Well, good morning. It's good to be with you guys again. Our text this morning is Matthew chapter 8. We'll read verses 1 through 4. If you're using the Pew Bible, that's on page 686. One of my initial reasons for picking this text is I thought it would be kind of cool to see the contrast between, we just celebrated Christmas, so the baby Jesus, think of that as like a very clean baby, with the leper, who's very dirty. And then I went to spend Christmas with my family. I have a six-month-old niece, and I found that the cleanliness of babies has been drastically overstated. but I think this will be still good. Matthew 8, verses 1 through 4. When Jesus came down from the mountain, great crowds followed him. And behold, a leper came to him and knelt before him, saying, Lord, if you will, you can make me clean. And Jesus stretched out his hand and touched him, saying, I will be clean. And immediately his leprosy was cleansed. And Jesus said to him, see that you say nothing to anyone, but go show yourself to the priest and offer the gift that Moses commanded for a proof to them. If you would join with me now. The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God will stand forever. Let's pray. Lord, we I pray that you would send your Holy Spirit to be with us now. I pray that your word would be the cleft in the rock in which I can stand. Lord, unless your spirit moves, we know that in large part it doesn't matter what words I say, but we need your spirit to drive the truth of your word deep into our hearts. And so I pray that those that need to be encouraged would be encouraged, and those that need to be convicted would be convicted. Lord, let your redeeming love be our theme today and until we die, I pray. And I pray this in your Son's name. Amen. So this time of year, I'm always amazed at how our attitudes towards ourselves change pretty much overnight. So if you're anything like me, you go from really lax to really strict with yourself almost overnight. So from Christmas to New Year's, New Year's Eve, it's the holidays. And that is an excuse that you can use to cover pretty much anything. So you wore the same sweatpants three days in a row, it's totally fine, it's the holidays. Did you sleep until 11.30 and then you had cookies for breakfast, it's totally fine, it's the holidays. Or did you watch so much football or Marvel movies or Hallmark movies that you forgot what the sunshine looked like? That's all right. No judgment. It's the holidays. And then the clock strikes midnight. It's January 1st. It's a new year. You wake up. You say, all right, new year, new me. This is the year I start waking up early. This is the year I start eating right. This is the year I become a better person. And I'm going to do it through sheer force of will. That's kind of the mindset that our passage speaks to today. So if your goal is some variation of that you want to love other people better, maybe that's why you're here this morning, or maybe it's something like you want to be more hospitable to your neighbors, you want to invite them into your home, or you want to share the gospel with somebody or invite your friend to Sunday school. If you think you're going to accomplish that goal just by your own indomitable human spirit, you're going to fail. For us to love others well, we have to first understand God's love for us. Generally, we have outlines when somebody preaches. Mindy, our church administrator, asked me for an outline three times. Each time, I thought I'd get it to her, but you know, it's the holidays, right? So here's my outline, because I know it's really important and it helps track. So I'll tell you the outline now, and you can write it down. So our main point. So you write this at the top, everything will flow from it. So our main point. is that we don't love others because we don't understand God's love for us. Main point. We don't love others because we don't understand God's love for us. All right, and then three sub points from that. So the first point will be we underestimate the vileness of our own sin. We underestimate just how vile, how gross our own sin is. Our second point will be that we doubt the depths of God's love. doubt the depths of God's love. And then third, that we doubt the abundance of God's compassion. Doubt the abundance of God's compassion. All right, so our first point, we underestimate the vileness of our own sin. So let's look at the first verse and a half here again. It says, when Jesus came down from the mountain, great crowds followed him. And behold, a leper came to him and knelt before him. All right, it seems fairly straightforward. But this is not normal behavior for a leper. And so don't let your familiarity with this story detract from just how amazing it is. It's like maybe some of you have seen all these superhero movies that have come out. You're like, ah, great, Iron Man saved the world again. But if Iron Man really saved the world, you would have a much better reaction. You would be much more excited. So here, Just think about it, let it sink in, let it permeate just how amazing this actually is. And so understanding what leprosy is I think will help us kind of refresh this in our minds. So some of you probably know that leprosy made you ceremonially unclean. There's lots of chapters in Leviticus about how you would cleanse yourself from leprosy, how you would be allowed back in. So if you had leprosy, you were cast out of the city. You weren't allowed in anymore. You were cast away from people. And you were cast away, especially from the temple. You were cast out of the presence of God. And what you might not know is just how gross leprosy actually was, is. kind of a long quote about just how gross it is, but notice that you're able to kind of identify leprosy with all of your senses. All right, so it says this, it says, the disease which we call leprosy generally begins with pain in certain areas of the body. Numbness then follows. Soon the skin in such spots loses its original color. It gets to be thick, glossy, and scaly. As the sickness progresses, the thickened spots become dirty sores and ulcers due to poor blood supply. The skin, especially around the eyes and the ears, begin to bunch up with deep furrows between the swelling so that the face of the afflicted individual begins to resemble that of a lion. Fingers drop off or they're absorbed together and toes are affected similarly. Eyebrows and eyelashes drop out and by this time one can see that the person in this pitiable condition is a leper. If you were to touch them, you could also feel it. One can even smell it for the leper emits a very unpleasant odor. Moreover, in view of the fact that this disease-producing agent frequently also attacks the larynx in your throat, the leper's voice acquires a grating quality. His throat becomes hoarse and you can now not only feel and see and smell the leper, but you can hear his rasping voice. And if you stay with him for some time, you even imagine a peculiar taste in your mouth, probably due to the odor. All the senses of the well person are engaged in the detection of the leper. It's really bad. It's really gross. And so it's no wonder that this drove the leper from society, drove him out. It's so bad that a few commentaries on this passage say that Matthew probably got things out of order. He probably combined a couple different stories because there's no way a big crowd of people would have been okay with a leper just coming up to Jesus. I think those commentaries are wrong. But that's how extraordinary it was for a leper to approach Jesus and to approach a group of people. But the point of this story isn't to be like the leper, because I don't think the leper was acting on his own. I don't think this was the one leper in all of Israel who just didn't care that he wasn't allowed to approach society. I believe that he was drawn to Jesus by the power of the Holy Spirit, and this is proved by what he does and by what he says. So what does the leper do if we look? It says that he knelt before Jesus. This isn't merely a greeting, like a bow or a handshake. This is an act of worship. He knelt before Jesus. He prostrated before him. What does the leper say? First, the leper calls him Lord. Which admittedly, it could mean, sir. But if you look at the whole thing, he says, Lord, if you will, you can make me clean. So he doesn't doubt Jesus' power to make him clean. He doubts whether Jesus will actually do it, but he doesn't doubt Jesus' power. And so it seems unlikely to me that this unclean man would rush to Jesus, he would fall on his face, and he would say, Sir, you have the power to heal this incurable disease of mine. I think it's much more likely that the leper's use of Lord means significantly more than that. I think this is evidence that the Holy Spirit was drawing a worshiper to the Son of God. And think about how unlike this we are. Unless the spirit works in our life, we are completely opposite of this. Think about how we view the filth in our own life all the time. We either try to convince ourselves that it's not that bad, or we think it's easily concealable if we just smile and put on a nice suit. Either way, we don't think that our sin is vile enough to actually deal with it unless the Holy Spirit moves in our life. But here's the thing, we all start as the leper is. Not physically, obviously, but spiritually we all start out as the leper. with our sin gnawing away at us, driving us apart from others and apart from God. And as we realize that our spiritual leprosy is just as disgusting as this man's physical leprosy, we begin to realize how vain it is for us to take pride in our holiness, thinking that apart from God's grace, that I'm any cleaner, that you're any cleaner, And the worst sinner that you can think of is like a leper thinking he's not any grosser than another leper because he has fewer open wounds and fewer missing fingers. One of the best parts of youth ministry, this is a crazy transition, but one of the best parts of youth ministry is seeing students have this light bulb moment where you can tell like, oh, they finally get it. And this can happen lots of different ways. One of my favorite goes like this. So before a retreat or a mission trip or just regular day, I'll challenge a high school student or a college student that comes back to be a leader. You know, and I'll check in with them after the retreat. And this is what they always say. The first time I ask them to do it, this is what they always say. They'll look at me and be like, Travis, those middle schoolers, man, they talk so much. They've got so much energy. I don't understand them, they stink, they don't pay attention. I was never like that. Yeah, and so I just look at them and smile. And then they realize that all middle schoolers are the same. They were, in fact, like that. And some of the high school students before them, some of the leaders before them had loved them anyway. And the light bulb goes off, and I know they're gonna be good leaders going forward because they realize the power of being loved despite your flaws. For us to understand the depths of God's love, we have to first understand that there's nothing lovable about us. But God loves us anyway. Our sin is vile. Our pride is disgusting. Our lust is hideous. Our greed is abhorrent. Our anger is repulsive. Our disobedience is foul. Our idolatry is sickening. Our materialism is obscene. Our coveting is revolting. And our attempts to cover it up is like a leper trying to hide his disease by wearing a long-sleeved shirt. But nevertheless, we are loved. To love others more, we must first understand just how vile our own sin is. Our second point is that we doubt the depths of God's love. And you can see how it flows naturally from the first point. We ask ourselves, man, if my sin is so vile, how could God possibly love me? And notice that the leper seems to wonder the same thing. We already talked about this. He had no doubt that Jesus could heal him. He had heard that Jesus had healed other people before. So he doesn't doubt Jesus' power. He just doubts whether Jesus will choose to heal him. Maybe if he was a wealthy man that could pay Jesus for this work, or if he was a woman or somebody that could offer lodging or a meal, then maybe Jesus would take pity on him. But the leper can offer nothing except for his dirty sores on his body and a stench that follows him around. This is a terribly one-sided relationship. It's the kind that we are hesitant to enter into. The leper would bring negative social stigma, disease, general unpleasantness. He offers nothing positive to Jesus, and so that if that he says, looms very large, if you will. You can almost picture it. So in his great need, this is a movie or something, in his great need, the leper rushes towards Jesus. So the focus would be on Jesus, and behind him it would be blurry. You'd barely see the crowd behind him. He'd been empowered by the Holy Spirit to fall on his face and to worship, but as he raises his head to speak, the focus changes from Jesus in the foreground to the crowd in the background, and Jesus gets blurred, and the leper would begin to see the faces of the crowd. He would have begun to see the sneers and the outrage and the repulsion on these faces, and he would temper his expectations of Jesus. Tim Keller has a great quote, and we're going to unpack in parts. So here's the first part of the quote. He starts out by saying, to be truly known and not loved is our deepest fear. It's not just Christians. It's everybody in the entire world. Our deepest fear is to be truly known and not loved. The leper's shame was very apparent. He was unable to hide it. He was truly known, but he didn't know if he would be loved or not. And now I think we can very much relate to the leper. Who here hasn't clung desperately to the one thing they're good at, begging God to not take it away? You know, if I don't have my wealth or my looks or my health or my parenting ability or my intellect, God, what can I actually offer you? Who here hasn't desperately tried to hide their sin? If my wife knew what I looked at, if my parents knew how I speak at school, if my neighbors knew how I treated my family, if my church knew how I doubted, how could they ever love me? Jesus, if you will, you can make me clean. Look at the beautiful simplicity of Jesus' response though. It's two words in Greek. He says, I will be clean. And this fits like a perfect puzzle piece to what the leper had said. Jesus doesn't use this as an opportunity to teach him or to lecture him. Jesus simply makes him clean. The leper says, if you will, Jesus says, I will. The leper says, you can't make me clean, and Jesus simply says, be clean. And the leper was made clean immediately. His sores were gone, his fingers and toes regrew, the stench left, his voice returned. He had been made clean. Jesus did, in fact, love him. Looking at where his sores had been made clean, the leper was able to see just how much Jesus loved him. It was more than he could have ever imagined because the love was greater than the depths of his impurity. Keller's quote goes on. It starts, to be truly known and not loved is our deepest fear. To be truly known and truly loved is our greatest desire. To be truly known and truly loved is our greatest desire. Believers, this is what you've been given, and it's what you have to offer to the world. Not your own love, but the love of God. Knowing the depth of your own sin shows the surpassing depth of your Savior's love. I already mentioned that we spent time with my family at Christmas, but we also spent some time with my in-laws up in Bristol, so up in the corner of Tennessee. And my sister-in-law and her family, they left the day before us, so I was helping them bring some stuff to their car, just like a big box full of food. And my nephew, who's four, he wanted to help me out. Well, he's four and a half. He wouldn't want me to help him. Four and a half, not four. So I was carrying this box of food. He wanted to help. And so I told him, Isaac, you can help by carrying the corner of this box. So I slowly lowered it into his hands. And as I slowly lowered the box, the more weight I let him carry, the bigger his eyes got. until he said, well, Uncle Travis, I'll let you carry this because you're a strong guy. That's not a compliment I get very often, so I told him that he was my favorite nephew, and I took it to the car. He's my only nephew. See, as Isaac began to realize his own weakness, he was astounded at the strength of someone that could carry a burden that he couldn't. As we see the hideous reality of our own sin, we should be amazed by the love of God that surpasses it. Once we realize the depths of God's love toward us, we can begin to love others more. All right, so we have our first two points covered then. So main point, we don't love others because we don't understand God's love for us. Point one, we underestimate the vileness of our own sin. Point two, we doubt the depth of God's love. And now, I kind of didn't tell you the whole truth. We're going to insert a half point now because I think it's really important and I couldn't figure out a way to make it flow well. And then we'll kind of get back into it. All right, so some of you might be struggling right now. You're sitting in the pews, you're thinking, Pastor, I know my sin, I know I need supernatural love and forgiveness, I get how vile it is. I've asked God to cleanse me, I've asked for good things, just like the leper, and God hasn't willed it. You might be sitting there, you've prayed countless prayers along the lines of, Jesus, if you will, you can provide a spouse. Or if you will, you could bring home my prodigal child, or you could save my best friend, or you could heal my body, or you could bless us with a child, and it just hasn't happened yet. So you wonder, does God really love me? So how do we reconcile these things? Well, look at what the leper asked for specifically in verse 2. He says, Lord, if you will, you can make me clean. That's an interesting word choice. Why not say, if you wanted to, you could heal me? But he wants cleanliness. So leprosy was directly tied to ritual purity. You can read that all through the Old Testament. This meant that the leper had not worshiped in the temple, he had not been touched, but he had been ostracized for the entire length of his disease. More than the physical pain being gone, the leper desired that his uncleanness or his shame be taken from him. But Jesus couldn't simply remove that shame with also removing that disease because that's how connected they were. All right, for those who've cried out for something and not received it, the shame that you feel, that feeling of being unpure and not directly, those aren't directly tied to your circumstances. Jesus will never deny cleansing you of that feeling, of that uncleanness, even if Jesus does deny changing your circumstances. You don't bear a single bit of impurity because you don't have a spouse or a child or because your child is a prodigal or your siblings won't talk to you. That shame or guilt you're feeling, that you're just not enough, that has been cleansed. You've been made clean, even if your circumstances haven't been changed. So then our third point we get to is that we doubt God's compassion. Some of you, hopefully all of you, were reading this with me and realized that I've kind of skipped a part in verse 3, so we'll get back to that now. And Jesus stretched out his hand and touched him, saying, I will be clean. And immediately his leprosy was cleansed. And Jesus said to him, see that you say nothing to anyone, but go, show yourself to the priest and offer the gift that Moses commanded for a proof to them. So we've seen how vile leprosy is and sin is. We've seen Jesus' love, but this part is astounding. Jesus touches the leper. So consider all the ways Jesus could have gone about healing this man. He walked in the doors. He just could have said, well, stay there. You're good. He could have told the leper, hey, why don't you just go wash yourself in a river and that will cleanse you, but you don't have to come any closer. Or he could have turned to one of his disciples and said, Peter, it seems like a great opportunity for you to go touch that guy and heal him. That's not what he chose to do. Jesus chose to touch the man, to touch his skin, the very thing that defiled him. This is an act of extreme compassion. The man had not felt human contact in years. And Jesus reaches out to touch him in front of the crowds. We don't know how many people were in the crowd, but in the Gospels, we read accounts of crowds of thousands of people. And every single one of them would have been repulsed by the leper, but Jesus cares more about touching the unclean man in front of him than the opinions of the crowd behind him. And generally, when something clean touches something unclean, it's the clean thing that gets dirty. So for example, when my clean shirt touches spaghetti, my shirt gets dirty, the spaghetti doesn't get clean. That's how it works. But the holiness of God is so immense that the unclean thing becomes clean, and a clean thing stays clean. So we saw this in Isaiah that Pastor Ben read. The coal touched unclean lips, and it was the unclean lips that were changed. It wasn't the coal that became dirty. Here we read that the unclean leper was touched by the clean, eternal Son of God, and it's the leper that's clean. The Son of God is not defiled. And this is exactly what's happened in our lives. So consider the passage from 1 Corinthians that Ben read earlier. It was the sexually immoral, the idolaters, the adulterers, the men who practice homosexuality, the thieves, the greedy, the drunkards, the revilers, and the swindlers that were washed, were sanctified, and were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God. In short, the dirty ones were touched by the clean one and they were changed. And what God has done for you, God can do for others. I think this is why Jesus told the man to go directly to the priests without talking to anyone. So the temptation for the man would have been to tell everyone that he was clean now. Can you imagine? He hadn't been touched. He hasn't spoken to his family or his friends in many years. He wants to go tell them, I'm back. I'm purified. And as a clean man, he would have maybe seen the lepers and he wouldn't have been repulsed by them. That's how he used to be. He would point them back to Jesus in his excitement. He would never go to the priests. He would never get it confirmed that he was actually clean. So Jesus tells him, just go do it right now. Don't talk to anyone. Just go. So Christian, you cannot simply make yourself love people more, but you can be empowered to love them more. You can tell other lepers that your sin has been washed by the blood of Jesus and nothing else. It's easy to be repulsed. People expect us to draw back. But we don't have to, because we have something more pure than their stains, and we have a memory that we started in the position that they're in now. So Tim Keller, he finishes his quote this way, I'll read the whole thing. He says, our deepest fear is to be truly known and not loved. To be truly known and truly loved is our greatest desire. And well, that sounds a lot like being loved by God. That sounds a lot like the gospel. So to those of you searching for that deep sort of love, this is an invitation to stop running, to stop searching. God the Father truly knows you and he truly loves you. But this is also a warning. God's love will meet you where you are, but it won't leave you where you are. Just like the leper wasn't sent back outside the temple, he wasn't sent back outside the city after he was cleansed, this new love will mold you into the shape of the one who gives it. Like all of God's people, it will no longer be said, so are some of you, but it will be said of you, so were some of you. To the church, this is an origin story. This is a reminder of God's great love for you in the past and also in the present. A love that found you when you wandered and a love that covers you even when you fall today. It's a love that is the foundation of who you are and of who you will be. A love that sought you, bought you, and empowers you to love others better. Amen. Let's pray. Father, we thank you for your great love for us, that while we were still sinners, you died for us. Lord, help us to consider the vileness of our own sin, but have no guilt, have no condemnation, because we've been washed clean by the blood of Jesus. The blood that never fails. And now we're able to stand before you, not in our own righteousness, but in the righteousness of Christ that clothes us. Lord, convict us to point others to this great love, I pray. And I pray this all in your son's name. Amen.