Matthew 8 Powerful Miracles in Difficult Places

The speaker talks about John being replaced for the morning teaching and clarifies John's teaching schedule. They mention the exceptional staff at the church, including Mark Moore and Jeff Reese's preaching abilities. They praise John Mann's skills as a business administrator and preacher. The speaker reflects on the Sermon on the Mount, highlighting the confusion among the people regarding Jesus' message and expectations of a political messiah. They emphasize the importance of the Holy Spirit in following the Sermon on the Mount. The speaker discusses the miracles of Jesus in the 8th chapter of Matthew to confirm his messiahship. They provide insights into leprosy, Jesus' miracles, and the setting of the Sea of Galilee. Additionally, they mention Father Damien's work with lepers in Molokai as an illustration. Well, good morning. Well, John was supposed to teach this morning. But they've got to be introduced again to the second service. And he thought it would not be appropriate for him to set a bad example and teach real short and let us loose early. Not a problem. So, we're going to fill in for him this morning. Now, I want to clarify something. John did not say this morning that he could teach every Sunday that we have him scheduled to teach. That's what we hope it means. But I would say that that's still in negotiating stages. But he will be teaching next Sunday. We don't have it next Sunday. Next Tuesday. No, Sunday after. Oh, that's right. We don't need it. We're not. Don't come next Sunday. Don't come. You'll be by yourself if you do if you come in here. All right. So, two weeks from today, John will teach the ninth chapter. And then Brother Jack will teach... No, I come back and teach 10 and 11, don't I? 10 and 11. And Brother Jack will take it from there. So, we're often confused, but we'll make it anyway. So, thank you. Let me just say a couple of things. You do not realize how fortunate we are as a church with our staff. Mark Moore pastored Lakeside Baptist Church in Canton for 30 years. Canton has about 4,000 or 5,000 people in it. They ran 1,500. Great church. He had me come over and preach one time on a Monday night. During the summer, I think. They had to move Sunday night to Monday night. And the music was just incredible. He could pastor any church I've ever preached in. Jeff Reese is one of the best preachers that we've got. He's always great. He could do the same. Now that we have John Mann. Now, John was pastoring with Todd when we were here. And been at the seminary a number of years. Vice president down at Jacksonville College for a few years. Has a good business training and experience. And perfect for our job as our business administrator. He can preach, too. He can preach any church I ever preached in. We are very, very blessed to have these men on our staff. And you all need to realize how blessed we are to have Jack Terry. Did you know that he was named to who's who in colleges and universities in 1956? And in 1972, he was named one of the outstanding educators of America. He has had 19 interims since he was at the seminary. Both interim pastor, interim minister of education. He's had 30 trips to Israel. Some of you have been to Israel with him. I mean, he is a world-class educator. We are blessed. My dad and granddad were both preachers. And I've been through majoring in Bible at Baylor and the seminary. I learned something every Sunday from Jack. And we all just thank God. Then you got me. I'm just a preacher's kid that grew up afraid to speak in public. And it shows you God's got a good sense of humor when he calls me to preach. But we're so blessed to have... You just don't realize that our church has outstanding leadership on our staff and in our ministry, our Sunday school. So thank you, John and Cindy and Jack and Barbara. And I'm just glad you didn't call me on Friday and ask me to do this. So you let me know Monday. So I said, give me enough time. Now then, we're in the 8th chapter of Matthew. And we kind of take a turn when we come to the 8th chapter. Jesus has finished his sermon on the mount. As Brother Jack so eloquently said last week, this is a masterpiece of a message that is one of the greatest messages ever heard by human ears. And when he preached that message, it was an astonishing thing. Human ears had never heard anything like he talked about. The multitudes were there. I did make a statement I need to add to that. Josephus says that there were 3 million people in Galilee. Today's scholars would put it more at 300,000 or 400,000. So there's quite a bit of difference between 300,000 and 3 million. But that's what Josephus said back then. Subsequently, the estimate's more like 300,000 to 400,000. That still means a lot of people. So when he talks about multitudes, you're not talking about a Sunday school class this size. You're talking about thousands of people that followed Jesus around. Jesus has won the popularity contest. The crowds belong to Jesus now. And they follow him everywhere. He can't go anywhere that the crowds don't follow him. And so they heard this sermon. When the sermon was over, the people who heard the sermon were still trying to figure out what does this all mean. They expected a political messiah. Their anticipation and their dreams, their expectations were that it would be a political king who would overthrow the power of Rome over the people and would free them from Roman dominance and from the pressure and persecution that that brought to all. But what Jesus said was not what they expected. They left trying to figure out how we apply this. Words are one thing, but where's the power to back up the words? How are we going to get rid of this Roman burden that we are forced to bear? So the people left still wondering is he really the messiah? How are we going to interpret all of this? And the truth is that none of us can live up to the Sermon on the Mount without the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is the ingredient that allows us to be true to the Sermon on the Mount. It's intensely personal. It's uncomfortably personal. The Jews had love for each other, but they hated their enemies. Jesus said not only should you not hate them, you ought to love them. It was a revolutionary message that they heard. But expecting a political king, the people were kind of confused. They were dismayed at what they'd heard and where was the power to bring Israel out from under the oppressive thumb of Rome? That's not what Jesus advocated and they didn't understand it. They wanted to hear more. They were concerned, and that's why after this now, everywhere Jesus goes, there are large crowds that followed him. They swarmed to him continuously. They had just heard the most provocative and penetrating message ever proclaimed. And bear in mind that Matthew's purpose is to confirm and to declare and to keep the messiahship of Jesus in front of the people. That's what he tries to do throughout the entire book. Matthew keeps the messiahship of Jesus on the cutting edge, and the miracles that come in this 8th chapter and following were all to prove the messiahship of Jesus Christ. Now,right off the bat, well,let's just read just a little bit of it. In verse 1, when he had come down from the mountain, large crowds followed him. Right away, this is first rattled out of the box, right away, a man with leprosy came up and knelt before him saying, Lord,if you are willing, you can make me clean. Now,a couple of things. The Jews did not understand leprosy. We don't really either. But Jews believed that somehow leprosy was a God thing. Somehow God was involved in leprosy. They didn't understand it. They didn't like it. If you were a leper, you were outcast from culture, from society in that day. In fact, the lepers had to identify themselves. Number one, they couldn't mingle with people that didn't have leprosy. But if they were to come near anybody, they would have to hold up their hands and cry, Unclean! Unclean! That's why it's kind of interesting. When the crowd surrounded Jesus, and this leper comes up crying, Unclean! Unclean! They parted the waters quickly. I mean, the thing opened up. Everybody scattered, pulled apart. And so this leper comes right up to Jesus. This miracle is not the first miracle that Jesus did perform. John tells us of that one in the wedding feast at Cain of Galilee. And by the way, that is a reminder that the synoptic gospels, who all cover the same general ideas and often repeat each other, different from John, who is more theological than the three gospels. But the gospels don't go in any chronological order. I mean, you don't finish Matthew and then Luke picks up after, and Mark and Luke pick up after Matthew. No, no. They're all separate. They have no chronological order. And so it can be kind of confusing because the gospels don't give us an easy timeline for the ministry of Jesus. The order of the reports of the gospels is not in theological order. It's not in chronological order. But Matthew is the gospel of the fulfillment of Jewish hopes and dreams and prophecies from the Old Testament. The key phrase in Matthew is, It is finished. That occurs 12 times in Matthew. It is finished. His obvious intention was to link the gospel with the Hebrew scriptures. And so the New Testament describes the fulfillment of the Old Testament. And it's all about confirming the ministry of Jesus as the Messiah. And that's the purpose that Matthew never gets away from. Now, the setting is the Sea of Galilee. Now, the Sea of Galilee is just a big lake. It's like 6 miles across and 13 miles long. And it's never over 150 feet deep. Oh, and the surface of it is below sea level. And it's surrounded by mountains. And so it's kind of interesting when you hear in this 8th chapter how Jesus cast the demon out into a herd of pigs and they rushed down into the lake. It's surrounded by mountains. And most of the shoreline would be pretty steep going into the lake. So it's just kind of, I can just imagine, the pigs get started and then they can't stop. They're drowning in the lake. It is a fascinating picture that we have here. And so we'll try to look at some of these things. By the way, let me give you another illustration. My father, I remember my dad preaching and used as an illustration, Father Damien. Now, you may or may not have heard of Father Damien, a Roman Catholic priest who came to the island of Molokai. He was serving on the big island in Hawaii. And on May the 10th, 1873, he felt called to go to Molokai to a leper colony. There was a leper colony on Molokai. And that's where the people sent all the lepers to get them out of sight and out of mind. And Robert Louis Stevenson says, It was a pitiful place to visit and a hell to dwell in. That's what Stevenson said. The lepers would sit there to rot and to die. There was no attempt made to cure it or to arrest the disease. They were outcast from society, separated from those that they loved, suffering from a disease that was considered loathsome and unclean and all but abandoned by the medical profession and without comfort from anybody except maybe every once in a while they'd have a religious service and some comfort in that service. Father Damien felt called to become the chaplain at the leper colony. They needed him desperately. They easily succumbed to apathy and hopelessness. Boatload after boatload of new patients arrived. They quickly became disheartened to the point of desperation. Damien himself wrote this, The settlement absolutely has to have a priest. I believe it is my duty to offer myself. I'm willing to devote my life to the leprosy victims. The sick are arriving by boatloads. They die in droves. I became a leper with lepers in order to win them all for Jesus Christ. When I preach, I'm in the habit of saying, We lepers. And for 16 years, he served on Molokai from 1873 to 1889, bringing as much physical and material and spiritual comfort to them as he could. What he did there was incredible. He worked to bring fresh water, clean water to the leper colony on Molokai. His ministry included helping to comfort them, to bandage their sores, to fill their coffins and dig their graves and build churches. He invested great time and effort in developing that water supply. He ate from a common bowl, food prepared by a leper, and used tools that were commonly used by all the lepers. And in time, he himself became a leper and died in 1889. Here's what he wrote. From morning till night, I'm surrounded by terrible physical and moral miseries. However, I try to make, to have a certain gaiety to build their courage. And in that effort, he was certainly successful. The presence of this good nature, this compassionate priest, literally transformed the atmosphere of the leper colony. And the lepers there quickly learned that they had a true friend. They were no longer orphans. A wave of hope swept through the colony. They were no longer those whose society had conveniently chosen to forget. And because of Father Damien, the whole cause of an awareness of leprosy spread across the entire world. Now imagine what it was like in Bible times. The lepers were outcast, considered unclean, unworthy of attention by the Jews. But this man had heard Jesus preach. He believed him. The law barred him from mixing with non-lepers. The only time he was in a crowd was with other lepers. He was ravaged by this terrible disease. He had no hope of ever approaching or participating in the synagogue again. The crowd heard him coming and parted the way. And he came to Jesus. In spite of all the objections and fears of the people, Jesus did not prevent him from coming to him. He didn't tell him, don't come, go away. He came right up to Jesus and said, Lord, if you're willing, you can make me clean. Now that was an earth-shattering moment for that leper. And Jesus did the unthinkable. He touched him. Nobody touched a leper, lest they be contaminated with leprosy themselves. This leper knew what it was like for nobody to touch him. Some people even threw stones at him and cursed him. And Jesus touched him. That is an incredible moment, an amazing act of grace and divine kindness. Touching him, Jesus just said, he just said, you can make me well if you will. And Jesus said, I will. Pretty simple. Go show yourself to the priest. Now this is where it gets interesting. The Jews had Mosaic laws contained how you could clear a leper of leprosy if they went through a certain procedure. Now because there was no cure for it, very few lepers ever did that. In fact, I can imagine that they maybe never had one get cleansed. I mean, for these priests that they were going to show themselves to, maybe they never had a leper come and say, I'm clear of leprosy. And they had quite an ordeal to be officially authorized to be back in society again. Many things. Jewish law involved the offering of two live birds with detailed instructions of their sacrifice. And each step of this process, by the way, it took eight days for a leper to be declared free from leprosy. Eight days. And it started off by the sacrifice of two live birds and detailed instructions of the sacrifice. And then step by step pointed and all of them pointed to the necessity of the shedding of blood for the cleansing. Then after that presentation, after the days of that, the cleansed leper had to wash his clothes to portray the cleansing of his leprous condition and remove anything that might remain from his leprous condition that might contaminate others. Then he had to shave his head. If he passed all the scrutiny of the priest, only then was he pronounced clean. But he still had some requirements. He still had to stay outside his tent for seven days. And he had to bring as a consuming or concluding sacrifice, two male lambs and one new lamb, some fine flour mingled with oil and about a pint of oil to the priest. That's how they made the sin offering. The priest would take some of the blood. Now this is really interesting. The priest would take some of the blood of the slain lamb and put a little bit of it on the leper's right ear. And his right thumb. And his big toe. Right big toe. Now you talk about it. This is going on. This is such a detailed thing. And at that point, this kind of expressed that a change had taken place, putting this blood on the edge of the ear, the thumb, and the right big toe. But it expressed that a change had taken place. And at that point, the priest poured the remaining oil on the man's head to indicate that an act of divine healing had taken place. Then after offering a meal offering represented by the flour, the priest killed a third lamb for the sin offering. It was a complicated, intense process that lasted for eight days. I mean, it is likely. Now this is my supposition. And Brother Jack can disagree with me, but nobody knows. It's my supposition that no priest had maybe never seen this. So it's the first time for these priests, as well as the first time for this guy coming to get reported that he's cleansed from his leprosy. It's certainly doubtful that any had ever succeeded in completing that process. But the fact that Jesus touched this man is amazing. It's just one of those fine, tingling moments. Nobody in the non-leper world touched a leper. But Jesus did. By the way, that's a reminder that nobody's too sinful for Jesus. Can't get too bad for him. He touched him. I'll never forget. In the 1960s, we were in Kansas City. And there was an evangelist that most of you have probably never heard of, Fred Durgee. I don't think any of you would have heard of Fred. He was a Missouri evangelist. Lived in Webb City, Missouri, down there in the southwest corner of Missouri. Multi-talented guy. Couldn't read music, but he could play the piano. Anything he could hear, he could play. And we were going to have the State Evangelism Conference. The pastor who brought me to Redbridge to the mission had left the church that brought me to Redbridge to be the mission pastor to become State Evangelism Secretary. So he was Luther Dyer, dear, dear friend. Passed away some years ago. In fact, I had him preach here one time. And he had had a stroke. He had a hard time preaching, but he had a stroke after he retired. And the Luther and the pastor of First Baptist Church, Raytown, Missouri, where the Revival, where the Evangelism Conference was going to hold, was the three of us met on Saturday night before the Sunday that the Evangelism Conference started. And Fred Durgee showed up. Now we got four. And Fred said, I just learned a new song that Bill Gaither wrote. And he sat at the piano and played and sang, He Touched Me. First time I ever heard it, my hair stood right up on the back of my neck. Incredible. I mean, this is really an incredible moment. Simply says, he touched me. But all of us can give that illustration. They've been to that because there was a time in our lives when without anything we deserved, anything we could do, he touched us. And the touch of Jesus always changes lives. Now I could chase a rabbit there because the majority of church members today did not reflect the touch of Jesus on their lives. Billy Graham once said that 70 percent of church members were lost. I don't know that that's true. But if the Bible says that any man being Christ is a new creation and you have someone who is not a new creation who claimed to be Christians, then you immediately have some questions about the reality of it. Coming to know Christ is to feel the touch of Christ on your life. And you can never be the same again. In the first great awakening that swept across Wales and England and finally came to the United States, in Ireland, the police didn't have anything to do after the revival swept through there. The bars closed. Crime grounded to a halt. So the police divided up in gospel quartets and sang all over Ireland after the great awakening that swept through Wales and Ireland. When God really moves and Jesus really touches you, things change. My dad used to say, if you could be saved and not know it, you could lose it and never miss it. If you've been saved, you know it. You don't have to explain it. You just know it. I was saved when I was five years old, almost six. Hadn't started school yet. So how do you know you were saved? I was there when it happened. I remember it vividly. It's as vivid as any memory anywhere in my life. He touched me. And to give you a long story. So he didn't save me out of anything. I sometimes think, well,I don't really have a testimony. He didn't really save me out of wickedness and sin. He saved me from it. So I'm grateful for that. I never had some of the experiences that some of my good friends have had. I wasn't away from God and deep in rebellion. Just the most natural thing in the world was to love Jesus and to commit my life to him. My dad was preaching a revival, a little church in Arkansas. Mom and I had come over to hear him. He preached that Saturday night. I turned to the young man. I said, most sitting close to the phone. I said, I'll go if you will. And he didn't do it. But when we got home to the parsonage, I slept on the back porch and screened in porch. I told Mom and Dad that I felt like I needed to be saved. And there on the back porch of that parsonage, we knelt together and I prayed to receive Christ. That's as vivid a memory as I have. No, it wasn't at that time when the Lord came in. But Jesus touched me. This is an amazing, amazing miracle. He touched the leper. And the leper was completely changed. Well, the second miraculous healing comes in verses 5 to 13. And this miracle revealed that Jesus didn't have to be physically present to exert his healing powers, which is kind of encouraging to us because now that Jesus is no longer on earth physically, his distance from where he is is not an impediment to his miraculous powers. He can still heal today even though he is in heaven. I believe in divine healing. I believe all healing is divine. I believe that sometimes God uses human means. He uses doctors. Apostle Paul apparently believed that because he carried a doctor with him on all of his mission trips. And he, you know, that's sort of an amazing thing. God still heals. I don't believe, you have to understand, the assignment given to the disciples when Jesus sent out the 10, the 12, and then when he sent the 70 out was to heal the sick. That was an assignment that basically showing that Jesus had given to his disciples the same powers that he had. That's not necessary today. They had no established, they had no written New Testament. They had the Old Testament, but they didn't have the New Testament and that was a one-time assignment that was given to them. We'll see that in a few later chapters of Matthew when we come to that point. But I believe in healing. I have prayed for people to be healed and they got healed. Linda Gant was one of them. Some of you will remember Bill and Betsy Torman. They were members here, lived in this area when we were here. She developed stage 4 cancer. Bailey and I were playing golf one day out to the west off of 35 West and he had built a house for them right on one of the tee boxes of that golf course. And so he called and told them we were coming by and we didn't know she was sick. And so they were looking for us and we got there, they waved and walked over to the fence and we walked over to the fence and she essentially said I've just been diagnosed with stage 4 cancer and given 6 months to live. We stood on opposite sides of the fence and I prayed for her to be healed. She and her husband Bill still live down near Whitney on the lake in 35 years. As far as I know, hadn't been notified that she died. She's still alive. I believe God healed her. I also pray God would heal Donna Neal. He died. God doesn't want to show he can still do this. I do not believe that God gives people the power to heal indiscriminately. I think God still heals, but the healing belongs to him not to anybody who's an instrument. I'm not a divine healer. I've had some success and a lot of failure. Praying for divine healing. But anyway, I didn't mean to get off on that. But it was... This is a great, great story of the healing and we get at chapters 10 and 11. We'll see about his ministry with the 12 that he sent out two by two. Now, this miracle in verses 5 to 13 involves a Gentile, a Roman centurion. He too was an outcast. The leper was an outcast outside the city. But the centurion was a Gentile outside the covenant. He was the commander of a hundred men. And he came to Jesus and asked him to heal his servant. He said... And Jesus said that, you know, that he would do that. And the centurion said... Just say a word and he'll be healed. I'm a man of authority just like you are. You recognize the authority of Jesus. But he said, I have men under me and I say here to this one you go there to this one you go there and they obey what I say. You're a man of authority. Just say the word. That's what we have here. Just say the word. And so Jesus said the word. And at that moment, this chapter says, he was healed. The servant was healed. Jesus said an amazing thing. He said, truly... Verses 10 and 11. Truly I tell you, I have not found anyone in Israel with so great a faith. I tell you that many will come from east and west to share the banquet with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob. Speaking of the kingdom of heaven. In the kingdom of heaven but the sons of the kingdom. This time the kingdom refers to the kingdom of darkness. Those in the kingdom of darkness will be thrown into outer darkness where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. Verses 10 to 12. The kingdom of heaven is for those who believe and receive Christ's offer of salvation. The Jews thought that all Gentiles were going to be cast into some kind of eternal destruction. It was a shock with what Jesus did. Just as much a shock of him touching the leper. He dared to reverse the beliefs of the Jews. Jesus clearly indicated that the kingdom of heaven is a place for even Gentiles could come. He stated that there were children of the kingdom of heaven and there were children of outer darkness. He opened up the whole world to become part of God's family. What an amazing thing. Now we go from there to Simon Peter's house. Now Peter's house was in Capernaum. Peter, Simon and Andrew lived in that area. Besidah which is about four miles away. Those disciples came to the area of Capernaum and Besidah. And the setting is a Sabbath. Jesus has already been to the synagogue. He's healed a demoniac and his reputation as a miracle worker is spread all over Galilee. So when he arrived at Peter's house his mother-in-law was sick the scripture says with a fever and had been able to prepare a meal for him. So verse 15 says Jesus touched her hand and the fever left her. Then she got up and began to serve him. Now this is a busy day for Christ. Demons were being cast out of individuals. Everyone who was sick was healed. Even in Peter's house the miracles continued. Verse 16 says when evening came the people brought to him many who were demon possessed. He drove out the spirits with a word and healed all who were sick. All. No one was left out. Anyone that needed healing got healed. Never had any people ever seen miraculous demonstrations of power and healing like this. Every disease, every demon that needed to be cast out was cast out. Every disease was healed. No one was turned away. On the cross Jesus would bring, secure the atonement and bring salvation to our souls. But listen carefully. Freedom from death and illness is not guaranteed to us. This will only happen through the redemption of the body that Paul spoke of in Romans 8, 22 and 23 when he said for we know that the whole creation has been groaning together with labor pains until now not only that but we ourselves who have the spirit as the first fruits we also groan with ourselves eagerly waiting for adoption the redemption of our bodies. God still heals but not everybody is healed. And no one escapes death. We're all terminal. We just don't know when. My dad died at age 52. Sometimes people say, well, he died prematurely. I said, no, he didn't die prematurely. He died right on time. God's time. We'll never, he used to say, I'll never be I may die in an accident but I'll never be killed accidentally. God's in control. The psalmist tells us that the Lord to the Lord belong the issues of death. None of us understands death. We know the reality of it. We don't understand all how to even talk about it. But we're all going to die. We buried a lot of people here last year. More and more are facing serious challenges. There'll be more. Some of us will someday die. Now, that's easy for us to think in general. But it gets a little harder when you say I am going to die. But I will someday. God's choosing. It's in God's hands. But the miracles that Jesus performed were for that day. They were Messiah-type miracles. They were confirmations and evidence of the Messiah-ship of Christ. They had no New Testament telling us everything we learned in New Testament about God and Christ and theology and all of that. We have that. So, we're not going to see, I don't believe God just saying you can heal everybody you touch. If that was the assignment, I believe if they follow the New Testament pattern divine healers today would go to all the hospitals and just heal everybody. That's what Jesus did. They all came and he healed them. Never had a failure. Everyone he said be healed was healed. Every demon he said get out got out. That's not true today. I don't believe God needs that kind of confirmation. He's given us the Bible and everything we need to know he's put in the Bible. And a careful reading of the Word of God will deal with every issue we ever face. There's not any issue that is not covered in the Bible. That's why I love expository teaching and preaching. I wouldn't preach a lot of this stuff. You come to some parts of the Scripture you just skip it like all the greetings and salutations. That's some of the best truth in the Bible. But we'd never do it if you weren't going verse by verse by verse. Everything we need about life and death and eternity is found in the Word of God. And that's why it's a treasure. And why the book of Psalms particularly Psalm 139 but in every book of Psalms there's some great word about the Word of God. The synonym for the Word of God throughout the whole book of Psalms. And the Bible was the song service in ancient days was basically singing the Psalms. The Word was the center of it. And the height one of the greatest passages in John chapter 1 says In the beginning was the Word. The Word was with God and the Word was God. All things were made by Him that were made by Him and not anything that was made was not made by Him. It's a wonderful, wonderful truth in the Word. And God's Word is just valuable to us. And yet Bible is still the most popular book in the world. Many people have one but don't read it. Well, read, absorb the Bible. Learn the Bible. My granddad said learn their address. If you learn a verse, learn the address. You quote John 3.16 John 3.16, that's the address. We focus on the Word. And, you know, if we stay in the Word somebody's going to be blessed. Not everything's exciting as everything else is. Some things are more gripping to us than others. But the Bible is the Word of God. And Jesus is showing His power over disease, His power over death. And now He's about to show His power over nature, over nature. It exercises, He exercises His authority by calming the sea. Verse 23 says that He got into, He told His disciples get ready, we're going to cross over to the other side of the sea. So He got in the boat. The disciples followed Him. Suddenly a violent storm arose over the sea so that the boat was being swamped by the waves. But Jesus kept sleeping. Oh, by the way, this is the only instance in the entire New Testament. It's also repeated in Mark and Luke where Jesus is seen sleeping. Shows you how tired He was. He'd been worn out. The crowds had been all over Him. He'd been busy healing and blessing people. He was tired. He curled up on a cushion and went to sleep in the boat before it ever left the shore. And Jesus kept sleeping. Even the storm didn't wake Him up. You know how tired He was. If you've ever been just bone tired, you know, just couldn't take another step. Apparently that's where Jesus was. So the disciples came and woke Him up saying, Lord, save us, we're going to die. He said to them, why are you afraid of little faith? Then He got up and rebuked the winds and sea and there was a great calm. The men were amazed and asked what kind of man this is. Even the winds and the sea obeyed Him. Now He is showing His power over nature itself. And as He was getting into a boat, there was a scribe who came to Him and said, the teacher, I'll follow you wherever you go. The scribe was a man of great knowledge. He had passed all the tests. He was permitted to teach in the synagogue because of his expertise and for what he had learned. And his job was to know and protect the law and to help the Sanhedrin know how to use the law properly. And Jesus simply said to him, Foxes have dens and birds of the sky have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay His head. Jesus said, I don't have any place to go. If you want to follow me home, I don't have a home. He designated Himself as the Son of Man, which, by the way, was the favorite designation of Jesus to describe Himself. It is used 38 times in the New Testament. John Phillips calls the Son of Man His messianic title, His racial name, His claim to kingship over all the earth. Son of David is His royal Jewish name, and Son of God is His divine name. His favorite name. That's how He described Himself. So another prospective disciple comes up here in verse 21 and 22 and says, First let me go bury my father. This seems like Jesus is going to be really ugly to this guy. But Jesus told him, Follow me. Now you think, why would Jesus be so rude to him? Well, it's likely that that was just an excuse because in that day, the people who always buried the dead saved the day they died. So if he was going to wait and bury his dead, they'd admit, My dad's not dead, but I'm going to wait until he dies, and then I'll follow you. It was just an excuse not to follow Jesus. And so that explains him brushing Him off and just saying, Let the dead bury the dead, but you follow me. Because the guy was really saying, I don't want to follow you now. I'll do it later. And by the way, you never obey Jesus later. You always do it now. Later won't work. You'll never get there. Now will work. This man was just really putting it off. And you think that's an excuse not to follow Jesus. The disciples were overcome with fear, and they cried out to Jesus. They looked at each other and said, What kind of guy is this? Even the winds and the waves obey Him. Now there's a, just let's break it into our lives. There's several things that are going to be true for all of us. One is, we're going to get sick. I don't know anybody that never has had any illness in their whole life. Common. May not be 100%, but it's close. We're also going to have trouble. We're going to have disappointment. We're also going to go through a storm. The good news about the boat that Jesus was asleep on, the boat was never going to sink as long as Jesus was in it. So Jesus was in the boat. And that's why I reviewed to the disciples. I said, Y'all don't have any faith at all. Don't you know, as long as I'm in this boat, you're going to be all right. Now the point is, we're going to go through storms we don't understand. We'll go through challenges that we certainly didn't desire. We're going to have moments of defeat and disappointment. There may be times of desperation and even depression. We're not going to avoid that. But we will get through it if Jesus is in the boat. If our relationship with Jesus is intimate and personal like it should be, then when we face storms, we're going to make it because he's with us. It's a great reminder to us that Jesus is able to get us through the storm. Now, when they landed on the other shore, they were met with two demons. The demons knew that they could not face Jesus. They didn't have any power to compare with his. And they knew they were about to be dispelled from the demoniacs. So they pledged with Jesus to let them go be possessed by the pigs. They picked it out. They pledged, Oh, we know you're going to cast us out. There's a bunch of pigs over here. Cast us into the pigs. I think it's humorous. The guy had been living with these demons. Pigs couldn't stand them and soon committed suicide. They couldn't handle it at all, unable to stand the demons. They just rushed down the hill into the sea. And it had to be a pretty steep hill because the mountains around them were pretty steep hill. Now, this is typical. It's just like us. The owners of the pigs are very unhappy. Their livelihood had been destroyed. And when the people who had seen what happened took place and got back in town, they told everybody about the miracle in town. And Jesus should have been welcome as a hero for delivering those two demoniacs. Those demoniacs were so vile and so violent and so wicked that they lived in a cemetery. And you couldn't even walk by the cemetery, Scripture says, because they get you. So the whole community here, instead of praising Jesus for delivering the demons out of the demoniacs, they were concerned about their welfare, concerned about their property. Their focus was not on the miraculous power that Jesus had to deliver the two demon-possessed men because the people came and instead of praising him, they begged him to leave. They threw him out. The people of that area were more concerned with the loss of the pigs than with the healing of the demoniac-possessed men. Surely a man like Jesus, with the power that he had, should have been worshipped and followed. But the people could not see the power that healed the demoniacs because they focused on their loss of property. After many miraculous healing miracles, the Pharisees finally said it out loud in the 12th chapter, verse 24, that Jesus was driving out demons by the power of the chief of demons itself. They're demons, but the head demon is the one that gave Jesus the power to do this. When Jesus told the story about the rich man and Lazarus and looking across the chasm, they could see the rich man in hell and Abraham and Lazarus were looking over and the man in hell said, I've got five brothers, send somebody to tell them so they won't come here. And Jesus' statement is absolutely true. If they won't believe the word, they wouldn't believe even if someone was raised from the dead. They won't believe. People find it easy to disbelieve. Faith is not easy. Faith is hard. I tell people who are more liberal in their theology, I'm not smart enough to be a liberal. I mean, you've got to have ultimate faith to believe that nothing plus time equals everything. What the atheists say. You know, just time. Nothing but time. I don't even believe, you know, what was the nothing that was there? Well, nothing plus time equals everything. That's what the liberals say, what the atheists say. That takes more faith than I've got. I just can't believe that nothing plus time equals everything. We struggle to have faith. It's not easy to have faith. It's something that the devil in the world tries to keep us from. But Jesus rebuked those disciples when they cried out, said, we're going to die. And he said, oh, you have little faith. He said, no, and I wouldn't let you die. This does not guarantee that we'll never have problems that are unsolved, that we'll never have sickness that won't kill us. We do know this, that every step of our earthly journey that we take, the Lord is there with us. And wherever he is, it's okay. He can see the long view. You know, there are two ways to watch a parade. Carol Ann and I flew one year to New York to see the Macy's parade on Thanksgiving. Our benefactor, someone we'd been working with, and had actually been a subcontractor with us at Lifeway, had put us a nice room at the Marriott Hotel right on the parade route. The problem was the room we had, all you could see was just about that much space for about 20 feet the parade passed by. We watched the Macy's Day parade, seeing 20 feet of it at a time, never really able to appreciate it. You could have seen it from the top of the building from beginning to end. In our lives, we only see a single day at a time, but God sees it all. Psalm 139 says, Before you were ever born, every moment of your life was already recorded. Oh, that means that we're destined to have what we have, and Calvin's right all the time. You know, we just, God causes everything, and we don't have any choices, no? Doesn't mean that at all. It just means that God knows what you're going to do, and he still loves you enough to plead with you even when you rebel, even when you turn him down, he still seeks you. One man said, I thought God for years, and then found out when I found him that he'd been looking for me all the time. If we keep God in our lives, we can be, even though we can only see that one day at a time, we understand the whole picture, because God is going to lead us and move with us through every moment of life. Well, we've got to quit. I always say I'm going to do early and I don't, but I'm going to. Father, thank you for your love and grace and for the word that you reveal so much of yourself, and thank you that we can trust you. You know what we're going to do, and you plead with us to do what is right anyway, and you love us, and every step we take is with you, and we thank you in Jesus' name. Amen.