The scripture is from the Gospel of Mark chapter 2, verses 1-17. Mark chapter 2, 1-17 is in the Bible and the Gospel of Mark and is also printed in your order of worship. A few days later, when Jesus began intercompurnum, the people heard that he had come, so many gathered, there was no room left, not even outside the door. And he preached the Word to them. Some men came, bringing him a paralytic, carried by four of them, so they could not get him to Jesus because of the crowd. They made an opening in the roots of Lord Jesus, and after digging through it, lowered the mass to the paralyzed man with line on it. When Jesus saw their face, he said to the paralytic, son, your sins are forgiven. Now some teachers of the law were sitting there thanking to themselves. Why does this fellow talk like that? He splashed for me. Who can forgive sins that got alone? Immediately, Jesus knew in his spirit that this was what they were thinking. In their hearts, and he said to them, why are you thanking these sins? Which is easier to say to the paralytic, your sins are forgiven, or to say, get up, take your mass and walk. But that you may know that the son of man has authority on earth to forgive sins. He said to the paralytic, I tell you, get up, take your mass and go home. He got up, took his mass, and walked out. In full few of them all. This amazed everyone and they praised God saying, we have never seen anything like this. Once again, Jesus went outside the lake. A large crowd came to him and he began to teach them. As he walked along, he saw Levi, son of Alpheus, sitting at the tax collector's booth. Follow me, Jesus told him, and Levi got up and followed him. While Jesus was having dinner at Levi's house, many tax collectors and sinners were eating with him and his disciples. For there were many who followed him. And the teachers of the law who were Pharisees, so I'm eating with the sinners and tax collectors, they asked his disciples, why does he eat with tax collectors and sinners? On hearing this, Jesus said to them, it is not the health that you need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners, the Word of the Lord.
On Sunday mornings, we're going through the Gospel of Mark, which is the shortest gospel in the New Testament. Jesus gives us four different Gospels that are sort of like histories, that is, that they are true, they're authentic, they're telling the fact. But in Mark, especially, you find that it is a different kind of history book. That is, Mark is not as concerned, maybe as Princeton doctor Luke, who wrote one of the other Gospels. Mark's not as concerned with chronological detail. That is, he's more concerned at giving a theological portrait. He's more concerned at showing you Jesus in such a way that it really might rattle you and break up various categories that you have. The fact that my whole purpose in this series is to give you a fresh look at Jesus Christ. We all need to do that. Whether you're here in a church for the first time, maybe you've been away from church for years, and you're just coming back. Maybe you've been in church Sunday after Sunday, for 30 years. What you and I need is to come in contact in a fresh, maybe startling away with the person that Jesus Christ. Now, the two events that are given to us today are ones that are, I think, really strung together intentionally. That is, they go very well together. In fact, if we have the time, we might even string together the two stories that I'll look at next week. But the two for this morning will defy. They give us a picture of Jesus where for the first time in Mark's account, he comes in contact with those who opposed him called teachers of the law. These were a minority group that nonetheless a very vocal group that hung rigorously to the law of God to the Bible. And they were so intense in living by the Bible that they did, I think, what really is human nature. And they sort of invented their own rules. First of all, a faith card so that they wouldn't flip off and break God's law. But then after a while, you know, the way it goes, it just became this endless list of do's and don'ts. And it's these people who come in contact with Jesus in the beginning of an ongoing debate. You know how it is in the presidential election this year. Back in that right now, and for the next couple of weeks probably be buried in the Olympics, but then the month of October will be full of debate. And the purpose of the debate on the mind of the candidates at least is that they might be distinguished from the other individual in a favorable way. And I think that's exactly what you see in the gospel. You see a lot of controversy. Jesus didn't mind being involved in controversy. But the controversy served to contrast him with those who clung to an artificially false form of religion. And that's what we see this morning. First of all, there was a contrast simply in the ways that they thought. Notice that after Jesus is after he healed the man who was paralyzed. The first story says in verse six, now some teachers of the law were sitting there thinking to themselves. And then it says in verse eight immediately Jesus knew in his spirit that is in the inner man that this was what they were thinking in their heart. You see, all of life is built around a framework of thinking. And there's no such thing as a person who's truly neutral when it comes to the metaphysical fear of life, the things that are beyond the things that are talking about heaven and hell, things of religion. There's no neutrality. And when these people approach Jesus, they had a very skeptical, if not negative and sinister even opinion of him. But Jesus never even had to hear what they said those that quickly came. He knew in their hearts what they were thinking. And the first thing that I want you to see this morning is that Jesus knows your heart and my heart as well. There's nothing that escapes his attention. And he knows that you and I come this morning with a very elaborate framework for thinking. The framework governs the way that you and I will think about heaven and hell, and I get a glass of water here, excuse me. About heaven and hell, about God and ultimate reality. So they'll also cause you to think about things like your own heart and what God thinks about what's going on in your heart. You and I come with this framework and that framework like a computer formatting will govern what happens to us in life. It's like endless hate being played over and over in a conversation that you have. And you and I have these internal conversations. Jesus comes into our life and begins to, I'm so sorry. He comes into our life and begins to challenge those conversations and those discussions. Now what specifically does he challenge really challenges what we think about sin and what God has to do with sin? Very interesting. Both Jesus and the teachers of the law or the Pharisees talk about sin. Neither of them were scared to talk about it, but they were diametrically opposed in what they thought about sin. Jesus looked at this guy that paralyzed the natural thing that you would think he would say is what he ends up saying. You're healed. Get up. Take your mat and go home. But instead he starts off by saying that you're sick and are forgiven. He looked sympathetically at the man and sees beyond the physical maladies to the inner maladies. So the teachers of the law on the other side are very negative about sin and sin. They're seeing them as outcasts and speaking of them as spiritual ones. But Jesus comes and with the picture of the paralytic, he gives us a picture of what sin does to a person. It's sin's paralyzed with that. Sin leaves rinders us without any power to get up spiritually and walk. Many times in the Bible, spiritual life is pictured as a journey of pilgrimage. Paul the Apostle uses the language of walking regularly to talk about the spiritual life of an individual. It's the picture of a paralytic at the front end of the Gospel of Mark. It's a powerful, vivid picture of the fact that you and I naturally before God can do nothing. We can't leave. And Jesus, while he's preaching and teaching, comes in contact with this man, where the natural thing that you would expect him to say is not all what he said. Why is it that Jesus then turns to the Pharisees and says, what's easier to say? Your sins are forgiven or get up, take your mat and walk. What he's saying is that one is dealing with the visible and one is dealing with the invisible. They're both difficult and either easy, both require God. But the spiritual, the invisible, is one that I can say to you, your sins are forgiven. But my words don't necessarily do anything. They don't carry any weight. But if I come to one who's been paralyzed their entire life and say, get up and walk, that's much more difficult. Because all of you would know instantly whether my words carry any weight or not. So Jesus says some more difficult thing also. Get up and walk. But what was his main point? His main point was that if you see that the more difficult thing visibly is accomplished, the healing of someone who's paralyzed, then you know that the difficult thing invisibly in the interior of man can also be accomplished. Now they were also on different pages as to the nature of God. The Pharisees or teachers of law were right. The only God can forgive sins. You know they said he's blaspheming, verse 7, who can forgive sins but God alone? Well they were exactly right on that. They knew their Old Testament. But they failed to see the main story of the Old Testament that God panned as the prophet Isaiah said is not too short to say. And as all the scriptures begin to paint a glorious picture for us, that that arm of salvation comes to us. It sort of reaches out of heaven into this world in a man who has also got the Messiah, the anointed one, the suffering servant, Jesus Christ. You know I think that there is the great temptation for all of us to think that we've got it figured out. And particularly if you've grown up attending a church or you've been in a church for a long time, you think you know that yeah we are exactly right on. Preach it to those lost people. But in reality all of us continue to have a framework of thinking that is in great jeopardy of being wrong, of missing it in a day way. I mean isn't it ironic that the people who were pouring their lives into the Bible, the teachers of the law described, they knew the Bible better than you and I could ever hope to know it but they didn't know it. And that's the story that I hear regularly from people in this congregation. They've come in here having known religion, known the Bible, but missed the main point of the Bible. That you and I are just like the paralytic, that you and I come without any power intrinsically, and that it's the grace of God in Jesus Christ that brings dramatic change. Well the other thing that I think the teachers of the law and Jesus were, an opposite in the spectrum on was how they thought of sinners. Not just sin as a principle but how they thought of sinners. You know what Jesus does is he moves from the picture here of the paralytic to a picture of a tax collector. As it's to say he too was a paralytic, he too was paralyzed by his sins. Now none of us today like the IRS and I need to be careful about that because it's a wonderful government institution in comparison to what it was in the ancient world. So when you see the Bible speaking disparagingly about tax collectors, it was a good reason. These were people that were sort of like independent contractors that would bid for the right to work in a certain region for the Roman government. And they would collect taxes, maybe in this case it was by the lake and they were collecting fishing taxes. They would give the amount that was required to the Roman government and then they would make their own money, their profit, their salary off. And it was such a great temptation to take you a little bit more than you needed to. So they were viewed as really outcast to some of the earth particularly Jewish tax collectors. So they were seeing a trader aligning themselves with the Roman government that had come in and passed out the Jewish leadership. And it's Levi or as we know him, elsewhere Matthew, that gives a tax collector stock enough here. You'd very negatively. And so that's why when Matthew is called and then Jesus goes to his home, the teachers of the law are saying the background, you picture them with their arm folded sort of smearing. What is he doing? Contaminating himself, aligning himself with tax collectors and sinners, outcasts from the Gospel of Luke. We gain the picture of another tax collector that you're familiar with. If you look at children's Bible much, man's a kid. You remember that little song about the we little man's a kid? Unfortunately, the we little song, this is the point. Because it emphasizes the fact that the reason the kids couldn't see Jesus was because he was sure. He had a physical challenge. But that's really not the point. I think the point is that because he was viewed so disparagingly, because he was a tax collector, when Jesus was coming through town, no one would let him through. And because he was sure he couldn't see others, so he needed to climb the sick and more sick children. It's to those kind of people that Jesus comes. Jesus is, as the hymn says, that we'll sing in a minute, a great percentage. And Jesus comes and calls Matthew to a radical light of following him. He did the same to the kids. But Jesus also comes in a very personal way, focusing in on that one individual, and demonstrating love and compassion, calling him here as time in another Gospel. The word friend is used. It's a very intimate term of love and devotion. And Jesus turns to the skeptical moralist, or the religious person, and says, you know, it's not the healthy you need a doctor that's sick. It's such a plain, spoken word, but what you and I don't know is that that was a phrase that was very commonly used by the rabbis in the first century, so that when Jesus said that to them, it was like he just placed them. He said, you know, it's a very thing that you say you believe. You deny. The very person that the law was intended to show up as a parolytic, once you need Jesus to come as a friend. It was a very person that you passed out. And Jesus was really saying two things, wasn't it? He was saying, indeed, I have come for people just like Levi, just like the man who was lowered through the roof, but he was also saying, you know, singing negative way to the teachers of the law, and let's you see yourself again. And I've not come for you. For those about who think that we've got it pretty much put together, Jesus is not comfortable. He has come for the unrighteous, for the sinners, for the outcast, for the person who knows that their life is not all put together. And that's why it's so important, even as a Christian, to understand that it is through weakness that we grow in Jesus Christ. It's through saying that whether it be a physical malady, or a Paul called it a thorn in the flesh in 2 Corinthians 12, those weaknesses are there to show it that it's only by the grace of God, the paralyzed grace of God, that we come to be accepted by Him. There is a great story given by one of my heroes today, Eric and Todd. Johnny, herself, is paralyzed, has been, I think, 32 years. And at this last year's Lincoln Air Conference, that R.C. Stroll's Ministry, you know, Orlando, she told a story of a trip she took to Africa, where she came to understand this in a fresh way. I'd like you to listen to that story right now. This is the form of a cross. It was a rather complex life. The air was high, and it killed her, and it wasn't dark. They had cleared the market place, and that was left over through the losers and the men and women's economy, and the officers, and the armed industry. Her streak, you know, it was a miserable death toll, and it had a little private break after this year. The air came out of the holes in the crack of the building and the door raised the towering. Children of this building, children of this building, by effort, or folio, calling out to the cracks in the towering, come out in the praise of all the fools from the pavement. This was her only subsystem. To give this reply, a moment ago, it was a market place that day, when the speed and humidity varied a lot, we didn't like home care of the Americans, and we didn't hear it in my own way. Where there isn't any protein, African cancer, but there are both that many. And as the army revealed, along with the cold fireballs, avoiding other young people from the army was altered, and it was okay to be true of the cold home. A farmer, like I was studying here old and single, and he wanted me to be. I lost this on the sidewalk. I'm going to make the canvas part of what I'm going to do, and I'm going to scratch my feet, listen to the bark, and see all the flashlight intervals from the house. And so did the light light and the work down there with the bomb. It's being a former home, a great, great, rich, both in capital things. And the heat was past, and then in a couple of days, we turned around the whole of the home, the former storm map, and she just ate in her late life, like a state of uplifted by the home arrow, and the storm we were having to eat. Oh, the journey, she said, welcome to our country, I guess so glad I could have come into my home. Welcome to the home, where I was so much wanted to take her, because we needed more. I'm trying to figure out what happened. We don't have to join a task force, being in circles with the Lord, she puts us in this position, sharing in itself, right? And then she said, that she was writing to join her and her other friend, and for all four years, she was going, come with us, the former storm we needed now. And so, I think that she was a black light, little late for me, and I was walking. And there, now, before it was my fault, under the neon light, was something, and something, and singing, and rejoicing, hi-ya, hi-ya, hi-ya, hi-ya, hi-ya, hi-ya, hi-ya, hi-ya. Hi-ya, hi-ya, hi-ya, hi-ya, hi-ya, hi-ya, hi-ya. Here's some people's tiredness. No one's alone. No one's alone. No one's alone. No one's alone. No one's alone. Here's some people's lonelyness. And not Americans, we've got tall women, and if not, we don't have them as well. We want to be happy, so yourats are getting. They're as they have been. Well, for a country. For Jesus is so big here, because we need Him for us. And if I'd like to follow Him, drag ourselves in dance, look at our side of all of our friends, and enjoy the source of service, I thought to myself, do you think there are those we need to come? Then maybe people will need us so much. It's a success. Beautiful pictures. Of this very point, that you and I, unless we see ourselves like Alma and her friends, we will be tempted to do all sorts of things, construct rules, do whatever it takes to make Jesus smaller. But until you and I use survival, to expose our weaknesses, to expose our desperate need, when we do that, then Jesus becomes big. He becomes glorious. And we begin to praise Him. That was the reaction of the people when Jesus healed the paralytic. It says that this amazed everyone to make praise God, saying we have never seen anything like this. You and I need to come to see ourselves exactly that way. Regardless of where you are spiritually, that is the snapshot of the Bible for it. Because when we see ourselves as we see God as strong, when we see that we have nothing that we've raised at table, then we see the gospel and we see Jesus as huge. And the end result is not discouraging, but it's that kind of joy that Johnny saw in those Africans. The kind of joy that Levi experienced, you know, the gospel of Mark doesn't always give up details. The gospel of Luke says that when Levi was called by Jesus, that the party that he gave was a banquet in honor of Jesus. That what happened to Matthew when he came to Christ was not gloom and doom. Now I've got to follow this Jesus had taken off the burden from his shoulders. And now it was time to party. Is your life characterized by that joy, by that celebration? Mine all too often is not. And I know it's because I see myself and my world as big and Jesus in proportion to smaller. Come celebrate Christ. Come know him not as a singing teacher of the law that is a friend for sinners and take your friends to Jesus as those who brought the paralytic to him. And watch Jesus do amazing things. Let's stand together and pray. Our Father, we come before you as those who have great need and we ask You, Lord, to make yourself big as You are. Take away the scale from our eyes and give us feet, Lord, spiritually to walk that we might walk in obedience to You and rejoice in celebration over Your paralyzing grace. Amen.