Daughters, Ken: Naaman Healed Of Leprosy ~ Northwest Bible Chpl Ministry

Yes, I too enjoyed the music. It, uh, is a delight to hear those that are so skilled. I travel among, uh, many assemblies around the country, and I think yours is the most, uh, musical assembly. So, uh, it's, uh, a blessing to all, I'm sure, to have those that study music as a profession teach it to others and then, uh, use their skills in, uh, praising the Lord. And yes, it's been a delight to be with you since, uh, ninety one, uh, seventeen years, uh, the month of April. Uh, my dear colleague, uh, McLeod has been coming a long time, but, uh, he has, uh, the depths of the winter in January, and for some reason I got April, and I, I tell them because they like me better is the reason I get April, but, uh, obviously that's not the case. Uh, we have watched our kids, uh, grow up, and it's amazing. It seems, uh, so fast, uh, for those of us that are adults, uh, so long, I think, for the young kids. Uh, very happy memories, uh, looking, uh, for Easter eggs in the backyards of some of your homes, uh, enjoying, uh, wonderful Easter meals at, uh, your tables. Uh, Christy now, uh, has been married three years, uh, graduating from Dallas Seminary with a degree in, uh, counseling, uh, this next month, wants to become a licensed professional counselor. Uh, Steven's graduating from Emmaus this year with a double major in Bible and, uh, computer information systems, getting married, uh, June second, moving to the Madison area. Uh, Robbie is graduating from high school and, uh, going to Emmaus next year. So three of our kids will be out of the house, and we'll be down to James and Andrew. Uh, James is sixth grade in middle school, and, uh, Andrew is, uh, fourth grade. Uh, so I hope to bring them, uh, at least one or two of the weeks, uh, that I'm, uh, coming. There's a five Sunday month, so I'll be coming four of the five Sundays, and, uh, though they're very busy and have youth group activities and all those kinds of things, I'll see if they can't, uh, join me one early Sunday morning and, uh, come in and see you all and, uh, enjoy fellowship with you. Uh, the college, uh, continues well. Uh, we are very grateful for your help in, uh, supporting two of our faculty members as commended workers from this assembly, the Jimos and the McLeods. Appreciate that very much. Uh, we have, uh, been, uh, delighted through the years to be able to expand our offerings. You know that, uh, we have a very successful elementary education program. We have, uh, computer information systems. I mentioned my son's graduating from that program, and, uh, we're actually, uh, going to be able to offer a cooperative, uh, program with our local community college, uh, to offer a nursing degree, uh, mixed with a Bible degree. So in, uh, uh four and a half years, you can graduate with an associate's as a registered nurse, uh, from our community college and with a bachelor's in the biblical studies from Emmaus, and that will fulfill the desire of a number of our young people, as they have desired, uh, to do both. In fact, my son-in-law, for example, came to Emmaus for the one-year certificate and did his RN, uh, somewhere else. We've had a lot of interest in an RN program, and we're very pleased, uh, to be able to set that up this year. We're beginning, uh, negotiations also, uh, uh, to do a similar program, uh, with, uh, business, eventually hoping to have, uh, business as a major on campus, uh, taught with the emphasis of, uh, business ethics and an emphasis in nonprofit, which would fit very well, uh, with the kinds of students that come to us and have interest to us. So, uh, do be praying for us, I, I would ask, as the Lord continues, uh, to bless the college. My thoughts this morning are drawn, uh, to the story of Naaman in Second Kings chapter five. and so I'd like you to open your Bibles there, uh, to the Old Testament. Uh, Naaman was, uh, from all, uh, reports, a very successful and admirable man. If you were to, uh, say, uh, what people thought of him, uh, what level of, uh, achievement, uh, he had made in life, everything seemed to go so well. But he had one terrible flaw, and he seemed, uh, so innocent, uh, as far as why he'd be afflicted with this. Uh, but though he, uh, was such a successful, valiant warrior, uh, the head of the entire army of the king of Aram, he had leprosy. Leprosy was a hideous, uh, disease. Uh, it, uh, tended to cause you, uh, to be ostracized, uh, from fellowship with your friends and others, especially in the nation of Israel, where you actually had to live separately, uh, from others. In Aram, they didn't treat you quite that way, but neither, uh, was it a very pleasant or acceptable disease, and it really was an impediment, uh, for him going forward in life. Uh, it was a kind of disease that could take over your life, ruin it, and maybe even kill you. And it seems, uh, so incongruent for him to be so successful in one side of his life and yet have this hideous disease. You notice as you read through scripture and the, uh, the comparisons of how, uh, leprosy comes up in scripture, that sometimes it's used as a picture of how sin attacks us. And leprosy, uh, is seen as something that is like sin, that it prevents us from having fellowship, and it's like sin in the sense that, uh, it seems to ruin everything else about our life, though the rest of our life might have seemed fine. I, I think that a common scourge, uh, in our lives today, uh, like cancer, uh, would be similar to a situation, uh, like leprosy in that day, uh, where it's quite a surprise, uh, to end up with cancer. Uh, it's a fearful thing. Uh, you, you wonder whether you will live or die. Uh, you wonder why me? Uh, you wonder why this has come upon me. You wonder, like, what have I done to deserve such a thing? And, uh, it again is somewhat picturesque of the problem, uh, that we have in our relationship with God. Uh, not that, uh, sinners get leprosy or sinners get cancer in, uh, direct proportion to their sin. I'm not saying that at all, but I'm saying that it's a picture of a much greater spiritual problem that we have with God. And God wants to use the diseases that come into our lives, uh, to teach us about the spiritual issues that we have in fellowship with him. And I think this story is an excellent one, uh, to help us gain balance in understanding how God calls on us to trust him in faith, even when circumstantially it doesn't seem easy to do so. So a very interesting story. Look with me, please, at please, Chri- second Kings, please. Second Kings in the Old Testament, chapter five, Beginning with verse one. now Naaman, captain of the army of the king of Aram, was a great man with his master, highly respected, because by him the Lord had given victory to Aram. It's kind of interesting to notice that even though Aram was the enemy of Israel, God himself had allowed Aram to gain control over Israel and to dominate them and to require tribute from them and the like. Uh, God was the one behind the scenes allowing this foreign power, uh, to be able to control his own chosen people, uh, to teach his people a lesson. And so there were so many things going well for Naaman. The king loved him, he was highly respected, uh, he was a valiant and successful warrior. Uh, but verse one ends with the contrasting phrase, but he was a leper. And frankly, nothing else matters in life. Uh, nothing else can be enjoyed. Overall, you feel no success whatsoever if you have leprosy. You could compare that to cancer. You could say, all my other problems pale in comparison to, uh, the problem of a life and death situation with cancer. It, it can, uh, absorb every focus of your life. And I ask you again to imagine, uh, since it's picturesque of sin in our lives, uh, we may not be aware of our sin, we may not be conscious of its ability to harm our relationship with God or to break fellowship with God, but it's there, it controls us, and it actually ruins every other aspect of our lives. But the story continues and the plot thickens. Verse two: Now the Arameans had gone out into bands and had taken captive a little girl from the land of Israel, and she waited on Naaman's wife. Since they were more powerful in Israel and were dominating them, they could do whatever they wanted to them, and one of the things they did was conduct raids and steal people and make them their slaves. And a little girl had been captured, and she seemed to be of the right age and disposition, uh, that Naaman himself had taken her home and given her to his wife as a servant. Now, you'd imagine if you were a little girl captured and taken away from your parents, uh, that you do everything to resist, that you'd be as, uh, unhelpful and uncooperative as possible, as resistant as possible, as, uh, as mean-spirited as possible, and that you would, uh, become, uh, entirely focused on the injustice of having been captured and made a slave. But this little girl is amazing. Rather than focusing on herself, she focuses on the opportunity that God has, uh, to use her as a servant of someone else. Uh, it's not her chosen lot in life. God has allowed it, and so she is willing to let God have his way with her. And she actually cares more for the other person than she does herself. We sang a few moments ago, make me a blessing. Watch as God uses this little girl in making her a blessing. She said to her mistress, I wish that my master were with the prophet who's in Samaria, then he would cure him of his leprosy. In other words, she has this great idea, and I don't know who put it in her head. In fact, I don't know that there's much precedent for this. I don't know of other examples of, uh, healing of leprosy, and yet she's just sure, uh, that God has the power to heal, and that God has obviously been working through, uh, his prophet, and that surely if her master, uh, Naaman were to go and see the prophet in Samaria, that God would be powerful enough to heal him. And so she says, I wish. Now, when this kind of, uh, news hits Naaman's ears, uh, it seems rather a- a desperate approach. Uh, he, however, has no other option. Uh, he has an incurable disease, and just the thought that there might be a possibility, uh, would cause one, as many do, to travel clear to Mexico to some, uh, clinic to, uh, try some form of alternative medicine, uh, seeking any possible hope there may be. So he latches onto this idea, well, maybe I could go see the prophet in Israel. So Naaman went in, verse four, and told his master, the king, thus and thus spoke the girl who's from the land of Israel. Well, the king loved Naaman and didn't want to see him suffer through leprosy, and he thinks this is a great idea. He says, go now, I'll send a letter to the king of Israel. And they're going through the proper so-called diplomatic channels, if you want to call it such. Uh, he's dominating Israel. He can do to Israel whatever he wishes, but he sends a letter to the king of Israel saying, I'd like you to see that, uh, my, uh, uh, captain of the army is healed of this disease. And, uh, Naaman departs and takes with him a, a wonderful reward for payment for this disease. Uh, he takes with him ten talents of silver, six thousand shekels of gold, and ten changes of clothes, probably ten entire wardrobes. Uh, so a king's ransom, uh, to be given to the prophet of God, uh, in, uh, reward, let's say, uh, for having, uh, healed him. So, uh, he traveled, uh, to the king of Israel, bringing the letter from his king, and, and it says in verse six, and now as this letter comes to you, behold, I've sent Naaman my servant to you, that you may cure him of leprosy. So one king says to the other in the letter, do take care of the captain of my army, the one who's been dominating you. Uh, heal him of leprosy, please. Well, if the king of Israel reads such a letter, uh, how is he to respond? Uh, well, he thinks that there's, uh, some pretext here for war, and he's imagining, uh, that since he's incapable of, uh, healing anyone of leprosy, uh, that this is meant to be some sort of provocation. Heal him or else I'll come and destroy you. Uh, so the poor king of Israel says, am I God? And he's right, only God could possibly heal someone of leprosy, though, uh, we don't have precedent to, uh, to expect this. Am I God to kill and make alive that this man is sending word to me to cure a man of his leprosy? But consider now and see how he's seeking a quarrel against me. This must be an attempt to spark a war. I don't know if you've been, uh, following the story this past week of, uh, the sailors of, uh, the British Navy that have been, uh, captured by Iran and, uh, being held captive, and how Tony Blair and the English government have been calling for their release, saying, no, they were in Iraqi waters, not Iranian waters, you have no right to have taken them. And even this morning, President Bush spoke up and said, these are now hostages, and I demand that Iran release them immediately. All of us are nervous of what this could possibly, uh, mean. Could it be escalation into war? We certainly don't want to involve ourselves in a whole nother war with Iran, adding that to our soldiers already in Afghanistan and Iraq. Oh, it's a, it's a nerve-wracking thing. Uh, we see this kind of thing in the news, and you can feel for the King of Israel, uh, getting a letter from the King of Aram saying, heal the, the captain of my army, please, and saying, I can't do this. This is impossible. What are you asking of me? Are you trying to provoke a war? Well, it happened when Elisha, the man of God, the prophet of God, heard that the king of Israel had torn his clothes, which is the way they expect- expressed a tremendous grief in those days. They sent word to the king saying, why have you torn your clothes? Now let him come to me, and he'll know that there's a prophet in Israel. Uh, so the right man, the prophet of God, finds out about the situation and says, oh king, just send him to me. And so you expect, uh, that Elisha will solve the issue. So Naaman came, but he doesn't come by himself. He's a very important man, and so look at his entourage pulling up in front of Elisha's humble home. He came with his horses and his chariots and stood at the doorway of the house of Elisha. Uh, one time when I was in here, uh, in Chicago, the, uh, the head of, uh, China was, uh, coming from Chicago O'Hare downtown for a big summit of some sort, and they closed the entire tollway. I was, uh, going, uh, northwest, and, uh, they were coming, uh, from the tollway, and I thought, like, whatever happened? The- there's no cars coming the other direction. Strangest thing. And then I saw the various, uh, police cars having blocked off the, uh, the entrances to the tollway. Then eventually I saw what seemed like an entourage of a hundred armored cars coming down, uh, with, uh, the Premier of China and all of his, uh, people, uh, for a meeting downtown. I thought, wow, what a major event in seeing someone so important come through. And this is what it must have looked like to have, uh, Naman in front of Elisha's house waiting to be healed. But Elisha's reaction is completely strange. I'm expecting a lot of fanfare. I'm expecting a major ceremony. I'm expecting it to be, uh, quite a show. Uh, you know what happens in a neighborhood when something exciting is happening, like a fire or something. The whole neighborhood comes out and everybody stands around and watches. And I suppose this would be very interesting to watch. But verse ten says Elisha doesn't even come out of the house. He doesn't even come out of the house. This is just plain disrespectful, isn't it? He just sends his messenger out, Gehazi, uh, and the messenger says, go and wash in the Jordan seven times, and your flesh will be restored to you, and you shall be clean. Now you think in one hand that Naaman would be glad to hear what the solution is. He just needs to go wash in the Jordan River, uh, and he'll be cured of his leprosy. Uh, but this is not the manner in which he expected it to take place. He was expecting, uh, a much more glorious miracle. Naaman became furious. I don't know what can set you off, how fast of a temper you have, and how easily, uh, you can become disappointed, but Naaman was furious and went away stomping, kicking the dust, saying, behold, I thought he'll surely come out to me and stand and call the name of the Lord his God and wave his hand all over the place and cure the leper. He was expecting a glorious show, but to go wash in the Jordan River? This seems beneath his dignity. And then he starts complaining, are not the Abanan, the Pharpar, the rivers of Damascus better than all the waters of Israel? Could I not wash in them and be cleaned? So he turned away and went away in a rage. In other words, he's saying, this prescription for healing from leprosy isn't anything like I expected. In fact, were I to design a prescription, I would have designed it much better than this. I'm not going to do it. What I find amazing about us is how we'll look a gift horse in the mouth. You understand what that expression means? You get a horse gifted to you, and you look at its teeth to see how old it is, and you say, like, oh, not a very good gift, it's an old horse. Isn't the real issue here whether or not he wants to be healed, not the manner? And I find when we talk to people about believing in Jesus Christ, they might say, well, that's not the way I think I ought to be saved. I don't think that's how my sins ought to be forgiven. It should be more glorious than that. I should have to do things in order to earn my salvation. Maybe I should have to crawl on my knees up the steps of the cathedral and to show my penance, maybe there should be something far more stupendous than trusting in Jesus Christ. It's not the way I would expect it. But his servants are thinking far more clearly than the emotional and enraged Naaman, and they come near him and speak to him, saying, verse thirteen, my father, had the prophet told you to do some great thing, would you have not done it? If he said, okay, just climb Mount Everest and you can be healed, you know, something that seems like a lot of work, something that seems difficult, something that seems beyond the ordinary, wouldn't he have done that? Well, sure he would have. How much more than when he says, wash and be clean? What's interesting is how the story is told and the way in which Naaman reacts. It is so obvious to us that this is the way we respond when God asks us to respond to him in faith. We say, faith, is that all he wants? Surely he wants more than that. Trust him? He wants me to trust him? How can I trust him when circumstances are like this? In fact, we creatively try to design some alternative. And Naaman says, the dirty, muddy Jordan River, I can think of better rivers. If you want me to go down in a river and wash, I can find a better river. And I suppose some of us might say, believe in Jesus Christ to have your sins forgiven. Why that? That doesn't make sense to me. I can't understand why you would require this of me. And yet, we're not the ones who have the power to save ourselves. It's God himself who's created us, who has the power to remove the damage of sin in our lives, has the power to heal us and make us whole, and has the power to give us life. Now, why would we introspectively say, I don't like what you've required of me? So what does Naaman do? He listens to the sense of his servants, and he went down and dipped himself seven times in the Jordan according to the word of the man of God, and sure enough, his flesh was restored like the flesh of a little child, and he was clean. I'm of that, uh, generation where I actually did change diapers on all five of my kids. I'm not like one of those ones who, uh, you know, never was there during the birth process or didn't change diapers or take care of kids. No, I'm young enough, just barely, to be of the the generation in which I've participated in all of that, and I can agree that there's nothing smoother and more tender than the flesh of a little baby. Imagine that change, from the hideous scaling sores of leprosy to coming out of that muddy Jordan River as clean and as fresh as new. You know, when God heals us of our diseases, particularly of our problem of sin, he makes us a new creature. Behold, all things become new. And Romans six even says to us, we're no longer slaves to sin. We're freed, able now to obey him and to follow him and to serve him. He's made us an entirely new creature, just like one who's had his skin clean to the point of being like a little child. Verse fifteen, when he returned to the man of God with all his company and came and stood before him, he said, behold, now I know that there's no God in all the earth but in Israel. And he recognizes that there's only one true God because no one would be able to do this. This is a unique, miraculous healing of God himself. And so the false gods that he's been worshiping his entire life, such as Baal, for example, does not exist. He can't do this. Only the one true God. And so he offers, uh, to Elisha, uh, the king's ransom of the ten talents of silver and six thousand shekels of gold and ten wardrobes of clothes. Says, take a present from your servant now. And you would think that, uh, just as, uh, we are able to receive gifts from, uh, let's say Egypt, for example, when the people left Egypt and went out into the wilderness, uh, surely can't we take something here as a reward, as, uh, being a faithful servant to God? But you'll see that Elisha turns him down and will not take a thing. And I think this is so that Naaman will not believe that he contributed anything to his healing, but it was solely the grace of God. Because wasn't that the issue in the first place, coming with this, uh, huge gift and then demanding that there wasn't enough fanfare and there wasn't enough of a, uh, a, uh, an amazing kind of healing, that it was something as simple as bathing in the Jordan River. It wasn't the Jordan River that healed him. It was God himself. And God doesn't need anything like this kind of rich gift. And so Elisha will not accept it. Verse sixteen, as the Lord lives before whom I stand, I will take nothing. Naaman urged him, but Elisha refused. And then Naaman goes on to say, well, I'll take a little earth with me, uh, back to my land, so that when I worship only now the one true God, the God of Israel, I'll worship on some of the land that came right from here. When I think of this story, and I, uh, go over it in my mind again and again, I realize how quick we are as human beings, uh, to invent and to propose our own solutions to problems that we have that God wants to solve. In fact, we'll creatively imagine, uh, that our ways are superior to God's ways. Uh, that our timing and our manner of healing is superior to anything that God would want in our lives. You know, there are times when God will allow us to remain sick. You know, the sickness has come upon us as a result of sin in our lives. In fact, the physical sickness is a good reminder and a picture of the spiritual problem that we have of sin. Uh, think of John ten when, uh, Mary and Martha send word to our Lord that, uh, their dear brother, the one whom Jesus loved so well, Lazarus, is sick. And you remember that Jesus explained to his disciples that God was going to be glorified through Lazarus's sickness. God allowed Lazarus to actually go all the way to the end, to die, and then four days later to be raised by Jesus back again. And remember how Martha and Mary scolded Jesus for arriving too late, saying, if you'd been here, my brother would not have died? See, in that case, it actually bring, it brought more glory to God for Lazarus to die than it was for Lazarus to live, except that he wanted to show his power in bringing him back to life again. And similarly, in this case, God is glorified through Naaman learning a lesson that is so hard that not one of us would ever volunteer to endure it. Which of us would want to suffer a hideous and harmful and nearly fatal kind of disease, an incurable one like this? Yet God calls on him to trust him in faith and not to invent other means, not to say that I can win your favor by, I don't want to call it a bribe, let's just call it a reward, but in some way contribute and pay back God for what he's done? No. God's grace is without measure and is without ability to be paid for, or else it wouldn't be grace. You can't put a price on it. It is a gift, and God shows his mercy and his grace to us when he heals us of a far bigger problem than leprosy or cancer or of any other kinds of diseases. God heals us, spiritually speaking, from our sins. The greatest problem we've ever had is our sin problem, our rebellion against God, our willingness to violate God's law and to sin selfishly and rebelliously. But God graciously has been willing to forgive us. What he asks of us may seem surprising. It may seem too easy in one sense. It is actually amazingly difficult for us. He asks us to humble ourselves and admit that we cannot contribute to our salvation in any way whatsoever, and that the only way that we can be saved is to cast ourselves completely on him. We must believe that Jesus Christ is his son, our savior, and that he died on the cross to pay for our sins, that we should have died to pay for our own sins, but that he died in our place, and to place ourselves into the care of Jesus Christ, transferring trust from ourselves to him, is the faith that God rewards by forgiving us of our sins and giving us life eternal. I praise God that his ways are higher than our ways, and that his ways are righteous and good. I praise him for his grace and his mercy and his willingness to hi- to heal a person like a Naaman. And I thank God that he used his servant Elisha, but even more surprisingly, that he used his servant, that little girl who'd been captured as a slave, to point her mistress and her master to the one true God, the one that can heal. If we're going to be used of God to be a blessing to others, may we be quick to share the love of God as he shared it with us, and tell others of where they can find forgiveness for their sins and even healing from their diseases, as God would will. Shall we pray? Heavenly Father, help us. And because we so easily trust in ourselves, we so easily focus on our own abilities, we so quickly think that we can contribute and motivate you to love us and to heal us. Instead, Father, teach us your ways. Teach us to have complete and total trust in you, that your gift of life, your gift of health is truly a gift of grace. We don't deserve it, and yet, uh, we long to have you in control of our lives. May we therefore learn from this story the faith you require of us, for we ask in Jesus' name, amen.