So what would you do if Jesus Christ walked in here tonight, physically here, and he just said, okay, anything you want, any kind of healing you want, I'll do it. You name it, you name anything. Whatever you want healed, whatever you want fixed, I'll do it. Just tell me, tell me what it is. What would you pick? What would you pick? We spent all the way through chapter 1 of the Gospel of Mark. We saw what the people of Capernaum picked. Fever, demons, injuries, diseases, various different things. Leprosy, all those things. And Jesus healed every single one of them. So if it were you, what would you choose? We finished up chapter one before the holidays. Chapter two, we start, Mark, tonight. And chapter two starts with yet another healing. So once again, we're gonna see a healing. And to help us understand what's going on in this whole section, go ahead and glance down in your Bible to Mark chapter two, verse 17. So let's skip ahead to 17, where Jesus calls himself a doctor, Dr. Jesus. So he's a doctor, that's how he thought, that's how Jesus thought of himself. He came to this world to be a doctor. Which makes sense after this just explosion of healings all the way through chapter one, right? We read through chapter one and it's just healing, healing, healing, healing, healing. Chapter two, more healing. So it makes sense that he would come to the doctor. It seems to make sense until you take a quick glance at the context of verse 17. And you'll see what Jesus meant by doctor there has nothing whatsoever to do with physical healing. Look at verse 16. Who are the sick there in verse 16 that Jesus came to be a doctor for? Who are the sick? Mark 2, 16. Sinners, tax collectors. Yeah, sinners and tax collectors. So Jesus came to be a doctor not for people who have physical problems, but for people who have spiritual illness and disease. But if that's the case, then what's the deal with all the physical healings at the beginning of Mark? Why does he just do healing, healing, healing, all these physical healings? Then he calls himself a doctor, but it's talking about spiritual healing. What is the relationship between physical healing and spiritual healing? Very important question for understanding this section. And what is spiritual healing. It doesn't mean the... spiritually sick. If I went to a doctor, a medical doctor, and I said, tell me about the flu. What's going on? What happens with the flu? He could explain some virus gets inside your body and causes damage and it creates these symptoms and whatever. He could explain it all. He could tell me what cancer does, or how a broken leg works, or brain damage, or a sprained ankle, or allergies. He could explain all these kind of physical things. We understand all that, but what does it mean to have a spiritual disease? What does it mean for there to be something akin to a virus, or like an injury or something on your heart? affecting your inner man, the non-physical, immaterial part of you, to be sick. That's the language that the Bible uses to describe sin. It's a spiritual disease. And here's something really important to understand. When the Bible calls sin a spiritual disease, that is not just an illustration or a figure of speech. It's very literal. Don't think that physical disease is literal and spiritual disease is figurative. When you think of the immaterial parts of you, the parts that you can't touch, your mind, your thoughts, your will, your emotions, your beliefs, Is that just a figure of speech? No, that's real, right? That's really part of it. That's just as much you as your body is you, isn't it? So what is, when Jesus came into the world, he came to set up a medical practice to heal spiritual diseases. When that immature part of you gets diseased, he came to heal those. What is that like? What is it like to have Dr. Jesus give you a treatment to do a procedure on? Jesus is gonna answer all these questions tonight for us in very vivid and unexpected ways. As we've already seen, Jesus is full of surprises. He doesn't disappoint here at all. It's been a while since our last session, so let me just refresh your memory on where we left off. We left off at the end of chapter one, we left Jesus out there in the boonies. Remember, he's by himself, he just cleansed this leper, and in cleansing the leper, maybe he had to trade places with him. So now Jesus is out there, and the man who created bliss, it's a profound symbol, remember, of how Jesus cleanses us. And that whole section last time, the healing of the leper, actually introduced this concept of Jesus as a spiritual healer. Because remember, the guy didn't say, if you're willing, you can heal me. He said, if you're willing, you can make me clean, right? Even more than physical healing, physical disease, his biggest problem was uncleanness. And ceremonial uncleanness illustrated spiritual filthiness before God. So, curing his leper It was a physical healing, but it was an illustration of spiritual cleansing, right? So this concept of spiritual healing was actually introduced there. Every time we sin, it makes us dirty on the inside. It soils us. And we can all relate to that, right? We all understand the feeling of being stained, dirty on the inside. We've all felt that. It's a horrible feeling, right? And there's a classic description of that feeling in Shakespeare's Macbeth. Lady Macbeth convinces her husband to murder the king of Scotland, and in trying to convince him, she says this, she says, a little water will clear us of this pain. It's just going to be a little stain, we'll wash it right off, it'll be no problem. It won't create a big stain on our souls, we'll be absolved. So they go ahead and they kill him, and they just feel so much guilt. It ends up driving Lady Macbeth to the point of insanity. She feels so guilty. And she ends up just losing her mind in this one scene. She's just incessantly rubbing her hands, trying to get the blood guilt off. And she's talking to this doctor, and she says these famous words, Out, damned spot! Out, I say! Will these hands never be clean? Evidently, she didn't realize that by using profane language, all she did was put another spot on her soul. But anyway, the doctor responds and says, this disease is beyond my practice. It's a famous scene in a play. It's famous because everybody can relate to that. People can relate to that. Psychologists have even studied it. I was reading this month about it. They call it the Lady Macbeth effect. And the burning question for researchers in psychology is, why is it that when people do something like that, they feel dirty inside? I mean, why? And you can see why that would be a mystery for an evolutionist or a naturalist, right? Because they can't understand. Because if you murder someone, I mean, if you're a strong person, you kill a weak person, that's the whole survival of the fittest thing. It's evolution at its finest, right? Why would you feel dirty? Where does the feeling of dirtiness come from? And if you say, oh, it's a social construct, it just means, you know, you need to learn. That doesn't work because it's universal. Every culture they look at, people feel this way. So it doesn't seem to be cultural conditioning. So why do people feel, of all things, the way they would describe the way they feel on the inside, why do they describe it as dirtiness? Well, here's a profound theory that seems to have eluded all the researchers that I'm just going to throw out there. I'm going to go way out on a limb and I'm going to say this. Here's my theory. People feel dirty because they are dirty. It's reality. Guilt feelings are not a social construct or learned behavior. They're a reflection of actual reality. Doing evil things makes your soul ugly and disgusting and loathsome and everyone who hasn't completely destroyed their conscience can heal that. They know that, they can relate to that. So Jesus comes and he heals the leper as an illustration that I can cleanse your dirty, filthy souls. That's what Jesus was saying. I can get the spot out. Okay, so all that was last time. That's all review from Healing the Leper. That's the end of chapter one. Now we're going to find out today that that is not enough. Cleansing does not have to be watched. See, when the blood of Jesus covers your sins, you get cleansed and washed, but that's just a fringe benefit. There's a lot of fringe benefits from being cleansed by His blood. You get pardoned from God, so you're no longer subject to the penalty of you don't have to be punished anymore, so you get that, you get rescued out of slavery from sin, you get washed, you get cleaned, the spot comes out, they give you spiritual life, they give you the Holy Spirit, it gives the sanctification process to make you holy, your destiny changes, instead of going to hell, now you're going to heaven, all kinds of benefits. But all of those are fringe benefits. They're not the main thing. So what's the main thing? What's the main benefit? The core thing out of which all those other things flow. That's what Jesus is gonna show us right now. So let's look. Chapter 1 ends with this statement. Very last verse of chapter 1. So he can't go, he can't enter openly. So he has to sneak in, so in verse one, look at the next verse, chapter two, verse one, some days later, when Jesus again entered Capernaum, so he waits a certain amount of days, and he comes back, he gives it a try, but he doesn't do it openly, he just kinda sneaks in to Capernaum, but probably because he just needed to get some rest, he's been out there in the wilderness, he wants to go home and get some rest, but right away, word gets out, immediately there's already an unmanageable crowd. The people heard, verse one, that he had come home, So many gathered that there was not any room left, not even outside the door. Now, we don't know for sure if this is Peter's house again, or if this is Jesus' own house, if he got in the house, but whatever it was, it's jammed full of people now. Inside the house. So now what? I mean, what do you do when you have a bunch of people? It's not like they're a big crowd camped out in your front lawn. They're inside the house. And this is the only time this happens to Jesus. The crowds did this. They would follow him in his house. There were times when he couldn't even eat because people were just crowding him. He was getting mobbed all the time. You know, Jesus' life was no fun. It was a very hard time during his ministry. There was no rest. It was absolutely relentless. The very problems that Jesus came into this world to solve dogged his steps wherever he went. So, here he's got this mob in his house. How's he going to handle it? So many gathered, there was no room left, not even outside the door. And so, he preached the word to them. That's what he always does. Every time Jesus sees a crowd, he preaches. He just starts preaching the gospel. That's what he did, that's why he came into this world. And so he's preaching, and it's not just the sick people who are there. Jesus was starting to attract attention from the religious leaders, and so in Luke's account, in the same, incident, Luke 517, the Pharisees and teachers of the law who had come from every village of Galilee and from Judea and Jerusalem were sitting there. So, this crowd moves in, religious leaders are coming from out of town, all the way down from Judea, everywhere, and Jesus starts preaching, and outside the house, outside the fringes of the crowd, here comes some Some people, verse three, some men came, bringing to him a paralytic carried by four of them. So this poor guy, he's paralyzed, I don't know if it's quadriplegic, paraplegic, but he can't walk. Rough existence, back then, in the ancient world, you can imagine, no wheelchairs, none of the apparatus we have had to be carried everywhere. He gets up in the middle of the night, has to go to the bathroom, somebody has to carry him, get drink of water, somebody has to carry him everywhere he went, literally needed 24-hour care. Very difficult life. Fortunately for this guy, he had some great friends, These four friends hauled this guy from wherever he lived, through town, to this house where Jesus was. So you can imagine, these five guys, the four friends and the guy, and they're talking, they're making their way through the streets of Capernaum and talking, telling stories that they heard about Jesus and all these healings and this amazing stuff, and they must have just been full of hope and full of anticipation and excitement. The guys were almost there, just right up the street. Suddenly they get around this, and they come around the corner and like, oh no. Look at the crown. But that doesn't stop them. They try to get in anyway. Again, in Luke's account, Luke says they tried to take him into the house and lay him before Jesus. They tried but failed. Nobody would let him through. They got a guy on a stretcher. Nobody was gonna let him in. Have you ever been real excited to show up somewhere and You're full of hope you get there and you find out it's full. You just have to turn around and go back home. That's what happens to these guys. They try to get in, they can't. So they do the only thing they can do. Wait. Then off they go. Right back down the road they came from. Meanwhile, Jesus is still in the house preaching. Probably doesn't even know anything about these guys being there. He's preaching his heart out. Pharisees are there, scribes are there, all these people are there. The house is packed. Jesus is preaching the gospel. He's declaring the glories of the kingdom. As usual, the people are riveted. They're captivated. They're in rapt attention. Everybody's listening to him. Jesus is revealing things about God that these people have never heard. Stuff that's not even in the Bible. He's telling them about the glories of the... He's telling them all this amazing... And he's got debris falling down on his head, and he's looking around, and there's noise up there. Now nobody's even listening to Jesus anymore. They're looking up there, they hear this noise, they're looking. I can see daylight through the ceiling. Somebody's up there, and they're making a hole in the ceiling. You look up and the hole gets bigger and bigger. It's those guys. It's those four guys when they left. They didn't go home. They went and bought some ropes and came back and they somehow hoisted their buddy up onto this roof, cased the place out, figured out the exact spot where Jesus was, and started digging a hole. And they kept digging until it was big enough to where they can lower this guy down in front of Jesus, and they get it right on. It's exact, Luke says they, Mark says they made an opening in the roof, literally unroofed the roof where Jesus was. Luke says they got it right in front of Jesus, so they nailed it. Which, that's impressive. If it had been me, I probably would have gotten the wrong room and tried like five holes in the roof before I finally got it. They got it right in front of them. So, how do you get to a nationally known figure, a big celebrity, and you want to get his attention, and they figure, well, if we get our friend and drop him on his head while he's preaching, then he can't ignore us, right? So, why are they so aggressive? Was it that they were just calculating? Well, it'd be a lot of work to do this ceiling idea, but It would be even more work to haul this guy all the way back home, so we'll just work it out better. We'll just get up there and make a haul of this. Are you sure that's a good idea? It's illegal. Yeah, but we'll patch it up. I mean, can you imagine the discussion? I don't know. Jesus, what if we get in trouble? If I win, they decide to just go for it. I think there's, it might be that they just didn't wanna carry the guy back home, but I think there's more to it than that. These guys are gonna do anything to get their friend to Jesus, and we're gonna find out at the end why that was. This is creative, persistent, insistent faith. They are going to get their friend to Jesus. They didn't see an impossible situation and think, oh, well, I guess the Lord can close that door and turn it away. No, the Lord closed the door, they opened a roof. They'd find a way to get it done. I mean, just think about this. We're used to the story, but how many times have you gone somewhere and there's standing room only, you can't get in, it's like, ah. How many times did it even enter your head, well, I could just climb up on the roof and bust through and drop dead. I mean. It doesn't work. So, such a dramatic moment. In fact, Mark wants us to feel the drama here. He wants us to imagine this, and I know that because he switches from the past tense to the present tense, which is what we do when we're telling stories and we want it to get real dramatic, we start talking in the present tense, even though it's already done. So, in the Greek it sounds like this. Starts in the past tense, they unroofed the roof where Jesus was, and having dug through it, they are lowering the mat. So there he jumps to the present tense. Picture, they're lowering the guy. And he wants us to imagine the scene. So imagine, let's do that, let's imagine. Imagine the dead silence. Everybody's minds are racing, but nobody's saying anything. Nobody's talking. See, look around the room. There's Mary, Jesus' mother. What's she thinking? It rains, you know. Homeowners, cover this. Or maybe she's thinking about the guys. You worry about the boys. Be careful. You could get hurt. What about... Some guy maybe stuck back in the doorway. Can't quit, can't get in at all, but he can see the paralytic being lowered down, but he can't see what's happening once he gets down. He wants to see the reaction. Pharisees and scribes sitting right in front, looking down at this guy. Wonder what sin he committed to deserve this. Guy over there on the side of the room with his sick baby. Just thinking, man, I wish I would have thought of that. Look at the paralytic. Beat red. Laying there embarrassed. All eyes on him. Shaking in fear. Matthew's account of Jesus. First thing he says, don't be afraid. Looking up at Jesus. What's Jesus going to do? Well, that's deceit. Jesus stopped preaching. He's just standing there. The only noise is these guys doing their thing. Pharisees, arms crossed, looking down at the man in disdain. The crowd's in stunned silence, watching, looking, paralytic, waiting. Four upside-down heads poking down through the ceiling. They want to see what's going on. Jesus is about to act. What do you think he's going to do? Well, if you've been reading a book and paying attention to him, it seems like you know exactly what to do. What does he do every time somebody brings any sick person to him? Is Jesus going to heal this guy? No. No, that's not what he does. He doesn't heal him. Just by the time when you think you got Jesus figured out, he's full of surprises. He does something different. So right at first, it seems like Jesus is going to heal him. You know, in all the miracle stories, they have a certain format, typically. And this is in the same format. So right in the progress of the format, this is the moment where you expect the healing. And it seems like it's gonna happen, because at first, Jesus has a real favorable response to this guy. Verse five, when Jesus saw their faith, he said to the paralytic, son, that's a term of endearment. It just means child. That's a normal word for child. My child. He calls him his child. That's a very affectionate term. Jesus associates himself with this guy in a family kind of a relationship. It's also, it's a term of endearment, it's also a term that implies a certain amount of authority. Typically a guy in his young 30s, like, you don't refer to adults as child, right? If you're in your 30s, even if somebody's 20 and you're 30, you don't call them my child, right? So this is the language of a benevolent superior talking to an inferior. It carries a certain amount of authority. All right, so everything about this account goes along exactly according to the normal pattern of the miracle accounts, except for the very last line. Right here, when you expect him to say to the paralytic, okay, son, my child, you're healed. Get up and walk. Instead, Jesus is full of surprises. He says, instead of saying, son, your legs are healed, he says, son, your sins are forgiven. Just wipes out his sins right there. He says, okay, your sins are gone. So, what happens next? Nothing. Nobody spoke. Room is silent. The paralyzed guy, it seems like stuff's happening because Mark tells us what people are thinking, but nobody's talking. Paralyzed guy tries to move his legs. Can't. Everyone watches to see his toes start twitching. Nope. Nothing. Friends are up there on the roof, they're watching, they're looking down. Is Jesus gonna do something else or what? Do you think Jesus just misunderstood what they wanted? Do you think later he was, oh, it was healing, oh, my bad, I'm sorry, I was thinking you wanted, I should've known, I should've seen the paralysis, I should've known, I was thinking you wanted forgiveness. No, no, Jesus knew exactly why they came, he knew what they wanted, he knew what they expected, and he intentionally throws all of us for a loop in the way he responds to teach us something. To teach us what? To teach us What's most important? To teach us something about priorities. So the whole first point of this message is Jesus' priorities. How do you think the paralytic would have felt if the story ended right here? Right here at Bridge Fox, story's over. He just forgets his sins, starts picking them back up, carrying them back home, paralyzed, and that's the end of the story. They bring this tragic figure to Jesus, whose life must have just been a nightmare, trying to live back then halfway, and Jesus just forgives him and that's all. How would you feel reading this story, if that's what happened? Your answer to that question reveals something about what you value. Since last time when we talked about cleansing the leper, and I told you spiritual cleansing is more important than physical healing, that was no problem. We could all handle that just fine. Nobody had to feel bad. Everyone's okay with that because the guy also got healed. Right? The leper also got healed. We can handle it just fine when somebody says spiritual is more important than the physical. As long as you get the physical too, then yeah, yeah, yeah. Spiritual is more important. I get it. But what if all you get is the spiritual? Then what? Hurricane Harvey came in, wiped out Texas. A lot of places in Texas flooded. Houston, there was a megachurch in Houston that got a lot of criticism, nationwide criticism, for not opening its doors to let people in soon enough. I don't know what the deal was with that. From what I understand, the criticism might have been unfair because they were trying to meet safety precautions, whatever. Anyway, aside from that, there was a Facebook discussion that I thought was really interesting. A friend of mine, Colton, posted on a Christian Facebook forum, and he made the comment, it's good that this church's doors weren't open to those people, because that church teaches a false gospel. Now what was interesting to me was the reactions that his post got, because it was a firestorm of reaction on his webpage. negative reaction from Christians who agreed that this church teaches a false gospel. But they said my friend was being cruel and inhumane, and he didn't care about these poor flood victims and what they were going through. And as I watched that debate go on, it became clear that these people would rather have the folks in Houston be exposed to a false gospel and get temporary relief from their physical suffering than to be protected from the false gospel and be exposed to the flood. You could see what they really valued when it was one or the other. People give lip service to the reality of spiritual dangers. And they say, yeah, yeah, spiritual, there's real spiritual dangers. But in real world situations, they don't seem to really believe that spiritual dangers matter way more than physical ones. Which is worse, to be homeless and cold and wet and uncomfortable, or to be led astray by a false gospel and go to hell forever? Which is the greater danger? What Jesus does here is very important, and I'm taking some time on it, because it has all kinds of implications for practical ministry. So often people say things like, you have to meet people's physical needs first before you give them the gospel. A lot of people operate that way. A lot of churches, they have soup kitchens, and they're handing out food, and they're doing all kinds of humanitarian stuff first before they ever get around to preaching the gospel, because they say you've got to earn your right to preach the gospel by giving people physical stuff that they need. And they say that's the approach, and they'll even say that it comes from Jesus. Evidently, Jesus didn't buy into that philosophy. He didn't read that book, because what he does here is the exact opposite of that. Jesus deals with this guy's sins first. He's just as paralyzed as ever. Jesus has the power to heal this guy with a thought, and he does it. He leaves him paralyzed, and just forgives his sin. See, Jesus doesn't look at people the same way we do. We care mostly about temporary, physical, temporal problems. He sees people, he cares mostly about eternal, spiritual issues. We look at a quadriplegian, our first thought is always, ah, poor guy, can't walk, rough level. Jesus looks at the same guy and says, ah, poor guy, he's doomed to judgment and the wrath of God. He's alienated from God. He needs forgiveness. His parentalism, it's a devil compared to that. Now did this guy come to Jesus seeking forgiveness? I don't know, nothing in the text indicates that, and if he was, he would be unique, because you never see that in the Gospels. People don't come to Jesus, people come to Jesus asking for a lot of stuff, mostly healing, but they'll come and ask for spiritual information, they'll come and ask for deliverance, they'll come and ask can we follow you, they'll ask for positions in his kingdom, they'll ask him for all kinds of stuff, but you never see anybody come and ask Jesus for forgiveness of sins. When it comes up, it comes up because Jesus brought it up, the topic of forgiveness of sins. My guess is this man was mostly wanting healing. He wanted to walk. And Jesus gave him something far greater. It's like a beggar asking for a dollar and he gets a billion dollar estate instead. But he doesn't get the dollar. Sometimes the cruelest thing God can ever do is to answer your prayers. The cruelest thing God can ever do is to give you the deepest desire of your heart sometimes. If Jesus would have healed this guy and sent him away unforgiven with healthy legs, tragic. Tragic. Forgiveness is not something that people typically seek, which is insanity, because it is the most important thing. So when we started, I asked, I said, getting all this stuff, like pardon, you don't have to go to hell anymore, you don't have to be punished for your sins, you get all these fringe benefits, spiritual life, going to heaven, all that's fringe benefits, none of that's the main thing. What's the main thing? Most important thing, most important thing, main thing, is what Jesus gives this guy, forgiveness of sins, forgiveness. Now, you might hear that and say, wait, wait, wait. That list of fringe benefits, Sounds like forgiveness of sins to me. Isn't that forgiveness? Doesn't forgiveness mean the same thing as pardoning? You don't have to be punished anymore? No. No. Forgiveness is not the same thing as pardoning. Think about this. Suppose a child disobeys his father and the father is angry and imposes some kind of consequences on this child. And after a while, the child can't stand being at odds with his dad, and so he comes and he confesses and he apologizes. I'm sorry, dad. And he begs forgiveness. Will you please forgive me? And if that happens, let me ask you this question. Is it possible for the father to lift the consequences, but still not forgive? Is that possible? Now let me ask you this. Would it also be possible for the father to Completely forgive. Welcome the child with open arms, like the prodigal father embracing his son that came back, and he throws a party and he celebrates. But he still leaves the consequences in place to teach him? Is that possible? So, if it's possible to pardon without forgiveness, or to forgive without pardon, then obviously, pardon and forgiveness are not the same thing. They're different. Pardon is a legal issue. Forgiveness is a relational issue. Forgiveness is when the closeness of the relationship is restored and the offended party no longer looks at the sinner through the lens of that sin anymore. The sin does not affect the way he feels about this person anymore. That's forgiveness. as one writer put it, forgiveness is the untroubled communication of love. So the love throughout the whole thing, the love is still there, but it's troubled, the communication of that love is troubled by the sin, and then when forgiveness happens, that disruption ends, and now there's untroubled communication of love. It's really sad that we so often seek the fringe benefits of forgiveness and not the forgiveness itself. We want to be free from the guilt feelings. We want to be absolved of punishment. Get rid of the consequences. We want the spot to be gone. We want the guilt out. We don't want to feel dirty anymore. We want all that. But how often do we seek all that, but we don't even seek the heart and soul of forgiveness, which is closeness with God again. Imagine some co-worker or someone at church that gets mad at you, cusses you out in front of everybody, and goes around spreading all kinds of lies about you, and messes up your whole life, and now everybody believes these lies about you, and it's impossible to do your job now, and all that's happening. And then a week later, he gets to feeling really bad about what he did. And he feels the stain on his soul. He feels dirty on the inside. And so he's talking to his friends about it. Oh, I wish I could get rid of the stain. I wish I could be clean. And I want to be washed. And he does everything he can to change and become a better man and all that. Well, well, that's great. But it's great that he wants to be a better man. It's great that he wants to be clean and cleansed and all that. Get rid of the spot on his soul. That's great as far as it goes. But what's missing? He hasn't come to you and said, I'm sorry. Right? He hasn't tried to make things right with you. You see, the guilt feelings, that's a problem, but that's secondary. The main issue is the broken relationship. When you say the sentence to someone, I forgive you, that's a very personal, relational thing to say, isn't it? If you say, I forgive your financial debt, then that could just be a business transaction. But if somebody sins against you and you forgive that, you say, I forgive that, that's very personal. That's the relationship being restored. You're back on friendly terms. You're no longer looking at this person through the lens of their sin. You no longer let that sin affect the way you feel about this person when you think about them. That's forgiveness. And that's what Jesus gave this man. That's the million dollar estate that he got instead of the one dollar that he asked for. Now, did the paralytic understand all that? I don't know if he understood it. I guarantee he understands it now. If we could interview him, if we could just get him down from heaven, just interview him right here in the room and just ask him, what do you think he would say? He might say to me, oh, yeah, back then, I mean, my memory's a little foggy, but yeah, I remember that I really wanted to walk. I thought, oh, that would make me happy. That's what I wanted with all my heart. Oh, if I could walk. Now I think about it, like, if I could have walked around on Earth in that little fragment of blink of an eye years that I was on Earth. I've been with Jesus about 2,000 years now. Closeness with the father is so much better, matters so much more. And by the way, just as an aside, Thinking of forgiveness as the central issue of salvation can really be helpful in evangelism. I've been noticing this as I've been sharing the gospel online with that chat web ministry that I do. One of the most difficult parts of sharing the gospel with somebody, I think, is starting the conversation, right? How do you get the conversation going? And then, once you get it going on spiritual things, how do you discern if they're a Christian or not? Because if you ask them, are you a Christian, and they say yes, how much does that really tell you? Millions of people think they're Christians and they're not saved. If you ask them, do you know for sure that if you died tonight you would go to heaven, that narrows it down a little bit more, but still, there's an awful lot of people who are 100% sure they're going to heaven, and they're not. They have absolutely no understanding of the gospel when you talk to them about it. And then you're in this uncomfortable kind of situation where you have to tell them all their beliefs are wrong. Actually, you're not going to heaven because your beliefs are all wrong. And that's not a great approach, right? That's not how you win people's hearts. So the thing that I've found that's really working well for me is to just ask the question, do you know for sure that all of your sins are forgiven? And I'm finding out there's a lot of people who are very sure they're going to heaven, but they're not sure at all that their sins are forgiven. And it's a great question to ask even for Christians, because a lot of times I find out the person is saved, but they still answer no to that question, just because they don't understand. They say, no, I'm not sure, and it leads to some great conversation. Sometimes I'll ask, if somebody walked up to you, a friend walked up to you and said, how can I know for sure that all my sins are forgiven, what would you tell them? and you can get an idea of how they think. If you ask the person if they know that they're going to heaven or how can a person know for sure that they're going to heaven, usually that will get people thinking in terms of religious observance. Most of the time, people will answer that question and say, read my Bible, go to church, do good stuff, more good words. It kind of gets them on that track. But if you ask them about forgiveness, you're asking them about a relational thing, and that puts them much more into a mindset of thinking about relationship with God in personal terms. It just directs the conversation in a much better way. Anyway, so, that's all free of charge. That's the point here. So what's the answer to our question? How do you know for sure that your sins are forgiven? Let's just deal with that question. On what basis does God decide to forgive some people's sins and not other people's sins? Well, Jesus is gonna answer that question right now, verse five. When Jesus saw their face, He said to the paralytic, son, your sins are forgiven. So what reason does that verse give for why Jesus forgave the sins? One word, faith, faith. He forgave his sins when he saw their faith. The only prerequisite for forgiveness of sins in this verse is faith. So that's point number two. First point is the, of Jesus' priority, which is spiritual things ahead of physical things. Point number two, prerequisite for that spiritual healing, faith. Faith, and that's not just in this verse, it's everywhere you look in the Bible. That's how it was for Abraham, that's how it is for us, no matter where you look in Scripture, Romans 3.28, a man is justified by faith, apart from the works of the law, Romans 5.1, therefore, having been justified by faith, we have peace with God. You have faith, you're forgiven. You don't have faith, you're not forgiven. John 8, 24. If you do not believe that I am, Jesus said, you will indeed die in your sins. You won't be forgiven, because you're unfaithful. Now that's hard for people to swallow, because it just seems like you must have to do something. Get baptized. At least pray a prayer and ask Jesus, forgive my sins, or something. It's hard for people to accept that you can just believe and instantly your sins are just wiped out, they're just all forgiven. It's hard for people to believe today. Harder for people to believe back then, because back then, sin, forgiveness of sin was all tied in with the sacrificial system, right? You offer a lamb on the altar and you get forgiveness. This guy, he doesn't have for a sacrifice. There's no priest anywhere to be found. They're not even close to the temple. No, none of it, none of it's there. Jesus is rattling the very foundations of the entire religion of Judaism here in this moment. He's showing them something that they should have already understood from the Old Testament, that being right with God is an issue of faith. They could have gotten that in the Old Testament just from Psalm 51, where David is repenting and says, if you desire sacrifice, I would bring it, but that's not what you desire. Faith alone. So we understand all that. Although in this passage, there's a little bit of a twist, isn't there? Because it doesn't say when Jesus sought his faith. It says when Jesus sought their faith, he forgave him. I wrestled and wrestled with that. Why is the focus on their faith instead of this guy's faith? Have you ever heard of God showing mercy on a person because of someone else's faith? Well, actually, that's not all that unheard of, is it? Happens all the time in Scripture. It's called intercession. Didn't Job do that? Didn't Job routinely pray and offer sacrifices for his children just in case they sinned? asking mercy for them? Didn't Moses pray to God and ask for forgiveness for the people? Didn't Daniel do that? Stephen and Jesus, didn't they both pray, forgive them? You know not what they do? People that were murdering them? Nothing unusual at all about God having mercy on someone because of someone else's faith. What makes this different is normally intercession takes the form of prayer, In this case, it's not prayer, right? It's action. This is not intercessory prayer. It's intercessory action. It's intercessory pain through a roof. But either one works, intercessory prayer or intercessory action. Either way, it works because it's not the intercession that matters. It's the what? Faith. Now, what about the person? What about the paralytic? Does that person who's being forgiven have to have faith? Do you have to have faith in order to be forgiven? Yes. Yes. But, very often, the person who's being forgiven, the reason they have faith is because God had mercy on them and sparked faith in their heart because of some friends who were trusting on that person's behalf. Because of that intercession. I believe this paralytic did believe That's why his sins were forgiven. I think he did believe, but I think he believed at that moment. I don't think he believed until he met Jesus at this moment. If he had already been a believer before they brought him, then his sins would have already been forgiven before they brought him, right? So the fact that they get forgiven right now means he believed right now. So I think he was an unbeliever before he came. Jesus moved it, he saw his friend's faith, that moved Jesus' heart, and he says, okay, I'm gonna move in your heart, and he created faith in this man's heart, the man believed, and Jesus forgave. And here's another question I wrestled with. And I finally answered the question, why does he save him based on their faith, but then I was wondering, why does Jesus not say anything about them being forgiven? Why doesn't he say, when he saw their faith, He forgave all, everybody who has faith. The only answer I can come up with is they must have already had forgiveness before they came. They did what they did because they had faith, and if they had faith, then they were already forgiven, because faith is the only basis for forgiveness, right? So these guys were already believers, and they were bringing their unbelieving friend to Jesus. That's what's going on in this story. Now one more question. If the man finally did believe, why does the passage not mention that? It only mentions the friend's belief. The only answer I can see for that is because that's where God wants to direct our attention, in this account. We should learn from this that Intercessory action is critically important for bringing people to faith in Christ. We need to follow these guys' example with creative, insistent faith when it comes to bringing people to Christ. Because if we do that, then Jesus is more likely to have mercy on this person based on our faith. It might be just as simple as, You might not even have to get that creative. It might just be, oh, you can't make it, you haven't been going to church? How about if I drop by your house and just pick you up on Sunday mornings? You haven't been in your Bible habit? What if we just read your scripture together? We'll just get together and have coffee every Friday morning. Do you have faith that just thinks, if I could just expose my friend to Christ's glory a little bit, something would happen. Do you trust Christ that much? And you're so confident in that, that you will get creative as you do what it takes to tear through a roof and get that friend to Jesus. So if you look through Jesus' eyes, and you understand the priorities, you understand what's really important, You'd really be fine if this story ended at verse five, right? It wouldn't bother you. The guy gets forgiveness. Jesus forgives the guy, teaches us what faith is all about, shows God's priorities, reveals what it means to be forgiven. Mark could just wrap it all up right here, verse five, and the account would be a great treasure. Because these five verses teach us what it's like to have an appointment with Dr. Jesus, and to receive spiritual healing. We learned that the one thing you need to do in order to be healed, and that it should be spiritual, not physical. And that you can have your loved ones healed by Dr. Jesus if you have this kind of insistent faith. So this would be a great place for the story to end, but it doesn't end in Versailles. In fact, right here is where the story just starts getting really interesting. The scribes are gonna react. And Jesus is going to confront them right in front of everybody in a very dramatic fashion and it's amazing. He dropped one of his patented brilliant questions on them, leaving them speechless and giving us a profound spiritual lesson and sending everyone out there rejoicing and praising God by the end of the account. Everything we've seen so far in the passage is really just introductory. We haven't even gotten to the main point. All we have now is the setting of the scene. But, tragically, we're out of time for tonight. So, I hope you can make it back next time, because this is just burning in me. I wanted to get to the end, but they had to cover this first part, because we're going to see the showdown between the religious leaders, and then we'll get the main point of this whole thing. So, I hope you can make it back next time. For now, let's close in prayer. Dear Lord God, thank you for Thank you for the people who muscled through opposition and obstacles and problems and difficulties and impossibilities in order to get the Gospel to us. To get the Gospel to somebody who got it to us. Lord, give us that kind of faith. Call to our minds someone who It's like this paralytic. If they just met you, they would embrace you. But they need somebody to roll up their sleeves and figure out a way to get them to you. Give us that kind of faith. We ask it in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen. Well, any comments or discussion? Yeah, just a thought, I guess. When he says that he saw their faith, it seems to me kind of that the parable is included in the they or only because When they were raising them up on the roof, he would say, no, no, and stop them and say, no. Yeah, so when he says stop them in the face, it's natural to assume that they would include all five. Yeah. But the attention is mainly on the four, because the way this describes is they do something, they tear a hole in the roof, and when he saw their faith, and to change the they from, because the first they is four, right? Four people are tearing a hole in the roof. And then to say the next they is five is a little bit of a It might be the case, but the main focus is on the four. I don't think that the guy was, you know, when a person comes to faith in Christ, something's happening in them for a period of time. They don't go from abject unbelief to full-blown faith instantaneously. Now for some people it's pretty quick, and for other people it's years of this turning and drawing by the Holy Spirit. And so you can see there are some people who, like Jesus said the one time, you're not far from the kingdom. You're not in the kingdom, but you're not far from the kingdom. Which to me, the Spirit draws, He works, He He enlightens, he opens eyes, in a gradual way sometimes. So, I can picture this paralytic not resisting. Saying, yeah, yeah I do want to see Jesus. Maybe it's mostly I want to be healed. I'm kind of curious. And it was enough to where he was receptive to where he's laying there and Jesus says something and the guy just believes it. You're forgiven. You know what? I am. He's right. I believe that. The scribes heard it and they had a whole different reaction. So the fact that he didn't reject that shows that he at least believed then. When that faith sparked, I don't know. And it doesn't seem like, and correct me if I'm not seeing it, their faith was not, oh yeah, we got to get down this in so he can forgive your sins. It was they had faith that he could heal you, not so much salvation. Yeah, that's a good question. Were the four, were they looking for forgiveness of sins or were they looking for just healing? And I think that there's a good reason to assume that they had both in mind. I think they wanted their guy to be healed physically. But I think it's also likely Given the fact that they had faith, which means I think they also would have had forgiveness, that they would have wanted their friend to have that same forgiveness. And so I think when you want to bring your friend to Jesus, you want them to get the whole package of everything that Jesus offers. And how much they understood about the priority of spiritual things above physical things, we don't know. All of us struggle with that, right? So is salvation the forgiveness of sins or the believing in the sacrifice? I somehow feel confused and I don't know why. Okay. So salvation is deliverance or rescue. So you are in spiritual catastrophe, you've got a spiritual danger, spiritual dilemma, problem, and you're rescued from that. What is it that you're rescued from? Well, part of it is the penalty of sin, hell. Part of it is other consequences of sin. But the main meat of it is alienation from God. and all that results from that. That's what you need to be saved from, is that alienation. Forgiveness is the chief thing that saves you from that. Because forgiveness takes away that alienation and brings you closer to God. So if someone is forgiven of their sins, they're going to heaven. Yes. Whether they have to believe the way they got forgiven. They don't have to believe any of that. Well, what they have to believe, what belief is, so that's a great question, what is belief? Because actually I didn't cover that in the lesson, that's an excellent question, what does faith even mean? Because I'll tell you, when you're sharing the gospel with somebody, you don't cover that, then you haven't covered anything, because most people have no idea what faith means. There's two parts to faith. Belief and trust. So you believe information, you trust a person. You believe the truth in scripture about who Jesus is and when he did, the cross, everything. You believe that he is the one who saved you, not yourself, not your good works. You believe that he is who you claim to be. All this truth you accept as truth. That's half of it. The other half is trusting him. So you trust a person, meaning You say, I trust you, Jesus, to be my guide in life. So if I'm walking through life, and all of a sudden everything in me says, this is the way to happiness, and your word says, no, no, this is the way to happiness, which way am I gonna go? I think I'm gonna trust you more than I trust myself. I'm gonna trust you more than I trust my own feelings. That's trusting. I'm gonna follow you because I trust you more than I trust myself. So I believe the truth, I trust you. Put those two together, you get faith. And that's why sometimes faith is just couched in terms of following Christ, and sometimes it's couched in terms of believing in truth. Yeah, that clarified it. Only other question, so you're not, you're not being, this is confusing to me, you're not being saved from hell to go to heaven, you're being forgiven of your sins. Yeah, well, the fact that you're not going to hell but you're going to heaven is a fringe benefit of salvation. There's a definite part of it. But what makes heaven heaven? What makes heaven heaven is closeness with God. What makes hell hell? What makes hell hell is distance from God, alienation from God. And so in a sense you could say going to hell or going to heaven is the same thing as being far from God or being close to God. But speaking of it in terms of forgiveness makes it easier to understand the relational component. Whereas speaking in terms of going somewhere doesn't automatically make you think in terms of a relational form. I just finished a great book by Keller on prayer, and I was wondering if you had been reading that at all? No, but I did read something by Keller on this passage. Is that where Beth came from? Yeah, he did talk about Beth. It was in his prayer book, too. It's just something I've been thinking over the last many months. Homiletics. When you take homiletics to a certain degree, and I think you paint a picture very well of of what's going on or what may be happening. I guess I've been thinking about that too and some other preachers and stuff. It's like, when does it become eisegesis? Putting details into the story, when is that eisegesis? It becomes eisegesis when some point, some spiritual point you're making comes from a detail that's not in the text. That's eisegesis. interjecting color in a way that points people to the points that are made in the text is the goal of the preacher that's what I was trying to do with every bit of color that I inserted and it wasn't just random I was coming up with stuff like for example everything was silent That's actually from the text. There's clues in the text that that was the case. So the fact that the guys walked back down the road, I don't know if they walked back down the road. Maybe they fought ahead and thought, just in case we can't get in, we'll bring some ropes. But I'm thinking, most people just don't bring ropes. Probably, they would have had to go get the ropes. Plus, it was just a little bit of a dramatic thing when I said they went away, and you're all saying, they didn't go. Okay, so the color pointing to the detail in, instead of providing color to point to something. Right, so I've heard that. I've heard some great storyteller, and then they add some little bit of color, and then they make a whole point. In fact, in this very passage, I've heard a number of preachers do that. They'll put in some little bit of color, and then they're drawing a spiritual point and principle from that There's not even in the text, I'm like, wait a second, that's not what it's teaching. So yeah, you've got to be careful.