence…so what? He asked anyway. Secondly, he was a Gentile…not Jewish…oh well, that didn’t stop the Centurion. And lastly, the situation was bleak with the chances for success looking less than favorable. However, the Centurion understood something. When Jesus is involved, you might as well just tell the bookies to throw the odds out the window because Jesus, the God of the longshot, is going to do whatever He wants to do regardless of how impossible things look.
So, where are you at right now in your life? Is your life in dire straits? Do you need a miracle? Is this your story? You’ve tried all kinds of things to fix whatever the problem is and nothing seems to help. In fact, not only have things not improved with everything that you’ve tried, but they’ve actually gotten worse. So, what are your options? Let me spell them out for you. You can do nothing….and nothing will change…. You can pray some safe religious churchy sounding prayer, never mind that you don’t really believe that anything will change and frankly, I have no idea how things will play out. This is God we’re talking about and He is merciful and faithful and His reputation is on the line so things might change. Or…you can be bold and honest. Go big or go home. The Centurion recognized that Jesus had power and that Jesus got involved with people’s lives right at the need level. He also recognized his own unworthiness but he asked in faith and he expected results. And you know what? His faith was rewarded.
Now I do need to clarify one thing here, one misconception that could possibly arise if I don’t and that’s this. God is not the genie in Aladdin and you don’t just rub the lamp and get three wishes. That character is actually fiction. So, I am not saying that we can ask for anything. Our chances of winning the lottery for example are probably as random as they have always been. We can’t ask for things just so that we can selfishly lavish them on ourselves or if our motives for asking just stink. The Apostle James dealt with that very subject in James 4:2 – 3. But rather, we need to frame our requests around the Lord’s Prayer, specifically the line that says, “Your kingdom come, your will be done, let me repeat that, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” Or in English, “God, what are You trying to do here and how can I cooperate with You? I have a problem, and it looks like this is the way things should be done so would you please fix this in a way that lines up with what You are trying to do. I know that you have the power to do this, that’s not the question, but, unless You have a better idea, would you please answer my prayer and fix this.” In other words, combine the pattern of the Lord’s Prayer with the faith of the Centurion in Luke 7 and watch what happens.
Or maybe you’re really not sure about this. I get it. Praying bold prayers with the bold faith of the Centurion, the kind of faith that made Jesus stop and go “Whoa! That’s awesome!” may not exactly be in your resume…yet. Then try this one. “God, if You’re real, please show up and fix this because I can’t. I don’t have a lot of faith. In fact, I have just enough faith to ask what I just did. Please help. Amen.” If that’s where you are sincerely at, don’t be surprised when God shows up.
Next week we’re going to take a look at a Gentile woman who made a request to Jesus and see how things played out for her. See you then.
Part 7: The Faith of a Syrophoenician Woman
Have you ever read a story in the Bible and, after you finished it, you found yourself thinking that what you read was kind of different, perhaps even odd? Yes, I know, for some of you reading this who don’t attend church all that often, that’s what you’re saying more often than not, whenever you read the Bible. But even for the rest of you, every once in a while, you will come across a story and after you finish reading it, there are elements in it that you are not entirely sure what to make of it. Today is one of those stories.
Now this story is unusual, not because of the outcome necessarily. A woman came to Jesus asking Him to cast a demon out of her daughter that was tormenting the girl and He did it. What is odd though is the dialogue that preceded it. It’s also a little bit puzzling in that it’s a story about Jesus doing a miracle for a Gentile woman but Luke, the Gentile historian, doesn’t talk about it, only Peter (through Mark) and Matthew do, perhaps because they were there when it happened and found it to be kind of odd too.
As both Peter and Matthew tell the story, after healing the Centurion’s servant, Jesus went north, out of Galilee to the region of Tyre and Sidon in what is today known as Southern Lebanon. Now, we’re not really told why, although I can hazard a guess. With all of the miracles that Jesus was performing, He never had a moment of peace in Galilee so He and the disciples would occasionally need a retreat to some place off the beaten path to recharge their batteries. It’s just a guess though because the text doesn’t say. In any case, Jesus was in Tyre and He was trying to keep the location of where He was staying a secret. It didn’t work.
Soon after He arrived, people found out where He was staying and, hang on folks, here we go again. A Syrophoenician woman found out what house he was staying at and came to Him begging that He heal her daughter. And here’s where it gets unusual. Jesus responded to her by saying nothing, He totally ignored her. Compared to how He responded to similar needs in Israel, this seems odd. Think about it. Not too long before that, a woman with an issue of blood just touched his robe and He put a whole mission on hold momentarily just to address her. Not this time though. He gave this woman the silent treatment and things must have gotten really uncomfortable because, according to Matthew, the disciples finally asked Jesus to send her away because she was bothering them with her begging.
So, after the disciples complained, Jesus responded to her but even then, his response was kind of unusual. “I was sent only to minister to the needs of the people of Israel.”
She was persistent though. She had finally gotten a response from Jesus so it was game on. Matthew says that she worshipped Him and said, “Lord, help me.”
“First, I should feed the children—my own family, the Jews. It isn’t right to take food from the children and throw it to the dogs.” Jesus replied. Just an editorial note here. The Jews referred to the Gentiles as the “dogs.” Why Jesus used that term for her, I honestly don’t know.
She was not to be denied, however. “True,” she answered. “But even the dogs are allowed to eat the scraps that fall under the table.” Her answer got His attention. Jesus commended her for her “great” faith and granted her request.
And with that, she exited the Bible, and we don’t hear from her again. So, the question that is staring us in the face is what are we supposed to make of this? Unlike some of the passages, we are probably faced with some questions where the answers to them are only speculative. Why did Jesus respond to this woman as he did? I’ve heard some theologians point out the fact that bantering was part of the culture at the time…it could be I suppose. That could be all it was. Other’s have theorized that He was inviting her to take a deeper walk of faith, that He was encouraging her to be persistent in what she wanted. Once again, it could be but I honestly don’t know and I could theorize about it forever. But rather than do that, let’s take a look at the obvious here.
First, the woman is a Gentile, an outsider looking in, and she had a great need. She came to Jesus and was persistent and, in the end, got exactly what she requested. She also recognized His authority and acknowledged it. She came to Him on His terms. That’s a lesson for all of us. When we come to God, we have to come to Him on His terms, not ours. This is not flattery by the way, it’s acknowledging who God is and also, who we are. She called Jesus, “Lord,” and she bowed to Him in worship. Here’s the truth. God is generous but we have to remember. We exist to serve God; it isn’t the other way around. We must never forget that.
The woman was also persistent. She didn’t quit. Jesus seemingly put up barriers but it did not stop her. She kept pressing in. If she kept pressing in, so must we. And this wasn’t the only time that the idea of being persistent appears in Scripture. Jesus told a parable about an unrighteous judge granting the request of a persistent widow where he was teaching the same thing. In fact, we aren’t fishing for an interpretation when we say this, Luke said in so many words that that was why Jesus told the parable in the first place. The bottom line is that we are encouraged to keep praying and keep pressing in because following Jesus is about having a relationship with Jesus and the overriding message from God when we pray is not to just get what we want and then go on about our merry way. No, rather it’s about establishing a deeper relationship with God but that takes time and persistence.
Another thing that becomes quite evident is the power of Jesus here. The healing takes place from a distance, something that perhaps the woman recognized. Notice that she didn’t say, come to my house and heal my daughter, she just asked Jesus to heal her daughter. Ironic, don’t you think? The Gentiles, both the Centurion and the Syrophoenician woman, figured out that Jesus could heal from a distance while the Jews generally missed that detail. Here’s a question for us. How strong do we think God really is? Do we think that He can really answer our prayer or are we just going through the motions? If we’re just going through the motions, God will see right through it. I’m not saying that He won’t be merciful and answer, He might, but religious exercises and doing the churchy, religious thing doesn’t always get His attention.
The last thing to notice is what actually got Jesus’s attention. Notice what it was. It was faith. Like the Centurion, like woman had great faith and it got Jesus’s attention and it was ultimately why He granted her request. Also, like the Centurion, the Syrophoenician woman had a faith that was not blind faith but faith based on the evidence. She heard the stories, she believed them and she stepped out in faith and went for it.
So, what about you? If you consider yourself an outsider, or just a seeker kicking the tires on this person named Jesus, are you willing to learn from the Syrophoenician woman? Look at how persistent she was. In terms of barriers, she was behind right from the start and Jesus seemingly threw up more barriers but that didn’t stop her. She had a need that she couldn’t meet and she wasn’t leaving until she had her need met. She pressed in, came to Jesus on His terms, and was rewarded for it. And, as you think about it, maybe you have a need too, except your need looks different from the woman’s need. Is this you? You have this need that’s this emptiness that runs deep down inside that just never quite goes away. And you’ve heard people tell stories about this Jesus and they claim that He’s changed their lives but that’s them and you’re you and well, you’re wired differently than they are. But..., but, you can definitely see that they have something that works for them and it looks intriguing. And when you ask them about it, and as you look at how they live, you can see that their faith isn’t this go to church on Sunday but it’s more like a faith that defines who they are and they live it out, 24/7. They aren’t perfect, but they are authentic and they take this idea of loving their neighbor as themselves seriously, even if it costs them. And they have this peace about them and, the word on the street has it that this Jesus is available to anyone who will follow Him on His terms.
So, what are you going to do about it? Are you willing to come to Jesus on His terms, surrender to His leadership and start doing life His way? Are you willing to see yourself as He sees you, as a person who does need a savior because you know that you can’t save yourself? Are you willing to press in and seek Him? You know, there’s this promise in the Old Testament that goes something like this. This is God speaking. “Whoever seeks Me will find Me and you will find Me when you seek Me with everything you’ve got.” How about it? Are you willing to seek God with that kind of persistence? If you do, He promises to show Himself to you but He won’t force you. If you do want to step out in faith though, one way to do it is through talking to God, just have a conversation with Him. Tell Him something like this maybe. “God, I need you. I have this kind of emptiness that has always been there and it’s never gone away. I’ve always thought that it was just normal, the way life is, but according to the Bible, there’s another way, a different way, a way to satisfy that need by coming to Jesus on His terms. If that’s true, if that’s what you’re offering, a way to satisfy this need, then I am going to take a step of faith and take you up on your offer. I need a savior because I can’t save myself so I accept Jesus as my savior and I am committed to following Him for the rest of my life. But God, You’re going to have to show me how to follow Jesus, what that actually looks like, because this is all new to me and I haven’t got a clue how to do it. But, if this offer is legit and Jesus can deliver, then I’m in. Thank you for saving me and doing what You promised that You would do. In Jesus’ name, amen.”
Next week we are going to take a one week break from this series to discuss an issue that we all will face at one time or another, the issue of stress, deadlines, and the temptation to cut corners. See you then.
Now this story is unusual, not because of the outcome necessarily. A woman came to Jesus asking Him to cast a demon out of her daughter that was tormenting the girl and He did it. What is odd though is the dialogue that preceded it. It’s also a little bit puzzling in that it’s a story about Jesus doing a miracle for a Gentile woman but Luke, the Gentile historian, doesn’t talk about it, only Peter (through Mark) and Matthew do, perhaps because they were there when it happened and found it to be kind of odd too.
As both Peter and Matthew tell the story, after healing the Centurion’s servant, Jesus went north, out of Galilee to the region of Tyre and Sidon in what is today known as Southern Lebanon. Now, we’re not really told why, although I can hazard a guess. With all of the miracles that Jesus was performing, He never had a moment of peace in Galilee so He and the disciples would occasionally need a retreat to some place off the beaten path to recharge their batteries. It’s just a guess though because the text doesn’t say. In any case, Jesus was in Tyre and He was trying to keep the location of where He was staying a secret. It didn’t work.
Soon after He arrived, people found out where He was staying and, hang on folks, here we go again. A Syrophoenician woman found out what house he was staying at and came to Him begging that He heal her daughter. And here’s where it gets unusual. Jesus responded to her by saying nothing, He totally ignored her. Compared to how He responded to similar needs in Israel, this seems odd. Think about it. Not too long before that, a woman with an issue of blood just touched his robe and He put a whole mission on hold momentarily just to address her. Not this time though. He gave this woman the silent treatment and things must have gotten really uncomfortable because, according to Matthew, the disciples finally asked Jesus to send her away because she was bothering them with her begging.
So, after the disciples complained, Jesus responded to her but even then, his response was kind of unusual. “I was sent only to minister to the needs of the people of Israel.”
She was persistent though. She had finally gotten a response from Jesus so it was game on. Matthew says that she worshipped Him and said, “Lord, help me.”
“First, I should feed the children—my own family, the Jews. It isn’t right to take food from the children and throw it to the dogs.” Jesus replied. Just an editorial note here. The Jews referred to the Gentiles as the “dogs.” Why Jesus used that term for her, I honestly don’t know.
She was not to be denied, however. “True,” she answered. “But even the dogs are allowed to eat the scraps that fall under the table.” Her answer got His attention. Jesus commended her for her “great” faith and granted her request.
And with that, she exited the Bible, and we don’t hear from her again. So, the question that is staring us in the face is what are we supposed to make of this? Unlike some of the passages, we are probably faced with some questions where the answers to them are only speculative. Why did Jesus respond to this woman as he did? I’ve heard some theologians point out the fact that bantering was part of the culture at the time…it could be I suppose. That could be all it was. Other’s have theorized that He was inviting her to take a deeper walk of faith, that He was encouraging her to be persistent in what she wanted. Once again, it could be but I honestly don’t know and I could theorize about it forever. But rather than do that, let’s take a look at the obvious here.
First, the woman is a Gentile, an outsider looking in, and she had a great need. She came to Jesus and was persistent and, in the end, got exactly what she requested. She also recognized His authority and acknowledged it. She came to Him on His terms. That’s a lesson for all of us. When we come to God, we have to come to Him on His terms, not ours. This is not flattery by the way, it’s acknowledging who God is and also, who we are. She called Jesus, “Lord,” and she bowed to Him in worship. Here’s the truth. God is generous but we have to remember. We exist to serve God; it isn’t the other way around. We must never forget that.
The woman was also persistent. She didn’t quit. Jesus seemingly put up barriers but it did not stop her. She kept pressing in. If she kept pressing in, so must we. And this wasn’t the only time that the idea of being persistent appears in Scripture. Jesus told a parable about an unrighteous judge granting the request of a persistent widow where he was teaching the same thing. In fact, we aren’t fishing for an interpretation when we say this, Luke said in so many words that that was why Jesus told the parable in the first place. The bottom line is that we are encouraged to keep praying and keep pressing in because following Jesus is about having a relationship with Jesus and the overriding message from God when we pray is not to just get what we want and then go on about our merry way. No, rather it’s about establishing a deeper relationship with God but that takes time and persistence.
Another thing that becomes quite evident is the power of Jesus here. The healing takes place from a distance, something that perhaps the woman recognized. Notice that she didn’t say, come to my house and heal my daughter, she just asked Jesus to heal her daughter. Ironic, don’t you think? The Gentiles, both the Centurion and the Syrophoenician woman, figured out that Jesus could heal from a distance while the Jews generally missed that detail. Here’s a question for us. How strong do we think God really is? Do we think that He can really answer our prayer or are we just going through the motions? If we’re just going through the motions, God will see right through it. I’m not saying that He won’t be merciful and answer, He might, but religious exercises and doing the churchy, religious thing doesn’t always get His attention.
The last thing to notice is what actually got Jesus’s attention. Notice what it was. It was faith. Like the Centurion, like woman had great faith and it got Jesus’s attention and it was ultimately why He granted her request. Also, like the Centurion, the Syrophoenician woman had a faith that was not blind faith but faith based on the evidence. She heard the stories, she believed them and she stepped out in faith and went for it.
So, what about you? If you consider yourself an outsider, or just a seeker kicking the tires on this person named Jesus, are you willing to learn from the Syrophoenician woman? Look at how persistent she was. In terms of barriers, she was behind right from the start and Jesus seemingly threw up more barriers but that didn’t stop her. She had a need that she couldn’t meet and she wasn’t leaving until she had her need met. She pressed in, came to Jesus on His terms, and was rewarded for it. And, as you think about it, maybe you have a need too, except your need looks different from the woman’s need. Is this you? You have this need that’s this emptiness that runs deep down inside that just never quite goes away. And you’ve heard people tell stories about this Jesus and they claim that He’s changed their lives but that’s them and you’re you and well, you’re wired differently than they are. But..., but, you can definitely see that they have something that works for them and it looks intriguing. And when you ask them about it, and as you look at how they live, you can see that their faith isn’t this go to church on Sunday but it’s more like a faith that defines who they are and they live it out, 24/7. They aren’t perfect, but they are authentic and they take this idea of loving their neighbor as themselves seriously, even if it costs them. And they have this peace about them and, the word on the street has it that this Jesus is available to anyone who will follow Him on His terms.
So, what are you going to do about it? Are you willing to come to Jesus on His terms, surrender to His leadership and start doing life His way? Are you willing to see yourself as He sees you, as a person who does need a savior because you know that you can’t save yourself? Are you willing to press in and seek Him? You know, there’s this promise in the Old Testament that goes something like this. This is God speaking. “Whoever seeks Me will find Me and you will find Me when you seek Me with everything you’ve got.” How about it? Are you willing to seek God with that kind of persistence? If you do, He promises to show Himself to you but He won’t force you. If you do want to step out in faith though, one way to do it is through talking to God, just have a conversation with Him. Tell Him something like this maybe. “God, I need you. I have this kind of emptiness that has always been there and it’s never gone away. I’ve always thought that it was just normal, the way life is, but according to the Bible, there’s another way, a different way, a way to satisfy that need by coming to Jesus on His terms. If that’s true, if that’s what you’re offering, a way to satisfy this need, then I am going to take a step of faith and take you up on your offer. I need a savior because I can’t save myself so I accept Jesus as my savior and I am committed to following Him for the rest of my life. But God, You’re going to have to show me how to follow Jesus, what that actually looks like, because this is all new to me and I haven’t got a clue how to do it. But, if this offer is legit and Jesus can deliver, then I’m in. Thank you for saving me and doing what You promised that You would do. In Jesus’ name, amen.”
Next week we are going to take a one week break from this series to discuss an issue that we all will face at one time or another, the issue of stress, deadlines, and the temptation to cut corners. See you then.
Part 8 Halftime: The Little Green Car
As most of you know, I work in a Christian High School in the Seattle area but what you may not know is that Dianna works on the same campus, just in a different ministry and so, we commute together on our way into work. In today’s post, I want to begin by talking about an experience that we had a couple of months ago on our way into work.
Now, we have two possible ways to commute to work. One is to go north on 405 to where it intersects with I-5 at the Swamp Creek Interchange, (Yes, Swamp Creek Interchange is the actual name of the juncture) a couple of miles north of the county line, and then go south on I-5 and take the 205th Street exit where it will eventually take us to work. Of the two, it might be slightly faster than the alternative route but the risk of getting snagged in a radar trap is also increased over the other route, (Not that I would know from personal experience. Seriously, it’s never happened to me. I’ve just watched it happen to other poor slobs.) and the pace is a little more intense.
The alternative route is to go west through Bothell and Kenmore on Bothell-Lake City Way and then cut off onto Ballinger Way just as you get into Lake Forest Park and head north into school that way. It’s actually three miles shorter than the other route and it’s a 40 instead of the 60 that’s in place on the freeway so it’s an easier commute. It is not, however, a route without its law enforcement hazards. As I said, it takes you through Lake Forest Park with its camera enforced traffic lights and a very strictly enforced 25 miles per hour speed limit that, apparently the Metro Transit busses are not exempt from following. (True story: I used to ride the bus to work and one night coming home, I got this driver who was an absolute crack up. With the running commentary that he would give on his route over the microphone, you would have thought that you were riding a tour bus and he was your guide. “And now, ladies and gentlemen, we are entering the lovely metropolis of Lake Forest Park. The speed limit through here is twenty five miles per hour and Metro Transit busses are not exempt. Don’t ask me how I know this…” No one asked.)
As expensive as that inconvenience might be though, that’s not the pitfall that I usually see in the morning, however. The trap that I usually see is on the other end of commute coming into Lake Forest Park and it’s the lane on the far right, the transit only lane. You see, west bound traffic on Lake City Way in the morning can get really backed up so drivers are always looking for whatever edge, legal or otherwise, to make up for lost time. Sometimes, that edge will be to just aggressively navigate the two lanes that anyone can be driving in and sometimes, that edge will be to bounce into the right hand lane, the Transit only lane, and risk the $186 fine if you get caught. (Thank you, Google.) and I have seen people get pulled over for that one more than once.
Anyway, about two months ago, Dianna and I were on our way into work when, as I glanced in my rear view mirror, I noticed this little green car coming up behind me and the driver was in an obvious hurry. He was jockeying back and forth between the two legal lanes without much success because traffic just wasn’t moving at all that morning. Okay, it was moving a little bit but not much and finally, out of frustration, he did it. He got into the lane reserved for the Metro busses and went for it, never to be seen by Dianna and me again, at least so we thought. We continued our commute legally, turning right on Ballinger and, once we got onto Ballinger, the traffic became less congested and we were fine. We were able to pick up our speed to 30 miles per hour and, later, when the speed limit increased to 40, we were able to easily match that pace. About ten minutes on Ballinger, at about the county line, we came to a traffic stop where one lane became two lanes and, as we came to a stop in the left lane I glanced to my right. Do you want to guess what I saw? Yep. It was the little green car and, as I recognized what it was, a thought dawned on me. For all of the jockeying and, in the end, even risking a ticket that this driver had done, in the end he had gained nothing except maybe a lot of stress.
Stress…that’s really all that it got him. Just more stress. Poor dude. I could relate though because many times, when I was running late, I too found myself under a lot of stress. The more that I pondered this, this got me thinking about what Jesus had to say about this topic of stress and worry and what antidote He offered for it. I went back in my mind to a passage in Matthew 6, where Matthew recounted the longest sermon recorded, that Jesus ever told, “The Sermon on the Mount.” In this sermon, Jesus made this statement, “Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes... Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life?... But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.” In other words, what Jesus was saying was, when it comes to worry, don’t do it but instead, exercise faith, seek first God’s kingdom and God will take care of these details.
Okay, that’s a simple enough antidote, I guess. Exercise faith in God, put His agenda first in my life and roll with it. There’s a problem though, I’m a guy who is driven by his curiosity and, as I read this verse, there was a thought, or more to the point, a little word that got my attention. One word literally jumped off the page at me, it was this word, therefore. Therefore…what was, therefore, there for? Its obvious purpose was to link together two thoughts so, and I had read the second though so the question was, what was the previous thought that it was linking the second thought to? I went back to verse 19 where Jesus said. “Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moths and vermin destroy, and where thieves break in and steal. But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moths and vermin do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also” …. I continued to read a little further where Jesus stated matter of fact, “you cannot serve God and money.”
I heard Rick Warren preach on this verse once and he made this observation, “Notice,” Warren said, “Jesus didn’t say that you must not serve God and money but you cannot serve God and money.” It’s impossible he explained, because the two are incompatible in that regard. Not that money, or having money is a bad thing, because it’s not. It’s a gift from God actually but when it becomes a god and usurps God, when it becomes an idol that controls people, all kinds of evil will ensue. The Apostle Paul, talking to his young protégé Timothy, wrote this, “the love of money is the root of all sorts of evil.” And Jesus, Paul’s source, knew this and spoke out against it many times during his three year public ministry. Jesus knew that money and the pursuit of it, when allowed free reign in a person’s life, was a cruel and savage task master that could neither fully satisfy nor would it be fully satisfied and it tyrannically demanded its followers to make all kinds of sacrifices on its altar.
Now, before I go any further, I will repeat myself again just to clarify my position. I am not saying that earning money, even lots of money, is wrong, in part because it isn’t, and even more importantly than that, it wasn’t what Jesus was saying either. But what happens to people when chasing money goes from being a good thing, to being the ultimate thing? Their relationships suffer for starters and it’s their most important relationships that suffer the most. For those of you who are my age, over sixty, remember the lyrics to Harry Chapin’s “Cats in the Cradle”? For the rest of you, Google the lyrics. It tells a pretty sad story actually, talking about the pitfalls of putting career ahead of family and it’s not told by a Christian artist either. It’s a secular song that speaks of a biblical truth.
Let me elaborate a little more. I was listening to a podcast earlier this week hosted by Marlon Humphrey where a guest on his show, an NFL owner, Steve Bisciotti, was asked about how he came to acquire his wealth, and, in the middle of the interview, Bisciotti made a couple of rather telling statements. His father died when Bisciotti was nine so Bisciotti grew up without a father. Fast forward thirty years later and Bisciotti’s business, that he started out of his basement, was doing quite well but, one night as he took personal inventory of his life choices and how they impacted his family, he came to realize this truth. He had grown up without a father because there was no other way. That was the hand that he and his family had been dealt. However, as he thought about it, for all practical purposes, his sons were also growing up without a father too, however, not because there was no other way but because of his choices. He was providing for them financially but he was absent in their lives at key little junctures every day and it wasn’t the way that he wanted things to be. Something had to change so he made the necessary changes. He promoted from within his organization and he delegated his responsibilities and took his hands directly off of some areas, becoming more of an advisor, granted an advisor who had the power still to hire or fire, but still an advisor none-the-less. And what he got in return was more freedom to spend time with the people who mattered most to him. In his words, he no longer had to be the first one in the office or the last one to leave. And his family? They were better off for it.
So, how did Bisciotti’s story play out. Well, his business didn’t suffer because of it, he owns an NFL franchise for pity’s sake, and his family is healthier. And, toward the end of the interview, he talked about his plans for his money when it’s all said and done. In the end, he plans on giving much of it away. Now, I don’t know if Bisciotti is a Jesus follower or not, but I can hazard a pretty good guess as to what he doesn’t serve. He doesn’t serve his money; his money serves him and we can all learn from that.
As we wrap up here in the next few minutes, let’s come back to Jesus and the Sermon on the Mount and take a look at what He said, who He said it to, and why He said it in the first place. His statement, “you cannot serve God and money,” was an across the board statement that was aimed at an audience whose economic status equally spanned across the board. He had rich people in His audience, poor people in His audience and people who were somewhere in between. The fact that he said it to all of them though says this about this idea of serving money. You don’t have to have a lot of money in order to be enslaved to money. All you really have to do is to let it predominate your thinking or fake like you have a lot of money by buying things that you cannot afford. All of this is a rat race that only the rats can win and even of those rodents running in that race, only the fat ones win.
So, what about the rest of us? What happens to us when we’re enslaved by money? Interest rates aside, we worry a lot about it for starters. Like the driver of the little green car on Bothell/Lake City Way, we take a lot of risks some of the time and we definitely jostle for an edge all the time. And, in the end, also like the driver of the little green car, we aren’t even economically better off for all of our efforts. It leaves us frustrated but do you know what else? It’s not how we were intended to live.
A little later in the book of Matthew, Matthew also recorded this statement by Jesus. “Are you tired? Worn out? Burned out on religion? Come to me. Get away with me and you’ll recover your life. I’ll show you how to take a real rest. Walk with me and work with me—watch how I do it. Learn the unforced rhythms of grace. I won’t lay anything heavy or ill-fitting on you. Keep company with me and you’ll learn to live freely and lightly.” Did you pick up on this invitation? “Learn the unforced rhythms of grace,” unforced. Yes, but what about the bills? Jesus, you’re saying, all of this, “walk with me and learn from me,” stuff is cool but we’re all allergic to starvation. We have to eat. Jesus patiently redirects our attention back to the Matthew 6, 33. “Seek the Kingdom of God above all else, and live righteously, and he will give you everything you need.” In other words, what Jesus was telling His audience, and what he’s telling us, is that if we will trust Him and put Him first, if we will serve God rather than money, that He will take responsibility to meet our needs. And if we don’t? Well, we’re kind of on our own then in some ways. A common saying in church circles is this, and it’s a logic based statement really. God is responsible for the consequences when I obey Him but I am responsible for the consequences when I blow Him off.
So, what are you going to do? It’s your call really. You can surrender to God and buy into His kingdom or you can blow Him off. If you trust Him and buy in, He will meet your needs, maybe not your wants, but He will meet your needs. History has proven that and, He also made this statement. Paraphrasing here, “if you think that what I am doing on earth right now is cool, wait until you see what I have in store for you in eternity. I took what you can imagine and I multiplied it.” And it’s an invitation that is across the board. It’s open to anyone who will have Him and who will surrender to Him on His terms. The easiest way to get started, if this is what you want to do is to pray something like this. “God, I surrender. My rebellion against you is over and I am sorry for both my attitude and my actions in the past. I know that I have offended you and that I have created a separation between us that only you have the ability to repair because I can’t do it, I’m not qualified. But you are qualified and you did make a way to bridge that separation when You sent Jesus to die on the cross for my rebellion. I believe that You raised Jesus from the grave and today, as I am ending my rebellion, I am accepting Jesus as my savior too. Thank you for forgiving me. As of right now, today, my statement to you is this. I will no longer serve money or anything else but, to the best of my ability, I will serve You and You alone God. In Jesus name, amen.
Next week we are going to take a look at the life of a man who threw off the yoke of slavery that money had hoisted on him and began to live a different way and we’ll see what we can learn from him. See you then.
Now, we have two possible ways to commute to work. One is to go north on 405 to where it intersects with I-5 at the Swamp Creek Interchange, (Yes, Swamp Creek Interchange is the actual name of the juncture) a couple of miles north of the county line, and then go south on I-5 and take the 205th Street exit where it will eventually take us to work. Of the two, it might be slightly faster than the alternative route but the risk of getting snagged in a radar trap is also increased over the other route, (Not that I would know from personal experience. Seriously, it’s never happened to me. I’ve just watched it happen to other poor slobs.) and the pace is a little more intense.
The alternative route is to go west through Bothell and Kenmore on Bothell-Lake City Way and then cut off onto Ballinger Way just as you get into Lake Forest Park and head north into school that way. It’s actually three miles shorter than the other route and it’s a 40 instead of the 60 that’s in place on the freeway so it’s an easier commute. It is not, however, a route without its law enforcement hazards. As I said, it takes you through Lake Forest Park with its camera enforced traffic lights and a very strictly enforced 25 miles per hour speed limit that, apparently the Metro Transit busses are not exempt from following. (True story: I used to ride the bus to work and one night coming home, I got this driver who was an absolute crack up. With the running commentary that he would give on his route over the microphone, you would have thought that you were riding a tour bus and he was your guide. “And now, ladies and gentlemen, we are entering the lovely metropolis of Lake Forest Park. The speed limit through here is twenty five miles per hour and Metro Transit busses are not exempt. Don’t ask me how I know this…” No one asked.)
As expensive as that inconvenience might be though, that’s not the pitfall that I usually see in the morning, however. The trap that I usually see is on the other end of commute coming into Lake Forest Park and it’s the lane on the far right, the transit only lane. You see, west bound traffic on Lake City Way in the morning can get really backed up so drivers are always looking for whatever edge, legal or otherwise, to make up for lost time. Sometimes, that edge will be to just aggressively navigate the two lanes that anyone can be driving in and sometimes, that edge will be to bounce into the right hand lane, the Transit only lane, and risk the $186 fine if you get caught. (Thank you, Google.) and I have seen people get pulled over for that one more than once.
Anyway, about two months ago, Dianna and I were on our way into work when, as I glanced in my rear view mirror, I noticed this little green car coming up behind me and the driver was in an obvious hurry. He was jockeying back and forth between the two legal lanes without much success because traffic just wasn’t moving at all that morning. Okay, it was moving a little bit but not much and finally, out of frustration, he did it. He got into the lane reserved for the Metro busses and went for it, never to be seen by Dianna and me again, at least so we thought. We continued our commute legally, turning right on Ballinger and, once we got onto Ballinger, the traffic became less congested and we were fine. We were able to pick up our speed to 30 miles per hour and, later, when the speed limit increased to 40, we were able to easily match that pace. About ten minutes on Ballinger, at about the county line, we came to a traffic stop where one lane became two lanes and, as we came to a stop in the left lane I glanced to my right. Do you want to guess what I saw? Yep. It was the little green car and, as I recognized what it was, a thought dawned on me. For all of the jockeying and, in the end, even risking a ticket that this driver had done, in the end he had gained nothing except maybe a lot of stress.
Stress…that’s really all that it got him. Just more stress. Poor dude. I could relate though because many times, when I was running late, I too found myself under a lot of stress. The more that I pondered this, this got me thinking about what Jesus had to say about this topic of stress and worry and what antidote He offered for it. I went back in my mind to a passage in Matthew 6, where Matthew recounted the longest sermon recorded, that Jesus ever told, “The Sermon on the Mount.” In this sermon, Jesus made this statement, “Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes... Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life?... But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.” In other words, what Jesus was saying was, when it comes to worry, don’t do it but instead, exercise faith, seek first God’s kingdom and God will take care of these details.
Okay, that’s a simple enough antidote, I guess. Exercise faith in God, put His agenda first in my life and roll with it. There’s a problem though, I’m a guy who is driven by his curiosity and, as I read this verse, there was a thought, or more to the point, a little word that got my attention. One word literally jumped off the page at me, it was this word, therefore. Therefore…what was, therefore, there for? Its obvious purpose was to link together two thoughts so, and I had read the second though so the question was, what was the previous thought that it was linking the second thought to? I went back to verse 19 where Jesus said. “Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moths and vermin destroy, and where thieves break in and steal. But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moths and vermin do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also” …. I continued to read a little further where Jesus stated matter of fact, “you cannot serve God and money.”
I heard Rick Warren preach on this verse once and he made this observation, “Notice,” Warren said, “Jesus didn’t say that you must not serve God and money but you cannot serve God and money.” It’s impossible he explained, because the two are incompatible in that regard. Not that money, or having money is a bad thing, because it’s not. It’s a gift from God actually but when it becomes a god and usurps God, when it becomes an idol that controls people, all kinds of evil will ensue. The Apostle Paul, talking to his young protégé Timothy, wrote this, “the love of money is the root of all sorts of evil.” And Jesus, Paul’s source, knew this and spoke out against it many times during his three year public ministry. Jesus knew that money and the pursuit of it, when allowed free reign in a person’s life, was a cruel and savage task master that could neither fully satisfy nor would it be fully satisfied and it tyrannically demanded its followers to make all kinds of sacrifices on its altar.
Now, before I go any further, I will repeat myself again just to clarify my position. I am not saying that earning money, even lots of money, is wrong, in part because it isn’t, and even more importantly than that, it wasn’t what Jesus was saying either. But what happens to people when chasing money goes from being a good thing, to being the ultimate thing? Their relationships suffer for starters and it’s their most important relationships that suffer the most. For those of you who are my age, over sixty, remember the lyrics to Harry Chapin’s “Cats in the Cradle”? For the rest of you, Google the lyrics. It tells a pretty sad story actually, talking about the pitfalls of putting career ahead of family and it’s not told by a Christian artist either. It’s a secular song that speaks of a biblical truth.
Let me elaborate a little more. I was listening to a podcast earlier this week hosted by Marlon Humphrey where a guest on his show, an NFL owner, Steve Bisciotti, was asked about how he came to acquire his wealth, and, in the middle of the interview, Bisciotti made a couple of rather telling statements. His father died when Bisciotti was nine so Bisciotti grew up without a father. Fast forward thirty years later and Bisciotti’s business, that he started out of his basement, was doing quite well but, one night as he took personal inventory of his life choices and how they impacted his family, he came to realize this truth. He had grown up without a father because there was no other way. That was the hand that he and his family had been dealt. However, as he thought about it, for all practical purposes, his sons were also growing up without a father too, however, not because there was no other way but because of his choices. He was providing for them financially but he was absent in their lives at key little junctures every day and it wasn’t the way that he wanted things to be. Something had to change so he made the necessary changes. He promoted from within his organization and he delegated his responsibilities and took his hands directly off of some areas, becoming more of an advisor, granted an advisor who had the power still to hire or fire, but still an advisor none-the-less. And what he got in return was more freedom to spend time with the people who mattered most to him. In his words, he no longer had to be the first one in the office or the last one to leave. And his family? They were better off for it.
So, how did Bisciotti’s story play out. Well, his business didn’t suffer because of it, he owns an NFL franchise for pity’s sake, and his family is healthier. And, toward the end of the interview, he talked about his plans for his money when it’s all said and done. In the end, he plans on giving much of it away. Now, I don’t know if Bisciotti is a Jesus follower or not, but I can hazard a pretty good guess as to what he doesn’t serve. He doesn’t serve his money; his money serves him and we can all learn from that.
As we wrap up here in the next few minutes, let’s come back to Jesus and the Sermon on the Mount and take a look at what He said, who He said it to, and why He said it in the first place. His statement, “you cannot serve God and money,” was an across the board statement that was aimed at an audience whose economic status equally spanned across the board. He had rich people in His audience, poor people in His audience and people who were somewhere in between. The fact that he said it to all of them though says this about this idea of serving money. You don’t have to have a lot of money in order to be enslaved to money. All you really have to do is to let it predominate your thinking or fake like you have a lot of money by buying things that you cannot afford. All of this is a rat race that only the rats can win and even of those rodents running in that race, only the fat ones win.
So, what about the rest of us? What happens to us when we’re enslaved by money? Interest rates aside, we worry a lot about it for starters. Like the driver of the little green car on Bothell/Lake City Way, we take a lot of risks some of the time and we definitely jostle for an edge all the time. And, in the end, also like the driver of the little green car, we aren’t even economically better off for all of our efforts. It leaves us frustrated but do you know what else? It’s not how we were intended to live.
A little later in the book of Matthew, Matthew also recorded this statement by Jesus. “Are you tired? Worn out? Burned out on religion? Come to me. Get away with me and you’ll recover your life. I’ll show you how to take a real rest. Walk with me and work with me—watch how I do it. Learn the unforced rhythms of grace. I won’t lay anything heavy or ill-fitting on you. Keep company with me and you’ll learn to live freely and lightly.” Did you pick up on this invitation? “Learn the unforced rhythms of grace,” unforced. Yes, but what about the bills? Jesus, you’re saying, all of this, “walk with me and learn from me,” stuff is cool but we’re all allergic to starvation. We have to eat. Jesus patiently redirects our attention back to the Matthew 6, 33. “Seek the Kingdom of God above all else, and live righteously, and he will give you everything you need.” In other words, what Jesus was telling His audience, and what he’s telling us, is that if we will trust Him and put Him first, if we will serve God rather than money, that He will take responsibility to meet our needs. And if we don’t? Well, we’re kind of on our own then in some ways. A common saying in church circles is this, and it’s a logic based statement really. God is responsible for the consequences when I obey Him but I am responsible for the consequences when I blow Him off.
So, what are you going to do? It’s your call really. You can surrender to God and buy into His kingdom or you can blow Him off. If you trust Him and buy in, He will meet your needs, maybe not your wants, but He will meet your needs. History has proven that and, He also made this statement. Paraphrasing here, “if you think that what I am doing on earth right now is cool, wait until you see what I have in store for you in eternity. I took what you can imagine and I multiplied it.” And it’s an invitation that is across the board. It’s open to anyone who will have Him and who will surrender to Him on His terms. The easiest way to get started, if this is what you want to do is to pray something like this. “God, I surrender. My rebellion against you is over and I am sorry for both my attitude and my actions in the past. I know that I have offended you and that I have created a separation between us that only you have the ability to repair because I can’t do it, I’m not qualified. But you are qualified and you did make a way to bridge that separation when You sent Jesus to die on the cross for my rebellion. I believe that You raised Jesus from the grave and today, as I am ending my rebellion, I am accepting Jesus as my savior too. Thank you for forgiving me. As of right now, today, my statement to you is this. I will no longer serve money or anything else but, to the best of my ability, I will serve You and You alone God. In Jesus name, amen.
Next week we are going to take a look at the life of a man who threw off the yoke of slavery that money had hoisted on him and began to live a different way and we’ll see what we can learn from him. See you then.
Part 9: Zacchaeus, The Poster Child for Repentance
Today’s story is one that is found only in the Book of Luke and it’s told in Luke 19. As Luke tells the story, Jesus was making His way to Jerusalem via Jericho and in Jericho, there was this tax collector, actually he was the chief tax collector, named Zacchaeus who was filthy rich and wanted to get a look at Jesus. Yeah, about that though. That was kind of a problem. You see, Jesus wasn’t exactly the easiest guy to get a look at, not because He was traveling incognito, just the opposite actually, but because he was traveling in broad daylight and crowds just flocked to him. He had rock star status. Everyone wanted to see Jesus and Zacchaeus was this short guy and couldn’t see over the crowds. Now, this may have been a problem for some short guys but Zacchaeus was an ambitious problem solver with mad problem solving skills. Couldn’t see over the crowds? No problem. He ran ahead of the crowd and climbed up in this huge sycamore tree and from that vantage point he could at least get a look at Jesus.
Okay, let’s stop right here for a moment because there’s a couple of things about Zacchaeus that are worth noting. First is his name, Zacchaeus is primarily a Greek name that means pure. Just speculating here but based on the fact that he had a Greek name, his parents albeit Jewish, were not likely all that religious or, even if they were, they were probably fairly well traveled and had Roman connections that Zacchaeus wasn’t above using for personal gain. As I said though, this is just speculation on my part because the Bible really doesn’t say. In any case, the fact that he was a tax collector says that he didn’t have a moral problem working with the Romans and the fact that he was a chief tax collector, that’s kind of like a person who is at the top of the heap in a multi-level marketing scheme, indicates that he didn’t have a problem exploiting his countrymen for personal gain, which is kind of ironic considering that his name meant “pure”.
The second thing that’s worth noting is that Zacchaeus was driven. Obstacles didn’t stop him. They didn’t stop him professionally, he was a chief tax collector and in the world that he lived in, you didn’t get into that spot unless you could deliver the goods for Rome and that almost certainly meant that you were going to have been a little bit ruthless.
The last thing that’s worth noting here is that Zacchaeus was hated by his countrymen. They saw him as a traitor and no better than the ruthless Roman occupiers who oppressed them. He was seen as a person who used his position of power to exploit the powerless and, for the record, even Jesus himself acknowledged this fact. In Matthew, for example, Jesus referred to pagans and tax collectors and tied them together in the same package. Not exactly someone you would want to take home to meet Mom, and not exactly someone who you would expect to see getting hooked up with Jesus. Stranger things have happened though, and, in fact, they did.
When Jesus got to the spot where Zacchaeus was, Jesus looked up at him and said, “Zacchaeus, come down from that tree right now. I must stay at your house today.” What? What? What? Get down from that tree because I must stay at your house today? Jesus said that to Zacchaeus!? Wow! Didn’t see that one coming. But that’s not all, look at the wording. It wasn’t a humble request, rather it was kind of a command. Now, just for the record, Zacchaeus could have refused I suppose, but Jesus couldn’t come in and interact with Zacchaeus on a one on one basis unless Zacchaeus extended the invitation. In any case, it’s a moot point because Zacchaeus was all over this, extended the invitation, and the crowd was less than pleased.
“He’s gone to be the guest of a notorious sinner,” is what people muttered. (That’s probably the P.G. rated version of what they said but this is a family friendly website and, since that’s how Luke recorded it, we’re just gonna roll with it and call it a day.)
And Jesus’ actions gave off this unspoken message. “Yeah, so what’s your point?” His disciples had to be used to all of this by now because He’d been doing stuff like this for the past three years, so off they trooped to Zacchaeus’ house where we aren’t specifically told that there was a party, but I can pretty well imagine that there was at least a feast and probably a party. Think about it. What’s the rich man’s mantra? If ya got it, flaunt it. Have you ever known a filthy rich man to hold back when an important dignitary, (and in Zacchaeus’ mind, Jesus was an important dignitary), came to eat at his house? Uh huh, I rest my case. And while we also aren’t told what Jesus said to the tax collector, based on Zacchaeus’ reaction, it got to him and he responded in faith.
“Lord,” he said. “I am now going to give half of my possessions to the poor and if I have cheated anyone out of anything, I will pay them back four times as much.”
And Jesus, pleased, replied. “Today, salvation has come to this house because this man too, is a son of Abraham. For the Son of Man has come to seek and save the lost.” And with that, Zacchaeus fades out of the Gospel accounts. Not much ink really, ten verses of fame if you want to get technical about it. But that’s all it took. It’s ten verses that are still being told 2000 years later and will continue to be told throughout all eternity.
Now there’s a lot that we can talk about here I suppose. Zacchaeus wanted to be seen and Jesus obliged him. Jesus didn’t worry about his past, wasn’t deterred by it but reached out and rescued Zacchaeus anyway. He made the social pariah part of the family of God. We could explore any one of these in depth, but that isn’t where I want to go here. I want to look at Zacchaeus’ response to Jesus after Jesus talked to him because it’s an amazing picture of what repentance looks like and it drives home an important point. Repentance is costly. There’s this idea out there that we can come to Jesus just as we are, (true) but not expect God to change and overhaul our life and that just doesn’t hold water. Yes, our salvation is a free gift from God because He paid the price for our rebellion but the cost of repentance, which leads us to follow Jesus, which is all a part of faith is quite costly. Let me explain what I mean.
When Zacchaeus repented, the first thing that he did was to give half of his income to the poor. That’s a lot of money. Now, is that what God would want us to do? Maybe, but then again, maybe not. In Zacchaeus’ case, to give half of his money to the poor was appropriate because up until he encountered Jesus, money was his god, his idol. The tax collectors only did that job for one reason. It was a way to get rich and, in Zacchaeus’ case, considering how high in the ranks he was able to rise, without having his conscience bother him in the least, that’s a pretty good indicator that he was addicted to making money anyway that he could. Now, by giving away his money, he was dethroning that idol in his life because, as I see it, before he ran into Jesus, money and possessions weren’t just an important thing in his life, they were the ultimate thing in his life. And by giving away half of his money he was demonstrating that money now longer ruled his life, Jesus did.
Now, as far as we’re concerned, maybe money isn’t the ultimate thing in our life, but what about the approval of others? Do we seek the approval of others even if it means that we don’t do what we know is the right thing to do? But we just can’t risk losing the approval of others so we compromise and call it a day. Or maybe, it’s our spending habits and well, we like new stuff, good stuff, and we buy stuff with credit that we know we can’t afford, but…well, we just gotta have it so we throw caution to the wind and go for it. Or maybe it’s our choices that relate to morality. Oh wow! That’s just a total Pandora’s box isn’t it. We know what we want to do, what our political party wants us to do, what choices we want to make and we know how we’ve always done it but we also know that what the Bible says, or for all that matters, what our mother says and that creates a problem. (By the way, just for the record, sometimes a mother’s sense of morality is closer to what is right than ours is. Yes, I’m quite aware how annoying that can be because I had a mother too and yes, it’s probably hitting below the belt but unfortunately, it’s true so I had to say it.) In any case, at the heart of repentance is a relinquishing of control as our pet idols are dethroned and God takes His rightful place as the governing authority in our lives and if you think that isn’t costly on a personal level, you’re dreaming.
Then there was the other thing that Zacchaeus said. If he had stolen from anyone, he would repay them four times over. At the end of the day, that was the price of restitution that the Mosaic Law prescribed if someone stole money from someone and was caught.
Yeah, but how would he know who he had stolen from? Oh, come on! Think about it. He was a tax collector for Rome, do you seriously think that he didn’t keep good written records about who paid what and how much? He had to have been an impeccable record keeper, that was a survival skill in his business. In any case, when Zacchaeus repented, it cost him a lot and, if it cost him a lot, even if it doesn’t cost us as much financially, it will cost us a lot in other ways. At the end of the day, it will cost us dearly as we make an exchange and replace our agenda with Jesus’ agenda as the operating agenda in our lives, and make no mistake, it will cost us that one thing that we hold dear, more dearly than anything perhaps. It will cost us control and that is indeed a pricey exchange.
So, the question that jumps out at us as we look at Zacchaeus is this. Why? Why would he make that exchange? Taken at face value, the answer is relatively simple. He thought that it was worth it. He looked at his life, evaluated where it was taking him and then he looked at what Jesus was offering and he came to the conclusion that what Jesus was offering was much better than what he was doing for himself so he took Jesus up on his offer. It was a simple choice but a hard choice at the same time. No longer would he be able to do things as he had done in the past. In fact, I’m not entirely sure that it didn’t cost him his job. It’s possible, although we aren’t told. In any case, life as he had known it would be different from there on out for him. He was going to have to roll differently.
So, what about us? What about you and me? The question, it seems to me that we all will have to field is this, is following Jesus worth it? We have to look at where we see our life going and ask ourselves this fundamental question. Is the offer on the table that Jesus is placing in front of us worth making the exchange for? What’s the offer on the table? Speaking churchy stuff here, a total pardon for every wrong thing that we’ve ever done. Notice I didn’t say parole, that’s conditional, I said pardon. I used a legal term, a term that means that it’s an acquittal of all offenses committed, that’s permanent. That means, that as far as eternity is concerned, we can never be charged with any of those offenses again. Let that thought sink in for a minute. That means that even if you have done something that has consequences that you’ll still have to pay for, a felony for example, you still might have to go to jail for that one, what will happen is this. When you die, (and no, I’m not morbid, just stating facts, nobody is getting out of here alive), when you physically die, that crime dies with you. With the pardon that Jesus is offering you, that offense doesn’t follow you into eternity. That’s definitely something to think about because, when it comes to doing things that have violated somebody’s moral code, often our own, we’ve all done them.
But it isn’t just that, there’s more. John Ortberg wrote a book titled, Eternity is Now in Session, and one of his points was that, based on what was written in the Bible, that eternal life isn’t just something that is out there waiting for us when we die, it actually starts as soon as we surrender control of our lives to Jesus. In other words, the transformation process starts now. Look, to talk a little doctrine here, there’s a legal term in the Bible, justification, that’s used to describe the process. Now, it’s not a moral term like it is in English, in Biblical Greek it’s a legal term and what it means is that God the Father took all of our offenses against Him, think of it like a dirty garment, put it on Jesus and took Jesus’ clean garment and put it on us who choose to follow Jesus. That is, a once for all event in time. From that point on, if you choose to surrender to Jesus, whenever God the Father looks at you, He won’t see your rebellion, what He will see is Jesus’ righteousness. Paul wrote about it in Romans, it’s called justification.
However, there’s still this matter of how you roll on a day to day basis. That, my friends, will not change overnight, at least not usually. That’s a process, a painful process sometimes I might add, speaking from personal experience. There’s a whole new level of conscience and sensitivity to what is right and what is wrong that you become aware of. Loosely translated, stuff that didn’t used to bother you is going to start bothering you as God, the Holy Spirit, starts meddling in your life. And there’s going to be some things, some ways of doing life, that you will never be able to do again, ever, and still have a clear conscience about it. Look at Zacchaeus. Once he started following Jesus, even if he did remain a tax collector, there was no way that he could ever defraud people again, ever, and not feel guilty about it. It just wasn’t possible.
But is it worth it? Is following Jesus and all of the repentance that comes with it, worth it? Consider this. How much of what you’ve got going are you going to be able to take with you on the other side of eternity when you go through the final check out? Your stuff? Seriously dude, someone else is going to get that proving once again that you and I don’t actually own anything, we’re just stewards of a lot of things that, once we go through the final check out, we will pass on to someone else. Look, most of what is on this side of eternity is temporary, even that car you’re driving is going to wear out and your house is destined to be bulldozed someday, but God makes this interesting promise. There’s some stuff that you are going to take into eternity and you will get to keep. The intangible stuff, based on the right motives, your character transformation for example, all of that is permanent. So, what are you going to do? Take Jesus up on His offer and follow Him or pass? Next week I am going to look at a man who passed on Jesus, flat turned him down but in the meantime, I would be remiss not to talk again of how to surrender.
Surrender, at its core, is a choice. Simply renounce a former way of thinking and put God’s agenda ahead of our own. Loosely translated, if what I want is at odds with what Jesus wants, if how I want to respond to something is at odds with the way that Jesus would respond, Jesus wins…always. It means that I am no longer relying on my own good deeds to be the basis for why I am accepted by God but rather, it means that I embrace God’s estimation of what will make me acceptable, it means that I buy into the fact that only Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross is sufficient to satisfy God’s justice. It means that there’s a new sheriff in town and it isn’t us, it’s Jesus and we tell Him about it in prayer.
Next week, we’re going to look at a guy who Jesus ran into just before He ran into Zacchaeus and his claim to fame was that he turned Jesus down. He looked at the same offer on the table as Zacchaeus did and he flat turned Jesus down. See you next week.
Okay, let’s stop right here for a moment because there’s a couple of things about Zacchaeus that are worth noting. First is his name, Zacchaeus is primarily a Greek name that means pure. Just speculating here but based on the fact that he had a Greek name, his parents albeit Jewish, were not likely all that religious or, even if they were, they were probably fairly well traveled and had Roman connections that Zacchaeus wasn’t above using for personal gain. As I said though, this is just speculation on my part because the Bible really doesn’t say. In any case, the fact that he was a tax collector says that he didn’t have a moral problem working with the Romans and the fact that he was a chief tax collector, that’s kind of like a person who is at the top of the heap in a multi-level marketing scheme, indicates that he didn’t have a problem exploiting his countrymen for personal gain, which is kind of ironic considering that his name meant “pure”.
The second thing that’s worth noting is that Zacchaeus was driven. Obstacles didn’t stop him. They didn’t stop him professionally, he was a chief tax collector and in the world that he lived in, you didn’t get into that spot unless you could deliver the goods for Rome and that almost certainly meant that you were going to have been a little bit ruthless.
The last thing that’s worth noting here is that Zacchaeus was hated by his countrymen. They saw him as a traitor and no better than the ruthless Roman occupiers who oppressed them. He was seen as a person who used his position of power to exploit the powerless and, for the record, even Jesus himself acknowledged this fact. In Matthew, for example, Jesus referred to pagans and tax collectors and tied them together in the same package. Not exactly someone you would want to take home to meet Mom, and not exactly someone who you would expect to see getting hooked up with Jesus. Stranger things have happened though, and, in fact, they did.
When Jesus got to the spot where Zacchaeus was, Jesus looked up at him and said, “Zacchaeus, come down from that tree right now. I must stay at your house today.” What? What? What? Get down from that tree because I must stay at your house today? Jesus said that to Zacchaeus!? Wow! Didn’t see that one coming. But that’s not all, look at the wording. It wasn’t a humble request, rather it was kind of a command. Now, just for the record, Zacchaeus could have refused I suppose, but Jesus couldn’t come in and interact with Zacchaeus on a one on one basis unless Zacchaeus extended the invitation. In any case, it’s a moot point because Zacchaeus was all over this, extended the invitation, and the crowd was less than pleased.
“He’s gone to be the guest of a notorious sinner,” is what people muttered. (That’s probably the P.G. rated version of what they said but this is a family friendly website and, since that’s how Luke recorded it, we’re just gonna roll with it and call it a day.)
And Jesus’ actions gave off this unspoken message. “Yeah, so what’s your point?” His disciples had to be used to all of this by now because He’d been doing stuff like this for the past three years, so off they trooped to Zacchaeus’ house where we aren’t specifically told that there was a party, but I can pretty well imagine that there was at least a feast and probably a party. Think about it. What’s the rich man’s mantra? If ya got it, flaunt it. Have you ever known a filthy rich man to hold back when an important dignitary, (and in Zacchaeus’ mind, Jesus was an important dignitary), came to eat at his house? Uh huh, I rest my case. And while we also aren’t told what Jesus said to the tax collector, based on Zacchaeus’ reaction, it got to him and he responded in faith.
“Lord,” he said. “I am now going to give half of my possessions to the poor and if I have cheated anyone out of anything, I will pay them back four times as much.”
And Jesus, pleased, replied. “Today, salvation has come to this house because this man too, is a son of Abraham. For the Son of Man has come to seek and save the lost.” And with that, Zacchaeus fades out of the Gospel accounts. Not much ink really, ten verses of fame if you want to get technical about it. But that’s all it took. It’s ten verses that are still being told 2000 years later and will continue to be told throughout all eternity.
Now there’s a lot that we can talk about here I suppose. Zacchaeus wanted to be seen and Jesus obliged him. Jesus didn’t worry about his past, wasn’t deterred by it but reached out and rescued Zacchaeus anyway. He made the social pariah part of the family of God. We could explore any one of these in depth, but that isn’t where I want to go here. I want to look at Zacchaeus’ response to Jesus after Jesus talked to him because it’s an amazing picture of what repentance looks like and it drives home an important point. Repentance is costly. There’s this idea out there that we can come to Jesus just as we are, (true) but not expect God to change and overhaul our life and that just doesn’t hold water. Yes, our salvation is a free gift from God because He paid the price for our rebellion but the cost of repentance, which leads us to follow Jesus, which is all a part of faith is quite costly. Let me explain what I mean.
When Zacchaeus repented, the first thing that he did was to give half of his income to the poor. That’s a lot of money. Now, is that what God would want us to do? Maybe, but then again, maybe not. In Zacchaeus’ case, to give half of his money to the poor was appropriate because up until he encountered Jesus, money was his god, his idol. The tax collectors only did that job for one reason. It was a way to get rich and, in Zacchaeus’ case, considering how high in the ranks he was able to rise, without having his conscience bother him in the least, that’s a pretty good indicator that he was addicted to making money anyway that he could. Now, by giving away his money, he was dethroning that idol in his life because, as I see it, before he ran into Jesus, money and possessions weren’t just an important thing in his life, they were the ultimate thing in his life. And by giving away half of his money he was demonstrating that money now longer ruled his life, Jesus did.
Now, as far as we’re concerned, maybe money isn’t the ultimate thing in our life, but what about the approval of others? Do we seek the approval of others even if it means that we don’t do what we know is the right thing to do? But we just can’t risk losing the approval of others so we compromise and call it a day. Or maybe, it’s our spending habits and well, we like new stuff, good stuff, and we buy stuff with credit that we know we can’t afford, but…well, we just gotta have it so we throw caution to the wind and go for it. Or maybe it’s our choices that relate to morality. Oh wow! That’s just a total Pandora’s box isn’t it. We know what we want to do, what our political party wants us to do, what choices we want to make and we know how we’ve always done it but we also know that what the Bible says, or for all that matters, what our mother says and that creates a problem. (By the way, just for the record, sometimes a mother’s sense of morality is closer to what is right than ours is. Yes, I’m quite aware how annoying that can be because I had a mother too and yes, it’s probably hitting below the belt but unfortunately, it’s true so I had to say it.) In any case, at the heart of repentance is a relinquishing of control as our pet idols are dethroned and God takes His rightful place as the governing authority in our lives and if you think that isn’t costly on a personal level, you’re dreaming.
Then there was the other thing that Zacchaeus said. If he had stolen from anyone, he would repay them four times over. At the end of the day, that was the price of restitution that the Mosaic Law prescribed if someone stole money from someone and was caught.
Yeah, but how would he know who he had stolen from? Oh, come on! Think about it. He was a tax collector for Rome, do you seriously think that he didn’t keep good written records about who paid what and how much? He had to have been an impeccable record keeper, that was a survival skill in his business. In any case, when Zacchaeus repented, it cost him a lot and, if it cost him a lot, even if it doesn’t cost us as much financially, it will cost us a lot in other ways. At the end of the day, it will cost us dearly as we make an exchange and replace our agenda with Jesus’ agenda as the operating agenda in our lives, and make no mistake, it will cost us that one thing that we hold dear, more dearly than anything perhaps. It will cost us control and that is indeed a pricey exchange.
So, the question that jumps out at us as we look at Zacchaeus is this. Why? Why would he make that exchange? Taken at face value, the answer is relatively simple. He thought that it was worth it. He looked at his life, evaluated where it was taking him and then he looked at what Jesus was offering and he came to the conclusion that what Jesus was offering was much better than what he was doing for himself so he took Jesus up on his offer. It was a simple choice but a hard choice at the same time. No longer would he be able to do things as he had done in the past. In fact, I’m not entirely sure that it didn’t cost him his job. It’s possible, although we aren’t told. In any case, life as he had known it would be different from there on out for him. He was going to have to roll differently.
So, what about us? What about you and me? The question, it seems to me that we all will have to field is this, is following Jesus worth it? We have to look at where we see our life going and ask ourselves this fundamental question. Is the offer on the table that Jesus is placing in front of us worth making the exchange for? What’s the offer on the table? Speaking churchy stuff here, a total pardon for every wrong thing that we’ve ever done. Notice I didn’t say parole, that’s conditional, I said pardon. I used a legal term, a term that means that it’s an acquittal of all offenses committed, that’s permanent. That means, that as far as eternity is concerned, we can never be charged with any of those offenses again. Let that thought sink in for a minute. That means that even if you have done something that has consequences that you’ll still have to pay for, a felony for example, you still might have to go to jail for that one, what will happen is this. When you die, (and no, I’m not morbid, just stating facts, nobody is getting out of here alive), when you physically die, that crime dies with you. With the pardon that Jesus is offering you, that offense doesn’t follow you into eternity. That’s definitely something to think about because, when it comes to doing things that have violated somebody’s moral code, often our own, we’ve all done them.
But it isn’t just that, there’s more. John Ortberg wrote a book titled, Eternity is Now in Session, and one of his points was that, based on what was written in the Bible, that eternal life isn’t just something that is out there waiting for us when we die, it actually starts as soon as we surrender control of our lives to Jesus. In other words, the transformation process starts now. Look, to talk a little doctrine here, there’s a legal term in the Bible, justification, that’s used to describe the process. Now, it’s not a moral term like it is in English, in Biblical Greek it’s a legal term and what it means is that God the Father took all of our offenses against Him, think of it like a dirty garment, put it on Jesus and took Jesus’ clean garment and put it on us who choose to follow Jesus. That is, a once for all event in time. From that point on, if you choose to surrender to Jesus, whenever God the Father looks at you, He won’t see your rebellion, what He will see is Jesus’ righteousness. Paul wrote about it in Romans, it’s called justification.
However, there’s still this matter of how you roll on a day to day basis. That, my friends, will not change overnight, at least not usually. That’s a process, a painful process sometimes I might add, speaking from personal experience. There’s a whole new level of conscience and sensitivity to what is right and what is wrong that you become aware of. Loosely translated, stuff that didn’t used to bother you is going to start bothering you as God, the Holy Spirit, starts meddling in your life. And there’s going to be some things, some ways of doing life, that you will never be able to do again, ever, and still have a clear conscience about it. Look at Zacchaeus. Once he started following Jesus, even if he did remain a tax collector, there was no way that he could ever defraud people again, ever, and not feel guilty about it. It just wasn’t possible.
But is it worth it? Is following Jesus and all of the repentance that comes with it, worth it? Consider this. How much of what you’ve got going are you going to be able to take with you on the other side of eternity when you go through the final check out? Your stuff? Seriously dude, someone else is going to get that proving once again that you and I don’t actually own anything, we’re just stewards of a lot of things that, once we go through the final check out, we will pass on to someone else. Look, most of what is on this side of eternity is temporary, even that car you’re driving is going to wear out and your house is destined to be bulldozed someday, but God makes this interesting promise. There’s some stuff that you are going to take into eternity and you will get to keep. The intangible stuff, based on the right motives, your character transformation for example, all of that is permanent. So, what are you going to do? Take Jesus up on His offer and follow Him or pass? Next week I am going to look at a man who passed on Jesus, flat turned him down but in the meantime, I would be remiss not to talk again of how to surrender.
Surrender, at its core, is a choice. Simply renounce a former way of thinking and put God’s agenda ahead of our own. Loosely translated, if what I want is at odds with what Jesus wants, if how I want to respond to something is at odds with the way that Jesus would respond, Jesus wins…always. It means that I am no longer relying on my own good deeds to be the basis for why I am accepted by God but rather, it means that I embrace God’s estimation of what will make me acceptable, it means that I buy into the fact that only Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross is sufficient to satisfy God’s justice. It means that there’s a new sheriff in town and it isn’t us, it’s Jesus and we tell Him about it in prayer.
Next week, we’re going to look at a guy who Jesus ran into just before He ran into Zacchaeus and his claim to fame was that he turned Jesus down. He looked at the same offer on the table as Zacchaeus did and he flat turned Jesus down. See you next week.
Part 10: The Guy Who Flat Turned Jesus Down
As many of you know, I see the first four books of the New Testament, the Gospels, as eyewitness accounts. Today’s story, a story about a guy who came up to Jesus and asked Him an important question, and then turned away because he didn’t like the answer Jesus gave him, is a story that’s recorded in all three of the early Gospels. It’s the story, loaded with all kinds of application lessons for those of us living in the 21st Century. It’s known in church circles as the story of the rich young ruler, although I prefer a different title. I prefer this title, “The Guy Who Flat Turned Jesus Down.”
The story itself is a simple one. Before Jesus had run into Zacchaeus, the guy we talked about a couple of weeks ago, He ran into this guy. Jesus was on His way to Jerusalem for the Passover celebration where He would ultimately be crucified and as He started this journey, a wealthy young man with a lot of authority in local affairs apparently, ran up to Him, prostrated himself before Jesus and asked Jesus this question. “Good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?”
“Why are you calling me good? There is only one who is good and that’s God alone. You know the commandment…” and Jesus listed off six of the Ten Commandments, kind of to give a broad, catch all net for what was required. “Do this,” Jesus said, “and you will live.”
The young man, fairly confident, must have beamed slightly as he said, “I’ve done all of those since I was a boy.” This is just my personal opinion but I suspect that he might have been expecting an “Attaway,” from Jesus at that point, but that isn’t quite what he got.
Matthew and Peter (as recorded in Mark’s Gospel) both agree that Jesus loved this young man and replied like this. “There’s one thing that you’re missing. Go and sell everything that you own, give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then, follow Me.” And when he heard this answer, the young man’s face fell because he was very wealthy. He turned and walked away.
Upon seeing this, Jesus made this candid observation. “How hard it is for a rich person to enter into the Kingdom of Heaven, it’s easier for a camel to go through an eye of a needle than it is for a rich person to do that.”
“Who then, can be saved?” the people asked Him.
“With man, it’s frankly impossible, but with God, all things are possible.” Jesus answered.
And about that time, Peter, kind of the spokesperson for the disciples, spoke up. “We’ve left everything to follow You.”
And, paraphrasing here, Jesus responded, “no one who has left homes and family and vocations to follow me will fail to receive much more of the same, along with persecutions, in this life and in the life to come. But many who are first will be last and many who are last will be first.”
As I consider what to do with this story, I have to be honest with you, this story is loaded with more applications than I have time to cover. In fact, I would recommend that you go back this week and read the story in all three Gospel accounts, (Matthew 19: 16 – 30, Mark 10: 17 – 27, and Luke 18: 18 – 30) and just ponder them and peel back the layers to see what’s there. In the space that I have remaining though, there are several things that stood out to me. Kickstands up, people. The road trip starts right now.
The first thing that stands out is how the rich young man was off base regarding how a person, using a religious term here, could obtain eternal life. His exact words were what he had to do to inherit eternal life but what he was really thinking was what did he have to do to earn eternal life. When Jesus answered him, he liked what he heard. He was feeling really good about himself and, consequently, his chances. He knew what was on his resume and it included obeying the Ten Commandments, which was what Jesus was quoting from, perfectly. Here’s the thing though, Jesus, probably by design, deliberately left out the first commandment, “you will have no other Gods besides me,” and when the young man gave his answer, Jesus went right after it.
“Sell all of your possessions, give to the poor and then follow me.” The issue here was not the man’s wealth, the issue here was what the man worshiped, his idol, that thing that dictated the agenda of the man’s life. In his case, the man’s deal was his wealth and Jesus knew it. Here’s the thing, when it comes to following Jesus, Jesus defines the issue in the same terms as you and I do a marriage. It’s like a covenant relationship, with an exclusivity clause. It’s Jesus and us and no one else when it comes to our lives, and, just for the record, Jesus, because He’s God, gets to call the shots, we don’t. Now that’s not to say that following Jesus automatically means that we can’t have nice things. Not at all, God is amazingly generous and loves to give gifts. It’s just that when the gifts, the nice house, the nice car, the clothes, for example, transition from a place where they are important to a place where they are of ultimate importance, where our happiness and identity and personal value are defined by them, where they become the driving force that dictates our decision making in every area of our lives, then that’s a problem. For the record, that’s where this man was and when Jesus called him on it and asked him to sell everything that he had and give away his money, he turned Jesus down.
Yeah, he flat turned Jesus down and that was a short sighted decision. Many church going people, when they read this story or think about this story, kind of stop at the point where the rich young man turned away sad. They close the book and move on at that point thinking that the story is over. That’s kind of like turning the television off in the middle of the third quarter of a football game because the game’s obviously over. The problem is that there’s still a quarter and a half left to play and that’s lot of football still left. It’s the same thing here. There’s still a lot of truth left to be told.
Here’s what I’m talking about. Five or six verses later, depending upon which Gospel account you’re reading, after Peter said that they, the disciples, had left everything to follow Him, Jesus stated that anyone who gave up everything to follow Him would receive all of that back plus much more both in this life and in eternity. Disclaimer time, in this life, He wasn’t necessarily talking about material wealth, because, usually in the context of the here and now, only in rare cases, will he actually go there. No, in this life, the promised wealth is more of the intangible variety than the tangible. We use synonyms such as peace, contentment, and satisfaction to describe it. This wealth is often measured in the quality of our relationships and not the size and diversity of our bank accounts and portfolios. Our lives often look more like the wise people written about in the Old Testament book of Proverbs rather than the fools talked about in that book. He promises to meet our needs, not to make us filthy rich.
Now, if you want to talk about extravagant material wealth, there is that too, but it’s just mostly on the other side of eternity. (Read Revelations, chapter 21 and just take in the landscape. Talk about extravagance beyond imagination, there it is. And that’s a Jesus follower’s future home and it lasts forever.)
There’s one other thing worth mentioning though and that’s that when it came to telling the whole story regarding what following Him looked like, Jesus didn’t pull punches, he told it like it was. Following Jesus also comes with persecutions. Those are His words, not mine. And He wasn’t lying. Take a good hard look at the lives of Jesus followers around the world. The social and economic persecution, the human rights violations that some of these people are subjected to simply because they are following Jesus is just off the rails. And sometimes they are forced to make the ultimate sacrifice. Since 1900 there have been more Jesus followers who have paid for their faith with their lives than in the other 1900 years combined. And, even in the civilized United States, following Jesus comes with a price. If you choose to follow Jesus and take what is written in the Bible seriously, you will be misunderstood, mocked, criticized, slandered, and censored. For the record, especially when compared to what is happening in other parts of the world, this mild form of persecution and censorship will come from both sides of the political aisle and across the board in all media platforms, liberal or conservative alike. It just depends upon the issue. (Yeah, I said it and yes, you can quote me. If you do actually quote me on that though, please make sure that you spell my name correctly.) But Jesus said that it would happen, that if we took following Him seriously and lived our lives under His authority and His leadership, that if we chose to be identified with Him, that persecution would happen. Personally, I just play the hand I’m dealt and roll with it. After all, it comes with the territory.
So why do it? Why give up everything and follow Jesus? Why give Him exclusive rights to dictate how we live our life? One sentence, three words. It’s worth it. Nobody else can deliver the goods. You want a pardon for every wrong thing that you’ve ever done? If you admit to Him that you’ve rebelled against Him and violated any number of moral codes, God’s, your mother’s…your own even. He can and will pardon you. Do you want a peace and a contentment that’s not dictated by your mood or your cup of coffee in the morning? Jesus can deliver that. That’s easy. How about relationships? Do you want to do relationships, even with people you don’t necessarily like, better? It’s part of the transformation process. Even in marriages, strike that, especially with marriages. It’s not Dianna and my story but I know firsthand of at least one couple who were divorced, papers signed, custody agreements in place, where not only did Jesus fix the relationship so that they were civil to each other but the marriage was actually restored. Today, they are remarried and are content with each other. I’m not saying that a reconciliation and remarriage would be every divorced couple’s story, in fact, I know that it probably wouldn’t be, but my point is, Jesus can deliver the goods. Think about it. Who else can do what Jesus does? No one. No one either secular or religious can do what Jesus can do. The best that they can offer is psychological band aids or liquid grace. Jesus though, delivers.
So, where are you at these days? Did you sort of stumble across this site to only find yourself suddenly face to face with Jesus and He’s put this offer on the table and He’s asking you what you want to do with it? Eh, don’t feel bad, it happens to the best of us. I was reading a book about seventeen years ago when He confronted me. Seriously didn’t see that one coming. Anyway, if that’s where you’re at, and you’d like to dive a little deeper into this or even go all in, maybe you’d like to pray something like this. “God, I’ve never really thought about going all in and following Jesus with every area of my life, but the more that I’m thinking about it, I have to admit that what I have going, what I’m doing right now, the choices I’m making in my life, just aren’t working and if you can change that, I’m willing to take a chance and follow you. You know that I have rebelled and done wrong to any number of people in my life and that I’ve violated your moral code. I want to stop doing that. Please forgive me and change me. And yes. I will follow Jesus to the best of my ability. I’m through being my own god, from now on, I want you to be God in my life. Thank you for hearing me today. Please change me. In Jesus name, amen.
And, if you aren’t ready to go there just yet, but you’d sure like to talk about it with Him, just ask Him to show up in your life and show Himself to you. Be ready to listen and be ready to respond to Him because one of the things that He promised was that whoever would seek for Him earnestly would find Him.
Part 11: The Dinner Party at the Pharisees House
I’ve always liked being invited to dinner parties because they are always such a mixed bag of things going on. The main course usually ranges from pretty good to downright excellent, the desserts are even better and, at the end of the night, somebody else has to do the dishes. Now, as good as all of this might be, that isn’t what often stands out to me though at these things. What stands out most to me at these things are the people who are often attending. They’re such a mixed bag. At a big party, they can often range across the board and every category of people can be in attendance. There can be people who are normal, people who are eccentric, or people who, well, let’s just say that eccentric is an understatement because they are just plain out there. During the course of His three year ministry, Jesus attended a few of those and He probably saw it all because, just like 2022, the people at the parties that Jesus attended ran the full gamut. Let me tell you about one of those parties that Luke told us about in his Gospel.
Luke records a story about a time when a Pharisee named Simon invited Jesus to come to his house for dinner and Jesus accepted. (Rabbit trail, one of the perks of being one of Jesus’ twelve disciples I imagine was that they got to go to a lot of dinner parties too because Jesus was often being invited to these so it seemed and they probably got to tag along.) Now, when He got there, as was the custom of the day, Jesus, probably the guest of honor, was reclining at the table, eating dinner when a woman, a prostitute, entered the room, came up behind Him and began weeping. We’re not specifically told why, they were most likely tears of repentance or perhaps they were tears of sadness because of, as the text reveals, how Jesus was being treated or, it could have been a combination of both, we just aren’t told. In any case, she came up behind Jesus, weeping and wet his feet with her tears, and then, she let her hair down, something that a Jewish woman would not do unless they were in an intimate setting, and dried Jesus’ feet with her hair. Then, she put on the finishing touches, she took the bottle of expensive perfume that she used for her trade, it had to have had a street value of at least a year’s wages, and anointed Jesus’s feet the entire bottle.
And Simon, the Pharisee who was hosting this hoopla, was mortified. “If this man were really a prophet,” he thought to himself, “he would know what kind of woman this is who is touching him, and what kind of woman that she is, that she is a sinner.”
And Jesus picked right up on it. “Simon, I have something to say to you.”
“Say it teacher,” Simon replied.
“There were these two men who owed a certain moneylender in a town money. One guy owed him fifty denarii (a denarius was a day’s wages for a skilled laborer) and the other guy owed him five hundred denarii but neither guy could repay the moneylender so he forgave them both. Now which guy do you think loved the moneylender more?”
“I would think that the one who had the greater debt forgiven.” Simon replied.
“You’ve judged correctly,” Jesus replied. And then, turning to the woman, He drove the dagger home. “Do you see this woman? When I came into your house, you gave me no water to wash my feet, (a common courtesy at the time) but she wet my feet with her tears and dried them with her hair. You didn’t give me a kiss, (another common courtesy at the time), but this woman, from the time I walked in has not stopped kissing my feet. You did not put oil on my head, (also a common courtesy typically bestowed upon a guest of honor at the time), but she has poured perfume on my feet. Therefore, I tell you that her sins, though they are many, have been forgiven as her great love has shown. But whoever has been forgiven little, loves little.”
He then turned to the woman and said, “your sins are forgiven.”
And the guests all snapped to attention, “say what? Who is this who even forgives sins?” What Jesus did here, and the guests picked right up on it, was issue a general pardon to this woman for all sins committed across the board from the time that she became aware of the difference between right and wrong until she died in the future.
And Jesus, on mission and totally undeterred, dismissed the woman. “Your faith has saved you. Go in peace.” And with that, Luke concludes the story.
So, what exactly can we take away from all of this? First, notice the small details in the story as Jesus told it. We have three characters representing three people who technically were at the party. We have the money lender who represented God, we have the guy who owed fifty denarii who represented Simon the Pharisee and we have the guy who owed five hundred denarii, who represented the woman. Here’s the thing to notice, according to the story that Jesus was telling, neither guy, the one with the fifty denarii debt, nor the one with the five hundred denarii debt, had the ability to pay the moneylender what they owed him. Jesus’ point was simple, in the same way that neither the fifty denarii debtor nor the five hundred denarii debtor had the ability to sufficiently repay the moneylender, neither did Simon or the woman have the ability to repay God. But the moneylender forgave them both, presumably on the same basis, mercy so it would appear, and, making the transition from the story to the real world, forgiveness from God was also available to both Simon and the woman on the same basis. Whether Simon picked up on that however, we aren’t told.
The second thing to notice is the difference in devotion between the woman and Simon. Simon, it would appear, was a rather shoddy host as hosts go. During Jesus’ time, it was customary for a host at a dinner party to provide water for the guests to wash their feet, to greet their guests of honor with a kiss, and to anoint the guest’s head with oil. Simon, according to Jesus, did none of that. In contrast, the woman would have made an amazing host. She wet Jesus feet with her tears and wiped them with her hair, she kissed Jesus’ feet non-stop and, instead of anointing Jesus’ head with inexpensive oil, she anointed his feet with costly perfume, an ointment that, for the record, had a street value that was off the rails by comparison to the value of the oil that Simon would have typically used to anoint the heads of his guests. And Jesus made an interesting part regarding the love level for Him between Simon and the woman. She loved Jesus much more than did Simon.
Another thing that Jesus did was issue a general pardon to the woman for her sin. When Jesus did this, if He didn’t already have people’s attention, He definitely had it after that. The rest of the dinner guests and anyone else listening for all that mattered, knew that only God could issue that kind of a pardon for rebellion and Jesus didn’t bat an eye. “Your faith has saved you, go in peace,” were His exact words. The implication of this was quite clear. Jesus was indirectly claiming to be God and therefore, had the authority and the ability to forgive sin.
So, what does all of this mean for us living in the 21st Century? First and most importantly, when it comes to our relationship with God, as God sees us, we’re all on a level plain. That flies in the face of the way that we see each other. We make distinctions and we have hierarchies that are frankly inconsequential to God. We see rank and status while He sees all members of humanity, unable to save themselves, in dire need of a savior. And, through faith in Jesus, that salvation is available to everyone, regardless of said rank and status.
The application here is simple really. Everyone has rebelled against God and that rebellion has incurred a debt that none of us have the ability to repay. By admitting that and placing our faith in Jesus for forgiveness, we can receive that pardon. That’s the offer that is on the table. The question is, will we take it? Will we believe that Jesus is telling us the truth and place our faith in Him for forgiveness. Will we pray something like this, “God, I’m coming to you today because I know that I have rebelled against you, I have walked all over your laws, and I have incurred a debt against you that I can’t repay. I believe you though when you said that Jesus’ death on the cross was sufficient payment for that rebellion. In fact, it’s the only payment that will sufficiently satisfy you. That’s your offer that is on the table and, in faith, I am taking you up on that offer right now. Thank you for forgiving me. From this point on, I will follow You and obey You to the best of my ability. In Jesus name, amen.”
Next week, I want to take a look at another guy who had nothing to offer Jesus but reached out to Him anyway. It’s one of my favorite stories because it reveals that if this guy could receive a pardon from Jesus, anyone can. See you then.
Luke records a story about a time when a Pharisee named Simon invited Jesus to come to his house for dinner and Jesus accepted. (Rabbit trail, one of the perks of being one of Jesus’ twelve disciples I imagine was that they got to go to a lot of dinner parties too because Jesus was often being invited to these so it seemed and they probably got to tag along.) Now, when He got there, as was the custom of the day, Jesus, probably the guest of honor, was reclining at the table, eating dinner when a woman, a prostitute, entered the room, came up behind Him and began weeping. We’re not specifically told why, they were most likely tears of repentance or perhaps they were tears of sadness because of, as the text reveals, how Jesus was being treated or, it could have been a combination of both, we just aren’t told. In any case, she came up behind Jesus, weeping and wet his feet with her tears, and then, she let her hair down, something that a Jewish woman would not do unless they were in an intimate setting, and dried Jesus’ feet with her hair. Then, she put on the finishing touches, she took the bottle of expensive perfume that she used for her trade, it had to have had a street value of at least a year’s wages, and anointed Jesus’s feet the entire bottle.
And Simon, the Pharisee who was hosting this hoopla, was mortified. “If this man were really a prophet,” he thought to himself, “he would know what kind of woman this is who is touching him, and what kind of woman that she is, that she is a sinner.”
And Jesus picked right up on it. “Simon, I have something to say to you.”
“Say it teacher,” Simon replied.
“There were these two men who owed a certain moneylender in a town money. One guy owed him fifty denarii (a denarius was a day’s wages for a skilled laborer) and the other guy owed him five hundred denarii but neither guy could repay the moneylender so he forgave them both. Now which guy do you think loved the moneylender more?”
“I would think that the one who had the greater debt forgiven.” Simon replied.
“You’ve judged correctly,” Jesus replied. And then, turning to the woman, He drove the dagger home. “Do you see this woman? When I came into your house, you gave me no water to wash my feet, (a common courtesy at the time) but she wet my feet with her tears and dried them with her hair. You didn’t give me a kiss, (another common courtesy at the time), but this woman, from the time I walked in has not stopped kissing my feet. You did not put oil on my head, (also a common courtesy typically bestowed upon a guest of honor at the time), but she has poured perfume on my feet. Therefore, I tell you that her sins, though they are many, have been forgiven as her great love has shown. But whoever has been forgiven little, loves little.”
He then turned to the woman and said, “your sins are forgiven.”
And the guests all snapped to attention, “say what? Who is this who even forgives sins?” What Jesus did here, and the guests picked right up on it, was issue a general pardon to this woman for all sins committed across the board from the time that she became aware of the difference between right and wrong until she died in the future.
And Jesus, on mission and totally undeterred, dismissed the woman. “Your faith has saved you. Go in peace.” And with that, Luke concludes the story.
So, what exactly can we take away from all of this? First, notice the small details in the story as Jesus told it. We have three characters representing three people who technically were at the party. We have the money lender who represented God, we have the guy who owed fifty denarii who represented Simon the Pharisee and we have the guy who owed five hundred denarii, who represented the woman. Here’s the thing to notice, according to the story that Jesus was telling, neither guy, the one with the fifty denarii debt, nor the one with the five hundred denarii debt, had the ability to pay the moneylender what they owed him. Jesus’ point was simple, in the same way that neither the fifty denarii debtor nor the five hundred denarii debtor had the ability to sufficiently repay the moneylender, neither did Simon or the woman have the ability to repay God. But the moneylender forgave them both, presumably on the same basis, mercy so it would appear, and, making the transition from the story to the real world, forgiveness from God was also available to both Simon and the woman on the same basis. Whether Simon picked up on that however, we aren’t told.
The second thing to notice is the difference in devotion between the woman and Simon. Simon, it would appear, was a rather shoddy host as hosts go. During Jesus’ time, it was customary for a host at a dinner party to provide water for the guests to wash their feet, to greet their guests of honor with a kiss, and to anoint the guest’s head with oil. Simon, according to Jesus, did none of that. In contrast, the woman would have made an amazing host. She wet Jesus feet with her tears and wiped them with her hair, she kissed Jesus’ feet non-stop and, instead of anointing Jesus’ head with inexpensive oil, she anointed his feet with costly perfume, an ointment that, for the record, had a street value that was off the rails by comparison to the value of the oil that Simon would have typically used to anoint the heads of his guests. And Jesus made an interesting part regarding the love level for Him between Simon and the woman. She loved Jesus much more than did Simon.
Another thing that Jesus did was issue a general pardon to the woman for her sin. When Jesus did this, if He didn’t already have people’s attention, He definitely had it after that. The rest of the dinner guests and anyone else listening for all that mattered, knew that only God could issue that kind of a pardon for rebellion and Jesus didn’t bat an eye. “Your faith has saved you, go in peace,” were His exact words. The implication of this was quite clear. Jesus was indirectly claiming to be God and therefore, had the authority and the ability to forgive sin.
So, what does all of this mean for us living in the 21st Century? First and most importantly, when it comes to our relationship with God, as God sees us, we’re all on a level plain. That flies in the face of the way that we see each other. We make distinctions and we have hierarchies that are frankly inconsequential to God. We see rank and status while He sees all members of humanity, unable to save themselves, in dire need of a savior. And, through faith in Jesus, that salvation is available to everyone, regardless of said rank and status.
The application here is simple really. Everyone has rebelled against God and that rebellion has incurred a debt that none of us have the ability to repay. By admitting that and placing our faith in Jesus for forgiveness, we can receive that pardon. That’s the offer that is on the table. The question is, will we take it? Will we believe that Jesus is telling us the truth and place our faith in Him for forgiveness. Will we pray something like this, “God, I’m coming to you today because I know that I have rebelled against you, I have walked all over your laws, and I have incurred a debt against you that I can’t repay. I believe you though when you said that Jesus’ death on the cross was sufficient payment for that rebellion. In fact, it’s the only payment that will sufficiently satisfy you. That’s your offer that is on the table and, in faith, I am taking you up on that offer right now. Thank you for forgiving me. From this point on, I will follow You and obey You to the best of my ability. In Jesus name, amen.”
Next week, I want to take a look at another guy who had nothing to offer Jesus but reached out to Him anyway. It’s one of my favorite stories because it reveals that if this guy could receive a pardon from Jesus, anyone can. See you then.
Part 12: Jesus Didn’t Get the Memo (Or He Just Ignored It!)
One of my favorite stories in the Bible is about a guy who, at least on paper, had absolutely no shot at getting into heaven. He was this man who, because of his horrible life choices, found himself hanging on a Roman cross with two other men. Now, one of the other two men sharing his fate, he probably knew because they were most likely associates. I’m guessing that the two of them had pulled off some heinous crimes together and might have even fed off each other when it came to ideas for what crimes to commit. In fact, it’s not a reach to argue that their association with each other was a big reason why they both were being executed that day.
The other person with him that day though, hanging on the middle cross, was an entirely different matter. That man was Jesus of Nazareth. They’d never met before that day. Granted, the guy had probably heard of this Jesus, a well-known rabbi from Nazareth, because it would have been hard not to. In three years, Jesus had at least for a time, achieved rock star status. He’d healed diseases, performed miracles and, at least according to the word on the street, had even issued a general pardon for people’s sin on occasion. He’d never committed any crimes though, at least not that anyone had ever heard of so, as far as our guy knew, Jesus was innocent and yet, there Jesus was, the innocent man being associated with the guilty, the innocent, right there in the muck with the condemned.
Ironically though, even though He shared the same fate as the condemned, Jesus wasn’t acting like the guilty. He never lashed out at his executioners, He never cursed, in fact, Jesus even prayed for His executioners. This definitely got the guy’s attention, and apparently, being quite cognizant that he wasn’t getting out of this one alive, as the man pondered his plight, it was at this point that he realized that if he was going to get right with God, it was now or never. Repenting of his rebellion and throwing what was left of his pride out the window, he made a request, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.”
Now conventional wisdom would tell us that this request was too late. The guy had nothing to offer and, even if he did, so what? Consider this, Jesus, although He was fully God, was also fully human and had His own issues to deal with. He was in intense physical agony too, not to mention emotional agony. God the Father had turned His back on Him. For the first time ever, Jesus was truly alone. Conventional wisdom, the wisdom that, from the beginning of time, has governed the affairs and laid down the rules for the way things operated, upon receiving this request, would have issued this memo, “Reject this one. Too little, too late.”
Yeah, about that. Jesus either didn’t get the memo or, if He did, He ignored it. According to Luke’s account, when the man made the request, Jesus turned his head and looked at the guy. “Today, you will be with Me in paradise.” In other words, “you got it.” Or maybe, a better way to put it might be, “I got you.” Yes, in the middle of His agony, Jesus pardoned a criminal sharing the same fate as Him, albeit, unlike Jesus, the criminal deserved what he was getting. But the guy still had a pulse, he acknowledged and repented of his rebellion, asked for a place in the Kingdom of God, and Jesus gave it to him. It’s mind boggling really and ripe with application for today. Let’s break it down, shall we.
According to Luke’s account, while Jesus was being executed on that cross, there were a lot of people who were mocking Him and throwing insults at Him. “You saved others, if you are really who you say you are, why can’t you save yourself?” It was so prominent that even one of the other men being executed joined into this insult fest.
“If you are who you say that you are, save yourself and us too.”
But our guy, upon hearing this, rebuked his fellow criminal saying, “Don’t you fear God, since you are under the same sentence? We’re getting what we deserve but He’s done nothing wrong.” He acknowledged two things. He acknowledged his personal guilt and he acknowledged that Jesus was holy, a man without guilt. And then, turning probably only his head toward Jesus, he made his request, which Jesus granted, and with that, our guy faded out of Scripture.
There are three things that we can learn from this guy. First, although he probably didn’t understand it fully, but he seemed to understand that he and Jesus were being identified together, in the eyes of the governing authorities, they were both condemned criminals. He might have even made the connection that that was how God the Father saw things too although we really don’t know about that because Luke doesn’t tell us. He definitely understood fully however, that Jesus didn’t deserve this identification because, as he told his associate, Jesus had done nothing wrong. Secondly, the guy, by faith, came to the realization that, somehow, this wasn’t the end for Jesus, that there was life after death and Jesus was going to be setting up His kingdom in that afterlife. And lastly, our guy wanted to be a part of that kingdom, but he knew that he couldn’t get there on his own. He wasn’t qualified. So, he did the only thing that he could do and asked Jesus to remember him when he came into that kingdom.
Now, something to remember about the writers of the Gospel accounts, is that they did nothing random, everything that they recorded had a purpose. So, what was Luke’s purpose in including this story. It seems to me anyway, that one of the things that kind of sets Luke’s account apart from the other Gospel accounts is that he seems to focus in on the long shots, perhaps because Luke, being a Gentile, an outsider, was one. The stories that Luke talks about Jesus often include people being identified with Jesus that one wouldn’t think would be included. The prodigal son, tax collectors, prostitutes, lepers, even the first people to get the message on the night of Jesus’ birth. All of these people were longshots. But that didn’t disqualify them being included into the kingdom.
And then, there’s the ultimate longshot, the criminal on the cross. One of Luke’s points is this and it’s something that all of us should remember. There’s no one who is so far gone that, if they want to repent, that Jesus won’t save them. “Every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future,” Oscar Wilde and St. Augustine are quoted as saying. It’s true. Every saint has a past and, if any sinner wants to have a future with Jesus, they can.
So, what is involved in obtaining this future? Once again, look at our guy because he got it right. He recognized and acknowledged his guilt and Jesus’ holiness, and in faith, he asked Jesus to remember him. He came to Jesus on Jesus’ terms. And he asked in faith. How he came to this realization, we aren’t told, but he placed his faith in Jesus, made his request, and was accepted.
Now what all of this means for us is this. In order to be accepted into God’s kingdom, we have to do the same thing. We must acknowledge that we are guilty. We have to buy into God’s standard of what righteousness is and not the usual standard that the world uses. Unlike the world’s standards that uses mulligans and what not, God’s standard is complete perfection. That’s a scary thought because the reality is that only a person who has never done anything wrong can enter God’s kingdom. That disqualifies all of us because, based on that, we’re all guilty. Before you give pushback consider this. We can’t even follow our own moral code perfectly. For the record, we’ve all fallen back on the “but,” factor. (Does this sound familiar? “I knew that I shouldn’t do this, I knew that it was wrong, but he was being such an ass that I just lost it.” Been there, done that, got the shirt.) Bottom line, we violated our own moral code, a lesser code than God’s, so that makes us guilty, and that guilt disqualifies us to enter God’s kingdom on our own merit. We need to ask for mercy and get there on Jesus’ merit. And that means all of us from the proper religious church going rule follower to the absolute worst person imaginable. (And by worst, I mean even the worst even by the convicted criminal’s standards.)
So, what are we going to do? Are we going to buy into God’s way of thinking or are we going to try and go it on our own because, while we may not be hanging on a cross right now, we all share the same fate as the criminal who was hanging on that cross. Seriously, look around. Nobody’s getting out of here alive. Cross or not, we’re all going to flatline someday. So, what are we going to do when that happens and we find ourselves looking face to face with our creator? Go it on our own merits and hope for the best or do what the guy on the first cross did?
You know, like I said earlier, there are no random details in the Bible. Granted, they may appear random, but they aren’t. Going back to Luke’s account of the crucifixion, there were two criminals hanging on crosses up there with Jesus. We’ve already talked about the one guy who was hanging on one side of Jesus, but hanging on the other side of Jesus, there was another man. The guy on the other side who was mocking Jesus and cursing Him right along with everyone else who wasn’t hanging on a cross. He was giving Jesus the business and there’s no indication that he ever changed his stance. Arrogant and rebellious, he took his last breath and entered eternity on his own merits and hoped for the best.
So, there we have it, two men, neither of whom were qualified to enter the Kingdom of God on their own merits and yet, if we can believe Luke’s account, one guy got in. He decided to become a Jesus follower is with Jesus today. And the other guy, the guy who entered eternity on his own merits, where is he? He’s in hell if I had to guess, not because Jesus wanted him to go there but because he chose to go there.
Now, what does that have to do with us? Pretty simple really. We’re faced with the same two options that both men who were crucified with Jesus were faced with. We can either place our faith in Jesus or we can go it on our own. If we go it on our own, all evidence indicates that we will end up in the same place that the criminal who didn’t place his faith in Jesus ended up. Look, here’s the deal. Jesus talked about heaven like it was a real place, a literal place and not just a state of mind and He talked about hell the same way. Here’s the difference though. The two places were not equal. What Jesus said about hell was that it was so horrible that a person would never want to go there, and, for the record, Jesus would know. After all, He created it.
Or… we can place our faith in Jesus and follow Him. Heaven is our destiny if we do and, what’s heaven like? “You can’t imagine how cool a place it is,” is what Jesus told His disciples. If we want to follow Jesus, what is involved is changing our minds about how we are living and admitting to God that we’ve failed, we’re guilty and that we need a savior because we can’t save ourselves. We basically exchange our agenda for Jesus’ agenda and place our faith in Jesus’ death and resurrection as sufficient payment for the penalty of our violation of God’s laws. And, as an act of faith, we communicate that to God through prayer. Simply stated, we pray something like this to God the Father, “God, I’m through rebelling against you and I want to follow Jesus. Thank you for sending Jesus to die for me. God, I believe that you raised Jesus from the dead. Please include me in the Kingdom of God, your kingdom, I want to be a part of it. In Jesus name, amen.”
Next week I’m going to start a series where each week I will take a worship song and break it down to see what theological truths can be gleaned about Jesus. I might even carry it through Christmas. See you then.
For those of you reading this, if I have described things here that resonate with you and you want to talk, get a hold of me. Email me at [email protected].
Copyright Sam Roach 2022
The other person with him that day though, hanging on the middle cross, was an entirely different matter. That man was Jesus of Nazareth. They’d never met before that day. Granted, the guy had probably heard of this Jesus, a well-known rabbi from Nazareth, because it would have been hard not to. In three years, Jesus had at least for a time, achieved rock star status. He’d healed diseases, performed miracles and, at least according to the word on the street, had even issued a general pardon for people’s sin on occasion. He’d never committed any crimes though, at least not that anyone had ever heard of so, as far as our guy knew, Jesus was innocent and yet, there Jesus was, the innocent man being associated with the guilty, the innocent, right there in the muck with the condemned.
Ironically though, even though He shared the same fate as the condemned, Jesus wasn’t acting like the guilty. He never lashed out at his executioners, He never cursed, in fact, Jesus even prayed for His executioners. This definitely got the guy’s attention, and apparently, being quite cognizant that he wasn’t getting out of this one alive, as the man pondered his plight, it was at this point that he realized that if he was going to get right with God, it was now or never. Repenting of his rebellion and throwing what was left of his pride out the window, he made a request, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.”
Now conventional wisdom would tell us that this request was too late. The guy had nothing to offer and, even if he did, so what? Consider this, Jesus, although He was fully God, was also fully human and had His own issues to deal with. He was in intense physical agony too, not to mention emotional agony. God the Father had turned His back on Him. For the first time ever, Jesus was truly alone. Conventional wisdom, the wisdom that, from the beginning of time, has governed the affairs and laid down the rules for the way things operated, upon receiving this request, would have issued this memo, “Reject this one. Too little, too late.”
Yeah, about that. Jesus either didn’t get the memo or, if He did, He ignored it. According to Luke’s account, when the man made the request, Jesus turned his head and looked at the guy. “Today, you will be with Me in paradise.” In other words, “you got it.” Or maybe, a better way to put it might be, “I got you.” Yes, in the middle of His agony, Jesus pardoned a criminal sharing the same fate as Him, albeit, unlike Jesus, the criminal deserved what he was getting. But the guy still had a pulse, he acknowledged and repented of his rebellion, asked for a place in the Kingdom of God, and Jesus gave it to him. It’s mind boggling really and ripe with application for today. Let’s break it down, shall we.
According to Luke’s account, while Jesus was being executed on that cross, there were a lot of people who were mocking Him and throwing insults at Him. “You saved others, if you are really who you say you are, why can’t you save yourself?” It was so prominent that even one of the other men being executed joined into this insult fest.
“If you are who you say that you are, save yourself and us too.”
But our guy, upon hearing this, rebuked his fellow criminal saying, “Don’t you fear God, since you are under the same sentence? We’re getting what we deserve but He’s done nothing wrong.” He acknowledged two things. He acknowledged his personal guilt and he acknowledged that Jesus was holy, a man without guilt. And then, turning probably only his head toward Jesus, he made his request, which Jesus granted, and with that, our guy faded out of Scripture.
There are three things that we can learn from this guy. First, although he probably didn’t understand it fully, but he seemed to understand that he and Jesus were being identified together, in the eyes of the governing authorities, they were both condemned criminals. He might have even made the connection that that was how God the Father saw things too although we really don’t know about that because Luke doesn’t tell us. He definitely understood fully however, that Jesus didn’t deserve this identification because, as he told his associate, Jesus had done nothing wrong. Secondly, the guy, by faith, came to the realization that, somehow, this wasn’t the end for Jesus, that there was life after death and Jesus was going to be setting up His kingdom in that afterlife. And lastly, our guy wanted to be a part of that kingdom, but he knew that he couldn’t get there on his own. He wasn’t qualified. So, he did the only thing that he could do and asked Jesus to remember him when he came into that kingdom.
Now, something to remember about the writers of the Gospel accounts, is that they did nothing random, everything that they recorded had a purpose. So, what was Luke’s purpose in including this story. It seems to me anyway, that one of the things that kind of sets Luke’s account apart from the other Gospel accounts is that he seems to focus in on the long shots, perhaps because Luke, being a Gentile, an outsider, was one. The stories that Luke talks about Jesus often include people being identified with Jesus that one wouldn’t think would be included. The prodigal son, tax collectors, prostitutes, lepers, even the first people to get the message on the night of Jesus’ birth. All of these people were longshots. But that didn’t disqualify them being included into the kingdom.
And then, there’s the ultimate longshot, the criminal on the cross. One of Luke’s points is this and it’s something that all of us should remember. There’s no one who is so far gone that, if they want to repent, that Jesus won’t save them. “Every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future,” Oscar Wilde and St. Augustine are quoted as saying. It’s true. Every saint has a past and, if any sinner wants to have a future with Jesus, they can.
So, what is involved in obtaining this future? Once again, look at our guy because he got it right. He recognized and acknowledged his guilt and Jesus’ holiness, and in faith, he asked Jesus to remember him. He came to Jesus on Jesus’ terms. And he asked in faith. How he came to this realization, we aren’t told, but he placed his faith in Jesus, made his request, and was accepted.
Now what all of this means for us is this. In order to be accepted into God’s kingdom, we have to do the same thing. We must acknowledge that we are guilty. We have to buy into God’s standard of what righteousness is and not the usual standard that the world uses. Unlike the world’s standards that uses mulligans and what not, God’s standard is complete perfection. That’s a scary thought because the reality is that only a person who has never done anything wrong can enter God’s kingdom. That disqualifies all of us because, based on that, we’re all guilty. Before you give pushback consider this. We can’t even follow our own moral code perfectly. For the record, we’ve all fallen back on the “but,” factor. (Does this sound familiar? “I knew that I shouldn’t do this, I knew that it was wrong, but he was being such an ass that I just lost it.” Been there, done that, got the shirt.) Bottom line, we violated our own moral code, a lesser code than God’s, so that makes us guilty, and that guilt disqualifies us to enter God’s kingdom on our own merit. We need to ask for mercy and get there on Jesus’ merit. And that means all of us from the proper religious church going rule follower to the absolute worst person imaginable. (And by worst, I mean even the worst even by the convicted criminal’s standards.)
So, what are we going to do? Are we going to buy into God’s way of thinking or are we going to try and go it on our own because, while we may not be hanging on a cross right now, we all share the same fate as the criminal who was hanging on that cross. Seriously, look around. Nobody’s getting out of here alive. Cross or not, we’re all going to flatline someday. So, what are we going to do when that happens and we find ourselves looking face to face with our creator? Go it on our own merits and hope for the best or do what the guy on the first cross did?
You know, like I said earlier, there are no random details in the Bible. Granted, they may appear random, but they aren’t. Going back to Luke’s account of the crucifixion, there were two criminals hanging on crosses up there with Jesus. We’ve already talked about the one guy who was hanging on one side of Jesus, but hanging on the other side of Jesus, there was another man. The guy on the other side who was mocking Jesus and cursing Him right along with everyone else who wasn’t hanging on a cross. He was giving Jesus the business and there’s no indication that he ever changed his stance. Arrogant and rebellious, he took his last breath and entered eternity on his own merits and hoped for the best.
So, there we have it, two men, neither of whom were qualified to enter the Kingdom of God on their own merits and yet, if we can believe Luke’s account, one guy got in. He decided to become a Jesus follower is with Jesus today. And the other guy, the guy who entered eternity on his own merits, where is he? He’s in hell if I had to guess, not because Jesus wanted him to go there but because he chose to go there.
Now, what does that have to do with us? Pretty simple really. We’re faced with the same two options that both men who were crucified with Jesus were faced with. We can either place our faith in Jesus or we can go it on our own. If we go it on our own, all evidence indicates that we will end up in the same place that the criminal who didn’t place his faith in Jesus ended up. Look, here’s the deal. Jesus talked about heaven like it was a real place, a literal place and not just a state of mind and He talked about hell the same way. Here’s the difference though. The two places were not equal. What Jesus said about hell was that it was so horrible that a person would never want to go there, and, for the record, Jesus would know. After all, He created it.
Or… we can place our faith in Jesus and follow Him. Heaven is our destiny if we do and, what’s heaven like? “You can’t imagine how cool a place it is,” is what Jesus told His disciples. If we want to follow Jesus, what is involved is changing our minds about how we are living and admitting to God that we’ve failed, we’re guilty and that we need a savior because we can’t save ourselves. We basically exchange our agenda for Jesus’ agenda and place our faith in Jesus’ death and resurrection as sufficient payment for the penalty of our violation of God’s laws. And, as an act of faith, we communicate that to God through prayer. Simply stated, we pray something like this to God the Father, “God, I’m through rebelling against you and I want to follow Jesus. Thank you for sending Jesus to die for me. God, I believe that you raised Jesus from the dead. Please include me in the Kingdom of God, your kingdom, I want to be a part of it. In Jesus name, amen.”
Next week I’m going to start a series where each week I will take a worship song and break it down to see what theological truths can be gleaned about Jesus. I might even carry it through Christmas. See you then.
For those of you reading this, if I have described things here that resonate with you and you want to talk, get a hold of me. Email me at [email protected].
Copyright Sam Roach 2022