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In the name of Jesus, amen. Dear saints, can you imagine being there in this crowded room in Capernaum on this day when Jesus is teaching, and the people are pressing in to hear his preaching and his teaching and to hear the coming of the kingdom of God, and there’s four guys who have a friend who’s paralyzed, and they’re trying to get him there. They can’t get him into the room, into the house, because it’s just so packed full, so So they take him up on the roof, Mark tells us this, and they dig a hole, and they lower him down into the midst of the crowd, right in front of Jesus. I wonder if they’re like, all right, if we dig here, we’ll probably land behind Jesus, so we’ve got to go over this way. And they land the guy right there, right in front of Jesus.
And I don’t know if you have friends or family who have had such horrible injuries that they have been paralyzed. And one of the things that if you’re with someone, you have to make sure that their limbs stay in the right spot, that they don’t just kind of fall over awkwardly because they can’t control where their arms are landing and where their legs are landing. And so you can almost imagine the sort of awkwardness with which this man is dropped in front of Jesus. And maybe his arm is to the side and maybe his head is not facing the right way and he’s looking at Jesus this way just to kind of get a glimpse of him, but he’s just there, helpless, right in the middle of this crowd.
And everybody knows what this guy needs. I mean, the friends know. That’s why they brought him to Jesus. They know that he needs to be healed. And the crowds know. I mean, you could hardly help from having a deep and profound sympathy for this man who can’t walk, who can’t work, who can’t feed himself, who can’t dress himself, who can’t clean himself. This deep sympathy knowing that if Jesus can do something, if anyone should be healed, he should heal him. Even the scribes that are there and the Pharisees, the grumblers, even I think they must have had some sympathy that this guy could use some help. If Jesus is who he says he is, he probably should show up now, try to help him.
Here’s what happens though. It’s amazing. To this man who’s totally helpless and totally sick, Jesus looks at him and says, first, these strange words, cheer up. And then second, your sins are forgiven. Now, I don’t know what you expect. I don’t think that’s it.
I don’t think anyone expected it. Well, maybe one guy did. Maybe the paralyzed man. But here’s the point. Jesus does not act like we expect him to. I want to think about this quite a bit today. Jesus does not treat us like we think he ought to treat us there’s really two vectors of expectation that that we bring to the lord uh the first and this has to do with what we’re talking about in bible class this week actually how the lord he humbles the proud and he lifts up the humble those are the two vectors that we kind of stand before the lord the one of pride and the other of humility And the way it works is something like this. When we’re proud, when we’re proud of ourselves, then we think that the Lord should probably be proud of us also. I mean, after all, if we’ve impressed ourselves by our good works and we’ve managed to put together an impressive resume, then why wouldn’t the Lord be proud of us? Why wouldn’t the Lord be so happy to receive us into eternal dwellings because of all the good works that we’ve managed to accomplish? If we think highly of ourselves, then surely the Lord will think highly of ourselves, right? Wrong. The Lord, he humbles the proud. It kind of comes in stages because, you know, the way the Lord does it first is he approaches us with his law.
But here’s what happens. If the law comes to us apart from the power of the Spirit, then the proud actually becomes mad at God because of the law. Oh, God has rules of me and expectations and things that I should do and follow. Well, he’s probably wrong and getting in the way of my great life here. So pride sets itself against the Lord. Either it thinks that the Lord is going to just simply welcome us into eternal habitations or else the Lord is going to be wrong himself in his own judgments. And so the Lord has to cast us down. So he is not proud of the proud. He comes to the proud to cast us low, and he does it with the spiritual work of preaching the law. The Spirit comes along, and it shows us not only that we’re sinners, which we know, it shows us that that sin that we’ve committed, all the wrong that we’ve done, everything that we’ve failed to do, is in fact offensive to God, that we are in fact offensive to God. And the result is something like this, words like this, I deserve, we would pray, your wrath and temporal and eternal punishment. Can you imagine saying something like that, thinking something like that, and yet we’ve said it and thought it already today, this morning. I deserve to the Lord, we have deserved your temporal and eternal punishment.
We are so wrong, so wicked, so evil, so full of this wicked nonsense of our sinful flesh and we’ve acted on it and all that we’ve done wrong, all that we’ve thought wrong, all that we’ve said wrong, all the love and good things that we’ve failed to do that we, in fact, are guilty before God. And when we are at last humbled, then our expectations towards God have changed. When we’re proud, we think God is going to be proud of us. But when we’re humbled, we think that God is going to be ashamed of it. ashamed about us or mad at us or ready to destroy us but he’s not he again defies our expectations and he comes to us with with gentleness with mercy he I think it’s how it goes with this guy who was paralyzed I don’t know what happened the Bible doesn’t tell us what happened to give him such a really terrible injury. My guess is that it happened when he was an adult because normally if you have some sort of injury like that from birth or from childhood, then your family is gathered around you. But this guy has four friends gathered around. We were speculating a couple of weeks in Bible class that they might have been there when the injury happened. So they’re carrying along some guilt. But it just has to be that this guy is is looking at this tragedy looking at this event looking at this illness and thinking it must be that that God is mad at me it must be that God is punishing me why am I so broken and why am I so sick and why are things so awful for me and that he can’t escape the idea that it’s because of the anger of God the wrath of God probably because of his own sin and and when we know when we really know how we have offended God and deserved his wrath, then we expect that that’s how he’s going to treat us, with anger, with frustration, with indifference, with wrath, with whatever. But imagine then what happens when this guy is laying there in this kind of pile of shame and guilt and wondering if all of his suffering are God’s wrath and his temporal punishment, and he’s just waiting for the eternal punishment.
And he would think that if God were there or if a holy person were in the room, then he would probably look at him there in his frozen body and say, well, don’t you think this is what you deserve? You earned it. You made the bed. You got to sleep on it.
I was wondering. I was wondering if he was trying to talk his friends out of bringing him to Jesus that morning. Hey, hey, this guy, Jesus, is in town. He’s doing all these miracles. I wonder if he can fix you. No, don’t. Yeah, yeah, let’s take it. No, forget about it. No, no.
Yeah, guys, grab the corners of the bed. Come on, let’s carry him over there. Look, guys, he’s probably busy. Look, there’s a crowd. We can’t get in there. No, let’s take him on the roof. No, you’re going to ruin the person. No, they’re going to be so mad at you. Remember what happened last time we were on a roof? I mean, and they say, look, we’re going to take you to this. And he said, I don’t even know if I can, I don’t even know if I can look at his face.
I think there’s a lot of people who don’t come to church because they hate God. But I think there’s even more people who don’t come to church because they’re convinced that God hates them. And they taste their sin, and they live in this soup of sorrow, and they wonder, if you, their friends, if you hauled them in here and sat them in here, what would the Lord have to say to me?
And Jesus looks at this guy and says, son, be of good cheer. Your sins are forgiven. That’s what Jesus has to say to you and to me. I just think that in that room, at that moment, which was just, I mean, everyone, you could hear a pin drop as everyone is waiting to hear what Jesus is going to say. And he says those words, friend, be of good cheer. Your sins are forgiven.
And the friends are on the roof like, we thought he could help. And the crowd is like, oh, that’s different. And the Pharisees and the scribes, they’re, you know how they are, they’re grumbling. But I think that this man and Jesus have to have such a smile on both of their faces. Your sins. You mean God is not mad at me? You mean this isn’t what I deserve? You mean that this isn’t just the beginning of the wrath that is on the way? It’s not a foretaste of the feast that’s coming to me?
You mean that God is dealing with me with mercy and kindness and love and gentleness and peace? Do you really mean it? And notice that Jesus doesn’t say, what sins? I don’t know what you’re talking about. He knows them.
He knows your sins. But he says, those sins, the ones that you wish I didn’t know about, those are the ones that are forgiven, that are died for, that are covered by my blood. These are the ones that I’ve redeemed you from.
Your sins are forgiven. Be of good cheer. that’s what Jesus has to say to this man that’s what Jesus has to say to you that’s what Jesus has to say to the world broken sins are forgiven now that the scribes grumble at this because they say no one only God has the authority to forgive sins and they think Jesus blasphemes because they don’t at least want to admit that Jesus is God but this makes a occasion for a wonderful demonstration because Jesus says, what’s harder to say?
Your sins are forgiven or stand up and walk. Now, I think the harder thing to do is to forgive sins rather than heal a paralyzed man. I just think on the level of difficult miracles, it’s got to be probably the higher miracle to forgive sins than to fix a man. But the advantage of the forgiving sins is you can’t see if it worked or not. It’s like the magic trick where you put a cup on top of a coin and you snap your fingers and it flips and you snap your fingers again and it flips back and then you show how you did magic. In other words, nothing changes. So when you say your sins are forgiven, you just don’t know the difference.
But Jesus says this, look, I want you to know that I have the authority to forgive sins and so he says to the man, arise, take up your mat and go home and he does it. He stands up. Can you imagine that, like, as the life starts to come back to his arms and and to his legs and he starts to wiggle his toes and he bounces up and and he and he leaves and jesus says this is for you also so that you can know that i can forgive sins the lesser miracle is serving the greater miracle and that greatest miracle is that declaration of the forgiveness of sin and dear saints the lord does the same thing for us week after week after week he does this miracle of putting his body and his blood here for us to eat and drink, and why?
So that you can know that that promise that Jesus makes to you, take and drink for the forgiveness of sins, is true, that he has the authority to forgive sins, and that he does, so that you can be of good cheer, so that you can rejoice in the kindness and the mercy and the love of God. It’s not what we expect. It’s never what we expect. The proud who expect God to applaud all of their efforts find quite a surprise.
But the humble who come to the Lord broken, cast down, afflicted, knowing not only the difficulties of this life, but the difficulties of the soul, the sins that we’ve committed, when we come to the Lord and expect to find Him angry with us,