You may be seated, and our children may go out to Children's Church at this time. And as they go, if you would take your Bibles and turn to the Gospel of Luke. Luke's Gospel and chapter 17. This morning we're going to look together at the healing of 10 lepers, verses 11 to 19. On the way to Jerusalem, He was passing along between Samaria and Galilee. And as He entered a village, He was met by ten lepers who stood at a distance and lifted up their voices saying, Jesus, Master, have mercy on us. When He saw them, He said to them, Go and show yourself to the priests. And as they went, they were cleansed. Then one of them, when he saw that he was healed, turned back, praising God with a loud voice. And he fell on his face at Jesus' feet, giving Him thanks. Now, he was a Samaritan. Then Jesus answered, Were not ten cleansed? Where are the nine? Was no one found to return and give praise to God except this foreigner? And he said to him, rise and go your way. Your faith has saved you. One of the traditions that we have at my home is that we pray together as a family before we eat our meals. And one of the things that we often pray for during those times is that the Lord would make us grateful for the daily food that he provides for us. And the reason that we need to pray that, of course, is because so often we're not grateful. And we're coming to the meal not full of thanksgiving and praise toward God as we ought. And so we pray that the Lord would change the attitude of our heart and make us grateful and fill us with thanksgiving toward Him. If you were to make a list of all of the great sins to avoid committing before the Lord, a lack of gratitude or thanksgiving might not be the first one that pops into your mind. But in fact, it receives remarkable prominence in the scriptures. And it's interesting, there are two very different situations in which your gratitude toward God can grow dim. On the one hand, your gratitude to God can grow dim when God's earthly gifts and provisions are at least apparently withheld from you in some way. When people face significant earthly trials, significant hardships and sufferings, and therefore might be tempted to think God is failing to provide faithfully for them, and so they don't feel grateful toward Him. One of the primary sins that is prominent among the people of Israel when they faced trials in the wilderness was grumbling against God. grumbling against the Lord. They were not satisfied with His provision. They didn't trust that it was good, and therefore, they grumbled. And so the Apostle Paul, he exhorts believers, Philippians 2.14, do all things without grumbling or questioning that you may be blameless and innocent, children of God without blemish in the midst of a crooked and twisted generation. It might seem understandable to you that you would be tempted toward a lack of gratitude when you face trials and hardships. What might seem more surprising is the other situation in which your gratitude toward God may grow dim. And this is the particular situation that is highlighted in our passage this morning. That's when God's earthly gifts and merciful provisions are given to you. And you may ask, well, how might that lead to a lack of gratitude? Well, in those situations, you are tempted to not be grateful to God because you largely forget about God. Just take it for granted, His blessings, and even begin to feel a sense of entitlement to those blessings. And you can even begin to view God as simply a means to an end, the one from whom you can get your gifts. You can fall in love with the gifts themselves and you don't receive them as they were intended. Namely, to lead you back up to the beauty and the glory and the grace of God Himself. So you begin to separate the gifts from the giver, and instead of letting your affection and your appreciation flow through those gifts to find their proper end and their proper resting place in God, instead your affection and your appreciation is directed toward those gifts as ends in themselves. Interesting enough, when that happens, there is, you might say, a double impact on your gratitude. Because not only does God grow distant as the goal of your delight and your praise, but in the process, the gifts themselves become unsatisfying as well. Because you're using them wrongly. You're seeking to gain from them what they cannot give you. Your hearts were made for God, and when you try to fill that desire with His gifts instead of with Him, you're just left wanting, and you're left wanting more, lusting for more. You're wanting His gifts from what they can provide for you that only God can provide. and using them not for what they were intended for, you end up ungrateful and you're not thankful. In 2 Timothy chapter 3, the Apostle Paul, he is warning Timothy that times of difficulty were coming. People were going to give themselves over to all kinds of wickedness and ungodliness. And he gives a long list. And the list begins with people being lovers of self and lovers of money. It ends with people being lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God. And right in the center of the list, you see this description, ungrateful. So Paul is saying that the hearts of many people will be crowded and captured with the things of this life, and they will not be filled with praise and thanksgiving toward God Himself. We see this in our passage this morning. Even in the presence of Jesus himself during his ministry on the earth, ten men who experienced the remarkable, merciful provision and blessing of the Son of God, Jesus Christ, in the midst of great earthly need, and only one of them who rightly stewards that earthly gift, allows it to lead him to the goal of gratitude and praise and worship of God Himself through Jesus. May the Lord help us today to learn from a Samaritan leper so that we will do the same and not leave this place today with ungrateful hearts. Look again at our passage. The first significant point to take note of is the simple fact that Jesus is on his way to Jerusalem. Luke begins this account, verse 11, by noting that Jesus was passing along between Samaria and Galilee, and most significantly that he was on his way to Jerusalem. You may remember from previous passages in Luke's gospel that this is more than just a random, just a geographical tidbit for people who like to have a particular setting in mind. There's great significance for Luke to this statement. This is actually a banner waving to remind Luke's readers what Jesus's ministry is ultimately about. Think back to chapter nine, after Jesus had already demonstrated broadly in his public ministry through his miracles, through his teachings, that he was the Messiah whom God had promised to send, that he was bringing God's kingdom upon the earth. And it all climaxes there in chapter nine, remember, where Peter's dramatic confession of the truth comes. Jesus, you are the Christ. And then immediately, Jesus explains that He was going to establish God's Kingdom, but He was going to do it in a way that they were not expecting. The Son of Man, He says, must suffer many things, and be rejected by the elders, and chief priests, and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised. And then Luke narrates just a little later in that same chapter that Jesus set his face to go to Jerusalem. And that puts Jesus on a journey to the cross, from chapter 9 to the end of Luke's gospel. Luke mentions it again in chapter 13, that he went on his way through towns and villages, teaching and journeying toward Jerusalem. And then we see it here again in chapter 17. Jesus is on His way to Jerusalem. And then from here, it's like a drumbeat as you near the climax. The references to this journey, they just increase. Chapter 18, verse 35, He drew near to Jericho. 19, verse 1, He entered Jericho and was passing through. That's right next to Jerusalem. 19, 11, He was near to Jerusalem. 1928, He went on ahead going up to Jerusalem. And then 1941, when He drew near and saw the city, He wept over it. He knew what would happen there. This was the purpose for which Jesus came. He would be rejected by men. He would suffer under the very wrath of God. and He would redeem God's people through His sacrificial death. And Luke is helping you to see that. He's waving the banner. He's banging the drum. Don't forget, Luke says, as you read what this book is all about. Don't forget as you see the miracles. Don't forget as you hear Jesus' teaching. This is the line that runs through the center of everything. Jesus. The Messiah is on His way to Jerusalem to die, to be rejected, to sacrifice His life and to rise again so that repentance and forgiveness of sins could be offered on the basis of His saving work. That is the ultimate hope for Samaritan lepers. That is the ultimate hope for Jewish lepers. That is the ultimate hope for ungrateful sinners who fail to steward the abundance of God's temporal, earthly blessing and fail to receive them rightly by letting them lead you to your hope and your joy in God Himself and in Jesus Christ, His Son. You must keep the cross before you as you consider the ingratitude of your own heart and receive His invitation to repentance. So as Jesus, the Savior, is on His way to Jerusalem, You see in verse 12, as he entered a village, he was met by ten lepers who stood at a distance and lifted up their voices, saying, Jesus, Master, have mercy on us. The second important point in this account, it's the cry for mercy. The cry for mercy. These men knew that they needed help. So far, so good. All ten of them had it right. They did need help. Their earthly circumstances were desperate. And it rightly led them to cry out to Jesus for mercy. Luke says that these ten men were lepers. Leprosy was a term that could refer to a variety of skin diseases. It's described in Leviticus chapters 13 and 14. God speaks rather extensively in the Old Testament law about how Israel as a people were to relate to someone who had contracted one of these infectious skin diseases. The priest would examine someone, and if they had a leprous infection, the priest would pronounce that person unclean. So to be a leper was very miserable. It was miserable physically. Leviticus 13 speaks of boils and of swellings and of raw flesh. If they had any feeling left at all, which in some cases they did not, there was no doubt significant pain and discomfort that came with these infections. It was horrible. And in addition to the physical misery, when a person was identified with leprosy, they were pronounced ritually unclean. And therefore they were required to live alone outside the community of God's people. We read about God requiring this in Leviticus chapter 13. meant to be excluded. It meant to be excluded from participating in all of the activities of the community of God. Excluded from temple worship. Excluded from the synagogues. Excluded from Jewish feasts and festivals. Excluded from the joy of just regular day-to-day relationships and fellowship within the community. It was a terrible and more often than not lifelong burden. That's why we read in verse 12 that although these lepers in some sense they met Jesus, that actually they stood at a distance. They were not allowed to have close contact with those who were clean. Now there's no mention of the idea that these men had sinned personally in some particular way in order to cause their sickness. God did on occasion strike people for their sin directly with leprosy. We saw in our Wednesday night study last year that happening with King Uzziah as a direct punishment for his sin. But it seems here that the experience of these men is simply a reflection of the fallen and sinful state of the human race in general. the disorder that is in creation because sin has entered into the world. They're experiencing life in a fallen world, as you and I so often do, even if not to this great extent. Nevertheless, in this general sense, you can be sure their experience still served as a pointer to their need to be personally forgiven of their sins and reconciled to God. sin had entered into the world and sin was in their life personally as it is for you and for me. It's always a reminder that there's something wrong that needs to be remedied, that needs to be dealt with and set right. Especially, I would say, in the lepers case, their exclusion from the community, it's a picture of the need that every individual has to receive God's forgiveness and to be restored to his people. That was at a more fundamental level what the arrival of God's kingdom was all about, even beyond physical healings. We'll come back to that point. But what we can say for now is that these men, at least they knew their earthly need. They also knew of Jesus' reputation and ministry of powerfully helping people who were in great need, who were unable to help themselves. This is far enough along in Jesus' ministry at this point. He had so broadly displayed His power to those in Israel, His power to heal. There would have been no question as to His ability in this regard to heal these men. So they lift up their voices from a distance and they cry out to Jesus, have mercy on us, help us. And again, so far in the story, you can rightly learn from all 10 of these men. You're in need today in so many ways. physical struggles, sickness, disease, injury, stress, sorrow, depression, social and relational divisions and conflicts, economic woes, job troubles, exhaustion, loneliness, anxiety, You have so many needs today. There's not one of you out there who's listening to that list thinking, I have no idea what you're talking about. And you are right to recognize your weakness and your need in every area of your life. And it is good for you to call out to Jesus and to ask Him for His help. Ask Him for His care. Ask Him for His merciful provision in every area of your life. And what you see is that Jesus is full of compassion And Jesus is full of power to help save. Isn't it great to know that Jesus wants you to know this? He inspired this passage to be written down by Luke so that you would know this. This is our third key point in the passage this morning, the compassion and the power of Jesus. There are two really wonderful attributes to be brought together in a savior, compassion and power. It is not the Jesus of the Bible who really sympathizes with you in your need and in your struggle, but He just doesn't have the ability to do anything about it. That is not the real Savior. And it is not the Jesus of the Bible who is really powerful, but who just doesn't care what you're going through. The real Jesus, The Jesus of the Bible is full of compassion and unlimited sovereign power. Look at verse 14. When he saw them, he said to them, Go and show yourselves to the priests. And as they went, they were cleansed. Jesus, he displays here again, as you've seen so often in Luke's gospel, his absolute authority over sickness. It's interesting how he would show this in different ways with different healings. Do you remember the leper back in Luke chapter five? What did he do? Jesus, he stretched out his hand and he touched him. I believe to show that when Jesus touches an unclean person, it's not Jesus that becomes defiled, but the person becomes clean. Jesus had no problem touching a leper. That leper would become clean. But in this case, he simply tells them, go, show yourselves to the priests. And why does he tell them to do that? Well, the requirement of a person who had been healed of leprosy was to go to the priests. And the priests were the ones who would then inspect them to see if they would be declared clean and allowed re-entry into the community through the proper ceremony. You can read all about that in Leviticus 14. So the priests basically served as the health inspectors when it came to these issues of uncleanness and disease. And so Jesus, in response to their request for healing, simply says, go and show yourself to the priests. And they would have known exactly what that meant. They would have been completely forbidden from going to those priests as lepers. But if Jesus is saying, go to the priests, he is saying, you will be clean by the time you get there. It's as good as done. There's no question that it's going to happen. When the priests examined these men, their flesh, it will have been made new by the declarative word of Jesus. And sure enough, Luke tells us in verse 14 that as they went, they were cleansed. You've seen it again and again in Luke's gospel. Jesus is full of compassion and He's full of power to meet your needs. And He wants you to trust Him for that. There's not a cell in your body that operates outside of the sovereign authority of Jesus Christ. There is not a macro or microeconomic factor that operates above and beyond the authority of Jesus Christ. There is no president, no pope, no king, no dictator, no prime minister, no terrorist group, no corporate executive that is above the command and sovereign authority of Jesus Christ. You also know, and you have to put this up together with these truths, you also know, as you saw in verse 11, that Jesus' purpose in his first advent and in this present age was not primarily about the relief of physical sickness and suffering or earthly trials and tribulations. You've got to hear both of these truths if you're going to think rightly about Jesus. It is true, He dramatically and broadly brought physical healing to the people of Israel on earth as a testimony to His identity as the Messiah, as the one who would establish God's kingdom upon the earth. has continued as the risen Lord Jesus today ascended at the right hand of God. He has continued to heal people throughout church history. We've witnessed such blessings here among us. And we are so grateful to Jesus for them. But in Jesus' first coming, it would not be as was expected. The kingdom would not be fully consummated. final and permanent fulfillment of what all of these blessings point to only comes with the new heavens and the new earth. Right now you live in a time of tension. When salvation has been won through the death and the resurrection of Jesus, but you are still waiting to experience the fullness of that salvation. And only then will all sickness and all trial and all suffering and all pain and all sin be completely done away with. So what do you do now? What do you do with that in light of your present afflictions, your present circumstances? Well, you still cry out to the Lord to meet your need, and you trust Him for His wisdom, and you wait patiently for that perfect and final fulfillment of those promises, knowing that He is compassionate, and He is powerful, and He can be trusted in the meantime as you wait for that day to come. It's true, isn't it, that you often experience His earthly, physical, temporal provision in your life today. This was the case in the lives of all ten of these men. Their lives had denigrated to an existence of relative isolation. They had banded together, but generally they were isolated and experienced physical misery. Their best days were behind them. There was little hope for any change for the better, but a reasonable expectation of life just getting worse. And with a word, Jesus completely reverses all of that. abundant, temporal, physical, earthly provision. But at this point, you begin to see a difference in the way that they steward that blessing that Jesus has given to all ten of them. Look at verse 15. Then one of them When he saw that he was healed, turned back, praising God with a loud voice, and he fell on his face at Jesus' feet, giving him thanks. Now he was a Samaritan. Then Jesus answered, were not ten cleansed? Where are the nine? Was no one found to return and give praise to God except this foreigner? And he said to him, rise and go your way. Your faith has saved you. So here you see a response of praise, a response of praise. Of these 10 men, only one of them returned to Jesus in order to express his thanks and his praise. He's overwhelmed with gratitude toward God and toward Jesus for what Jesus has done. He's instructed by this earthly blessing, and it leads him to worship. It leads him to praise. To give thanks in the fullest sense of the word. Praise includes the idea of thanksgiving, but it also captures with it the necessary component of worship and faith. that must be expressed in and with that thanksgiving. Praise is the expression of reverence and gratitude as an act of worship. I believe that's a really important point here in terms of what distinguishes this Samaritan from the other lepers who fail to return and express their own praise. And here's what I mean. The issue was not simply that the Samaritan just tended to be a more thankful or a more polite person than the others. He wasn't just the kid that his mom taught him to write thank you notes when he was growing up. The difference was that when this man experiences Jesus's gracious provision in relation to his leprosy, that gracious temporal provision led him to recognize the reality of God's redeeming power that was being worked out in the ministry of Jesus. I don't believe this was any secret to this man. Jesus had been making broad and bold claims about himself throughout his ministry. And this man would have known that. And in this temporal blessing, it led him to see he is who he says he is. All the promises, they're true. It's not just about my skin being made well for a couple of years. It's about God's salvation. It's about the Messiah reversing the curse. It's about eternity and forgiveness and reconciliation with my God. And as a result, this man received the eternal life that was found in Jesus. He had found the Messiah. He had found the Christ, the One who had set His face to go to Jerusalem and to die in the place of sinners. And this man was made new. And not just on the outside, but on the inside he was made new. He was spiritually made new. And I don't know how much of the precise details he understood at this moment before the cross and the resurrection, But what you see is that he was led to praise God. He fell down at Jesus' feet, full of thanksgiving, full of trust in Him. And Jesus declared, your faith has saved you. And that is the better translation of verse 19. It's the Greek word sozo. The primary word use in the New Testament to refer to eternal salvation. And it's true, the word, it can also refer simply to physical healing, but I believe that it is being used here to refer to the full sense of salvation, including forgiveness of sins and eternal life. That's the point here. All ten men were made well. This man was saved. It's the exact same phrase that Jesus used back in Luke 7 when He says to that sinful woman, remember, who fell at His feet. And Jesus says, your sins are forgiven. Your faith has saved you. Go in peace. This man became a good steward of Jesus' gracious earthly provision, and he followed that blessing up to the source from whom all blessings flow. and he found the eternal prize, which is Jesus Christ himself. Luke makes the further point here that he was a Samaritan. He was not only an outcast because of his leprosy, he wasn't even fully a Jew. He was, as Jesus says here, a foreigner. He had no rights to the covenant promises of Israel. And yet he alone was the one who responded to the mercy of Jesus with genuine praise and joyful faith toward God. Let that be an encouragement to you. Do you feel distant from God? Do you feel distant from the people of God? Do you feel distant from the hope of eternal life? This word is for you. You're the kind of person that Jesus is looking for, who has nothing to come to Him with. Open hands. You've got nothing to offer. You can just turn from your sin and fall at Jesus' feet and thank Him for His grace and trust Him with your salvation. The other nine, apparently Jews, failed to return and to give praise to God, which it seems Jesus interprets here as a lack of genuine faith and worship. This will be the pattern in the majority of Israel. Jesus, he came to his own, and his own did not receive him, you're told in John 1.11. Many of them experienced the earthly benefits of Jesus's compassion and power displayed in remarkable ways among them. But only a few came and fell at his feet and bowed to him as Lord and gave him praise and thanks and humble trust as the Messiah, the Son of God. And so it was with these nine. Their health was restored. They had been made well. Their social life was restored. Their temporal misery relieved. And in their enjoyment of His gifts, they lost Jesus. They failed to steward God's temporal grace and provision and let it lead them to His eternal provision and to Jesus Himself. They didn't follow that line. And that's the warning for you here in this passage. Are you stewarding God's abundant temporal graces and provisions in your life? Are you recognizing the daily kindnesses shown to you by Jesus and deliberately following them up in faith to the Savior who gives them to you? You may experience many blessings of Jesus during your earthly life. And you may even feel some sense of gratitude for them. But if it never moves you to a personal trust and delight and praise in Jesus himself, where you fall at his feet and you acknowledge him as Savior and Lord, then you have not been saved. It matters not how good life is going right now. If you have not bowed at the feet of Jesus, don't assume that God has accepted you. The only way to receive God's eternal blessings, His eternal blessings, is through the death and the resurrection of Jesus Christ in your place. Have you bowed at His feet? That's the warning. but it's also the encouragement that's given to his people through this one Samaritan. When you turn from your sins and you turn to Jesus, who died and who rose again in Jerusalem, and you trust in him personally for the forgiveness of your sins, for the hope of eternal life, and for every other need that you have, both now and in eternity, when you do that, Your heart is filled with thanks and praise toward God, and Jesus becomes to you a compassionate and powerful Savior, now and forever. Is that your life's hope? Is that your trust? Come to Jesus, bow at His feet, and have your heart filled with thanksgiving and praise because of the eternal blessing and provisions of Jesus. Let us pray together. Our gracious Lord, we worship You as our God and our Savior. We give you thanks and praise for the abundant provisions and gifts that you've given us. Many in this life already. And Lord, we pray that we would let those incredible mercies that you have shown to us lead us rightly to put our hope, to find our joy, not ultimately in those gifts, but in the giver of all good gifts. Lord, you are worthy of all our trust and adoration and praise. And we worship you today through Jesus Christ, in whose name we pray. Amen. Please stand together.