Matthew 8:1-13 - Epiphany
III - January 22, 2012
God’s Will,
God’s Word
The centurion
said to Jesus, “Lord, I am not worthy to have you come under my roof, but only
say the word, and my servant will be healed.”
Everything depends on God speaking. God says it and so it is. This is how He created the universe. God’s word is powerful. Jesus didn’t have to go anywhere in order to
heal this man’s servant. He only had to
say the word. The centurion relied on
the power of God’s word.
These are the two
things that our faith is concerned about: God’s will and God’s word. Everything depends on these. In fact, since we’re not able to know God’s
will apart from His word, as far as we are concerned, these two things are
really the same thing. We can’t know
what God wants without Him telling us what He wants? We have no access to God’s thoughts toward us
apart from where He makes His thoughts crystal clear. Nowhere else does He do this than in the
words that He inspired His prophets and apostles to write. We call this word Holy Scripture, or the
Bible. These are the two things that
faith trusts in: God’s gracious will, and the power of God’s word.
It is significant
that Jesus healed the leper in our Gospel lesson by touching him with real
physical contact, because physical contact between a leper and anyone else was
absolutely out of the question. He was
unclean. He wasn’t allowed to even come
near anyone, but was required by law to shout out, “Unclean! Unclean!” in order
to warn healthy people who might have come near. He was totally helpless. There was no cure for him, there was only
more pain, more misery, loneliness, and rejection. But this man wasn’t afraid to go to
Jesus. Why not? Because he knew something about Jesus. He knew that Jesus would not turn him away or
reject him because of his uncleanness. There
is only one way he could have had such confidence. He had heard the true word about Jesus. There is no other possible explanation for
his bold approach. Somebody must have
told him who Jesus was and what He could do, and that He was willing to do
it. This is how it works: “Faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the
word of God.”
The centurion was
also an outsider. He was a Gentile, not
a Jew. He came to Jesus to intercede for
his servant who was paralyzed and in terrible pain. Jesus praised this man’s faith as being
greater than any He had seen in Israel.
Why? Because this man knew that
what Jesus said was all that mattered.
The leper
appealed to the Lord’s goodwill. The
centurion appealed to the power of His word.
These are the two things that faith is concerned about. In fact they are the very foundation of our
Christian faith. Faith is trust in God that
He is willing to help and save us. Faith
is trust that when God’s word promises help, it is as good as given. And, as we’ve seen, the two are inseparable. We can only know God’s goodwill in His word,
and when we have His word, we have His goodwill.
Apart from God’s
clear promises we are in darkness—we are left to rely on ourselves. We can pray for help. We can wish for help. We can imagine that help will come. But without Him speaking to us and promising
His help, our prayers are no more than wishes without anymore solid a foundation
than our own imaginations. Think about
it. It doesn’t matter what we want from
God if God hasn’t promised to give it to us. We need to be well
acquainted with what God promises in His word to give.
In the eighteenth
century a movement known as rationalism swept across Europe. Many who considered themselves more
enlightened attacked the truth of God’s word as unreasonable, and mocked the
idea of faith as an old vestige of ignorance.
The church greatly suffered because of this.
But the Christian
church suffered perhaps even more because of the foolish efforts of a certain
German theologian by the name of Friedrich Schleiermacher. Schleiermacher took it upon himself to try
and reconcile the doctrine of the church to the so-called “enlightened”
opinions of modern man. He thought he could
redeem the respectability of religion by redefining a few terms so that they
weren’t so hard for rationalists to accept.
Of course, all this did was change the very message of the Gospel. But of all these terms, the greatest damage
that Schleiermacher did through his influence in the church was in redefining
the word faith itself. Here is his definition: “Faith is the feeling of absolute dependence on God.” With this definition, he made the phenomenon
of faith itself more important than the
substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things not seen (Heb.
11:1).
But faith is more
than a feeling. We don’t rely on how
dependent we feel towards God. That
would be a reliance on our own religious efforts. The activity of faith is not to look at all
the things that we want, and then to realize how much we depend on God to give
it to us. NO. The activity of faith is to learn from God’s
word what God wants! It is to learn His gracious will toward us,
and to trust Him when He promises to give us what we need.
To this day,
Schleiermacher is celebrated by many as the man who saved religion. But he did so only by inventing a false one. And it’s no different from the false religion
that sinners have been inventing from the beginning. This is the nature of idolatry. From the beginning, people have been
inventing false gods by inventing false promises from their false gods. This idolatry lives in every human
heart. It is the essence of sin to place
confidence in what you yourself feel rather than what God Himself says. The idolater refuses to recognize the
authority of God’s will because he refuses to be bound by God’s word.
But look at the
faith of the man suffering from leprosy.
His faith was different. He did
not search his faith for what he needed, but sought Jesus. “Lord, if you are willing, you can make me
clean.” With this, he confessed that
Jesus was God. He called him Lord. And when he said: “If you are willing,” he was not questioning that Jesus was willing
to show him mercy. Just the opposite—he
was appealing to God’s gracious and merciful will. He was confessing that Jesus was the God who
could help him. He was acknowledging his
own helplessness, and inability to help himself in any way. Lord if YOU
are willing. The leper did not depend on
his own will or desire to cure himself or to be cured. He didn’t depend on his own feeling of
dependence, but depended instead on God’s willingness to help.
The leper did not
say to Jesus, “If I am willing, you can make me clean.” No. He
said, “If YOU are willing.” Neither did Jesus respond by grilling the man
to see how much he truly wanted to be helped.
No. He directed Him to what
Christian faith holds onto, and then He gave it to him. He gave him what his faith desired; He gave
him what GOD truly wanted.
The source of our
faith does not reside in our own will.
It resides in God’s will. It is God’s
willingness – not ours – that faith receives and depends upon. Our will, our wants, our desires can
accomplish nothing at all. But God’s will
– what He desires for us – is everything.
And it is revealed and given in His word alone.
Our Gospel lesson
this morning teaches us about the power and confidence of Christian
prayer. Christians pray. If you don’t pray, you’re not a
Christian. Yet, we don’t look to the
fervor of our prayers in order to know the value and strength of our
faith. No, we look to the word of God
that we put our faith in and that teaches us how to pray. In the same way, we do not look to our
prayers to guide us through life. We are
not guided by our prayers. We are not
guided by where we express our desires, but where God expresses His.
God directs our
lives by His will, not by our own. This
is why our Lord has taught us to pray, “Thy will be done.” The power of prayer is not that it gains
information about God’s will apart from God’s word. It is precisely the opposite. Prayer always flows from faith in
His
word. As Jesus promises in John
15, “If
you remain in Me, and My words remain in you, you will ask what you
desire, and it shall be done for you.”
Faith does not
expect from God what He has NOT
promised. Faith expects and trusts in
what God HAS promised. There is a world of difference. It’s the difference between playing God and
trusting in God. It is the difference
between trying to get God’s will to conform to ours, and submitting to His will,
knowing that it must be gracious even as God is gracious. True faith believes that God knows better
than we do about what we need. You can be sure of this: If God hasn’t
promised something to you in the words of Holy Scripture, you don’t need
it. If He has promised it to you, you
can be sure that He will give it to you.
Both the leper and the centurion prayed to Jesus. Both prayed in faith. Their faith was expressed by appealing to God’s will and God’s word.
We are currently
celebrating the season which we call Epiphany.
Epiphany means manifestation. Jesus
manifested and revealed His glory — not the glory of God which is that
unapproachable light that would destroy all who seek him, but the glory of God
that seeks out to save those who suffer from sin and all its consequences. This is the Light that enlightens the
Gentiles by revealing what God wants to give to all nations in Christ.
While Jesus’ miracles
revealed the power of His divine word, Jesus’ suffering on Calvary reveals His
goodwill to sinners. These two go
together. Jesus is able – powerful enough – to give you forgiveness of sins and
eternal life. He is God. He wants
to give you forgiveness of sins and eternal life. He is your Savior. He who bore your sins on the cross reveals this
same glory today.
No, He doesn’t
promise that He will remove every sickness from our bodies. That is why we must pray, “If it is Your will,” when we pray for
health and healing. But He does promise forgiveness for every
sin. And that is why, even more
importantly, we do NOT pray, “IF it is your will, forgive me for my
wrong.” We know it is His will. He has said so in the Bible. He has proven it by fulfilling the Father’s
will that man live a perfect life of obedience, and by offering His own perfect
life to pay for our lives of sin. And here
where He speaks to us His word, He has said that we need this forgiveness, that
He has died to win this forgiveness, that He has risen to make it ours, and
that He gives this forgiveness through the very words He speaks to us – as He
baptizes us, as He absolves us, as He gives us His body and blood to eat and to
drink. Here His will and His word are bound
together for us still today. Faith comes
to us by hearing of God’s goodwill toward us – so that by prayer we may confess
with our mouths what we believe in our hearts, and ask of Him what He has
promised to give.
In Jesus name,
Amen.
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