The Seventh Sunday After Pentecost
July 8, 2018
“Good News for the Loser”
Rev. Don Ginkel
Ascension Lutheran Church Littleton, Colorado
As the sun sets over the town of Capernaum, a man coming home from work senses confusion and excitement in the streets. Everybody is running. He reaches out and grabs a friend by the coat. “What’s going on?” he asks. The man answers, “Jesus is here, Jesus of Nazareth, and He’s preaching at Peter’s house.” This man’s eyes grow wide open. He throws down his tools and breaks into a run, only he heads in the opposite direction from the crowd. He goes to the home of a friend, and the two of them go to the home of a third friend, and the three of them go to a fourth.
Then, together, they go to a shabby little house where another one of their friends lives. This man has been sick, paralyzed for years. They tell him, with eyes shining, “Jesus is here, you know, the Preacher, the Prophet, the One who has healed so many people. We believe He will heal you. How about letting us take you to Him?”
The man nods, and they pick up the pallet on which he is lying. Running, hurrying, stumbling, they carry him until they get to the street where Peter’s house stands. Imagine their disappointment as they look at the scene. Verse 2: “They gathered in such large numbers that there was no room left, not even outside the door, and Jesus preached to them.”
The room where Jesus is teaching is jammed full. The door and the courtyard are packed. Hundreds of people are milling around. There is no way for one person to get through that crowd, let alone four men carrying a stretcher. Then one of them has an idea. “Why don’t we take him up on the roof and lower him down to Jesus?” In those days the roofs were flat with staircases going up the outside, so this would be a fairly easy matter.
Verse 4: ‘Since they could not get to Jesus because of the crowd, they made an opening in the roof above Jesus by digging through it and then lowered the mat the man was lying on.” Now, these men had one main concern. They had a friend. He was in great need, spiritually and physically. These men were so concerned over their friend that they did everything they could to bring him to a place where he could hear the Good News. Jesus was in the midst of talking when suddenly some tiles in the ceiling were removed, and the four men lowered their friend in front of Jesus. Jesus took a look at the lost man, looked up at the four friends on the roof.
Verses 5 and following: ”When Jesus saw their faith, He said to the paralyzed man, ‘Son, your sins are forgiven.’ Now some teachers of the law were sitting there, thinking to themselves, ‘Why does this fellow talk like that? He’s blaspheming! Who can forgive sins but God 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 thinking these things? Which is easier: to say to this paralyzed man, ‘Your sins are forgiven,’ or to say, ’Get up, take your mat and walk?’ But I want you to know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins.’ So He said to the man, ‘I tell you, get up, take your mat and go home.’ He got up, took his mat and walked out in full view of them all. This amazed everyone and they praised God, saying, ‘We have never seen anything like this!’”
This is a case of evangelism in action—and we usually have the same cast of characters.
Character 1: A lost person
Character 2: A Savior with the power to heal
Character 3: A friend who brings the two together
There are a thousand and one positive reasons for bringing lost people to Christ. Today that conviction suffers from tired blood. Great numbers of Christians are embarrassed to talk about a person being lost for eternity. To many of us, being lost simply means being lost out in the woods or someplace like that, and we say, “Somebody will find him.” But we fail to remember that when the Good News came to Capernaum, the only way that this paralyzed man received the Good News was that someone recognized the fact that he was lost and that he would stay that way until the Good News touched his life.
We need to be more sensitive to the cry and condition of the lost. We need listen to the person who works beside us, our boss, a neighbor, or the grocer. Most of them are lost, and we have the Good News to turn them around. We’ve got the Good News that will cause them to be healed. That Good News is: “JESUS CHRIST LOVES THE LOSER!” Some of you can remember when the Good News of Jesus was no news. It wasn’t that long ago that some of you wouldn’t be caught dead in a church. Somewhere, someone may have said to you, “Come on down from the searching tree. Let me come to your house.”
In my parish ministry I can remember standing at the doorsteps of many homes, knowing full well that lost people were on the inside and they knew full well that I was on the outside, but never did the two of us meet at the time. Later the Holy Spirit would see to it that we would meet, and then, it would be my honor to introduce them to Jesus. How many of you came from different towns where you had a friend who sat down with you and told you the Good News for losers, and you were found. And still others of you were found very early. You were born into families with a mother and father who brought you to Jesus when you were young.
Now we are together in one group. One of the main reasons we have come together as a congregation is because people are lost. Jesus Christ came for one purpose: To seek and save the lost. We are to be people who see men as Jesus saw Zacheus looking down from a tree: “I’d like to come to your house. I’d like to sit down with you. I’d like to be your friend, and I’d like to tell you some Good News.”
We are here to proclaim to this community that we have been rescued by a God who loves losers and who loves to change losers into winners. We don’t go to others saying, “You’re all wrong, and I’ve got the answers.” We go saying, “I’m in the same boat with you. We’re both failures. I identify with you. I can take my mask off and admit my failures and prejudices. But let me point you to Jesus, the Savior. I’m not what I should be. I’m not what I’m going to be. But because of Jesus I’m not what I used to be.” I suspect that Zacheus trusted Jesus because he sensed that this Man was ready to die for him. And I suspect that people will believe what we say about Christ when they see that we’re willing, in some sense, to die for Him and for them. Maybe the world doesn’t believe because it doesn’t believe that the believers believe. And then again, maybe they don’t believe because we don’t see them as lost.
The four men in our text could see their paralyzed friend as lost and in need of Jesus. Can you imagine the joy these men experienced when they saw their friend healed physically and spiritually? That has to be something they never forgot. They are still rejoicing over that in heaven.
I remember when I was 21 years old. I was a second-year student at Concordia Seminary, and I took my old Plymouth to a Standard Oil gas station for gas and servicing. I would make it a practice to say a nice word about Jesus to the man who took care of my car. Late one Monday afternoon I dropped my car off to be serviced. The attendant greeted me with a big smile, and he said, “I want you to know that on Saturday evening I had a meeting with Jesus. He is now my Savior. And I went to church yesterday for the first time in my life.” Then he thanked me over and over again for speaking to him about the Lord. I had to leave my car there, and as I walked the two miles back to the Seminary, I don’t believe my feet hit the sidewalk even once. I walked on air. I thanked Jesus over and over. Like the four men I experienced an unbelievable joy for the man and for Jesus. My dear friends, I would like very much for you to have a similar experience. Your life will never be the same.
No, you will not die if you do this. Let’s use (Joyce Dowdy or Mary Farley or Larry Boeding, Larry Buethe) as an example. Is that okay? Imagine that on Thursday of this week Joyce decides to share her faith or invite a certain woman living a few doors down the street from her. Joyce goes up to the house, puts her finger forward to ring the doorbell and she suddenly dies of sheer fright. There she is, frozen in front of the door reaching out for the doorbell. TV cameras come out. The Denver Post takes a picture of her for the front page of the paper. And imagine the funeral sermon Pastor John will preach at her funeral service. But now the good news. Joyce doesn’t die. She isn’t even injured. And you won’t die either when you reach out to someone for Jesus.
How can we be more like the four men in our text? There are four key words: Love.
Pray. Tell. Invite. I share these four with you now.
1. Do it with love. Love the spiritually lost like the four men did in our text. My next door neighbor in Lakewood was Anthony. Irish. Catholic. Mad at religion. I told him about Jesus. He didn’t like that. Then I just loved him. He later came to faith and is now in heaven. LOVE them.
2. Do it with prayer. My Grandfather, Fred Wieland, was a lifelong unbeliever in New Ulm, MN. My Mom prayed for him for all his adult life. When he was seventy years old he became a Christian and a member of a Lutheran Church in New Ulm. PRAY for them.
3. Do it by telling our story. Tell them what we were like before we became a Christian, how we became a Christian, and since we became a Christian. TELL them our story.
4. Do it by inviting them. Invite them to worship with us, invite them to attend a Bible study with us, and invite them to Pastor’s next Adult Membership Class and attend with them. INVITE them.
Four key words: Love. Pray, Tell, Invite.
Let’s pray: Lord, eternity will not be long enough to thank You for dying on the cross for us. We also know that eternity will not be long enough to thank some friend who introduced us to You. But we know that in eternity we will not be able to introduce anyone to You. The time for that is now. Help us, dear Lord, to be more like the four men in our text. Help us to love, to pray, to tell, and to invite. In Your name. Amen.
My parents invited a little girl to Sunday School – eventually her parents came, too. Now this little girl is 77 and just told me she was so glad for this!