Faith, Forgiveness, Friendship and Five Guys

Faith, Forgiveness, Friendship and Five Guys  

 

Luke 5:17-26 

 

This story occurs near the beginning of Jesus’ ministry in his hometown of Capernaum and Jesus is speaking to a packed room – literally. A large crowd has gathered to hear him and there are people jammed into every room, people are spilling out the doors, and people pressed to the windows hoping to hear him speak or do a miracle. The power of the Lord to heal is so tangible that Luke goes out of his way to mention it. You could literally feel the power of God in that room. But there’s also a tension in the room so thick you could cut it with a knife. 

 

Luke writes in verse 17 that Pharisees and teachers of the law – the religious experts of the day - have “come from every village of Galilee and Judea and Jerusalem” in order to evaluate Jesus’ ministry. Luke gives us a window into their attitude when he writes that they were sitting there. That may not seem odd to us cause we’re used to the speaker standing and the listeners sitting, but in those days the teacher sat and the listeners stood. To sit in those settings was a symbol of authority and judgment. This was a religious delegation of experts who clearly saw themselves as the “authority” when it came to the things of God. 

 

So here’s the picture: Jesus is teaching a room packed with people, and sitting in the front row is a delegation of religious stuffed shirts with their folded arms and scowling faces just waiting to catch Jesus in a theological misstep. You could feel the tension! If I were in Jesus’ position, I’d be praying for a quiet, uneventful service so as not to give these guys any ammunition. Let’s just sing a couple hymns, have a non-controversial bible study, and then call on Brother Bartholomew to close us with a prayer. And Lord, please, please, don’t let anything weird happen. 

 

And that’s when it happens. They hear a commotion above them, and suddenly there’s a hole in the roof and four guys are lowering a paralytic down on a mat right in front of Jesus. Jesus looks up and he sees four faces looking down from a hole in the roof and Luke records, when Jesus saw their faith…Not his faith, their faith. They believe he will perform a miracle for their friend. 

 

You’ve got tension emanating from the stuffed shirts, you’ve got the power of God to heal emanating from Jesus, and you’ve got this childlike faith coming from the paralyzed man’s four friends. But Jesus doesn’t do or say what we’d expect him to. We expect Jesus to say, “be healed” but instead he says “Man, your sins are forgiven you.”  Why would Jesus say that? Didn’t Luke go out of his way to tell us the power of God to heal was in the room? Isn’t it obvious that these men want their friend to be able to walk again? After all, how much sin can a guy who needs to be carried everywhere by four men get into to? He’s not sinless, but his options for sin are pretty limited.  Why would Jesus respond to their faith by saying your sins are forgiven you?

 

I think there are two reasons. First, Jesus knows he is answering this man’s deepest need and heart’s desire. Look at the tender way he addresses this man. The ESV translates Jesus calling him “man” but the Greek word is an endearing term closer to our word “friend”. Matthew’s account adds two important words. Jesus said, “Friend, take heart, your sins are forgiven”

 

Take heart. What was crushing this man’s heart wasn’t his paralysis, it was his sin. His heart is weighed down with guilt and sin and shame and he is as helpless to do anything about that as he is about his paralyzed limbs. In this sense, we are all that man. We might be able to lift our legs up and walk, but we can’t lift ourselves out of our own sin. We have no power to cleanse ourselves of guilt and shame. We have no power of our own to walk with God in this life or stand in His presence on the Day of Judgment. Paul says in Ephesians 2 that more than being paralyzed; we were dead in our transgressions. Dead means we couldn’t do even the smallest thing to lift ourselves out of our desperate state. Spiritually speaking, we were that man. There were no sweeter words that man could have heard, and no sweeter words that we can hear than, “friend, take heart, your sins are forgiven.” Jesus said it because it was what this man needed most to hear. 

But there is another reason Jesus said it. Remember that tension in the room I was talking about? If you or me were in that situation, we’d probably be doing everything we could to defuse the tension but by saying what he did Jesus poured gasoline on the tension and lit a match! These sour-faced stuffed shirts now have the verdict on Jesus they came for! He’s a blasphemer! They began to think to themselves, Who does he think he is? Who can forgive sins but God alone? (vs. 21) And it’s true the Bible says that only God can forgive sins:

 

"I, even I, am he who blots out your transgressions, for my own sake, and remembers your sins no more.” Isaiah 43:25

Jesus is fueling the tension to press hard on the first part of their question: Who is this? Who can forgive sins? Jesus wants that question to be pressed on because there are only two possible options. Either Jesus is claiming the authority to do something he has no power to do, or he is God. So Jesus asks them a trick question: Which is easier, to say, “Your sins are forgiven you,” or to say, “Rise and walk”?

 

What do you think? Which would you think is easier, to say, your sins are forgiven you, or to say 

to a paralytic, rise and walk? The answer is it’s far easier to say to someone your sins are forgiven. There’s no way to verify it - no way to prove if someone’s sins are or aren’t forgiven. But if you say “rise and walk” to a paralytic, everyone’s going to know right away if you have the power to say that or if you are a fraud. It’s way easier to say “Your sins are forgiven…”

 

But forgiving sins is infinitely harder to actually do than healing a paralytic. Healing a man whose limbs are paralyzed is a wonderful display of God’s power, but even God’s power can’t absolve people of sin. There is only one way that God could forgive our sin: Jesus had to die on the cross and pay for our sins in order to make it possible for our sins to be forgiven and our guilt to be cleansed. 

 

So what we have in this packed little room is a three way collision between the tense hostility of the religious experts, the faith of five guys who are not religious experts, and the power of the Lord to heal. Jesus says to the stuffed shirts, to prove to you I have the authority to say your sins are forgiven…rise and walk. And the power of the Lord to heal met the faith of these men and the paralytic immediately got up, picked up his mat, and glorified God. The crowd watching this went crazy praising God and in awe of His power. The religious experts went away so mad at Jesus they could kill him. 

 

But before we leave this crowded room, there let’s are some lessons we can all learn from these five men. They have no schooling, no theological training, and no seminary degrees hanging on their walls, but they have a far better grasp on the kind of faith that pleases the Lord than that entire front row of stuffed shirts would ever know. 

 

1. Their faith brought them to Jesus 

 

The only reason their faith was powerful is because it brought them to Jesus. They could have drilled a hole in any other roof in Capernaum that day and their friend would not have been healed. It wasn’t because they had faith that their friend was healed, it was because their faith brought them to Jesus.

A lot of people think that faith has power in itself: it doesn’t matter what you believe the important thing is that you believe. The Bible tells us that faith is only powerful when it brings us to Jesus. Saving faith is faith that believes in Jesus. It’s not our faith that saves us; it’s the object of our faith – Jesus – who saves us. Acts 4:12 says, And there is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved.” When the jailor cried out to Paul, “what must I do to be saved?” Paul answered, believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and you shall be saved.  

 

This is so simple, but it is so important that we make sure our faith is bringing us to Jesus. Not to church. Not to the bible. Not to theology. Not to sound doctrine. Those are all necessary things but our faith isn’t meant to bring us to those things, those things are meant to bring us to Jesus. Faith brings us to Jesus.  

 

2. Their faith expected to receive from Jesus

 

There are a lot of people who come to Jesus hoping to receive a miracle of answered prayer from him, but few put it on the line like these four guys did. The woman with the bleeding issue had strong confidence, saying to herself as she took hold of a corner of his cloak, “if I can just touch the hem of his garment I will be healed.” She had faith and she expected to receive. But if nothing happened, she’d just melt back into the crowd and no one would know.

Once you poke a hole in someone’s roof, interrupt a meeting, and dangle your paralyzed friend in front of everyone, you’re pretty much committed. If Jesus said, “sorry, I don’t do paralyzed people hanging from holes in the roof”, it’d be really embarrassing to have to haul him back up and start patching up the hole you made in the roof. Their faith gave them confidence they would receive from Jesus.

 

I need to learn from these guys because it’s really easy for me to go to a place where I’m really not expecting much unusual from God. That’s not good. We pray but without any real expectation that God will answer. We ask God to free us from sin but we expect the chains to remain. We ask God to

 transform our hearts but we don’t believe anything will change. We pray for someone to come to know Christ but we’d be shocked if they ever did. I call it being faithful but not being faith-filled. Faith has an expectancy component to it.

 

Praying with expectancy doesn’t mean we make demands of God or expect that He will answer every prayer the way we want, it means we pray with a kind of confidence that God hears our prayers and He will answer in some good way. Hebrews 11:6 encourages us: And without faith it is impossible to please him, for whoever would draw near to God must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him.  We believe that He exists, and that He rewards us when we seek Him. That’s expectancy.

 

3. Their faith didn’t give up easily

 

As they were carrying their friend to Jesus, I’m sure they’re praying for God to bless their efforts. And then they get to the house and they can’t even get near Jesus! Every normal route to Jesus is blocked! All they wanted to do was lay this man down in front of Jesus, but they couldn’t because of the crowd. At that point it would have been easy for them to conclude it must not be God’s will. I mean, if it were God’s will, He’d make sure it was easy for us to get our friend to Jesus.

 

We need to be careful that we don’t equate obstacles with God saying no and that we don’t equate ease with God saying “yes”. Sometimes Christians talk in terms of “doors opening” and “doors closing” and I get that, but I’ve seen people confused when they make a significant decision because they thought God had opened a door and then things go wrong and they’re left wondering what happened. There’s no on size fits all answer to this, but just because a door opens doesn’t mean God wants us to walk through it. And just because a door closes doesn’t mean He doesn’t.

These guys hit the proverbial “closed door” if ever there was one! And the saying, “when God closes the door, somewhere He opens a window” wasn’t even true here. There weren’t any open windows either. They had to make their own “open door” in the roof. If obstacles were God’s way of saying “stop”, we’d never learn perseverance. We’d never learn to overcome. We’d be like water, always seeking the path of least resistance. Sometimes God puts roadblocks and obstacles in our way to warn us not to keep going, but sometimes God puts obstacles in our way to teach us to press on. Press on through that setback. Press on through disappointment. Press on through that challenge. 

 

God loves us too much to teach us to quit the minute things get rough, or we don’t get our way, or we meet some resistance. He wants our faith to have some steel in it, some backbone, some resolve so sometimes He packs the room so there’s no easy way to get where He wants us to go. When God closes a door, and doesn’t open a window, look for a loose shingle and start tearing a hole in the roof. That’s actually not very catchy but the point is, their faith didn’t give up easily and neither should yours. How to discern God’s leading and will is for a different message, but our hearing from God needs to go deeper than if a door opens, if it’s easy, it’s God’s will and if a door closes, if it’s hard, it’s not. The point here is that their faith didn’t go belly up the minute they hit an obstacle.

 

4. Their faith was a community event

 

Jesus looked and saw “their” faith. It took all four of them to carry the man to the house, to hoist him onto the roof, and to lower him from the roof. If these four men had not joined their faith together to bring their friend to Jesus, he would not have been healed and this story would not be in the Bible. God had something He wanted them to accomplish, but they could only do it if they worked together. Their faith was a community event.

We shouldn’t think that anything God wants us to do, we can do alone. One of the reasons God places us in a community of faith is because He has things in mind for us to accomplish as we work together that we couldn’t do on our own. Our mission is to carry people to Jesus, but we need each other to do that effectively. I had a touching example of this come to my attention recently.

 

Three weeks ago we had our 3^rd Annual Pig Roast and it was a really fun day and we had a good number of people come by who weren’t GCC members. Last week I received a letter from a man named Jerry who attended the pig roast and wrote a thank you note and I want to read an excerpt:

 

In February I lost my wife of 53 years and am totally lost without her and Sunday was not my greatest day, and I felt I needed to be around people and that was the reason I came to your community event.

 

I sat with a wonderful loving couple and they made me feel so good…At the end of the day we held hands and the young man said a prayer for my wife and I as tears flowed from our eyes. 

 

God had said of all my commandments, “love” is the greatest and on that day I felt the love from this young couple flow into my heart and I felt such peace in my soul. You have a lovely parish with so many people that really do practice their faith. That Sunday was not only food for nourishment but a food that filled my heart with love, a day I will never forget. Peace be with you. Jerry

 

It took many hands to carry this man to Jesus that afternoon. Terry, Linda, and Bree planning all the

hospitality details. Mike and Tim getting up at 2am to roast the pig. Mike Reade worked hard with advertising to get the word out (I suspect this man heard from one of the radio spots Mike arranged). All those who handed out invites or invited neighbors and co-workers. Many of you arriving early to help set up. Those who brought food (pretty much everyone). And this couple from the church– who I don’t even know who it was – who sat with this man and showed him love and care. None of it could have happened without many hands grabbing the mat and lifting. 

 

Sometimes we can fall into the mindset that church is something we attend to receive spiritual encouragement for our lives and it is that, but it’s more than that. Most of the real fun doesn’t start until we join our faith with others and grab a corner of the mat and work together to bring people to Jesus. I’m excited for the coming days as we look for new ways to connect with our community and new ways for us to bring the good news of Jesus Christ to our region. To do that the way the Lord intends, we all need to grab a corner of the mat and lift together. Four important faith lessons we learn from these five guys: 

 

• Their faith brought them to Jesus
• Their faith expected to receive from Jesus
• Their faith didn’t give up easily
• Their faith was a community event.

 

May our faith do the same: bring us to Jesus, expect to receive (good things) from Jesus, not give up easily, and help us to work together as a community to bring other people to Jesus. Let’s ask God to help us live this kind of faith out in our lives each day.