Keyser, Keith: Meetings At Man O War Bahamas-2008-02 ~ Mark 2:1-14

Good evening. Please turn in the word of God to the Gospel of Mark, the second chapter, Mark chapter two. Mark chapter two. And we'll begin our reading at the first verse. Mark chapter two, verse one. And again he entered into Capernaum after some days, and it was noise that he was in the house. And straightway many were gathered together, insomuch as there was no room to receive them, no, not so much as about the door. And he preached the word unto them. And they come unto him, bringing one sick of the palsy who was born of four. And when they could not come near unto him for the press, they uncovered the roof where he was, and when they had broken it up, they let down the bed wherein the sick of the palsy lay. When Jesus saw their faith, he said unto the sick of the palsy, Son, thy sins be forgiven thee. But there were certain of the scribes sitting there and reasoning in their hearts, why doth this man thus speak blasphemies? Who can forgive sins but God only? And immediately, when Jesus perceived in his spirit that they so reasoned within themselves, he said unto them, Why reason ye these things in your hearts? Whether it is easier to say to the sick of the palsy, thy sins be forgiven thee, or to say, arise, take up thy bed and walk? But that ye may know that the Son of Man hath power on earth to forgive sins, he saith to the sick of the palsy, I say unto thee, arise and take up thy bed and go thy way into thine house. And immediately he arose, took up his bed, and went forth before them all, insomuch that they were all amazed and glorified God, saying, we never saw it on this fashion. Then verse seventeen, when Jesus heard it, he saith unto them, they that are whole have no need of a physician, but they that are sick. I came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance. And the Lord will bless the reading of his holy word. The name of the Lord Jesus Christ is probably the most famous name in the world today. I can't think of anyone else that would be as famous or as well known as the Lord Jesus. In fact, I was reading just today in a secular news magazine a statistic that there are now ninety five percent of the world's people that have some portion of the word of God translated into their own languages. And when you think about how Jesus is proclaimed on the airwaves, on the radio, and now on the internet, and in print, and how so many in so many different lands seek to make known the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, indeed, it is rare to find someone who's truly never heard of the Lord Jesus. There are such people in our world, but they are happily a shrinking group every year as the gospel goes forth further and further to regions beyond to let people know whom the Lord Jesus Christ is. But just knowing his name, however, doesn't mean that people really understand who he is. There are many people, perhaps millions in our world, that have heard the name of Jesus Christ, but they don't really know what God's word says about him. And yet the name of Jesus still excites a lot of interest and a lot of activity among people, so much so that in my homeland of the United States, scarce a few months goes by that he's not on the cover of either Newsweek or Time or one of our major news magazines. They do so often cover stories about the Lord Jesus Christ. They seldom say very much good about him, but they do put him on the cover once in a while, and I guess they feel good about that. I find this isn't much different than how things were in the Lord Jesus' own day, because when the Lord Jesus was there going about in Judea and in Galilee, wherever he went, the crowd seemed to flock to him. After all, he was a man who did many wonderful miracles. A man who would cleanse lepers, as Mark tells us at the end of chapter one. A man who, a little earlier in chapter one, could cast out demons. A man who would heal lame people, like the man with the withered hand in Mark chapter three. or the man who was laying as an invalid for thirty eight years by the pool of Bethesda in John chapter five. He could do other wonderful, miraculous things too. He could take just five loaves and two fishes. I don't know if it was a Nassau grouper or not. I rather doubt it in, in that part of the world, but, uh, he could take just a small amount of food, just five loaves and two fishes, and nonetheless he could feed five thousand men plus women and children, one of the gospels tells us. I wonder if it just doesn't mention the men because the men are known to have bigger appetites than the women and children. I don't know about that, but any way you slice it, that is a miraculous feat, taking that small quantity of food that wouldn't have fed under ordinary circumstances the twelve, let alone those five thousand plus people out there. And yet the Lord Jesus did these sorts of things without difficulty, and repeatedly he did these miracles as signs pointing to his true identity. And yet there were so many that flocked to hear about the Lord Jesus and wanted to get a glimpse of the Lord Jesus, but they didn't really know who the Lord Jesus was. And there were many still that came to the Lord Jesus just because they were curious. There were others that came to the Lord Jesus, perhaps because they wanted to keep up on current events. And there may have been others who came to Jesus because they wanted to satisfy some kind of religious impulse. There was another group of people that we'll read about here in Mark chapter two— we've already read about them, who would come seeking to disprove what the Lord Jesus would say, seeking to contradict him. And we still have people like that in our world today, many that refuse to believe the claims of the Lord Jesus Christ, many that oppose what he taught, in fact, and the claims he made. But we're going to see that the Lord Jesus can stand up against the likes of that sort of people. Now, as the Lord Jesus was in this house, Mark tells us that there was a great crowd that gathered round about the house. I don't know if you're used to having great crowds over to your house, perhaps at Christmas time or at other holidays or special family get-togethers, but, you know, sometimes you can have an event in your house and you can get so many people in there that you think, boy, maybe I shouldn't have invited my cousins from the other islands, you know? Maybe I should have just stuck with Man of War people, and maybe I shouldn't have let any of those crazy Americans that are on the island come, because it's feeling kind of tight in here. Well, if you've ever felt that way, you begin to get a little bit of a sense of what it was like that day when the Lord Jesus in that house in Capernaum was there, except it was all the more so. There was a tremendous crowd crowding about this house. Everybody wanted to get in to see the Lord Jesus. Everybody wanted a piece of him, as it were, wanted to hear what he had to say, and so they crowded about all the doors and all the windows, and there was, uh, you know, six people sitting on the sofa and five people on the love seat, and three on daddy's favorite lazy boy recliner, and there were all the people almost hanging from the rafters. The house was jam-packed, a big crowd of people there to hear what the Lord Jesus had to say. And notice what the Lord Jesus did in verse two. He preached the word to them. Now, there are a lot of people that look for signs and wonders, that look for something miraculous. There are a lot of people that look for those things, not because they're genuinely concerned with any kind of change in their own lifestyle, but because they're curious and they want to see something dynamic happen. That's why you have all these people, you know, that'll have television specials once in a while, people like David Copperfield and Lance Burton and so forth, who don't really perform miracles, but they perform a lot of illusions. They kind of pull tricks that people think, wow, how'd they do that? They make the Statue of Liberty disappear or make a jetliner disappear or whatever. I understand Bahamas Air has a tendency to do that once in a while too, but they always find them again. They found our plane after we waited an hour for it, but it reappeared. It was a wonderful trick there, and we've experienced the same thing at the hand of our airlines at home, so don't think I'm picking on Bahamas Air. But sometimes things disappear, and then they reappear again, and people think that's wonderful. The Lord Jesus didn't do those kind of tricks. He did bona fide miracles, real works of power that changed lives. And yet the Lord Jesus wasn't interested in satisfying people's curiosity. When people came to the Lord Jesus, what was most important to him was to preach the word to them. And I want to tell you, if you ever think, you know, maybe Christianity would have been more convincing if I had lived in the Lord Jesus' day. Maybe if I could have lived back then when Jesus was there, here on earth, doing all kinds of miracles and signs and all these types of things, maybe we'd be seeing a lot more people saved. But, you know, the Lord Jesus himself said in John chapter six, when the multitudes came to him, he said, you're not following me because you saw the signs. You may have looked at the signs, but you didn't really perceive what they were pointing to, in other words. You know why you're following me, said the Lord Jesus? You're following me because you ate of the loaves and were filled. So yes, they observed a miracle. Yes, they even participated in it by eating the loaves, but they didn't become believers in the Lord Jesus. They merely became people that wanted to come to Christ for whatever material benefits he could give to them. And in some parts of the world, people come to Christianity for that reason, because they think, if I come to Christ and if I call myself a Christian, God will prosper me materially. God will prosper my business. Well, I got news for you. When one wanted to follow the Lord Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew, the Lord Jesus told him how discipleship was. He said, foxes have holes and the birds of the air have their nests, but the Son of Man has not where to lay his head. Our Lord Jesus lived a life of poverty here on earth, and while he may give us all the things that we need to meet our actual needs, he promises to do that. Nonetheless, he doesn't promise anybody that they're going to get rich in following him. If the Lord has entrusted riches to you, he does it so that you may be a steward of them for him, that you may take care of them for him and use them for his glory. But many more of God's people in our world today don't have a lot of things, materially speaking, and neither did the Lord, and neither did his disciples. So if you don't have much of this world's goods, you're in very good company with the Lord Jesus himself. But the Lord Jesus was more interested in giving people the word because that was such that didn't satisfy people's curiosity. To preach the word to them actually changed lives, because Romans chapter ten would tell us, for example, that faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God. And so, so you've done a very good thing tonight in coming here to be under the sound of the word of God, because if you hear it and believe it, it is that which will change your life. Not only for time, but for eternity. And so the Lord Jesus, we read, preached the word unto them in verse two. But then, with this great crowd crowding about the Lord Jesus, that had certain disadvantages, because in those days, uh, they didn't have the zoning laws that maybe we have in our countries, and places weren't made handicap accessible. And lo and behold, a handicapped man turned up at the meeting. Uh, you never know when one of them is going to show up. I've always had some compassion in, uh, myself for the handicapped. I don't know why, I just do, but as a joke, I'm handicapped myself, you know. But anyway, uh, the handicapped man turned up at the meeting, and it was a problem. No ramp to bring this man up into the meeting. No, they couldn't have even carried him up the steps and through the door, if there were steps, because there were so many people crowding around the house and hanging in the windows and out there in the garden, stepping all over the hibiscus plants and trampling down the bird pepper bushes and whatever this great crowd around the house was doing, this poor lame man on a, on a couch, on a stretcher, if you will, he couldn't be brought in. The crowd was too great, and yet he had four friends who carried him to that house, and they were very good friends, because not only did they carry him all the way to the house where the Lord Jesus was, they said, we're not going to let any obstacle get in our way. And so they proceeded up to the second story of the house and onto the roof. In those days, in that part of the world, apparently, they would put a lot of turf on the roof, a lot of dirt, and and things might even grow up there. But they'd go up there and they'd tear through that layer of dirt and tear through the ceiling, and they'd lower down the man into the midst of the meeting there where the Lord Jesus was speaking. Now, can you imagine that? You're sitting there in the meeting listening to the Lord Jesus. He's about at his fourth point in the sermon, and suddenly somebody starts breaking through the ceiling, and the next thing you know, here's a man lowered on a stretcher. What would you think about that? I tell you what, the four men carrying that man on the stretcher and the man on the stretcher himself, they didn't give a hoot about what anybody thought. They had one thing in their minds. We have to get our friend to the Lord Jesus at any cost. We have to get this man to the Lord Jesus because only the Lord Jesus can help this man. Only he has the solution to this man's problems. And he indeed had a solution to the man's biggest problem. Before I go into what that problem was, I want to ask you tonight, what kind of obstacle will keep you from the Lord Jesus Christ? You know, there are many in our world today who won't come to the Lord Jesus, not because the Lord Jesus doesn't want them. He ends the Bible in the very last chapter, Revelation twenty two, saying, let him that is athirst come and drink of the water of life freely. He ends the Bible with an invitation for people to come. It's just what he had been saying all along in Matthew chapter eleven. He said, come unto me, all ye who are weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest. The Lord Jesus says, permit the children to come unto me and forbid them not, for of such is the kingdom of heaven. The Lord Jesus was always telling people to come to him. The Lord Jesus was always presenting himself to people as the savior of the world, as the one that anyone could come to, however bad they've been, whatever sins they've committed, however unworthy they may feel, whatever they may have done in the past, the Lord Jesus says, come to me, and I can deal with it. Come to me, and I can save you from your sins. Come to me, and I will give you new life. And yet so many people do not take the Lord's offer of coming, do not come to Christ, because they let obstacles get in their way, and they make excuses, perhaps. They say, well, yes, it would be nice to follow Jesus, but after all, I have to make a living. I've got to earn my way in this life, you know, and I- I've got to give proper time to my business, and I just don't have time to think about, uh, these things of religion and not to think about the things of Christ in particular. Well, that's a sad thing, and the Bible knows about business people. The Bible talks a lot about them, in fact. It talked about one man who was really prospering, going great guns. He was like some parts of my wife's family. He was a farmer, and, uh, he had record yields in his fields. So much produce was being grown there. He had record-breaking harvests, so much so that he says, oh, this is wonderful. What I'm going to do is tear down my barns and build bigger barns. He was so busy looking at the stock market and what the price of wheat was selling for on the world market that he didn't realize until he went to bed that night, and God appeared to him and said, thou fool, tonight thy soul shall be required of thee. So many people have given themselves over to material things and to things of their job and things of their career, and yet neglected the things of their soul to their eternal detriment, to their eternal loss. It's a terrible thing, you know, to gain a lot in this world only to leave it all, because the Bible says that we entered this world naked, and we're going to exit the world the same way. We shan't be taking anything material into eternity with us. No? You can build a great life for yourself in this world, and yet you can be lost. That's why the Lord Jesus posed the question in Matthew sixteen: what shall it profit a man if he gains the whole world but loses his own soul? What a terrible thing that would be. There are other people that say, well, no, that's not my problem exactly, but why I don't want to come to Jesus is, after all, only geeks come to Jesus, nerds, unpopular people, you know, people that are kind of the outcasts and on the fringe of society, people that need help, people that need a crutch. I'm not like that. I want to be popular, they say. I want to fit in, you know, with the, the people that are cool in this life and the people that have a good time. And if I come to Jesus, well, I know for sure that that'll be the end of the good times. I won't have any fun anymore. Oh, they've obviously not met a lot of the Christians I know who are able to enjoy the good things of this life and yet to enjoy them to the glory of God, who are able to have the kind of a good time that doesn't cause you to wake up the next morning with a hangover, that doesn't give you some kind of a disease, that doesn't imperil your health or your life or ruin your reputation or make you feel guilty in the morning. No, the Lord Jesus gives us all things richly to enjoy in him if we belong to him, but many don't want to come to him because of the obstacle of pleasure and of their friends. And they say, after all, if I come to Jesus Christ, what will my friends think of me? Hmm. Well, I tell you, one day you're going to have to stand before the God of the universe, and you won't be able to say, you know, I want to call my friend whoever, I won't name any name in case I name somebody's name in here, but I want to have my best friend here standing with me to sort of speak for me at the judgment. No, that's not going to happen. In fact, Romans chapter three tells us that at the judgment, every mouth will be stopped. No one's going to be able to say to God, Lord, you didn't give me a chance. Lord, it isn't fair. I didn't have an opportunity to be saved. There wasn't enough done to save me. No, you may look around for your friends, but I'm afraid it's going to be every man and woman, boy and girl for himself at that occasion. You're going to have to stand before God and give an account of what your life has been. And if your life has been one of neglecting Christ, if you do not know him as your savior and you pass out into eternity that way, the Lord, the Lord will say to you, depart from me, ye that work iniquity, I never knew you. What a terrible thing that would be. There are many other obstacles that people let come between them and the Lord Jesus Christ. But the bottom line is, the Bible tells us that what we need to do is put aside every obstacle. Whatever would stand in our way, we need to cast it aside that we may come to the Lord Jesus Christ. That's what Paul said in Philippians three. He could go back and he could say, you know, before I became a Christian, I was quite a successful man, very religious. I had an excellent pedigree. I was an Israelite. I was a Hebrew of the Hebrews. I was circumcised the eighth day of the tribe of Benjamin. As touching the law, I was blameless. Concerning zeal, I was persecuting the church. As he would say elsewhere in the book of Galatians chapter one, I profited in the Jews' religion above many of my equals or my contemporaries. So he could point back to his life, and he could point to all the things he had done, all the success he had had, all the fame and notoriety he had gained. And yet, you know what his estimation in the end was? He says, but whatsoever things were gained to me, those I counted loss for the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord, for whom I've suffered the loss of all things, and do count them but rubbish, that I may gain Christ. He looked on his past life, and he said, you know, whatever made that life good, whatever made me well off in this world and famous, whatever this world says is worth having, I'm willing to put it behind my back and call it garbage. Because compared to the Lord Jesus Christ and knowing him, that's what it is. No, says Paul, all I want now is to be found in Christ, having his righteousness, knowing him. He wanted no obstacles before him. Well, as these men lowered the man into the presence of the Lord Jesus, what do you think the Lord Jesus would say to that? I mean, I'm sure there are many preachers, I've known a few of them, that are easily distracted if some child starts to make a little bit of noise in the meeting, they get thrown off, or if somebody's there and their eyes are wandering and they're wondering what the score is in the Super Bowl or something, you know, the preacher gets very distracted at that. But don't be thinking about that anyway, because with the power outage, the cable's out too, so you're not missing anything. We can have a prayer meeting after the meeting if you want, but anyway, uh, as they lowered this man into the Lord Jesus' presence, I'll tell you what he did not do. He did not say, how dare you interrupt my meeting? He did not say, now there you go, you've thrown me off from what I was trying to say in the sermon. No, they lowered this man into the presence of the Lord Jesus, and there was no rebuke, no censure from the Lord Jesus. Rather, it says in verse five, when Jesus saw their faith, he said unto the sick of the palsy, Son, thy sins be forgiven thee. You know, the wonderful thing about the Lord Jesus is if you come to him, if you come to him as a sinner in need, the Lord Jesus will not turn you away. He will not say, no, this is an inconvenient time for me, or no, I'm sorry, you- you- you came at a bad time. I only save people between three and five p.m. No, he doesn't care about any of that. You come to him any time of day or night, and you want to do business about your soul, you want to be saved, the Lord Jesus will never turn you away. And as you come to him, the Lord Jesus looks at you, just as he looks at these men, and he sees what human beings can't see. He sees the truly intangible, something invisible, faith. Now, how can you see faith? Faith is belief. Faith is putting your confidence in something. It's the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen, Hebrews chapter eleven verse one says. So it's contrasted in the word of God. In second Corinthians five, Paul says, we walk by faith and not by sight. So faith is believing what you cannot see, and yet the Lord Jesus is able to look at them and to see their faith because he can gaze right into their hearts. He could see what they were doing there. He could see that these people were serious, that they weren't going to let anything stop them from bringing their friend to Christ. He could see that this man had a deep need, and he was looking to the Lord Jesus Christ to meet that need. Now, we may look at that man, and our automatic first thought would probably be, ah, I see that man has a need. He needs physical healing. After all, he's sick of the palsy, as the King James says, or more modern translations would say, he's paralyzed. Here's a man that can't get up and walk. He can't move around. He's physically debilitated. He's got problems. That must be that man's biggest problem, because after all, there's nothing worse than having physical problems, right? Uh, wrong. Uh, the Bible's quite clear that there is something worse than having physical problems. That the Lord Jesus himself said that if your right eye offends you, pluck it out, because it's better for you to enter into eternity having one eye than to enter into eternity and go into hellfire with two eyes in perfectly good working order. The Lord Jesus said, if your right hand offe- offends thee, cut it off, because it's better for you to enter into life maimed than to enter into eternity and be lost with two good functioning hands. And how many people walk around in our world sound in mind and body, with their circulatory systems working properly, and their respiratory systems, and their digestive systems, and all of the systems of the body functioning a-okay, no problems, in good health, and yet they're lost, dead in trespasses and sins, not recognized by God as even being alive in his presence, not having a relationship with their creator. Now, I tell you, there's something worse than being physically debilitated, that is to be spiritually debilitated. There's something worse than having physical problems, because as others in this room could attest, you can have physical problems, and yet those very same physical problems will drive you to Christ, will remind you that you can't do it yourself. Because if you were to take, uh, the majority of the world's athletes, for example, and you were to poll them and say, now, do you need anything? The first thing they're taught in their culture of athleticism is to say, no, I don't need anything. I'm tough. I'm, I'm strong. I'm fast. I have endurance. I've trained myself. I've prepared my body. I eat right, and I work out so many hours a day, and I've prepared myself in mind and body. I'm a warrior, they'll say. I don't need anybody or anything. And yet that's absolute rubbish. Because the Bible says we've all sinned and fall short of the glory of God. And what we as sinners need is a savior. That's what this man, in all of his paralysis, lying on the, on the stretcher there, perceived that those around didn't see. He saw that he had a deep need, because when they lowered this man into the Lord Jesus' presence, the Lord didn't immediately say, rise up and walk. He said something else first. He looked at him, saw his faith, and said, Son, thy sins be forgiven thee. In other words, the Lord Jesus goes right to the heart of this man's problem. His biggest problem is not that he's lying on a stretcher. His biggest problem is not that he's paralyzed or can't work. His biggest problem isn't that he can't lead a normal life. His biggest problem is that he's a sinner on his way to hell who needs to be saved. And the Lord Jesus looks at him, and he says, Son, thy sins be forgiven thee. The best news that a sinner can ever hear, that they can hear that they've passed from death unto life, that they can hear that there's no more judgment for them, no wrath of God that's going to fall on them, that they can hear that when they die or when the Lord Jesus comes, whichever happens first, that they won't be in hell separated from God for all eternity, but that they'll be in glory, having everlasting life with the Lord Jesus, that they can hear that even from the moment they believe in Christ and are saved, that that eternal life will begin in their lives right here and right now. What a tremendous message this gospel is. As the Lord Jesus said to that young man, the source of all your problems is gone. I've forgiven your sins. Your deepest problem is solved. I'm forgiving you. What would you say to that? Well, the people sitting around, some of them didn't quite like that statement. They said to themselves, not out loud, they were reasoning in themselves, verse six says, in their hearts. Verse seven says, why did this man thus speak blasphemies? Who can forgive sins but God alone? Now they were half right. Their statement had a logical foundation of fact. They said, who can forgive sins but God alone? And that's true. Ultimately, God is the only one who can forgive sins, because ultimately, every sin is against God. You know, people do certain things in our world, certain things that God calls sin and says are evil, and they say, no, it's not evil because no one gets hurt by it. I'm not hurting anybody by doing it, they say. Now, usually when people say something like that, they're mistaken. If you look hard enough and think about it, usually somebody is hurt. But, you know, people often say that kind of thing, but the Bible says, no, that's not true. When David came to repent of his sin in Psalm fifty one, he would pray to the Lord, and he would say, against thee and thee only have I sinned. Now, we might be tempted right there to stop David and say, excuse me, King David, but as I remember my history, and doesn't second Samuel say that you took advantage of a married woman, Bathsheba? Wouldn't you say you sinned against her? Yes. And yes, it seems to me, as I recall the story, King, uh, David, that you took a man's wife, you defrauded a husband, you committed adultery, and you hurt that husband by thereby doing. And to make it worse, to cover up your sin, you engineered the murder of that same man. You put him in the forefront of battle, and you told his comrades to pull back so that he'd be killed in the battle, and that's exactly what happened to him. Wouldn't you say you sinned against Uriah, that's Sheba's husband? Well, yes, I guess I'd have to concede that. A- and yes, David, uh, you, as the leader of a nation who are supposed to lead people to God and make sure they walk in the ways of God, by sinning this way and by engineering this great cover-up, and by hindering God's blessing from coming on you, and by extension on the nation, wouldn't you say you sinned against the nation? Uh, yes, I suppose in a certain sense we could say that too. And what about the little baby? Because after all, God took the life of the child. Isn't there some crime committed there, David? Yes. But when he comes down to confession in Psalm fifty one, he says, against you and you only have I sinned. And that's true. Yes, we may sin against one another. Yes, we may sin against other people. But the issue is not how good have I been towards other people? How nice have I been to my neighbor? How well have I treated other people? You can be an upstanding member of your community and basically be decent and nice to everybody on this island. You can do all of that and still sin against the Lord every day of the week by not giving him his place in your life. That's the mistake that so many make. When we talk about sin, they'll say, oh no, I'm not really a sinner. A sinner is Osama bin Laden, somebody that gets people to fly jet airplanes into tall buildings. A, a sinner is one of those serial killers that you hear about on court TV, true TV, I guess as they call it now. A sinner is maybe some lying politician or somebody that robbed a bank. I'm not a sinner, they say. But when in fact the worst sins, the Bible says, is not giving God his proper place. Romans one starts out a great catalog of sins by saying that when they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful. These men were right when they said, who can forgive sins but God alone? Because God, as the offended party, because God is the holy one who determines right and wrong, because righteousness is what accords with his character, because sin is everything opposed and antithetical and opposite to what God is. Because of all of that, God is the judge of all the earth, as Abraham called him, and only he has the right to forgive sins. So their reasoning was sound. Who can forgive sins but God only? But the problem was that they said, how can this man forgive sins? Who can forgive sins but God only? And if we take their question and we say, well, if God can only forgive sins, and if this man is claiming to forgive someone's sin, then logically, this man must be claiming to be God. And so they should have investigated that. They should have said, now it's evident that you're claiming something that only God can do. Could it be somehow, some way, that you are God? And then the Lord Jesus could have unfolded the wonderful story of how God became flesh, how the Son of God himself came, what we remember at Christmas, how he came and was born of a virgin, and he could have explained it to them. But instead of giving the Lord Jesus a pla- a chance to explain, they did what many do even to this day, they made assumptions about him. They didn't let him speak for himself. They just decided there and then that he was a deceiver and a blasphemer. They said, why does this man, full stop, nothing more than a man, why does he speak blasphemies? So the Lord Jesus says, all right, which is easier to say? Notice the Lord's terms. I guess you think that I say, says the Lord Jesus, that this man's sins are forgiven, and there's no way of proving it. I mean, I can say that I have a helicopter in Pennsylvania, and you can't disprove it, standing here at least. Uh, you could go up there, and you could look around at all the airports in the area, and if you can't find my helicopter, I suppose you could say, well, I found no evidence of it, Keith. But if I just say something, I can say a lot of things that you wouldn't necessarily be able to verify or disprove. But the Lord Jesus here says, all right, you want evidence, you want to be able to put it to the test, you you're good empiricists, you want to experiment and and put something to the test and see if it's true. Which is easier to say, thy sins are forgiven thee, or to say, arise, take up thy bed and walk? Well, the main difference being, isn't it, that you can say, thy sins be forgiven thee, and nobody knows except the Lord Jesus himself whether that's actually happened or not. Nobody but God the Father in heaven and God the Spirit and God the Son standing in that room ultimately can prove that statement. But if he says, I say unto thee, take up thy bed and walk, everybody in that house knows whether the statement's true or not. Because if he says, take up thy bed and walk, and the man doesn't take up his bed and walk, that shows he doesn't have any kind of power, any kind of authority to back up his words. But the Lord Jesus says that you may know that the Son of Man has power or authority on earth to forgive sins. He turns to the man on the stretcher and he says, I say unto thee, arise, take up thy bed and walk. How gracious of the Lord Jesus. That man believed that the Lord Jesus had forgiven his sins. Jesus saw his faith and that of his friends. But it was the crowd around that didn't believe. And to show them the truth of who he is, that he had every right to forgive someone's sins, he would demonstrate it by healing that paralyzed man on the stretcher and telling him, now get up and take up your bed and walk. And the man did exactly that. But we may ask ourselves tonight, on what basis can the Lord Jesus say to a sinner, thy sins be forgiven thee? Yes, it proves he's God, because only God can forgive sins. If God is ultimately the one that all sin is against, then God has to be placated. God must be, uh, brought to the point where he can forgive it. But how can the Lord Jesus forgive a sinner tonight? How can he forgive somebody on Manawar Key, sitting in the sound of my voice this evening? He can do it this way, because when it came time to punish sin, the holy God of the universe didn't shrink from punishing sin. He poured out his wrath against sin, and he judged it to the fullest, except the wonderful thing of the gospel is this, that when he poured out his wrath against sin, he didn't pour out his wrath on sinners. That is what we deserve. But rather, at the cross of Calvary, he took the only man who's ever lived on this planet who wasn't a sinner, the only one who was sinless and impeccable and capable of sinning. He took God the Son himself, and he laid on him the iniquity of us all. He took him, and he judged him for our sins. So that he may now turn around and offer forgiveness to us today and say, see, there was a payment made almost two thousand years ago at Calvary. The precious blood of the Lord Jesus was shed. His life was poured out. He gave himself as an offering for sin. And how do we know that offering was received? Well, three days later, God raised him from the dead, showing that he had received that payment. And now he lives never to die again, and he promises to extend that same endless eternal life to whoever will come to him as a sinner and confess, yes, Lord, I'm a sinner, I deserve hell. Yes, Lord, I don't deserve your grace, but you offer it to me, you offer me salvation, you offer me forgiveness of sins, you offer me eternal life through what your son, the Lord Jesus Christ, has done. And if you come to the Lord Jesus Christ sincerely that way, if you come to him and say, Lord, save me a sinner, the Lord will do that. But you have to mean business. You can't be playing around. You can't be faking it. Because just as the Lord Jesus could look on the hearts of these men and know what they were thinking, so he knows what you're thinking. He knows what you're thinking right now, sitting there in that pew. But if you're serious, you've never done so before, and you want to be saved, you can come to him and be saved tonight. You can come to him just as this man came, putting aside the obstacles and saying, all I want is Christ. Give me Christ, and Christ will give himself to you and give eternal life and forgiveness to you. What a wonderful Savior we have tonight. Father, we thank thee for the Lord Jesus Christ. We thank thee for his gospel. We thank thee that he is the great physician who not only heals the physically sick, but the spiritually sick. The one who can save a soul from hell and from punishment. And Father, the one who can give eternal life and say they will never perish. We thank thee for him, and we pray for anyone here who doesn't know him as their Savior, that tonight would be the night where they would come and say, my Lord and my God, save me a sinner. And we pray for anyone who may hear this, either outside passing by or even hearing it on recording. Father, that they turn to thee while thou mayest be found. We ask in the Lord Jesus' name. Amen.