If You Are Willing
You can never tell what people are going to do. I was reading recently about some of the wacky moments on the popular TV game show “The Price Is Right.” The wackiest moments were not scripted. They came as a total surprise. One time, a model was sitting at the wheel of a car being offered as a prize. Since the car was inside, on the production set, crew members were to manually push it to where it would be displayed for the winner. Unfortunately, as the crew pushed it from behind, the car smashed through the wall of the set. A camera caught the ensuing bedlam. You could see emcee Bob Barker ducking for cover as the wall tumbled down. “But the model never lost her stage presence,” Barker recalled later.” The car kept rolling and she continued smiling and waving.” Only once was Barker injured during a show. It happened when a 250-pound woman went berserk after winning a prize. (1) That’s not surprising. Some of the people chosen for some of these shows do act insane.
You can never tell what people are going to do. Take this man who came to Jesus for healing. The man had that awful disease which was the scourge of the ancient world, leprosy. Humbly he bowed at Jesus’ feet and spoke these words, “If you’re willing, you can make me clean.”
I suppose we should marvel at the man’s faith. But I wonder if he was trying to somehow manipulate the Master. “If you’re willing . . .” Evidently Jesus did not take offense at the man’s approach. Filled with compassion, Mark tells us, Jesus reached out his hand and touched the man. “I am willing,” he said. “Be clean!” Immediately the leprosy left the man and he was cured.
Then something quite interesting happened. Mark tells us that Jesus sent the man away at once with a strong warning: “See that you don’t tell this to anyone. It was a simple request stated clearly: “Don’t tell this to anyone!” What part of those words didn’t the man understand? “Don’t tell this to anyone! But go, show yourself to the priest and offer the sacrifices that Moses commanded for your cleansing, as a testimony to them.”
Jesus healed this man of a dread disease, and asked only one thing in return. Silence. But you can never tell what people are going to do. Mark tells us this man “went out and began to talk freely, spreading the news. As a result,” Mark explained, “Jesus could no longer enter a town openly but stayed outside in lonely places. Yet the people still came to him from everywhere.”
This story reinforces what we said last week: Jesus’ primary mission was not to heal the sick. There simply were too many of them--and there was only one of him. His primary mission, therefore, was to proclaim the coming of the kingdom of God and to create a community of people, the church, to carry on his work of salvation, including his ministry of healing.
Still, he confronted a problem. There were all these sick people coming to him and he was a compassionate man. He didn’t want to turn anyone away who had need of him. They, in turn, couldn’t keep quiet about what he had done for them. We call this a vicious cycle. He healed, they spread the word, and therefore, there were that many more people to heal. So, even though healing was not his primary objective, people came in droves to be healed. It got so bad that he had to slip into towns unobtrusively. It was interfering with what he had primarily come to do. It was a “catch 22.” He could not help caring about people. They could not help telling about the wonderful things he had done.
I wonder if this doesn’t illustrate God s greatest dilemma. Bear with me for a little outside-the-box thinking. If I were to ask you the most troubling thing about our faith, my guess is that most of you would say it is the problem of suffering. “I have a friend with cancer,” you might say. “She is suffering terribly. Why doesn’t God heal her? I know God answers prayer. I know some people say that God has healed them. So why doesn’t God heal my friend?”
Every pastor encounters this question. Most pastors agonize over its answer, because we care about people. And we feel we ought to be able to provide an answer. We want to bring people comfort and hope. But, as St. Paul says in First Corinthians 13:12, “For now we see through a glass, darkly . . .” There are some things that remain in the area of mystery, even to those who study God’s Word comprehensively. But I wonder if this little story of the man who was healed of leprosy and couldn’t keep quiet about it doesn’t at least hint at God’s dilemma.
Jesus’ compassion reflects the compassion of God. Just as Jesus desired healing for the hurting, so God desires healing for the hurting. God is, after all, absolute love. In the Sermon on the Mount Jesus taught us not to worry. God knows our needs. God is aware of the sparrow that falls from the sky. How much greater, asked Jesus, is God aware of our needs? The same compassion Jesus had for people, God has for people. And yet, the fact remains. Around this planet, there are so many people, so many good people, in pain.
Some of you are familiar with a man who is called by an unusual name, Boomer Esiason. Esiason is a former outstanding NFL quarterback.
Boomer Esiason and his wife were devastated when, in 1993, they learned that their precious, two-year-old son, Gunnar, had cystic fibrosis, a potentially fatal lung disease. Even with the best treatments available, most cystic fibrosis sufferers don’t make it past their early thirties. Boomer and his wife developed an amazing compassion for children with special needs. They took in many foster children; they also adopted a young boy named Mark. And they started a foundation which is now the nation’s second largest foundation for Cystic Fibrosis funding. Boomer and his wife, Cheryl, learned to live day by day, and to look for blessings where they could find them. As Boomer once commented on children with special needs, “They are the most fulfilling children to be around . . . I’ve been around a lot of these kids and every one of them has just been special, like they’re angels, like they’re touched by God.” (2)
They are touched by God. The troubling question is, why aren’t special needs children healed physically, emotionally, mentally by God? Why doesn’t God act to relieve them of their hurt? No one, of course, can give us a definitive answer. However, some people have resolved this issue this way: they say, there are some things even God can t do. That makes sense, doesn’t it? If God is all loving and people are suffering, then God’s power must be limited somehow. Otherwise God would have set the world right long before now. And that’s what some conscientious Christians believe.
Rabbi Harold Kushner wrote a best-selling book, When Bad Things Happen to Good People. He wrote this book after watching his young son, Aaron, suffer from one of the most heart-wrenching conditions which a human being can confront. The boy had progeria, a disease in which the aging process is bizarrely speeded up. Kushner was told that Aaron would never have any hair or grow over three feet tall. At six years of age he would have the skin and bone structure of an old man. Harold Kushner watched his son shrivel up, grow weak, and finally die, all before his fifteenth birthday. Can you imagine anything more horrible?
In his book, Kushner said he grew to accept God’s love, but question God’s power. He says he came to believe that God is good, and hates to see people suffer, but is not powerful enough to solve all the world’s problems. God is all loving, but not all powerful. We can be sympathetic to this solution. Kushner’s book was a best seller because many people find this solution appealing. We believe God loves us, yet we still hurt; so the only possible alternative is that God’s power is limited.
The only problem is that this is not the testimony of Scripture. The testimony of Scripture is that God is both all-loving and all powerful. PhillipYancey in his book Where Is God When It Hurts? asks, why didn’t God reveal this truth that God’s power is limited to Job, if it is the truth? Job had just about every disaster imaginable befall him. Why didn’t God say to Job, “Sorry, Job. I did the best I could. You know how it is.” Instead, Job 38-41 contains one of the most impressive descriptions of God’s power that you will find anywhere. (3) For the Christian community the concept of a limited God is simply unacceptable. It is clearly unbiblical.
We believer that God is all loving and all-powerful. That leaves us with only one alternative: God must have a higher plan for creation than we can see. In the same way that Jesus wanted to heal everyone but knew that this was not his central mission, so God must have a higher plan for his children. And just as Jesus’ plan of creating a community of faith that would build hospitals that would heal far more people in one day than Jesus could have bodily ministered to in a lifetime, so God’s plan for His children whom He loves so much must be so far superior to any hardship that we might endure that to even imagine the wonder of it all is beyond our mental capability. As Paul says in Romans 8:18: “I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us . . .”
The tension between our inadequate understanding of the why behind suffering and the great plan God has for us, we call faith. The writer of Hebrews defines faith as “the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” (Hebrews 11:1) And so it is. Philosopher Peter van Inwagen puts it this way: “I have never had the tendency to react to the evils of the world by saying, ‘How could there be a loving God who allows these things?’ My immediate emotional reaction has rather been: ‘There must be a God who will wipe away every tear; there must be a God who will repay.’” (4)
This is faith. It is the belief that, though I may not have an answer to the “why?” of suffering, I know that my Redeemer lives. And I know there is a plan being worked out--a plan built upon God’s great love for each of us--that one day will be revealed. This plan will give us so much joy that the memory of our sufferings will quickly fade. That’s faith.
I make this point for this reason. Phillip Yancey, in the research he did for his book, interviewed many hurting people. He discovered that those who got bogged down asking why they were suffering did not cope nearly as well as those who simply recognized that suffering exists and trusted their lives to God. Other researchers have made the same discovery. This side of Heaven, we will never know the answer to why, but we can know the loving care of our Heavenly Father.
Pastor Richard Exley says we can do one of two things with our suffering: we can make it into a shrine or we can turn it into a sacrifice of praise (Hebrews 13:15). When we allow our heartaches to control our lives or harden our hearts, then we are making a shrine to our suffering. But when we turn our heartaches over to God and continue to trust Him, we are turning our heartache into a sacrifice of praise. (5) When Vance Havner, a man who has inspired so many pastors and lay people alike, lost his wife to disease, he was disconsolate. He hurt like many of us have hurt. But out of the experience he later wrote these important words:
When before the throne we stand in Him complete, all the riddles that puzzle us here will fall into place and we shall know in fulfillment what we now believe in faith--that all things work together for good in His eternal purpose. No longer will we cry, “My God, why?” Instead, “alas” will become “Alleluia,” all question marks will be straightened into exclamation points, sorrow will change to singing, and pain will be lost in praise. (6)
We began this message by saying that you can never tell what people are going to do. And that’s true. But I can tell you what God is going to do. There will come a time when God will wipe away every tear from our eyes, and those who have suffered will be released, and we will see God’s plan unveiled in all its glory and we will rejoice eternally in what God has done in our behalf.
You can never tell what people are going to do. I was reading recently about some of the wacky moments on the popular TV game show “The Price Is Right.” The wackiest moments were not scripted. They came as a total surprise. One time, a model was sitting at the wheel of a car being offered as a prize. Since the car was inside, on the production set, crew members were to manually push it to where it would be displayed for the winner. Unfortunately, as the crew pushed it from behind, the car smashed through the wall of the set. A camera caught the ensuing bedlam. You could see emcee Bob Barker ducking for cover as the wall tumbled down. “But the model never lost her stage presence,” Barker recalled later.” The car kept rolling and she continued smiling and waving.” Only once was Barker injured during a show. It happened when a 250-pound woman went berserk after winning a prize. (1) That’s not surprising. Some of the people chosen for some of these shows do act insane.
You can never tell what people are going to do. Take this man who came to Jesus for healing. The man had that awful disease which was the scourge of the ancient world, leprosy. Humbly he bowed at Jesus’ feet and spoke these words, “If you’re willing, you can make me clean.”
I suppose we should marvel at the man’s faith. But I wonder if he was trying to somehow manipulate the Master. “If you’re willing . . .” Evidently Jesus did not take offense at the man’s approach. Filled with compassion, Mark tells us, Jesus reached out his hand and touched the man. “I am willing,” he said. “Be clean!” Immediately the leprosy left the man and he was cured.
Then something quite interesting happened. Mark tells us that Jesus sent the man away at once with a strong warning: “See that you don’t tell this to anyone. It was a simple request stated clearly: “Don’t tell this to anyone!” What part of those words didn’t the man understand? “Don’t tell this to anyone! But go, show yourself to the priest and offer the sacrifices that Moses commanded for your cleansing, as a testimony to them.”
Jesus healed this man of a dread disease, and asked only one thing in return. Silence. But you can never tell what people are going to do. Mark tells us this man “went out and began to talk freely, spreading the news. As a result,” Mark explained, “Jesus could no longer enter a town openly but stayed outside in lonely places. Yet the people still came to him from everywhere.”
This story reinforces what we said last week: Jesus’ primary mission was not to heal the sick. There simply were too many of them--and there was only one of him. His primary mission, therefore, was to proclaim the coming of the kingdom of God and to create a community of people, the church, to carry on his work of salvation, including his ministry of healing.
Still, he confronted a problem. There were all these sick people coming to him and he was a compassionate man. He didn’t want to turn anyone away who had need of him. They, in turn, couldn’t keep quiet about what he had done for them. We call this a vicious cycle. He healed, they spread the word, and therefore, there were that many more people to heal. So, even though healing was not his primary objective, people came in droves to be healed. It got so bad that he had to slip into towns unobtrusively. It was interfering with what he had primarily come to do. It was a “catch 22.” He could not help caring about people. They could not help telling about the wonderful things he had done.
I wonder if this doesn’t illustrate God s greatest dilemma. Bear with me for a little outside-the-box thinking. If I were to ask you the most troubling thing about our faith, my guess is that most of you would say it is the problem of suffering. “I have a friend with cancer,” you might say. “She is suffering terribly. Why doesn’t God heal her? I know God answers prayer. I know some people say that God has healed them. So why doesn’t God heal my friend?”
Every pastor encounters this question. Most pastors agonize over its answer, because we care about people. And we feel we ought to be able to provide an answer. We want to bring people comfort and hope. But, as St. Paul says in First Corinthians 13:12, “For now we see through a glass, darkly . . .” There are some things that remain in the area of mystery, even to those who study God’s Word comprehensively. But I wonder if this little story of the man who was healed of leprosy and couldn’t keep quiet about it doesn’t at least hint at God’s dilemma.
Jesus’ compassion reflects the compassion of God. Just as Jesus desired healing for the hurting, so God desires healing for the hurting. God is, after all, absolute love. In the Sermon on the Mount Jesus taught us not to worry. God knows our needs. God is aware of the sparrow that falls from the sky. How much greater, asked Jesus, is God aware of our needs? The same compassion Jesus had for people, God has for people. And yet, the fact remains. Around this planet, there are so many people, so many good people, in pain.
Some of you are familiar with a man who is called by an unusual name, Boomer Esiason. Esiason is a former outstanding NFL quarterback.
Boomer Esiason and his wife were devastated when, in 1993, they learned that their precious, two-year-old son, Gunnar, had cystic fibrosis, a potentially fatal lung disease. Even with the best treatments available, most cystic fibrosis sufferers don’t make it past their early thirties. Boomer and his wife developed an amazing compassion for children with special needs. They took in many foster children; they also adopted a young boy named Mark. And they started a foundation which is now the nation’s second largest foundation for Cystic Fibrosis funding. Boomer and his wife, Cheryl, learned to live day by day, and to look for blessings where they could find them. As Boomer once commented on children with special needs, “They are the most fulfilling children to be around . . . I’ve been around a lot of these kids and every one of them has just been special, like they’re angels, like they’re touched by God.” (2)
They are touched by God. The troubling question is, why aren’t special needs children healed physically, emotionally, mentally by God? Why doesn’t God act to relieve them of their hurt? No one, of course, can give us a definitive answer. However, some people have resolved this issue this way: they say, there are some things even God can t do. That makes sense, doesn’t it? If God is all loving and people are suffering, then God’s power must be limited somehow. Otherwise God would have set the world right long before now. And that’s what some conscientious Christians believe.
Rabbi Harold Kushner wrote a best-selling book, When Bad Things Happen to Good People. He wrote this book after watching his young son, Aaron, suffer from one of the most heart-wrenching conditions which a human being can confront. The boy had progeria, a disease in which the aging process is bizarrely speeded up. Kushner was told that Aaron would never have any hair or grow over three feet tall. At six years of age he would have the skin and bone structure of an old man. Harold Kushner watched his son shrivel up, grow weak, and finally die, all before his fifteenth birthday. Can you imagine anything more horrible?
In his book, Kushner said he grew to accept God’s love, but question God’s power. He says he came to believe that God is good, and hates to see people suffer, but is not powerful enough to solve all the world’s problems. God is all loving, but not all powerful. We can be sympathetic to this solution. Kushner’s book was a best seller because many people find this solution appealing. We believe God loves us, yet we still hurt; so the only possible alternative is that God’s power is limited.
The only problem is that this is not the testimony of Scripture. The testimony of Scripture is that God is both all-loving and all powerful. PhillipYancey in his book Where Is God When It Hurts? asks, why didn’t God reveal this truth that God’s power is limited to Job, if it is the truth? Job had just about every disaster imaginable befall him. Why didn’t God say to Job, “Sorry, Job. I did the best I could. You know how it is.” Instead, Job 38-41 contains one of the most impressive descriptions of God’s power that you will find anywhere. (3) For the Christian community the concept of a limited God is simply unacceptable. It is clearly unbiblical.
We believer that God is all loving and all-powerful. That leaves us with only one alternative: God must have a higher plan for creation than we can see. In the same way that Jesus wanted to heal everyone but knew that this was not his central mission, so God must have a higher plan for his children. And just as Jesus’ plan of creating a community of faith that would build hospitals that would heal far more people in one day than Jesus could have bodily ministered to in a lifetime, so God’s plan for His children whom He loves so much must be so far superior to any hardship that we might endure that to even imagine the wonder of it all is beyond our mental capability. As Paul says in Romans 8:18: “I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us . . .”
The tension between our inadequate understanding of the why behind suffering and the great plan God has for us, we call faith. The writer of Hebrews defines faith as “the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” (Hebrews 11:1) And so it is. Philosopher Peter van Inwagen puts it this way: “I have never had the tendency to react to the evils of the world by saying, ‘How could there be a loving God who allows these things?’ My immediate emotional reaction has rather been: ‘There must be a God who will wipe away every tear; there must be a God who will repay.’” (4)
This is faith. It is the belief that, though I may not have an answer to the “why?” of suffering, I know that my Redeemer lives. And I know there is a plan being worked out--a plan built upon God’s great love for each of us--that one day will be revealed. This plan will give us so much joy that the memory of our sufferings will quickly fade. That’s faith.
I make this point for this reason. Phillip Yancey, in the research he did for his book, interviewed many hurting people. He discovered that those who got bogged down asking why they were suffering did not cope nearly as well as those who simply recognized that suffering exists and trusted their lives to God. Other researchers have made the same discovery. This side of Heaven, we will never know the answer to why, but we can know the loving care of our Heavenly Father.
Pastor Richard Exley says we can do one of two things with our suffering: we can make it into a shrine or we can turn it into a sacrifice of praise (Hebrews 13:15). When we allow our heartaches to control our lives or harden our hearts, then we are making a shrine to our suffering. But when we turn our heartaches over to God and continue to trust Him, we are turning our heartache into a sacrifice of praise. (5) When Vance Havner, a man who has inspired so many pastors and lay people alike, lost his wife to disease, he was disconsolate. He hurt like many of us have hurt. But out of the experience he later wrote these important words:
When before the throne we stand in Him complete, all the riddles that puzzle us here will fall into place and we shall know in fulfillment what we now believe in faith--that all things work together for good in His eternal purpose. No longer will we cry, “My God, why?” Instead, “alas” will become “Alleluia,” all question marks will be straightened into exclamation points, sorrow will change to singing, and pain will be lost in praise. (6)
We began this message by saying that you can never tell what people are going to do. And that’s true. But I can tell you what God is going to do. There will come a time when God will wipe away every tear from our eyes, and those who have suffered will be released, and we will see God’s plan unveiled in all its glory and we will rejoice eternally in what God has done in our behalf.
