The Root of the Problem | Devin LaBay

Well, good morning.

It is good to see you this morning.

Wanna again welcome all of our friends and and family who have uh joined this morning.

Welcome.

We hope that you'll stick around uh following worship uh for uh classes and and uh fellowship afterwards.

Um, you know, I had a couple of people ask me this morning, wow, you you really do have a suit.

And I said, Well, I only bring it out for weddings, funerals, and special occasions.

Uh so this is a very special day uh here uh at Central.

And it is good to be here this morning for Friends and Family Day.

You know, friends are are an invaluable blessing to us.

And we're gonna take a look at this account that Frank just read a moment ago, but maybe look at it from a little different perspective.

Um I think this this paralyzed man's friends just thought they knew what the problem was.

And what they discover is that it goes much deeper than that.

And so that's what we're gonna be taking a look at this morning.

But I want to share a story with you about friendship.

Some of you may know this, it's it's it's it's a historical fact.

Uh Jackie Robinson was the first African American to play Major League Baseball.

And some of you remember when when that happened, and it was a big deal.

It was a very big deal.

Jackie Robinson was an incredibly talented baseball player, and he played for for the Brooklyn Dodgers.

And when he came up into the big leagues and they were traveling around, Jackie Robinson, man, he caught it from everybody.

He caught it from his teammates, he caught it from uh the opposing fans.

It was a very difficult and challenging environment to play in.

And so they were playing a game at Ebbett's Field, their home stadium in Brooklyn, and Jackie Robinson, playing second base, made an error.

He made an error and he caught it from his own fans.

I mean, they were booing, they were jeering, they were calling him all kinds of names.

Some we can say, some we probab we don't need to say.

But he was catching it from everybody.

And he was just standing there at second base with his with his head hung low, and Pee Wee Reese, who played shortstop for the Dodgers, walked over from shortstop to second base where Jackie was, and he put his arm around him and just stared at the crowd.

And it was a capacity crowd.

And he just stood there with him, with his arm around Jackie Robinson until the crowd finally quieted down, and you couldn't hear anything.

P.

BB Reese was making a statement that day about friendship.

He was making a statement that day about sticking with your friends, even when times are difficult, and some of you know what that's like.

You've you've been on either end of that, and you know the value of a friend.

You know, it's been said that prosperity begets friends, but adversity approves them.

And that is true.

And so as we continue in our study this morning, let's go to God in prayer and ask the Holy Spirit to join us uh in our message this morning.

Our Father, we thank you for bringing us together today as friends and family, as children of God, children of yours, Father.

In the name of Jesus Christ, to to first and foremost worship you, to proclaim your goodness, to remember Jesus as he asked us to through the communion, and to sing praises under your name.

Spirit, we thank you so much for moving within us as believers, for guiding us, for comforting us, for leading us.

We thank you for our friends.

We thank you for those who have stood with us in those difficult times, and we thank you for the opportunity as friends to be there for our friends, to stand with them.

But no greater friend have we than Jesus.

Jesus gave his life for us so that we could live.

And Lord, we ask that you would help us to live to the fullest.

To share you with others and the blessing of that friendship that we have with Jesus.

Lord, we love you so much, and we we praise you for all that you do for us, for what you do for us as much.

And we offer this prayer together in the name of Jesus.

Amen.

I can remember being a medic in the Air Force uh years ago and dealing with a problem that is known as reflective or referred pain in a patient.

And so what that means is that this pain is pain that manifests itself in a part of the body that's different than where the injury occurred.

Okay?

And so, for example, a sore shoulder can be indicative of a problem with your gallbladder.

Also, uh a pain in the neck or a pain in the shoulders or a pain in the arm can be indicative of a heart attack.

You see, every medical professional is trained to understand that the problem that a patient has and the symptoms they show are not always the same.

You see, you have to trace the symptoms back.

You have to trace them back to the root of the problem in order to relieve the pain and to begin the healing process.

Friends, this is a process that is not limited to just physical issues, it's also necessary in addressing the emotional and the spiritual issues that we have as human beings.

For example, getting married is not the cure for loneliness.

Throwing money at a problem, it doesn't make the problem disappear.

In fact, most of the time it makes the problem worse.

Going to church that doesn't make us right with God.

And giving our children what they want does not make us good parents.

Family, we can spend a lot of time, we can spend a lot of resources, we can spend a lot of emotion focused on eliminating symptoms without ever addressing the root problem that we suffer from.

And so in our time together this morning, we're going to experience one of my favorite events in the Bible.

Now, on the surface, if you're just looking at it at surface level, it's it seems to be just another healing of Jesus.

And I don't say that lightly, but on surface, on the surface level, it seems to be what this is.

But in this account, we not only see what a big difference that true friendship can make in the lives of others, we also see Jesus as he addresses the problem and not just the symptoms.

Luke's account here parallels Mark's account in Mark chapter 2, verses 1 to 12.

Mark 2:1–12

And most scholars are in agreement on this.

They are in agreement that Mark's gospel was written first, and that Luke probably, most likely, pulled from what Mark had recorded in order to share with Theophilus, whom Luke's gospel is addressed to, about this particular event and other events in the life and ministry of Jesus.

But here's the thing that you'll never see in the Gospel of Luke.

Luke never claims to be an eyewitness to all that he shares with Theophilus.

But he does claim to be giving Theophilus an orderly account of the life and ministry of Jesus.

Now, according to Mark chapter 2, Jesus is in Capernaum and was teaching in a home that was packed.

Mark 2 · chapter mention

It was packed in the house.

It was packed all around the house with people.

There's people all over the place, around and in this house.

And some believe that this house was Peter's home.

Because if you remember, Jesus had healed Peter's mother-in-law not long before that.

And so you have four guys, four men who heard that Jesus was in town.

And when they heard that Jesus was in town, they loaded up their friend who had been paralyzed and they carried him to see Jesus.

And we're not told the details of why this guy was paralyzed.

We really don't know.

That detail is not given in Mark's gospel.

It's not given in Luke's gospel either.

We don't know whether he had a stroke.

We don't know whether he fell off of a ladder.

We don't know how he became paralyzed or if he was born that way.

And this may further support the idea that Luke drew upon Mark's gospel for his information.

Remember, Luke was a physician.

And he would have been very detail oriented about such things, but the details of this man's injuries are not known and they're not shared.

So when the four men arrived at the house carrying their friend on a stretcher, they discovered there's people all over the place.

And this house is packed.

There's no way we're going to get in there.

Friends, most people would have said, hey man, we tried.

We tried.

And turned around and carried him home.

Or they might have waited to see if they could get in to see Jesus a little bit later.

Or they could have hoped that Jesus would hear about this guy, one of many that are paralyzed, waiting outside for him to come out and to heal them on the spot.

Those are just three options of what these men could have done with their friend.

But these four friends were different.

These guys decided if they couldn't get in, they were going to go vertical.

They were going to go above and beyond for their friend because that's what friends do for one another.

So they climbed up on the roof.

Now picture this in your mind, okay?

They climb up on the roof, they lift their friend.

I don't know how much this guy weighs.

They lift their friend on the stretcher, up on the roof with them, and they begin to dig.

Now you've got to think about what a roof was made out of during this time.

The roof of a house during this time was constructed by placing beams two or three feet apart and covering them with branches in between and padded with reeds and thistles and twigs.

And so when you looked up, you see these beams and all this stuff that's on top of the beams.

And then on top of all of that, what they would do, they would pack about six inches of dirt mixed with clay in order to prevent the roof from leaking is bad.

And then they would place clay tiles on top of that.

And so here they go, they pull their friend up and they start pulling off tiles and they start digging through all the dirt and clay and pulling out twigs and stuff, trying to find where the space between the beams are, and they're just going at it.

And because constant maintenance was required on this type of roof, what they did was they built into the structure of the house on the outer walls steps.

So that if you needed to do a repair job, you could just go up the steps on the outside of the house onto the roof and do the patchwork that you needed to do.

So once these four friends got on the roof, again, they started digging through all this stuff.

And it wouldn't be long, just think about it, it wouldn't be long before dirt began to fall on the people inside the house, including Jesus.

So Jesus is talking, the people are listening, and all of a sudden he got stuff hitting people in the face.

And then they all look up and they see dirt falling and see something rustling in the roof, and Jesus is talking, and then he stops and he looks up to figure out what's going on, as if he didn't already know.

Okay.

And this is what's happening at the time.

Church, God gave us a mind, and he gave us an imagination for a reason.

And when we take the black and the red ink off of the white pages of our Bibles and allow them to live in our mind and our imagination, we begin to see the beauty of this story.

I can see dirt falling and people looking up at the ceiling.

And then Jesus himself just stops speaking and looks up with everyone else.

Now I believe, in my mind, I believe Jesus has got a smile on his face when he's looking up at the ceiling.

Because he knew what was going on.

And then when he sees their faces looking down into the room from above.

Now picture that in your mind.

You finally get a hole in the roof big enough, and you see four faces just looking down at you from the roof.

I have to believe when that happened, family, that Jesus laughed.

And he may have even said something like, Welcome, brothers, glad you could make it.

After they had cleared enough of the roof out of the way, they began to lower their friend down between the beams to the floor below at Jesus' feet.

Now see that.

Picture that in your mind.

And then verse 20 says, seeing their faith, Jesus said, friend, your sins are forgiven you.

Take a look at what you see on the screen there.

Look at what Jesus said.

Whose faith brought forgiveness to this man?

It was the faith of their friends.

You see that?

Don't miss it.

Family, if you think that your prayers and your actions on behalf of your friends make no difference, I encourage you to think about that again.

Because here's the thing that we need to understand.

Many is going to be the reunion in heaven one day.

When someone walks up to us and says, Thank you so much for your prayers and the things you did for me.

I'm here in part because you cared for me.

Again, remember how Jesus responded to their faith.

Jesus didn't respond the way that these four friends thought that he would respond.

Now consider what they've been through.

They hear Jesus is in town.

They go to their friends and say, hey, look, buddy, we're going to take you to this Jesus fella, and we're going to get you fixed up.

Put him on the, you know, pick up the stretcher, carry him over there.

There's a capacity crowd in and outside the house.

They're got to be thinking, we're not getting in there.

And the paralytics got to be thinking, ain't no way they're going to get me in there.

And then they figure, okay, fine, we're going to go up on the roof.

And they start lifting him up on the roof.

All this that they're going through, they get up there and they start peeling away tiles and twigs and dirt and everything else.

They brought their friend there, damaging someone else's personal property in the process.

Scattering dirt all over people below them so that their friend could be healed, not forgiven.

Not to discount forgiveness.

After all, forgiveness is great, isn't it?

But forgiveness doesn't cause you to walk again.

So as these men look down into that crowded house, and you got some people wiping dirt off of their face and probably mumbling a few things, and they're a little upset with them, their friend's still lying on the floor.

He's still paralyzed.

And you could probably see it in their faces when Jesus said, Friend, your sins are forgiven.

What they hoped and expected Jesus to say was, You are healed.

And what about the paralytic himself?

He's been along for the ride.

What's been going through his mind?

What's going through his mind right now as he's lying there, still on that stretcher?

His hopes were raised when he first heard that this man, Jesus, is going throughout the countryside healing people, raising people from the dead.

And he had to determine whether this is real or whether it's not.

They were raised even more when his four friends said, Hey, don't worry, we're going to take you to him.

You don't have to wait for him to come to you.

We love you.

We're going to take you to him.

And when they arrive, they see the crowd.

He can, you know, perk up on a stretcher.

You know, he can see that there's people everywhere.

What makes me think that Jesus is going to make any special assurances for me?

When he saw that crowd, his hopes were kicked out from under him, I guarantee it.

Until his friends said, Hey, hey, we didn't come here.

We didn't come this far for nothing.

Let's go vertical and go through the roof.

Only to raise the paralytic's hopes again.

Then as he's lowered through the roof down to the very feet of Jesus, Jesus says, Friend, your sins are forgiven you.

He had to be disappointed.

You ever thought about that before?

We've heard this story a hundred times.

But don't you think maybe he was just a little bit disappointed when Jesus said, Friend, your sins are forgiven?

Church, I would imagine that the four friends and the paralytic himself were thinking to themselves, Jesus is completely missing the point.

And this brings us to the main point of this incredible story.

And don't miss it.

Church, sometimes our greatest need is the thing we don't see.

The assumption on the surface by everyone involved in this story was that this man's greatest need was for physical healing.

And the question in their mind was, why didn't Jesus just meet the obvious need?

We ask that question ourselves, don't we?

When we're suffering from something, when our friend is suffering from something and we pray to God, why are you not recognizing the obvious need?

That's what they're asking themselves right now.

Family, there are a couple of reasons that we might consider.

First, Jesus knew.

Whether we realize it or not, is that everyone's greatest need is forgiveness of their sins.

Later in his ministry, Jesus would say in Matthew chapter 16, verse 26, for what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul?

Matthew 16:26

But what will a man give in exchange for his soul?

Family, we can have everything that the world has to offer, but if we don't have the forgiveness of Jesus Christ, then we have nothing of eternal value.

A second reason that we might consider is that Jesus, in his infinite wisdom, knew that this man's physical condition was a symptom.

It was a symptom of a spiritual root cause.

Friends, there's thousands, literally thousands, of recorded cases of physical problems being manifestations of emotional or spiritual issues.

When the holistic medicine movement began in the late 1960s, people began to understand that before we can solve many of our physical symptoms and people's suffering, we have to address the emotional issues and the spiritual issues first.

Church, we have a tendency to believe that if we can just achieve tangible things in this life, then we'll experience emotional and spiritual peace.

But here's the thing with that.

What we discover is that once we achieve those goals, once we reach that mountaintop, family, what we figure out is that our souls are still empty.

Whatever the thing was didn't fix it.

And we still haven't found what we're looking for.

As it turns out, there were others in this story who had obvious problems with what Jesus said to this paralyzed man.

In response to what Jesus says to this man, the scribes and the Pharisees, who were dutifully committed to the law and the man-made regulations that had been added to the law to insulate and guard the law, they took issue with this.

Chapter 5, verse 21 says, They heard what Jesus said to this man, that his sins were forgiven, and immediately thought to themselves, Who is this man?

He speaks blasphemy.

Only God can forgive sin.

Who does he think he is?

Now, friends, not a soul in that crowded house, not a soul peering through the windows, looking through the doorway, within earshot of Jesus, heard what you see on the screen right now.

Nobody heard that.

That's what they were thinking.

That's what the scribes and the Pharisees were thinking.

And nobody in that crowd other than Jesus knew it.

Only Jesus knew what was on their minds.

It's like dialogue bubbles were popping up all over these guys' heads, and Jesus is reading their thoughts.

He knows what they're thinking, he knows what they're saying to themselves.

And Jesus calls them out on it in front of everybody.

Now think about that for just a minute.

You got people packed in everywhere.

And Jesus calls them out in front of everyone in verses 22 and 23 and says, Why are you reasoning in your hearts?

Which is easy to say, your sins have been forgiven you, or to say, get up and walk.

Only the scribes and the Pharisees knew what he was talking about.

Nobody else had a clue.

You imagine what that was like.

They knew Jesus had them dead to rights.

He called them on the carpet in front of everyone.

In other words, here's the answer to the questions and accusations in your mind that no one else knows and no one else heard.

And without taking his eye off of them, family, he says in verse 24, but so that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins, he said to the paralytic, I say to you, pick up your stretcher and go home.

Verse 25 says that the man immediately got up before them.

Everybody saw it.

Picked up his mat and went home, glorifying God.

Now let's think about that for a minute.

Let's think about that logically.

Let's think about that medically.

As a military medic, I can tell you right now that if this man had been paralyzed for any amount of time, he wasn't just gonna get up and walk anywhere.

That is a physiological fact.

Friends, we have no idea how long this man was paralyzed for.

Doesn't tell us.

Doesn't matter.

Experts say that muscle atrophy sets in after two weeks of inactivity.

And so at that rate, when you think about it, it wouldn't take long for someone who wasn't paralyzed to lose the ability to walk.

But when Jesus spoke, he immediately stood up and he began to walk.

He didn't need to gain his balance, he didn't need to go to physical therapy, he didn't need anything.

Because by the word of Christ, Jesus, he was whole again, physically and spiritually.

And as he's glorifying God all the way home, apparently emotionally as well.

Now I can only imagine the look on the faces of his four friends when this happened.

Still, remember, they're still on the roof looking through the hole, looking down on what's going on.

I can only imagine the expression on their faces.

And once their friend got on their feet, I can see them sliding down off the roof and embracing their friend.

Verse 26 says that they all were struck with astonishment.

Your translation may say that they were all amazed.

The word that Luke shares there to Theophilus in the Greek is the word ecstasis.

And it's where we get our English word ecstatic from.

So Luke says that everybody that saw it, everybody that saw it was ecstatic at what they saw.

Including the scribes and the Pharisees.

But not necessarily for the same reason that everybody else was.

Regardless, verse 26 also says that they were filled with fear.

The Greek word that Luke uses there is phobos, and it's where we get our English word phobia from.

So-and-so needs to come to Jesus.

Family, did it ever occur to us that maybe we need to carry someone to Jesus just like these four guys did?

Notice that it took four of them to get it done.

And you know as well as I do, the thought of bringing someone to the Lord for healing on our own is overwhelming.

We struggle with a lot of things.

We know what needs to happen.

We know we need to bring someone to Jesus, but the very thought of it is overwhelming.

And because of that, we decided, well, I'll just pray about it and hope for the best.

Not that prayer is ineffective.

But I believe that the Lord expects us to not only be prayerful for others, but to also be actively looking for ways to bring healing to the lives of others.

But in order to do that, we have to step through the fear of what people might think.

We have to be willing to go vertical, to go through the roof, the risk maybe getting some little bit of dirt, a little bit of dust on somebody in order to help our friend out.

Are you willing to do that for your friend?

We've got to do that to get beyond the fear of what people might think.

How they might react and get to the root of the problem.

So let me ask you as we close, what symptoms are you dealing with today?

What symptoms are you dealing with?

It's the physical problems.

This paralytic had physical problems, but there was a spiritual root to it.

He needed his sins forgiven.

How are your physical issues affecting you spiritually?

You need to ask that question.

Maybe it's emotional symptoms this morning.

Maybe you're angry about something.

Maybe you're worrying about something.

Maybe you're sad about something or resentful.

What's that doing to you spiritually?

Do you need what this paralytic needed today?

Your physical and emotional issues are paralyzing you.

And you're ready to walk with Jesus.

Is that where you find yourself this morning?

I hope so.

I hope that you're willing to take that step today.

To find the root cause, the spiritual answer to the emotional and physical issues that you're suffering with.

We're going to sing a song and you're going to have an opportunity to respond as the Spirit calls you.

Our shepherds from Central will be up here, up front with me.

And we invite you to come where you will be embraced, where we'll pray for you, pray with you, and help you to find the spiritual solution for what you're dealing with.

Let's stand and sing.