Our Next Chapter: The Doctor Is In
Luke 5:12-32
We’re starting a new chapter, going through a
transition. I believe that in 3 years or
so, we’ll look back at this time and say, though it wasn’t easy or comfortable,
we took the right steps and we’re in a much better place (with Christian
Education, family life, counseling, etc.).
Please visit our website for further details.
If you’re new/visiting, this month of September is a
way of getting to know where Renewal is heading.
[John Applegate: Counseling Ministry]
I’ve noticed an oscillation (lessened over the years). Sometimes I feel like, “I’m a fairly well
adjusted adult, emotionally and mentally healthy.” And then there are times when I’ve felt,
“What’s wrong with me? Why these
insecurities and fears?” I used to have
a staff sister who had a degree in Biblical counseling, and I used to say she
was my therapist.
Over the years I’ve noticed it’s not just me, we all
have issues. We all have childhood or
family issues, we have deep insecurities and fears, we have unbiblical and
distorted view of ourselves, we have unhealthy driving desires. We have a history of broken relationships, or
tendencies toward anxiety or depression.
We have significant dysfunctionalities.
Some of us have gone through times of loneliness, grief, serious marital
conflicts, etc.
Even some of us here who look like we have it all
together, we find inner brokenness.
Others of us, we’re still too young, and we
haven’t been in those difficult circumstances that reveal some of these deeper
issues.
Or we’re not self-aware: something doesn’t seem
completely right, but we haven’t explored or come to an understanding of what’s
gone wrong inside.
“It is not the healthy who
need a doctor, but the sick. I have not
come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.”
I’d like to use this as a
lens as we take a look at this slightly broader passage.
(vv. 12-13) This leper begs
Jesus, “Lord, if you are willing, you can make me clean.”
Jesus reaches out and touches
the man, “I am willing. Be clean.”
He speaks with authority: Be clean, and
immediately the man is cured. This leper
also recognized Jesus’ authority, “You can heal me.” In the next story, Jesus also has authority
to forgive sin. We’ve looked at this
authority theme a month ago, so I won’t develop again here.
He responds with compassion: “Yes, I’m willing.” In Mark’s account of this incident (Mk
“Unclean”
people were to stay outside the community.
You weren’t allowed to touch someone unclean because you’d become
unclean too. This man has been alone and
untouched for probably for many years.
In Scripture some times you see that people were greeted with a
kiss. This man was never kissed, never
hugged, never touched. In fact, this is
the man people ran away from. Jesus
doesn’t just say, “Be clean.” He first
touches the man. Jesus didn’t just see
the leprosy, He saw the person. There’s
a personalized care.
This healing is one of many healings we read about in
Gospels. Jesus is always caring for the
poor, weak, outcast: blind beggars, lame beggars, the demon-possessed,
Gentiles, and the “untouchables.”
Jesus came for the sick, the weak, the outcast, the
suffering. He had compassion on people.
In Jesus’ first sermon, he stood up in a synagogue and
read Isaiah 61
18
“The Spirit of the Lord is on me,
because he has anointed me
to
preach good news to the poor.
He
has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners
and
recovery of sight for the blind, to release the oppressed,
19
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s
favor.” (Lk 4:18-19)
Then he said, this Scripture is fulfilled in your
hearing. I am the anointed one here to
bring good news, and freedom.
When John the Baptist was in prison, he sent a
messenger to confirm whether Jesus was in fact the Messiah.
So
he replied to the messengers, “Go back and report to John what you have seen
and heard: The blind receive sight, the lame walk, those who have leprosy are
cured, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the good news is preached to the
poor.” (Lk 7:22)
Isaiah’s prophecy is being
fulfilled. I am the Messiah.
And this is what the Messiah
does: he heals, he cures, he restores.
He is a healer, restorer.
The Doctor is In.
(17-26) As powerful and
dramatic as Jesus’ healing ministry was, we’d point out that this was not his
main ministry.
We get very concerned about physical/medical problems
(someone develops cancer or gets injured in a car accident or is hospitalized),
and these can be tragic.
But Jesus sees a different priority, a different focus. Jesus came to solve the sin problem. His concern is primarily with our souls, not
our bodies. Jesus advises don’t worry
about what people do with your body, worry about what is happening to your
soul.
Some friends carry a paralytic on a mat to where Jesus
was, but they couldn’t get to Jesus because of the crowds. So, they get on the roof and lower him
in. Jesus says, “Friend your sins are
forgiven.”
Well, the religious leaders get really offended. Who does he think he is, what makes Jesus
think he has the right to forgive sins?
Only God can forgive sins.
Jesus knows what they’re thinking and says, Don’t get
so bent out of shape. I can say, “Your
sins are forgiven” or “Get up and walk.”
But that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to
forgive sins . . . get up, take your mat and go home.”
The physical miracle was to confirm the spiritual
miracle. People were given a visible
miracle so they could believe the invisible miracle. Jesus has authority to forgive sins, and that
was the main miracle of the story.
Simon Wiesenthal, The
Sunflower, recounts how in 1944 he was a young Polish prisoner of the
Nazis. He had seen his grandmother shot
in his own home, his mother crammed into a freight car. Altogether 89 of his Jewish relatives would
die. He was called from his prison
detail to the bedside of a Nazi officer.
The officer began to make his confession, including how they had once
rounded up 300 Jews, herded them into a house, doused it with gasoline, and
fired grenades at it. Anyone who tried
to escape were shot by the soldiers who surrounded the house.
The officer pleaded, “I am left here with my guilt . .
. I know that what I have told you is terrible. In the long nights while I have been waiting
for death, time and time again I have longed to talk about it to a Jew and beg
forgiveness from him. . . I know what I am asking is almost too much for you,
but without your answer I cannot die in peace.”
Wiesenthal just stood their in his prison uniform,
marked with the yellow Star of David. He
wrote, “At last I made up my mind, and without a word I left the room.”
Wiesenthal didn’t have the will to forgive. And to be
honest, even if he did have the will, he didn’t have the authority. Was Wiesenthal
authorized to pardon this man from
all the crimes and bloodshed against his people? (Yancey, Amazing
Grace, 110)
You see, these Jewish leaders were right. Ultimately, neither Wiesenthal nor any human
can forgive sin. We don’t have that kind
of authority, we are not the judges of earth.
But Jesus is. He has that
authority, and if He declares you forgiven, you are forgiven.
If
you know you’ve made mistakes, bad choices, gone down some bad roads,
If
you’ve taken things that were not yours
If
you have horrible secrets hidden in your closet, deep regrets that darken your
sky,
If
you know you’ve hurt some people, deeply hurt, intentionally hurt them,
If
you’ve harbored bitterness and hatred in your heart
And
the guilt weighs on you, your sky is always cloudy
Jesus
says, I have authority to forgive sins.
This
man didn’t do anything to deserve forgiveness.
There’s nothing to suggest this man did lots of good deeds or was a
religious man. In fact, the whole thrust
of the passage is not to emphasis anything of the man’s worthiness but to
emphasize Jesus’ authority and compassion.
There is healing, not because of something in us but because of
something in Him. Christians aren’t
better people, more deserving people. We
believe we’ve found a powerful and compassionate Healer.
27-32
We come to the more immediate
passage
Jesus calls Levi, tax
collector, he came for “not healthy but the sick”
Romans
would get people to collect a certain amount of tax from their own people and
give it to Caesar. But these tax
collectors were allowed to collect more than required and keep the difference
for themselves. They were they traitors
to their people, collaborators with the oppressors, extortionists who grew filthy
rich. It may be difficult for us to
understand how loathed tax collectors were.
Despised: For those with Korean parents, these were
collaborators with the Japanese when they occupied
Immoral: Maybe we can compare them to corrupt
politicians who sacrifice the good of their constituents to serve themselves,
to corporate executives who plunder their own employees, to Americans who sell
secrets to terrorists and jeopardize thousands of lives.
They
were so despised by other Jews that they were excluded from
These
are people you don’t want as your neighbors, people who keep your kids away
from, people who, quite honestly, we’d probably never talk to.
Edward J. (Joseph) Wedelstedt claimed to be the
largest distributor of pornography in the
Jesus is looking for 12 men to be his disciples, and
he passes P. Young, passes P. Dwight, passes me, but chooses Mr. Wedelstedt.
So
it’s understandable when the religious leaders react as they do as Jesus is
going to a party with Levi and all his tax collector friends. I’m not sure how it was like, but I’m sure
their regular parties had plenty of drugs, girls from the strip clubs, gambling
tables.
And
so they ask the disciples, “Why does your Rabbi hang around these kinds of
people?!”
Jesus’
reply: “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but
sinners to repentance.”
1. Jesus came for the sick.
His whole ministry was for hurting, lost, messed up,
broken people.
He’s the doctor, and he came for the sick. He didn’t come for healthy, righteous people,
but broken and sinful people.
This incident with Levi not an exception. Jesus had lots of these kinds of
friends. A few chapters later (Lk 15) we
see Jesus and a crowd of tax collectors and “sinners.” Again, the religious leaders were aghast and
muttered, “This man welcomes and fellowships with sinners!”
The
Doctor is In. And now there is hope,
there is healing.
2. We’re all sick.
The humbling part of the gospel is that you have to
acknowledge that you’re sick, that you need a doctor.
When Jesus says he didn’t come for the healthy or the
righteous, we need to be careful how we understand this. It is not that in the world there are
healthy/righteous people and sick/sinful people, and Jesus came for the
sick/sinful. No, the Bible makes it
clear that we’re all sinful and sick.
We’re all broken inside and out.
Jesus was speaking to the religious leaders who
thought they were healthy and righteous.
They were quite confident that they were good people, they were
acceptable to God.
The irony in the gospel is that the people in the most
danger are the “good” people. Throughout
Jesus’ ministry the ones who are condemned are the religious people, the guys
who prayed and read their Bibles. And
all the “bad” people, Jesus loved them and they loved Jesus.
The truth of the matter is that these religious
leaders, these “good” people, they need a doctor too. They were filled with self-centeredness,
self-righteousness, they lacked love, were hypocritical, they sought the
applause of men.
Jesus tells another story in Luke 18 about a religious
leader and a tax collector who went to the temple to pray. The religious leader was praying about
himself, “God, I thank you that I’m not like other men—robbers, evil doers,
adulterers—or even like this tax collector.”
He thought he was pretty good.
But the tax collector was sitting in the back, beating
his breast, “God have mercy on me a sinner.”
And Jesus says, it was the tax collector who went home right with God.
The key to the gospel is understanding, I’m sick
too. I stand in line along side the tax
collector, porn king, child molester. I am sick, I need the doctor too.
The church is not divided into the strong healers and
the weak patients. The church is made up
100% of sinners. In the kingdom of God,
there are only two categories: there’s God, and there are sinners saved by
grace. There’s no place for
self-righteousness or looking down on others.
We’re all sick and sinful people, we all need the Doctor.
3. Churches
were meant for the sick.
It’s okay to be “broken” (Family Life: all marriages
have their problems; it’s okay; be transparent; don’t hide so much)
Everything may look nice and clean on the outside, but
we have people in our church who’ve been depressed, bi-polar, anorexic,
grieving-stricken, been in counseling, struggle with pornography and would
visit strip clubs, been raped, divorced, had abortions. Some of these have been leaders in our
church.
What hospitals
are to the body, the church is to be for the soul. This is a place for broken people. There’s no need to be ashamed about being
broken here.
There are many doctors in the Church.
The analogy does break down. In one sense, there is only one Doctor, His
name is Jesus.
But in another sense, in this hospital, there isn’t a
small staff of doctors to care for all the sick. Rather, the church is a place where it’s
people are both the patients and the doctors.
Priesthood of all Believers. In
Christ, you are a Minister, a Priest, you can be, in fact, we believe you are
called to be Spiritual Doctors for one another
The counseling ministry doesn’t plan to counsel
everyone’s problems, though of course they will do some of that. Rather, it is their desire to help train us
so that the Body of Christ could more effectively minister to one another.
To remind us of the announcement from last week:
please consider signing up for classes.
Saturday class: how people change, helping people change, are designed
at applying the gospel to the deeper issues and sins of our heart, and helping
us help one another.
I’ve used this illustration a
couple years ago, but it captures the message well, so permit me to share it
again.
Tony Campolo has to fly to Hawaii to speak at a
conference. He checks in at his hotel
and tries to get some sleep. Unfortunately,
at 3 am, his internal clock says its 9 am.
The night is dark, the streets are silent, the world is calm, but Tony
Campolo is wide awake, and his stomach is growling.
He gets up and wanders out into the
quiet streets, looking for a place to get some breakfast. Everything is closed, except for a greasy
dive in a narrow alley. The place reeks
with dirt and grunge. Tony’s even afraid
to touch the menu.
The guy behind the counter says ‘What
d’you want?’ Somehow Tony isn’t so hungry any more. He sees a stack of
doughnuts under a plastic cover. ‘I’ll
have a doughnut and coffee,’ he says. That ought to be safe.
Then the door swings open. In walk eight or nine prostitutes, just
finished with a night’s work. The place
is small, and they all walk up to the counter.
Suddenly Tony is surrounded by loud-talking prostitutes, smoking and
swearing. He gulps at his coffee,
hurrying to get away.
The woman next to him turns to her
friend and says, ‘You know what?
Tomorrow’s my birthday! I’m going to be 39. . .’
Her ‘friend’ gets real nasty. ‘So, what
do you want d’ya want from me?’ she sneers, ‘A birthday party? Ya want me to
get you a cake that says Happy Birthday on
it?’
The first woman says, ‘Aw, come on! Why
do you have to be so mean? I was just
tellin’ you, that’s all. Why do ya have
to put me down? I don’t want anything from you.
I mean, why should you give me a birthday party? I’ve never had a birthday party in my whole
life. Why should I have one now?’
Tony gets to thinking. He stays till the women have left. Then he says to the fellow behind the
counter, ‘Do they come in here every night?’
‘Yep,’ says the man.
Tony says, ‘The one who was sitting here
- does she come here every night?’
‘Sure,’ says the man. ‘That’s
Agnes. She’s been coming here for
years.
‘Well,’ says Tony, ‘She just said it was
her birthday tomorrow. What do you
think? You think you and I could maybe
throw her a birthday party right here tomorrow night?’
The man gets a cute smile on his chubby
cheeks. ‘That’s great!’ he says. ‘That’s great!’
He turns around to the window into the
kitchen, and shouts to his wife, who’s doing the cooking: ‘Hey, Come out here! This guy’s got a great
idea. Tomorrow’s Agnes’ birthday. Wants us to go in with him and throw a party
for her right here tomorrow night.
His wife comes out from the back. “That’s wonderful!’ she says, ‘You know, Agnes is really a nice
person. She’s always trying to help other
people. And nobody ever does anything
nice for her!’
So they make their plans. Tony says he’ll get a cake and decorations
and be back at 2:30 the next morning.
But the man in the greasy apron, whose name turns out to be Harry,
insists he’ll make the cake.
At 2:30 the next morning, Tony’s
back. He’s brings some crepe paper decorations
and a large poster that says: Happy Birthday, Agnes. By 3 o’clock, the diner’s looking pretty
good. By 3:15 it’s crowded with
wall-to-wall prostitutes. Harry’s wife
got the word out on the streets and it seems as if every prostitute in Honolulu
was there!
At 3:30 the door swings open, and in
walks Agnes and her friend. Tony has
everyone ready. They all shout, ‘Happy
Birthday, Agnes!’ And she’s
flabbergasted! Her mouth drops open; her
legs wobble; she puts her hands to her head and almost falls over,
stunned. Her friend grabs her by the arm
and leads her to the corner, where the birthday cake awaits. The room is exploding with a chorus of Happy Birthday to you.
Now she’s crying. She sees the cake with all the candles, and
Harry, who’s not used to seeing a prostitute cry, says rather gruffly, ‘Blow
out the candles, Agnes. If you don’t
blow ‘em out, I’ll have to do it!’
So Agnes composes herself, and she blows
them out. Everyone cheers.
‘Cut the cake, Agnes! Cut the cake!’
But Agnes looks down at the cake and,
without taking her eyes off it, says to Harry, ‘Look, Harry, would it be
alright with you, if I ... I mean, is it okay if I ... do you think it’d be
okay if I just kept the cake for a little while? Is it alright with you if we don’t eat it
right away?’
Harry doesn’t know what to say. He just shrugs and says, ‘Sure, if that’s
what you want to do. Keep the cake. Take it home, if you want to!’
Agnes turns to Tony. She says, ‘Is it okay? I live just down the street. Can I take the cake home for a minute? I’ll be right back! Honest!’
Agnes picks up the cake like it was the
Holy Grail. Slowly she marches through
the room with it high in front of her for everyone to see. She carried her treasure out the door, and
everyone in the room watches in stunned silence. And when she’s gone, nobody seems to know
what to do. So Tony gets up on a chair
and says, ‘What do you say we pray?’
And there they are, in a
hole-in-the-wall greasy spoon, all the prostitutes of Honolulu’s streets, at
3:30 am, and Tony prays for Agnes, for her life, her health, her soul, her
relationship with God.
When he’s finished praying, Harry leans
over the counter, ‘Hey!’, he says, ‘You never told me you was a preacher! What kind of church do you belong to anyway?’
Tony says, ‘I belong to a church that
throws birthday parties for prostitutes at 3:30 in the morning!’
Harry thinks about that for a
minute. Then he says, “No, you
don’t! There ain’t no church like
that! If there was, I’d join it! Yessir!
I’d join a church like that!’
I’d join a church like
that. Harry would have really liked
Jesus.
Renewal, we are to be a place
for sinners. We’re to realize that Jesus
came for the sick, and that’s good news for us (who know we’re sick) and for
our broken world.