Matthew-091

 

We turn now to the Word of God. In the last few weeks, we have been looking at Matthew Chapter 23 on the theme of the “symptoms of spiritual disease” and how to deal with these symptoms. First, you have to understand what they are and we saw that there are seven basic symptoms of spiritual disease and that all these symptoms are various manifestations of hypocrisy.

We see that the Scripture tells us hypocrisy will result in spiritual death, as the Lord Jesus says plainly in Matthew 24:51, the place for the hypocrites will be in hell. And in this passage he said, “How shall you escape the condemnation of hell?” So hypocrisy is a fatal disease. How can we remain free of it?

 

Hypocrisy: Selfishness, egocentricity – untransformed human nature

When we look at these symptoms of hypocrisy, we ask, what is hypocrisy fundamentally? Can we sum it up in such a way that we can clearly grasp the nature of hypocrisy? We saw already, that as far as the Scripture in the Greek is concerned, hypocrisy does not simply mean pretense. One can be sincere and yet sincerely ungodly of one’s own choice. The ungodly person need not be pretending to be godly. He may not be godly but it doesn’t have to be insincere. We must in some way be able to pinpoint what the Scripture means by the word “hypocrisy.”

There is this story of a woman who had to cross a very old, rickety and unsafe bridge. Before crossing, she prayed to God and said, “God, if you will bring me safely across this bridge, I will put $5 into the offering box. So she started walking across and the bridge seemed to be quite firm up to that point. When she was nearly half way across the bridge, she discovered that she would probably make it across without divine help, so she regretted having offered $5 in the offer­ing box. Not being very wealthy, she decided to scale down her original offer. She said, “God, you know that I am not so rich and after all, this bridge doesn’t seem to be as rickety as I thought, therefore I think you wouldn’t mind if I only put $3 into the offering box. Then she went on a little further, and lo and behold, this bridge began to shake and to wobble a bit, and she got scared. And she said, “O God, I’m only joking. Don’t take me so seriously. I’ll put the $5 in the offer­ing box if you get me across. That’s okay.”

What does that tell us about human nature? That is very hypocritical behavior. One moment she says, “I’ll give God $5,” the next moment $3 and then back to $5, depending upon the situation. She was bargaining with God. Now I find that human beings are often doing this with God. How much does she think her life is worth? Is her life worth only $5? If that bridge collapses, God will only be out of pocket by $5. That’s not too much of a loss for God perhaps, but she loses everything! What is this? We want the most from God and we want to give the least to God, isn’t that the case? We are always having this attitude towards God: How can I get the most from him and give the least in return to him? This is something that is entrenched in the mentality of man. That tells us much about the root of hypocrisy namely, selfishness, egocentricity.

So what is hypocrisy? Hypocrisy in fact, very simply defined, is the basic element of human nature. Now that is very important for us to grasp. Hypocrisy in Scripture is nothing more or less than human nature in its natural state. Once we grasp this, we won’t make the serious mistake of thinking that only the Pharisees are guilty of it, as though the Pharisees were the only people who had human nature. We would laugh at this woman, yet truly, if we observe the way we ourselves live, too often, this is the way we conduct ourselves with God, isn’t it?

Notice how when you are coming up to exam time, suddenly, you become extra godly. But when the exams are past or the crisis is past, there’s no need to be so religious anymore. So what is the difference between us and this woman? There is nothing. It’s simply that when it’s put in that form, it looks comical. Yet in truth, we are simply just like that ourselves. I’m sure you have noticed that time and again. This hypocritical attitude is human nature. It’s simply that man is like that in his relationship to God.

And when you look carefully at these seven “woes” which the Lord Jesus speaks of concerning the Pharisees, they are nothing but the elements of human nature.

 

Human nature is always concerned about the external

In the first of these, we don’t like other people to do what we can’t do. If we can’t have it, we don’t want others to have it. A child who cannot have a sweet doesn’t want others to have a sweet. “If I can’t get it, you can’t get it.” This is human nature.

If we look through the list, human nature is exactly like that. We are always concerned about the external. We stress the internal much less. We are concerned about whether or not other people have a good opinion of us. That is exactly what the Lord Jesus says. We wash the outside of a cup and we are not so worried if it’s dirty inside because others can’t see if the inside is dirty. But what other people can see is what matters. Therefore, we have to be scrupulous on the outside. And this kind of thing is constantly bothering us. That is human nature.

Families which are heavily in debt and so cannot afford that kind of living standard will still try to outwardly show that kind of living standard in order to impress the neighbors. They want other people to believe that they are rich so that they can have equal standing with those who are of a much higher income bracket. That is human nature.

 

Concerned about trivial things, and overlook the important

When we look through the list that the Lord Jesus condemns the Pharisees for, left to ourselves, every one of us would be like this. Let’s be honest. I see it among Christians all the time. We are careless about the big things, the deep, important principles of life, but we are scrupulous about things that are really not that important.

As I have already illustrated, we get irritated with each other over trivial things. “I don’t like the way this person wipes the dishes. I don’t think that person washes the dishes clean enough. My way of washing dishes is better. His way of washing dishes is not as good as my way, and so my health is at risk when he does the dishes!” So we are always disturbed about the way this person does this, and the way that person does that. Why does he always put his slippers in this place instead of that place? We are always annoyed by the little things. In a family, the irritation between husband and wife, or parents and children, is always about the little things. It’s a little this and a little that which somehow blows out of proportion. That’s exactly what the Lord Jesus says here. All this is transported into the spiritual life in the same form: we get annoyed over small things, and overlook the big things. We are very attentive to detail about what we may or may not do; and we overlook the deep principles of justice, mercy, faith which the Lord Jesus speaks of in verse 23.

This means we must realize that unless we overcome the problem of human nature, we won’t escape the problem of hypocrisy. You and I will be hypocrites so long as we let our natural man, our human nature in its basic condition remain in control of our lives. We will not be one iota better than the Pharisees. And if we think we are better than the Pharisees, we only fool ourselves.

 

Fact 1: Being aware of the dangers of hypocrisy will not save us from hypocrisy

Let me establish two basic factual observations. The first factual statement I would like to make is: Even being aware of the dangers of hypocrisy is not going to save us from hypocrisy. The fact that we know of these dangers does not prevent us from falling into them. I would like you to understand that the Pharisees themselves were deeply aware of the dangers of hypocrisy. It’s not as though we know the dangers of hypocrisy and the Pharisees don’t. If we think like that, we have not yet read the Talmud, the book of learning of the Jews, which stresses again and again, the danger of hypocrisy. They were deeply aware of it. They were no fools.

In fact, both the Babylonian Talmud and the Jerusalem Talmud list seven kinds of hypocritical Pharisees. Notice the number 7 is very much parallel to the Lord Jesus’ own teaching. They also put it in quite a comical way, which reminds us something quite similar to what the Lord Jesus is saying. For example, one type of Pharisee keeps banging his head on the wall causing his head to bleed. Why? Because he was afraid to look upon a woman as it would induce his lust and he would sin. He would rather be looking at the wall than be tempted to sin by looking at a woman. There is another kind of Pharisee who is so concerned to be humble that he is so bent and looks like a pestle in a mortar. There were different kinds of Pharisees. Some became Pharisees because they feared God where­as others were Pharisees for the wrong motives.

The Pharisees were very conscious of the danger of hypocrisy. To stress this point, let me read you a statement from the Talmud, from the Jewish book of learning of the Law. And here is one such thing:

Now you could not put it stronger than that. The Jewish rabbis themselves saw how dangerous is this sin of hypocrisy, but it did not prevent them from falling into hypocrisy. And we often have the notion that as long as I know there is a danger, I won’t do it. Not so. Why isn’t it so? As we have seen, hypocrisy is human nature at its very basic level. To be delivered from hypocrisy, you would have to be delivered from your own basic egocentric human nature. We would have to be able to cure ourselves of our own disease, but we cannot do it. This was the mistake of the Pharisees. They sought to cure themselves! I hope you understand deeply the problem of hypocrisy, that it’s not some mysterious, strange, exotic disease that only a few people are affected by. It’s a disease that affects every one of us who allows our basic nature, the ego, to dominate our thinking whether as Christians or as religious people.

 

Fact 2: No fundamental difference between Jesus’ teaching and the Pharisees’

The second factual statement I want to make is this: There is no fundamental difference between the teaching of the Lord Jesus and that of the Pharisees. It’s very important to grasp this. The Pharisees believed in one God, the Lord Jesus also taught one God. The Pharisees believed that there would be a coming Messiah. The Lord Jesus also taught this. They did not accept Jesus as the Messiah but they believed in the Messiah too. They believed in angels, in heaven and hell, in all the things which the Lord Jesus also taught. There is no fundamental doctrinal difference at those levels, but you might say there is one important difference namely, that they did not accept Jesus as the Christ or the Messiah. They did believe in the Messiah or the Christ (“Messiah” is Hebrew; “Christ” is Greek. The two mean the same thing.), but they did not believe Jesus to be the Messiah. If we are saved simply because we believe certain things to be so, and in this case, to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, then on that basis, the Mormons, the Jehovah’s Witnesses and many different sects which believe that Jesus is the Messiah should all be saved. Why shouldn’t they be saved?

 

How do we remedy hypocrisy?

There is an important thing I would like to bring out here. How do we remedy hypocrisy? Do we remedy hypocrisy because we believe in certain doctrines? Is that the magic trick by which we can destroy hypocrisy? We must be very superficial if we think that we can destroy hypocrisy by some magic wand simply because we believe the right doctrine! You know that cannot be so. When we are talking about how to deal with hypocrisy, we are talking about the very matter of salvation. Here the salvation of the Pharisees was at stake. They were heading straight down for hell because they had not overcome the problem of hypocrisy. And you and I will head straight down for hell unless we overcome the problem of hypocrisy, namely our very human nature in us. Man in his natural state cannot hope to enter into the kingdom of God, and hypocrisy is simply man in his natural state. He is egocentric, selfish, superficial, materialistic. So hypocrisy is the problem of salvation. How do we deal with this?

 

Root of hypocrisy: rejection of the lordship of God’s Christ and his teaching

Let us turn back to Matthew 22:41-46, the discussion about who the Messiah is, to seek an answer to the problem of hypocrisy. And notice the order in which the Scripture appears. And I deliberately left this passage out in order to come back to it:

There is a progression of order and thought in Matthew. They are not thrown together in a random fashion. Here the identity of the Messiah, who is the Savior-king, is discussed immediately before the problem of hypocrisy. What is the point of this discussion? Before the Lord Jesus begins to condemn the Pharisees on their hypocrisy, he asked them a question: “What do you think of the Savior, the Messiah? Whose son is he?” The question really is, “Who is he?” They said, “He is the Son of David.”

As you know, David was Israel’s greatest king. David was the one towards whom all Israel looked back with joy! The days of David the king were the most glorious moment in the history of Israel! Those were the glory days when Israel once stood in its history, and very rarely in its history was it ever that Israel could stand independent, a free nation with its head held high. Most of the time, Israel was either trampled by this or that nation. It was forever under some­one’s heel. It was under the heel of Babylon, of Assyria, of Egypt, and finally, under the Romans. It simply was too small to be an indepen­dent nation. Their dreams for independence simply couldn’t be realized. But when David was king, those were the few days in the history of Israel when they were truly independent. No nation dominated Israel in the days of David, their greatest king. It was the time they thought back with joy and glory!

 

The root of hypocrisy: Rejection of the lordship and teaching of Christ

God said to David that there would always be a king upon the throne from the house of David. The point is the Messiah was going to come from the house of David. They looked forward to the Savior who would come from the house of David. So whose son would the Messiah be? From whom would the Deliverer come? From the house of King David.

However, there comes a big problem. The Lord Jesus says to the Pharisees, “I’ll give you a puzzle. Even though you acknowledge that David was speaking about the Messiah in Psalm 110, and you also acknowledge that the Messiah is David’s son. Why does David call him “Lord” in Psalm 110? It’s unthinkable that you would call your son, ‘my Lord.’” So they were trapped in their own thinking, their own words. The Pharisees were puzzled by this one. It tells us that they were caught, not knowing how to answer the question. And “after that, they dared not ask him any more questions.” They were the ones who tried to catch him and now he turns the table around on them. They couldn’t think of an answer. Why? Because they had consistently failed to see the glory of the Messiah, that he was not just the son of David but also the Son of God, to whom God gave all his authority and power. That was what they failed to see.

The practical point that emerges from this is that the king that they looked up to was able to call the Messiah, his own son, “Lord,” even though he was his father in ancestry; he recognized his son to be greater than himself. The Lord Jesus is not only greater than Solomon, but he is also greater than David, the greatest king of Israel! What made David great was precisely his humility in realizing the greatness of the Messiah, the greatness of the Savior. In prospect, he already lived under the lordship of the Christ whom God will send. So did Abraham, who was also the father of the Lord Jesus in ancestry, as the Lord Jesus said to the Jews in John 8:56, “Abraham rejoiced that he was to see my day; he saw it and was glad.”

The point that the Lord Jesus is driving into the minds of the Pharisees is this: the root of hypocrisy lies in the rejection of the lord­ship of Christ. If anyone had reason to reject the lordship of Christ, then David had, because he could have claimed the position of fatherhood. Although he had reason on the human level, you might say, to have assumed the rejection of the lordship of Christ, he did not do so. On the contrary, he acknowledged the Christ as his Lord. The Lord Jesus is saying to the Jews, “If David could call the Messiah ‘Lord,’ although he was his son, and he recognized the Messiah’s greatness as far greater than himself, how much more should you have acknowledged the Messiah as Lord, but you have not done so? And because you have not acknowledged the Messiah as Lord in your life, you are bound to fall into hypocrisy. There is no one who can save you unless you know how to save yourself, and that cannot be done as it would be like lifting yourself off the ground by your own bootstrap. If you could save yourself, you would not need the Messiah. Although you look for the Messiah, you don’t acknowledge me as Lord. You are simply trying to make use of the Messiah which David did not do.” That is the spiritual significance of this passage if it has any significance at all.

The question is simply this: Do you truly acknowledge Christ as Lord, and so submit to his teaching in your life, and follow in his footsteps? David certainly acknowledged the Messiah as Lord, the Anointed One whom Yahweh God sent. Either you acknowledge Jesus the Messiah as Lord, or else you will be living a life of hypocrisy. There is no middle ground between these two. Either Jesus is truly Lord of your life and mine, so that if we are willing to repent and obey his teaching and be transformed to a new life; or else we have no alternative but live in our own strength, as the unregenerate man, and therefore, live in hypocrisy. In choosing the latter, I will have external religion. I will walk around with my Bible. I will go to church two or three times a week. I will say my prayers in a sort of mechanical fashion. I will have the outward religious behavior so familiar to us in Buddhism, in Hinduism, and in nominal “Christianity.” This is religion on the outside, but corruption on the inside, like a whitewashed tomb – clean and nice-looking on the outside, but dead men’s bones on the inside. That is what happens when you simply accept religion without accepting Jesus as Lord.

I want to say this especially to those who are being baptized. The last thing I want to happen with you is that you become a religious person on the outside and nothing changes inside. You are still the egocentric, selfish, materialistic, greedy person that you are. And all that happens at baptism is that you put on a cloak of religion outside, but nothing is changed inside. That is a disaster! You must under­stand when you become a Christian, either you acknowledge Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior-king of your life, not just with your mouth but in your heart; that from now on, you will by God’s power, totally obey God’s commands in Christ’s teaching. Otherwise, you are simply going to be another Pharisee! That is the choice that faces you today.

 

Avoid hypocrisy by submitting to the lordship of Christ

This being so, let us continue to examine how to avoid the dangers of hypocrisy through the lordship of Christ whom God sent. We move back to Matthew 23, and the Lord Jesus gives us the key, the answer to this problem in verse 23. Let us read again Matthew 23:23

Peppermint comes from mint, a little green leaf that grows in the garden and often, it grows very easily. We used to pick mint just by the forest’s edge. It just grows wild. Mint, dill and cumin are simply little garden herbs, and the Pharisees were very careful in tithing these garden herbs. These are the things we need to look at. What made them hypocrites was that they were very careful with small things but overlooked justice, mercy and faith. These are three things we need to look at because they are inseparably linked to the lordship of Christ.

 

1. Judgment (justice): Concern for God’s judgment

The first one translated as “justice” is really the Greek word krisis which means basically judgment. In fact, it appears 12 times in Matthew. Elsewhere in Matthew, it is consistently translated as “judgment.” For example, Jesus uses this word in “the Day of Judgment” several times. It can mean justice but it’s very rare. The translators decided to put “justice” in here, but I would prefer to keep the word as “judgment.” Why? The reason is if we are conscious about the judgment of God and that we have to answer at the Judgment of God, then we will be careful with justice. We will not dare to be unjust because we know we will have to face the judgment. So justice is a secondary and derivative thing coming from the perception of judgment. This means that a true Christian who acknowledges the lordship of Christ will be careful concerning how he lives because he is aware that the Judgment is coming.

The apostles preached that God has appointed Christ as the Judge in Acts 10:42. He has appointed a day in which we all must stand before Christ as God’s regent (cf. Col. 1:19, 2:9) in judgment. You and I, every one of us, will have to answer before God at the Judgment. And if we are aware of the lordship of Christ, we are aware that his lordship will be expressed on the Day of Judgment, that each one of us has to answer before him. And if that is so, we will be careful how we live.

The trouble with many Christians today, is they are taught that we don’t have to worry about judgment, very contrary to what the apostle Paul says, as I have pointed out to you before, we must all stand before the judgment seat of Christ, and Paul says, “We shall be judged by him.” And because of that, Paul is very careful of how he conducts himself.

One of the greatest errors of preaching today is to say that every Christian may not have to concern himself with the Judgment anymore, that Judgment is past, that the Christian will not be judged. Then what does Paul mean that we will all stand before the judgment seat of Christ? Well, they say, “That’s just to receive a reward.” Is that the case? This kind of thinking does not square with Scripture. A Christian who does not concern himself with the Judgment is going to be very careless about how he lives. I can point out to you many, many places where Scripture says that Judgment will begin at the house of God, giving one example, 1 Peter 4:17. The same Judgment will begin at the house of God and spread through the whole world. Let’s not kid ourselves with different standards of judgment, one for the church, one for the world. That is not so, at least not in my reading of Scripture it isn’t (cf. Romans 2).

So the problem with the Pharisees is obvious too, that they were not very concerned with the Judgment, just like Christians are not concerned with the Judgment today, hence the very low standard of the quality of the Christian life. The quality of the Christian life will not improve until the Christians realize that we will answer before God for the kind of life we live, that we will be judged indeed more severely than the non-Christian because to whom more is given, more is required (cf. Lk.12:48).

In fact, this word “judgment” translated as “justice” is the same word that occurs in verse 33 in the Greek. But if you read only the English, you will have lost the point of it. Verse 33 reads like this:

Unfortunately, as I have said, the English has removed the word “judgment.” The Greek reads, “How will you escape the judgment of hell?” This Greek word here for “judgment” is also found in verse 23, translated as “justice.” If you claim Jesus as Lord, the first thing is, you will be conscious that you have to answer to him, God’s regent, at the Judgment.

 

2. Mercy: Concerned to be constantly forgiving

Let us move onto the second thing: mercy. We read for example, in Matthew 9:13 “I will have mercy and not sacrifice.” The lordship of Christ is expressed when he reminds God’s people to love as God commands. Mercy is love in our relationship to each other when we have been offended against. Mercy is expressed in Matthew 18:33 in terms of forgiveness:

Mercy is simply forgiving the person who has offended against us. People are constantly offending each other in the church of God, isn’t it? To talk about love when we are not forgiving is pure hypocrisy. I must be constantly forgiving those who offend against me if I truly love them. And we are so full of faults that consciously or uncon­sciously, we will constantly be offending each other. We would soon fall apart if we didn’t constantly have mercy upon one another, forgiving one another. Submission to the teaching of Jesus is seen in our readiness to be merciful to one another. You will be concerned whether or not you are constantly forgiving. If you hold a grudge against someone in your heart right now, then you are rebellious in your life at this moment. Let me state it categorically, if you are un­forgiving, you don’t know Jesus as Lord, because you haven’t obeyed his teaching and you simply say, “Lord, Lord,” with your lips but you deny him in your life.

I must constantly forgive. I must bear no grudge against any man who has offended against me; and I must search my heart many times to ask myself, “Do I really bear no bitterness?” And I must be able to say honestly before God, “I bear no bitterness against those who have offended against me.” I often have to ask myself when I see that person again, will I truly be able to be merciful? And I must be able to say by the grace of God, “Yes, I will be merciful. I will not be bitter. I will not be harsh. I will forgive.” Can you say that? Can I say that? That is the acid test of the lordship of Christ. Otherwise, again, we are hypocrites if we say, “Lord, Lord,” with our lips but in our lives, there is bitterness, grudging, complaining, murmuring, and the lack of love.

 

3. Faith – used 8 times by Lord Jesus

Let us come to faith. We constantly have the problem of defining faith in terms of the lordship of God’s Christ. What is faith? So many theses have been written on faith that it’s unbelievable! How many people have got doctoral degrees in theology in writing a study on faith! A friend of mine who is teaching in Hong Kong right now col­lected his Ph.D. for writing a thesis on faith. This is very surprising, because there are already endless other theses written on faith. The reason that there are so many doctoral dissertations on faith is precisely because Christians find that they don’t understand what faith is. How are we to understand faith?

This word “faith” occurs in Matthew only 8 times. It doesn’t occur very frequently at all. All these 8 times in Matthew occurs on the lips of the Lord Jesus. So it’s quite a rare word in Matthew. It’s even rarer in Mark, occurring only 5 times. In Luke it occurs only 11 times. But it is a favorite word of Paul. Paul uses it 142 times compared to 8 times used by the Lord Jesus in Matthew. Imagine that! The great problem is that although Paul uses it 142 times, people are still not quite sure what Paul means by faith. That is why you have all these doctoral dissertations on faith. In fact, I myself wrote a doctoral dissertation on faith except I never submitted it. I still have this whole volume, 300 some pages on “The meaning of faith in Scripture.” I say all this so that you can see the great problem of what is the precise meaning of faith. I want to say particularly to those who are not Christians, and those who are about to be baptized, that you understand when you exercise faith, what exactly you are going to do. If we are saved by faith—and the scholars can hardly understand what faith is—where does that leave us? We are all left in the dark! That is a very bad situation to be in. Let us try to grasp what faith is in the Gospel of Matthew.

 

Matthew 23:23

As I said, the word “faith” occurs just 8 times in Matthew; 7 times before Matthew 23, and the eighth time is in Matthew 23:23, which we have just discussed. We will look at these 7 times to get a clear understanding of what faith is, and hopefully, you will know what you have to do when you exercise faith, because we are talking about eternal life, about salvation. We do care whether or not we have faith as defined in Scripture. If you don’t even know what faith is, you don’t know whether you have it or not! I hope that within the next few moments, after we have looked at how the word “faith” is used, we may come to an understanding of it. I will just mention the instances and then draw the conclusions, putting them as simply as possible.

 

Matthew 21:21

Moving in reverse order, we find one of the other 7 occurrences of faith in Matthew 21:21.

This passage tells us the power of faith. As I have expounded this passage in considerable detail, I will not repeat what it says except to say that faith here is contrasted with doubt. “If you have faith and do not doubt.” If you are absolutely certain of God’s intention, of God’s love and power to do it, then it will be done for you.

 

Matthew 17:20

We move to Matthew 17:20 which I have also expounded:

We don’t realize that the word “little faith” is one word in Greek, oligopistos. Again, we see the transforming power of faith, to move mountains, to change the whole scene.

 

Matthew 15:28

So far, we are only talking about the power of faith. Let us move a bit further back to Matthew 15:28 where the Canaanite woman pleaded with the Lord Jesus to heal her daughter of demon possession.

There you see the healing power of faith where the person was instantly freed from the power of the demon.

 

Matthew 9:2

Let us move to Chapter 9 where “faith” occurs 3 times. In Matthew 9:2, we read about the paralyzed person they brought to the Lord Jesus, who forgave him his sins as well.

Then he goes on to heal him physically as well, in consequence of faith.

 

Matthew 9:22

Then, we read about a woman with a flow of blood who was healed instantly as well:

Her flow of blood was immediately stopped. Through faith, she was immediately healed by the power of God working in the Lord Jesus.

 

Matthew 9:29

In Matthew 9:29 we read the power of God in healing the blind man through faith. Two blind men cried out to the Lord Jesus, pleading with him to heal their blindness, and his answer in verse 29:

Immediately, their sight was restored. That is the transforming healing power of faith.

 

Matthew 8:10

The last instance is in Matthew 8:10. Here we read of the centurion whose servant is healed through the faith of the centurion.

 

Faith is: Knowing God can do for me what I cannot do for myself

What do we learn about the meaning of faith from these seven examples? You will notice that five of these have to do with physical healing. This is very important for us to know in order to understand the meaning of faith. The connection between physical and spiritual healing in the Gospels is very, very close. The acts of physical and spiritual healing performed by the Lord Jesus are closely inter­twined, with almost no separation between the two.

The reason is that sin is seen as a spiritual disease, and both spiritual and physical illnesses are connected to sin in Scripture. (However, this does not imply that every instance of physical illness is necessarily linked to sin.) The healing of the one can be the healing of the other, as in the case of the paralytic. As the Lord Jesus said to those who brought the paralytic,

The power of God is the same in each. There is no difference between healing spiritual sickness and healing physical sickness because sin is sickness. If sin is in your life, then you are spiritually sick. Isaiah 1:4-6 illustrates this point:

They have forsaken Yahweh God. They have despised the Holy One of Israel. There you see the picture of sin is the picture of illness. The man who lives in sin is sick. From the top of his head to the sole of his foot, there is no soundness in the sinner. That is why Isaiah 53:5 says that by the Messiah’s stripes, by the punishment that Jesus took for us, we are healed. Our healing comes from the sacrificial death of Christ applied into our lives because sin is sickness.

Faith is simply that you come to God as a person who is spiritually sick, and have faith in him to heal your spiritual sickness.

It is just as the blind man comes to the Lord Jesus and says, “I ask you, please heal me.”

The Lord Jesus says, “Do you think I can heal you?”

And he says, “Yes, you can for you are the Christ, the Son of David.”

So the Lord Jesus says, “Be it done to you as you believe. Since you have faith, your eyes will be opened.”

So what do you do when you exercise faith? Just as the blind man, the paralytic, the woman with the issue of blood, and the centurion with the dying child said to the Lord Jesus who fully represents God, you come to God and say, “God, I am spiritually sick through and through. There is no soundness in me from the top of my head to the sole of my foot.”

And God will ask you, “Do you believe I can heal you? Do you believe I can restore you spiritually?”

And you say, “Yes, God, I believe you can, because Christ has revealed your character, authority and power; and he has died to shed his blood to wash me clean when I repent, so that you will forgive my sins. I believe that you have the power to heal my spiritual sickness and transform me.”

And God will say to you, just as the Lord Jesus did, “Be it done to you according to your faith.”

That is faith. Faith is the confidence that God can do for you what you cannot do for yourself. Faith is the confidence that God can trans­form you, that he can deliver you from your natural selfishness, your natural superficiality, your natural quarrelsomeness, your natural bad temperedness, your natural self-centeredness, your egocentri­city. Only God can do it! Faith is: the faith that comes to God in the confidence that he can make you spiritually healthy, spiritually ra­diant. Isn’t it easy to understand? Once we see the parallel between the physical healing and the spiritual healing, the meaning of faith is perfectly clear. It is the confidence that God can do for me what I cannot do for myself.

 

Also have faith for others; bring them to God that he will change them

There is also something very beautiful here. The paralytic could not come to Jesus himself. He had to be carried by some friends to Jesus. And there the beautiful statement is “when Jesus saw their faith”—not just the paralytic’s faith, but the faith of those who brought him to Jesus—he said to the man, “Your sins are forgiven.” And he also said, “Get up and walk.”

The reason this comforts me is this: Sometimes, we look at others and we feel a sense of despair. When will they become what they should be in Christ? When will they begin to live as true Christians? Well, we need not despair. If we think of them as the paralytic, we will carry them to God in prayer. We will say, “God, we bring this dear brother (or sister) to you with his (her) many faults. He (she) is still living with the human nature in this way. God, please have mercy upon him (her).” You might even have to break through the roof as well to drop him right in front of God. We will bring him there, and God will yet have mercy on him to transform his life. If I didn’t have this confidence, I would give up! We would just have confidence for ourselves alone, and think, “Maybe God will do something with me, but he can’t do anything with the other person.” Why not? If he can heal you, he can heal him. That is the glory of faith!

So I say to those of you who are about to be baptized. Make sure that it’s not just some external washing but that you say to God, “God, I know what I really am. I know how selfish I am, how sinful I am, but I’m going to trust you to heal me, to make a new person of me, to make me spiritually healthy because I come in repentance of my sins, which only Christ Jesus’ blood can cleanse. I’m going to trust you, God. I know that you can do it, I know that you will do it, and I thank you for it.” That is faith. When you exercise that faith, you have been delivered by God’s power from hypocrisy which is the disease of sin.

Let us be quiet before God in prayer.