Well, hello everyone and welcome back. This is our daily devotional for Tuesday, November 18th, 2025. And I am really delighted to be back with you. I'm here in my study at the church, back in the book of Matthew. And again, what a glorious time away, but also what a glorious thing it is to be back home and to be back with you all. I gotta tell you, my reading has been transformed as I've been preparing for these daily devotionals. You know, for the last week and a half, two weeks or so, things have been a little bit different as I've been in Israel. If you're tuning in for the first time, feel free to go back and look at some of those devotionals as we went to lots of different places. I didn't remark on one place because I knew where I left off and I knew where we were going next. I've even got a visual aid. I wish I was clever enough to find some way to screen share with you to show you the actual picture. I printed it out, so maybe you'll see it. But nevertheless, do you remember where we left off? We had just finished the sermon on the mount. Matthew chapter 7, which interestingly enough, I couldn't find a decent picture to show you in this format of where they think the Sermon on the Mount took place. It's really just kind of a guess, but where we're beginning now, we have a very good idea of where the things we're about to read actually took place, that it was either in or outside of Capernaum, which is known as the city of Jesus Christ. It's where Jesus spent the bulk of his ministry, did a whole lot of things there, like what we're going to get to tomorrow, which is the faith of the centurion. But first, we've got something else to deal with as we begin Matthew chapter 8. But again, what a wonderful thing it is to be with you all. I'm so happy to be back. Many of you have asked me about Israel. Wednesday night, I'm going to try my best to record that here. No, the picture's not going to be that great, but Wednesday night, I'm going to talk about my Israel trip. I'm going to do a slideshow. We start eating at six o'clock and I found out it's going to be Israeli type food. And don't worry, it's not going to be crazy or anything like that. If you've been with us on Wednesday night, you should have built up a level of tolerance and trust. knowing that the food is going to be fantastic. And I'm super excited about that. But we start eating at 6. If you can't get here at 6, that's okay. We eat from 6 until 7. Then we're going to break off and we'll have youth group. I think the youth group is staying in though with the adults for the sake of the slideshow, all that kind of business, the PowerPoint. and talking about the trip. But especially if you have little children, they are practicing the Christmas pageant, y'all. It's coming up very soon. It's the same night as the cantata and that's December 21st. So go ahead and start marking your calendars. Also, this coming Saturday, we're having our annual youth group fundraiser. It's our Thanksgiving community meal. If you have not ordered yet, please call the office. And if you have questions, let me know. I'll give you the number. But call the church office, place your order. We're doing it differently this year. We're having a separate time for dine-in and for drive-thru. We're also changing the way we're doing the food. So it shouldn't be nearly as long of a wait as it was last year. And I still, we feel terrible about that, but we should have a new system this year. Everything should go great, but we would absolutely love to have you. So come on out for that and let us know. So we will have enough food. Now, with all that being said, we're gonna pick up in Matthew chapter eight, post-Sermon on the Mount, what does Jesus do next? Let's go to the Lord in prayer, and then we'll dig in. Our Father, we thank you so much for this time that you have given to us, and we pray for wisdom and understanding in it as we continue to go through the gospel according to Matthew, as we see the story of your Son and our Savior told to us in such vivid detail. Help us to see what you would have us to see. Help us to gain an appreciation for his sacrifice, certainly for his work here, but not just the signs. Let us see what the signs point to, the glory of your kingdom. None of this is gonna happen without your Holy Spirit, so please guide us now, and we pray it in Jesus' name, amen. All right, so we finished with Matthew chapter 7. Remember Matthew 5 through 7 is the Sermon on the Mount. And Matthew chapter 8 begins with this. It says, when he, and yes, the he is Jesus here, right? When he came down from the mountainside, large crowds followed him. So immediately, first and foremost, we gotta realize that there's a lot of different things going on here with Jesus, but for lack of better term, notoriety. Notoriety, you could even use the word fame, is really building with Jesus, and it's fascinating. We know that he's been doing healings, we know that he's been, the term exclusively used in the gospel according to John is signs. Remember, the value of the sign is not the sign itself, it's what the sign points to, okay? And what the signs point to is the kingdom of God being at hand and still coming in all of its fullness. But he's doing signs and wonders, but it's fascinating that what we see in Matthew 5-7, don't let this scoop by you. The crowds are growing more and more, And yet the reason they're growing more and more in Matthew five through seven is not because Jesus has fed them. It's not because he's done great miracles or anything like that. It's the word of God. The power is always in the word of God. Now, I'm not saying that the signs, I'm not saying that doesn't matter. And we're about to see that he's about to give another sign. He's about to perform a miracle. Those are important to what Jesus was doing in his earthly ministry. But nothing is more important. than the Word of God being revealed. God always works through the power of the Word. It is the Word that created all things, speaking all things into existence. It is the Word that makes the healings, the signs, and the wonders possible. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. So don't miss that Jesus sits down in Matthew 5-7, Going back to Matthew 5 now when he saw the crowds He went up on a mountainside and sat down and then he begins to teach begins to teach Don't let it miss you that it's not people say. Oh, is he doing? To do any signs any wonders? No. Okay. Well, we're out of here now They listened to him Because what he says, think about all those subjects we saw in Matthew 5 through 7. Not only those teachings on the things that are transparent and obvious up front, but the deeper things where it's like, hey, if you hate your brother in your heart, you've already committed murder. Serious stuff, compelling, compelling teaching. And so the crowds followed him. But what do we see next? I would argue we see something that would definitely cause the crowd to disperse. A man with leprosy, Matthew 8, verse two, a man with leprosy came and knelt before him and said, Lord, if you are willing, you can make me clean. Now, before we even talk about the man, we need to talk about the problem here and what might've made the crowds dispersed. Realize that there were a lot of diseases, a lot of things that were going on in Jesus's time. None of them. held the severity and the stigma that leprosy would have held. We know from external sources, lepers had their own colonies. They weren't allowed to live in regular society. And a lot of this had to do with fear over their disease spreading. Leprosy was and is. It remains to this day. It can be very easily treated comparatively to some other diseases, but it still exists in today, and it's still a very disastrous disease. It does horrible things to the human body. But at this time, lepers were given their own colonies. They had to wear special clothes. They weren't allowed to be a part of regular society. When they approached people that didn't have leprosy, they had to call out, unclean, unclean. Imagine living that lifestyle. It's almost like, you know, not nearly as bad. But you remember back when COVID was raging? Did you ever go anywhere with a cough? And you just cough and people look at you like, get out of here. I don't want that. And y'all, I'm not even going to get into the debate over COVID and its severity and how dangerous it was. But we got a little glimpse of that. But it's very difficult for us to understand what a leper's life would have been like, not to mention what the disease itself would do. And I don't want to be gross, I don't want to be nasty, and I'm not trying to go for shock value here. But you know how leprosy works and works. One of the things that it does is people have a misconception. They believe that leprosy causes you to like your fingers fall off and your nose and your ears and that kind of stuff. And that it's not leprosy that does that. What leprosy does is a couple of things. Number one, it deadens nerves. And so the problem is that, especially in an agrarian society like this, a farming society, we know that he's right outside of Capernaum, which is right there on the Sea of Galilee. We know that this is an aquatic culture. There's a lot of fishermen, that kind of stuff. If you're a fisherman, you're working with your hands all the time, with nets, that kind of stuff. If you get leprosy, it kills nerve endings. And so one of the things that can happen is you can get a cut, you can get an injury, and not even know it. And so you can get an awful infection, and then your fingers end up coming off, really bad stuff. But the horror of leprosy that people just don't talk about, and I understand, and if you have little kids, I'm giving you, I'm gonna give you 10 seconds to put your hands over their ears. 10, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one. Parents, you have been warned. The horror of leprosy is this, because it kills nerve endings, especially in the extremities of your body, that means fingers, toes, noses, ears. In places with not the best sanitation, in places that didn't have houses that were closed, you could fall asleep at night. And it wasn't leprosy that made people's noses fall off and their ears fall off and that kind of thing and lose their fingers. It was that When you lose sensitivity in those areas, and you live in an area like this, rodents would come in at night and literally chew the nose off of your face. And you wouldn't even know, because you couldn't feel it. There's a book out there, and I can't remember the author's name, but it was written by a Christian physician that worked in leper colonies, I think in Thailand or somewhere. Anyway, it was called The Gift of Pain. And it was all about how pain itself, that we don't like it, is a gift. Because pain helps us be sensitive to what's really going on in life. You chew on that for a little bit on your own as you think about the pain that you face. But nevertheless, that was the horror of being a leper. So not only was it this terrible disease and you had to call out unclean, excuse me, whenever you entered society, not only were you cut off from family and friends and economically you were destroyed, oftentimes physically speaking, you were destroyed. And so the idea is that Jesus comes down from the mountain and then this leper shows up and he says, Lord, if you are willing, you can make me clean. Now I want you to think about that statement. First and foremost, the leper, and we don't even know the man's name, Right, there's ideas, but nevertheless, biblically speaking, we don't know this man's name. He comes to Jesus convinced. He comes to Jesus absolutely knowing without a shadow of a doubt that if Jesus wants it to happen, it's going to happen. Let me ask you something. Just us. When you pray, and when you go to God over something, Do you go to him as convinced as this man was who went to Jesus? Because this man makes it very clear right there, verse three, Lord, if you are willing, you can make me clean. But even that phrase, see this leper that comes to Jesus, is he talking about just his leprosy? I don't think so, because that connotation, yeah, it would have been connected to the leprosy, but it's much deeper than that. He's pointing to a much deeper spiritual reality, you see. But he's convinced that if the Lord is willing, the Lord can do it. In James, we're told this about wisdom, but it applies to prayer in general, that when you ask God, he gives willingly, but you shouldn't ask with doubt. You should ask with understanding. And Jesus gives all sorts of parables about this, where he's like, hey, listen, which one of you, if your son asked for a fish, you'd give him a serpent? Or if he asked for bread, you'd give him a stone? He said, even you wicked men, you know how to love your sons. How much more does your heavenly Father desire to give you good gifts? But when you go to God, do you go with that understanding that he loves you? That he is able to intervene? If he's willing, there ain't a thing that he can't fix. If you don't go to God with that mentality, kind of like what James talks about, you're like the double-minded person that's tossed to and fro by the wind and the waves like a boat without a rudder or without a sail. Instead, we are called to faith. And so he said, verse three, Lord, if you are willing, you can make me clean. Verse three, excuse me, that's in verse two. Verse three, Jesus reached out his hand and touched the man. Time out, pause. That in itself is extreme, that Jesus was willing to touch a leper. Just goes to show that Jesus is not defined by the conventional thought of our culture. The idea of clean and unclean, worthy and unworthy. Jesus supersedes all of those things. And he does that based on faith, if we're trusting in him. He's not concerned about the conventional, just like he's not concerned about it here. He touched the man. The same man that would have had to come and cry out, unclean, unclean, just in case somebody might bump into him. He touched the man. I am willing, he said, Be clean. Immediately he was cured of his leprosy. Then Jesus said to him, see that you don't tell anyone, but go show yourself to the priest and offer the gift Moses commanded as a testimony to them. Now, A couple of things here. I'll go in reverse order. The second thing is that Jesus says, now go to the temple, go to the priest, and offer the offering. What he's talking about here is that Levitical code offering where if God blessed or if God healed, you went to the temple and you made an offering. You showed yourself to the priest. And Jesus is doing this because he's saying, hey, go complete the law. Do what the law requires of you. Now, very soon that's going to change when Jesus fulfills the law. If you and I are healed, we don't have to go to the, well, there is no temple anymore. And we certainly don't have to go to a priest because there's only one priest who is Jesus Christ, our Lord. And we should go to him in gratitude. But my point is, we don't have to go make a physical offering. We don't have to go to the temple. We don't have to go see some human and say, hey, look, I'm clean. Look at what the Lord's done for me. But just because we don't have to do that ceremonially speaking, I think one of the applications of this devotional is, if the Lord delivers you, you owe him a debt of praise and gratitude. There's no priest to show yourself to. But if the Lord has worked, you should be ready to testify to that, just like Jesus told this man to go and do. But the second thing there is very interesting. It's actually the first thing. You might say, why would Jesus say, see to it that you don't tell anyone? Well, y'all, in Matthew, this is the first spot that we get this idea of the messianic secret, where Jesus, at the beginning of his earthly ministry, is out there. He's preaching, he's teaching, he's doing the signs, but there is an air of secrecy. And why? We don't exactly know. We get a hint in John when Jesus performs his first public miracle, which is the wedding at Cana in Galilee, where he turns the water into wine. Remember what he said to Mary when she said, hey, come here, do something about it. He said, woman, my time has not yet come. What he's talking about there is entering the scene very publicly, doing public miracles, making it clear that he's the Messiah. What he's doing now is he's preaching, and he's teaching, and he's not making the bold statements yet that he will go on to make. Statements like when they say, hey, are you the Christ? And he says, I am. He evokes the name of God. It's the highest form of blasphemy, or he's telling the truth. He was telling the truth. But nevertheless, it's still early in his public ministry. And so he's maintaining that as he continues to build, as he continues to teach, as he continues to offer signs. But realize, we're far past that, you and me. The idea of Jesus saying, see to it that you don't tell anyone, that's building to a certain point. And then he tells everybody who he is. Well, that's where you and I are at right now. where we need to be ready to proclaim the greatness of God. Now, told you I had a visual aid for you this morning. I don't know what you can see. Just behind this here, I'll hold it back here. This is a garden that is planted right outside of Capernaum. And over behind it, you can see the man in the middle with his hands raised. That's supposed to be the leper. This is where they say this took place. It's outside of Capernaum, which would have been appropriate. Because Jesus, the leper, would not have been allowed to go into the city. It's just down, if you could see on the other side of him, there is the mountain where they believe Jesus offered the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew 5 through 7. I think it's the Orthodox Church that's built this amazing chapel up on top. And I couldn't go there, I couldn't take pictures, but nevertheless. It's an incredible sight to behold. But they planted this garden, and the garden represents life out of death, newness out of disaster. And the man with his hands up there is the leper, praising God. That's the statue. This is where this supposedly took place. Is that the place where it took? I don't know. I don't think they know either but Archaeologically speaking. It really makes a lot of sense that the leper would have come right here right outside of Capernaum It's it's not a few hundred yards from there that the city gates would have been and also You find the the synagogue where Jesus would have done so much preaching and teaching the synagogue courts where what we read about tomorrow would have taken place when the centurion sent representatives to him, all of those things. But y'all, the point is the beauty here, right? It's a beautiful garden and the statue represents one who is praising God. Y'all, I don't know what you've been through personally in terms of healing. I don't know what physically has taken place in your life, but I know this, if you are in Jesus Christ, If you're trusting in him alone for your salvation, you are a new creation. And that alone, that especially warrants praise. So are you ready to testify to God's greatness? Are you ready to tell people, just like that leper who prayed, are you ready to praise God for what he's done for you? If not, and if you don't see what he's done for you, then it's entirely likely that you don't know him. But if you do, let me encourage you, in light of this, don't forget the teaching here, that Jesus defies conventionality, that he can change any person at any time, that we're called to pray with belief, and that we're called to testify. That's what the leper teaches. This leper, we don't even know. But what a wonderful lesson for us in light of the marvelous work of Jesus Christ in taking us as sinners and saving us all for the sake of His glory and His kingdom and our good. So keep these things in mind. Let's pray. Our God and our Father, we praise you for this time that you've given to us. We thank you for this leper. We don't even know who he was. that believe, that had faith, let us have faith. Please give us faith in keeping with who you have called us to be. We know it doesn't take much. It just takes genuine faith. So let us turn to you in trust. Please work in our lives so that we may be a blessing to others. And we pray it all in Christ's name. Well, I'd like to thank you all for being a part of this time. Lord willing, we'll be back tomorrow morning at 6 a.m. and then tomorrow night around seven o'clock. Again, we would love to have you tomorrow night. Come on, you don't need to sign up or anything like that. Also, we really would appreciate the support for our meal this coming Saturday. Call the office, get signed up for that. But nevertheless, it's so good to be back with you. And oh yeah, be planning for Sunday. I will believe in church. Take care.