The Kingdom Way | Luke 5:12-14 with Pastor Clayton Tyner

Welcome to the MetaCurch podcast.

My name is Clayton.

I'm the pastor at MetaCurch, and I hope that today's message is inspiring and enlightening and really builds you up wherever you're at in life.

I want to welcome you in.

I'm so glad you joined us wherever you're joining us from.

If you're at our Helotus venue, man, I am just so proud of the work happening in Helotus.

If you're joining us online, man, I just thank God for our online ministry.

If you're joining us online and you're in the San Antonio area, make sure you come out to one of our venues and worship with us in person.

We are in this really unique section today.

But uh before we get there, if you are new, my name's Clayton.

I'm the lead pastor here at MetaCurch.

Um, man, I'm so glad.

I think God really has something for you in the text today.

Uh if you're new, we've been walking through the Gospel of Luke very slowly.

We've just been taking our time, allowing the Holy Spirit to speak to us.

Um at MetaCurch, you need to know this.

Like if you're new, you can decide maybe right now if you're coming back next week, because uh we take our faith seriously at Metachurch.

Amen?

We're not playing games, we are not playing church.

This is not a box to check.

And if you are looking to check a box to say, I did a spiritual thing this week, my goal is to make you as uncomfortable as humanly possible, and you can go somewhere else and they'll let you check a box.

I will not let you check a box.

We believe that Jesus is real, that he actually came to earth, he died for our sins, he rose from his own grave, he ascended back to heaven, and we believe that Jesus is coming back for us.

And we do not see anything left on the prophetic timetable, which does not mean Jesus is coming back tomorrow.

It just means he could.

And so we should take our faith seriously, and we want to invite you into that to take your faith seriously as well.

And some of you, you're you're not believers in Jesus yet.

You're skeptical about the claims of Christianity, and look, uh, I get it, and I was you for a long time, because there's some pretty big claims about the God who spoke the universe into creation, stepping out of eternity and into our world and dying for our sins.

It's a lot to take in.

Um and so look, this is a a place where if you don't believe yet, you belong here and you will be loved here.

And you should take your faith seriously, even though you don't really have faith yet.

And the way you take it seriously is you keep showing up and you keep leaning in and you keep asking questions and you seek God, and if you keep seeking God with all your heart, you will find God.

And the reason I know that is because God is already after you.

And you will find that out.

Maybe you'll even find that out today.

I'm very excited about our text as we continue to walk through Luke's gospel.

And uh, we already read a piece of it, and so you know that the showdown in this text is between Jesus, who most of us are familiar with, and then a man who has leprosy.

And I've got to do a little bit of contextual work first, or the severity and the shock of this passage will not sit on you appropriately, because we are so far removed from leprosy that we don't really know how to read this text.

As a matter of fact, leprosy is a disease that has been all but eradicated in the developed world.

There are only about 150 Americans who get leprosy every year, and they only get it for one of two reasons.

Either they were traveling in the undeveloped world and picked it up there, or oddly enough, shout out to Texans, armadillos also carry leprosy.

That's real.

I know you've heard that fact.

That's real.

So come at us, the rest of the 49 states.

We've got leprosy in Texas, all right?

Now, if you get leprosy, uh, it's not a huge deal.

It's easily cured with antibiotics.

It's just not an issue anymore.

We don't think about it at all.

Uh, I I did some like some analysis, right?

So you are twice as likely to get struck by lightning as an American than you are to get leprosy.

You are ten times more likely to become a millionaire playing the lottery than you are to get leprosy.

Which I think, I'm not good at statistics, I think that means that if you get leprosy and get struck by lightning, you should play the lottery.

That's what I think that means.

You're just probably not gonna get it.

And if you do get it, it'll be fine.

We'll get you some antibiotics.

You'll be back up on your feet.

And so that's our reality.

And look, we've had some things, uh, like in the 80s, you know, with AIDS, where we were very scared of that.

Um, even more recently, we went through COVID, and of course, we don't want to even go back to that in our mind, but there was a lot of like, you know, quarantining and separation and all of this.

That's about as close as as any of us have ever gotten to understanding what it was like to have leprosy in your village, and it's actually not close at all.

And the problem is this is a pre-scientific world, and they're trying to figure these things out.

Uh, they don't know how contagion works, they just know if something is contagious.

And leprosy was absolutely brutal.

It was a death sentence, but it was an incredibly slow, incredibly horrific death.

Uh, there's a medical professional, he wrote about leprosy.

He says this the hair falls from the head and the eyebrows, the nails loosen, decay, and drop off.

Joint after joint of the fingers and the toes shrink up and slowly fall away.

The gums are absorbed and the teeth disappear.

The nose, the eyes, the tongue, and the palate are all slowly consumed.

The aesthetic of someone who is deep into their journey of leprosy is absolutely the stuff that horror shows are made of.

It was revolting and it was unbelievably scary.

And so we have laws back in the Jewish law that govern their society about what happens if someone gets leprosy.

We read about that all the way back in Leviticus chapter 13.

Leviticus 13 · chapter mention

It says the person who has a case of serious skin disease is to have his clothes torn and his hair hanging loose, and he must cover his mouth and cry out unclean, unclean.

He'll remain unclean as long as he has the disease.

He is unclean, he must live alone in a place outside of the camp.

Here's how it would actually work.

Uh, people got rashes and psoriasis and things like that.

Uh, you would go and you'd show yourself to the priest.

This is a pre-scientific world.

The priest would look at it and you'd be put in quarantine for about seven days and come back, and they would see if the rash is going away, you're declared clean, you get to resume your normal life.

If it's the same or gets worse, you're put in quarantine again.

And this pattern continues.

Eventually, if you show the telltale signs of leprosy, then you are cast out from your village.

You are cut off from your family, your community, your religion.

And because in the Old Testament, the actual presence of God lived inside of Israel, being cast out into the wilderness in a real sense, you were seen as cut off from God Himself.

And so here's what I need you to understand if you're gonna understand today's passage.

In the ancient world, leprosy was not treated as a sickness.

It is a sickness, we treat it with antibiotics.

In the ancient world, it was not treated as sickness, leprosy was treated as death.

And the people who lived with leprosy out in the wilderness, eventually putting together these communities called leper colonies, where they at least had each other, they were known as and they were thought of as the living dead.

People did not hate lepers, as a matter of fact, the opposite is true.

Every person in that leper colony once belonged to a family, to a community, to a synagogue.

Because they didn't understand, interestingly, we know now, leprosy actually isn't very contagious.

But they didn't know, and the gruesome, gruesome experience of leprosy, people were scared to death.

And so imagine your grandparent or parent or sibling or friend or even your child gets leprosy.

And for the sake of the entire community, they must be cast out.

It was a heartbreaking reality, and people had to mourn it like death because leprosy wasn't seen as a disease.

It was seen as death itself.

It's almost like death in slow motion.

Leprosy was believed to be uncurable.

As a matter of fact, the scholars during Jesus' time would say that we are more likely to raise someone from the dead than to cure someone from leprosy, which is just their way of saying it's actually impossible.

If you watched the TV series The Chosen, which follows the life of Christ, I just think they do such a good job in this scene because they don't really see the leper coming, and Jesus doesn't see him coming.

The first people in Jesus' caravan that see the leper are the women, and the women scream like they are being chased by an axe murderer.

And that would have been true.

Horrifying to see, and it's like the scariest thing imaginable.

The women scream, if you remember the scene, the men draw their weapons.

Get too close, and we will kill you.

That's how deathly serious leprosy was.

Can you imagine your entire life?

Anytime you come within proximity of people, you have to announce what is wrong with you.

By law, a leper, when they came in proximity of someone, had to yell out, unclean! Unclean.

Can you imagine the shame?

The stigma, the marginalization and ostracization of being a leper.

Now that we have some understanding of that, we can walk in and have some understanding of what is happening in this moment with Jesus.

Luke writes in Luke chapter 5, verse 12, while Jesus was in one of the towns, a man was there who had leprosy, and look what Luke adds.

Luke 5:12

All over him.

We've learned a lot about Luke as we've been studying his gospel.

One of the things we learned early on is that Luke is an ancient physician.

He's a doctor.

And he writes like a doctor, and he's signaling something the other gospels don't quite make clear that he is not in early stage leprosy.

He doesn't have a spot, and he's quarantined right now, and they're waiting to see what happens.

He has leprosy from head to toe, which means in this very slow-moving disease, he has had it for years and years, and he is likely disfigured almost beyond belief.

He will have no hair left on his body, he will have no fingernails left, he might not have many fingers left, he will have no teeth in his mouth, he will be incredibly, incredibly, incredibly disturbing.

This is who approaches Jesus.

And it's worth noting that just the very fact that this man comes at Jesus is not just him breaking social norms, this is him breaking the law.

In order to get anywhere near someone, you must announce yourself in your shame, unclean, unclean, but he does not do that.

And the only reason that we have this moment in scripture recorded for us is because this man with leprosy decided he had nothing left to lose.

Have you ever gotten there?

Have you ever come to the end of yourself?

Like all the things you know how to do, all the effort you know how to put in, all the ways you know how to manipulate, all of the white knuckling, all of the maximum effort, all of the stacking up more and more debt.

Have you ever just come to the end of yourself where you have nothing left to lose?

There's a few things as dangerous as a man with nothing left to lose.

He's not allowed to approach people, and if he gets anywhere near proximity, he has to cry out unclean so that they know they're in proximity of a leper so they can draw their swords and keep them away, and he doesn't do any of it.

What is implied by the text is that this leper has heard about Jesus.

If you've been with us in the series, Jesus is in the area of Galilee.

People are bringing the sick and diseased to him, and he's healing every single one of them.

And news of this has reached the leper colony that there is a man in town who maybe, just maybe, could cure us of our disease.

And this man decided I've had leprosy a long time.

I've got nothing left to lose.

To loosely quote Curtis 50 Cent Jackson, it's get healed or die trying at this point.

I just found out who all my friends are.

Everyone who got that.

That was fun.

And it's so impressive that he will approach.

But what I really need us to pay attention to, and this is why we have to slow down when we read scripture, is it's not just that he approaches Jesus, it's how he approaches Jesus.

Let's build out a little more of verse 12.

While Jesus was in town, a man who had leprosy all over him.

He saw Jesus, he fell face down, and he begged him.

This order of events matters.

He saw Jesus, and he recognized in Jesus something he'd never experienced before.

And here's how we know: because he fell down on his knees and bowed his forehead to the ground.

As an Israelite man, to bow before anybody but God is blasphemy, potentially punishable by death.

And then after going into a posture not of request, not a posture of negotiation, it is a posture, please don't miss this, of worship.

The man falls on his face in a posture of worship, a recognition that I am not just standing before a rabbi, I'm not just standing before a teacher, and I am not just standing before a healer.

Somehow, isn't this incredible?

Somehow, the leper knew he was standing in front of God.

Sometimes revelation will come from the most unexpected places.

Think of all of the people who've been in proximity to Jesus, who have been moving with Jesus, traveling with Jesus, listening to Jesus, learning from Jesus, being healed by Jesus, and seemingly the first person in the Gospels to recognize that they were standing in front of Yahweh God was the leper, the outcast of society.

He sees him, he worships him, and then he begs him.

This may seem odd to you because as humans, uh we we don't love people begging us.

Am I like alone in that?

When your kid asks for something and you give them the answer, and then they know the answer, but they ask again, and it's been 17 seconds, and you're like, I already told you the answer, and they're like, Okay, I get it, and then they wait 37 seconds, and then they freaking ask you again, and they're just like begging you, you know?

It's like, dude, I said yes, and if you ask me one more time, what's gonna happen, parents?

You're gonna turn a yes into a no.

We don't like being begged.

Did you know?

The God of the universe wants you to beg him.

He wants your requests.

He wants you to pray fervently.

He wants you to pray like a man or woman who has come to the end of themselves.

Your kingdom and your will no longer works out, no longer does the job.

You've had enough of the world, and the more you take in, the emptier you become.

You come to the end of yourself, you have nothing left to lose, and so you throw yourself on the mercy of God and you beg God.

But there is an order.

He sees him, he worships him, and he begs him.

It's been really fun.

We've been going through the model prayer as we're learning to pray as a community.

And one of the things the prayer that Jesus modeled for us does is it helps correct this.

Because as modern Christians, we're actually pretty good at the begging.

We come and we're like, God, if I could get this and not get this, and you get me out of this, give me some more of this, help me with this, get rid of this, but fill me up with this.

We have all the list of like, here's what we want from God.

And we start there, and so we approach God with our requests, but the model prayer: before we make our requests, we give God our worship.

The leper comes and he is in more desperate need than any of us have ever been at any point in our lives.

And before he begs, he worships.

And worship gives you proper perspective on who God is and who you are, and that whatever you are requesting from God, you can trust him with.

Does that make sense?

There is a proper order to this, and we are very quick to think that we can come with our skill and we can approach God and we can barter with God.

We're like, God, you know what?

If you get me this, listen, God, I've been putting like a hundred, a hundred and ten in the offering every month.

Listen to this.

If you get me this, I'm going up to 150.

But we are post-Enlightenment people.

It's just good to know that because it really informs how we think about almost everything.

We value logic, so we we bring these logical arguments to God.

It's like, how could God say no to me now?

You know, I've brought this three-part logical, airtight syllogism, you know, if this and this, then this.

It's like, God, I I've laid it.

You can't argue, you made logic, and I'm just using logic, so now you gotta give me the thing.

There's something so painful about coming to the end of yourself.

I don't know if you've been there.

If you haven't been there yet, you're still on the journey, you will get there, and it can be extremely painful.

Because we we put a lot of stock in ourselves.

You know, and we all came up in elementary with the little posters on the wall, like, you can do it.

You can be an astronaut.

It's like, no, you can't, you know.

You can barely do geometry, you're not going to the moon.

And so we put a lot of stock in our own ability, our own value that we bring to the table, our own intellect, our own negotiating skills, our own networks.

And it can be incredibly painful to run after your own will and your own kingdom and to hit rock bottom and to come to the end of yourself.

And I mean, I only know that because I've done it multiple times.

And yet, when you come to the end of yourself, what you realize is there's really just God.

And he's not me, and that's a very, very, very good thing.

And the only thing left to do is to drop to my knees and put my face on the ground and just worship him.

And when you've actually come to the end of yourself, you're still gonna ask for what you think you need, but you ask different.

Because no matter the outcome, he's still God.

And he's still good.

And I just wonder if you're begging God.

Some of you, you don't have an active prayer life, and so we have to start working on that.

But before we pray and before we wrestle with God, and before we fight for what we want, we must learn to worship.

And we're gonna finish out verse 12.

I think this is very important.

We have to listen carefully.

While Jesus was in one of the towns, a man was there who had leprosy all over him, he saw Jesus, fell face down, and begged him.

Pay very careful attention to what the leper says.

Lord, if you are willing, you can make me clean.

Period.

Can I tell you this why we have to slow down?

I have I've preached on this passage at least twice before today.

I have read this passage, I can't tell you how many times.

I would have sworn.

This verse ended with a question mark.

And I think that, because that's often how I approach God.

Would you do this for me?

Question mark.

Can you get me out of this?

Question mark.

Would you be willing to?

Question mark.

He doesn't interact with Jesus with a question.

He makes a clear and definitive statement.

He knows who Jesus is.

I don't know how.

I don't know how he got this revelation.

Let me remind you, in the ancient world, the scholars would tell you, you would have better luck calling someone out of their grave than you would curing someone of leprosy.

And this leper, years and years and years with the disease.

He just knows.

He doesn't say, hey, do you think you are up to the task?

I've heard you have like opened some blind eyes and cured some fevers.

And what about leprosy?

Do you think maybe you could heal a leper?

Question mark.

There is no question to him.

He is standing in front of God and God can do whatever he wants.

Please pay attention because I'm about to speak so directly to some people at our venues, some people online.

The only hesitation he had was not if Jesus was capable of doing the impossible and healing a leper.

His only hesitation is whether or not Jesus would be willing.

I've lived enough life to know that there are many things that speak into our identity.

Now they shouldn't.

We should find our identity in Christ and in Christ alone.

And as we mature in our faith, more and more the things of this world will quit having a voice in our identity.

But I've lived long enough to know there's all kinds of things.

You know, how much you have sitting in your bank account and what the brand is on the front of your car and who you are connected to, and how many followers you have on socials, and all these things speak into our identity if we let them.

And I've also lived long enough to know that there is nothing in our human experience that gets as loud of a voice as quickly into our identity as shame.

And the shame of every time a traveler comes near your way on the wilderness road and having to cry out, unclean, unclean, it will not take long until the words you're saying that are true about your disease, about your skin, also become a reflection of what you believe about your soul.

You get in the habit of telling some lies, which, if you are in a relationship with God, that will produce shame for the activities that you have committed.

And all of a sudden that shame begins to speak louder in your life than the voice of God.

And so you aren't a person who told some lies, you become a liar.

It's identity.

Some of you got married young, you didn't handle it very well.

A divorce isn't something that happened.

You see a divorce as a part of who you are.

You carry the shame, not externally, but internally.

And this can be very difficult because leprosy isolates you from your community.

It is our sin in our life that isolates us spiritually.

It doesn't get us kicked out of our homes or kicked out of our cities, but it does keep us separate from our heavenly Father and separate from the eternal life that we are created for.

And this is the point of the message where it's like everything Jesus is doing is demonstrating the way of the kingdom of God.

And it's hard for us to see ourselves in the story because we don't know any lepers, and leprosy is not a big problem.

But I think it's a direct parallel because the lepers of that day were the living dead.

And let me tell you, for every single one of us, scripture says we have a problem, and that problem is our sin, and our sin has separated us from God.

And scripture does not say that you are spiritually sick, it says that you might be alive, but you are spiritually dead.

We are the living dead.

That the leper had crossed the hurdle of faith, that Jesus was able to heal him, but he hadn't quite been able to believe that Jesus would be willing.

He's been marginalized too long.

He has been unclean too long.

He's been disconnected too long.

He's been in his shame for too long.

I'm talking to anybody today who is listening to this message, who you actually do believe in God, and you believe that God came down to earth in the person of Jesus, you even have begun to believe that Jesus really died for the sins of the world and walked out of his own grave.

You believe that Jesus is capable of healing you and saving you and restoring you, but because you know you, you're not sure he's willing.

And it is not a lack of belief.

There's no longer an intellectual barrier in the way of your relationship with Christ.

The only thing between you and your salvation is your shame.

You know, I can preach this because I know it and I experienced it.

Shame spirals us.

For some of you, it's like the only thing between you and the purpose God has for you is the shame that you can't give up to God.

For some of you, the thing that's driving your marriage apart is the shame of past actions or unconfessed sins.

For some of you, the thing that's keeping you from your security and your confidence is shame, not even of your sin, but of things that have happened to you in your past that have made you think differently about yourself and spoken into your identity.

And Jesus wants to take that from you so badly.

And what happens is it creates a cycle, and I know because I lived in that cycle.

When I was in my season of greatest rebellion, I did not have the excuse of not knowing God.

I knew God.

I knew the Lord from the time I was a child.

I had heard from God.

I'd been called by God.

And I started tiptoeing my way into deeper and deeper sin.

And the shame of that sin began to mold my identity.

And the cycle is I began to believe things about myself that keep me from going back to the very God who could get me out of this cycle.

And by the time I came to the end of myself, which is the most beautiful thing that will ever happen to you, and is also one of the most painful things that will ever happen to you.

By the time I got there, I had run out of options.

I couldn't think my way out of it, I couldn't force my way out of it, I couldn't manipulate my way out of it, I couldn't pay my way out of it, I couldn't lie my way out of it.

I was at the end of myself.

And finally, as someone who knew God was able, but didn't believe that God was willing.

At the end of myself, I had the one thing I had needed all along.

I had nothing left to lose.

And so if I go to God and God strikes me down, I'm living in hell on earth anyway.

And here's what you will find when you come to the end of yourself and you are finally willing to trust God with your shame, Jesus will be there.

And he will not be there in a defensive posture, keeping you at bay.

He will be there with open arms.

Let me show you in verse 13.

Four words, reaching out his hand.

I'm telling you, it's impossible for me to make this sit on you with the weight that it should.

I can't get there myself.

I'm not blaming you.

In the ancient world, anybody reading this would get to those four words.

Reaching out his hand.

A man with full-blown leprosy at his feet, reaching out his hand, their hearts would fall out of their bodies reading those four words.

Surely this foe's not touching this leper.

There's no way.

It's the most climactic moment of Luke's gospel to this point.

Reaching out his hand.

Three words today.

Listen to me.

Three words that can change your life if you will let them.

Jesus touched him.

Jesus touched him.

It's like you don't understand, man.

This I'm on my third marriage, and this one isn't gonna work out.

Jesus will touch you, he will touch your life.

You don't understand, I'm still hiding the addiction, and everybody thinks that I'm free and clear, and everyone thinks I'm going to meetings.

I'm not going to meetings.

I'm going to the bar.

I'm still in the addiction.

Dude, Jesus today will touch your life.

I can say with the uttermost confidence that you have not gone too far, you are not too dirty, you have not sinned too much, your debt is not too great.

I know that Jesus will reach out and touch your life.

Because Jesus touched the leper.

This is the kingdom way.

This is Jesus leaving you without excuse.

For all of those who are like, even if he's able, bro, you don't know me.

There's no way.

There's no way he's willing.

This is the passage that leaves you without excuse.

Come to the end of yourself.

You have nothing to lose, you have everything to gain.

Jesus touched him.

He was saying, He says, I am willing to be made clean.

And immediately, pay attention.

Immediately the leprosy left him.

This is a man who had been who would have been disfigured almost beyond recognition.

It leaves him.

You see, the miracles of Jesus, it's not like they fix something into something new.

What the miracles of Jesus do is they restore things to their proper working order.

And it's immediate.

And so let me remind you that to heal a leper, we know this context, is to bring someone back to life.

Healing a leper is bringing someone from death into life.

I'm gonna show you that in the scriptures because you need to know this is a direct gospel parallel.

You do not have leprosy on your skin, but you have sin in your soul, and you are the living dead.

And at the moment of faith, there's not 15 confessions you need to make, there's not 10 classes to go to, there's not 16 Hell Marys and 10 Our Fathers, there's no purgatory to sit and wait for someone to pray you out of.

All of that is extra biblical.

It does not come from God's word, and we lean on God's word.

At the moment you put your faith in Jesus Christ, you are healed, you are saved, you are restored, and you are given eternal life.

Now, I'm gonna be honest, every time I've preached this, this is how I wrap up.

It's strong, it's gospel.

But Jesus didn't wrap up here, and so we shouldn't either.

Look at our last verse, verse 14.

Then Jesus ordered him.

You should pay attention to this.

Jesus doesn't lead from like authority a lot.

He has all the authority he could.

He's not like ordering people around.

Jesus orders him to tell no one, and he orders him to go and show yourself to the priest and offer what Moses commanded for your cleansing as a testimony to them.

Let me tell you what's happening here.

Number one, depending on how many years this man has lived with leprosy, he is likely going to go and show himself now completely healed and restored to the same priest who once had to dismiss him from his life.

It's a powerful testimony that God is on earth.

But there's something else happening here that's really key.

We started the message off in Leviticus 13.

Leviticus is the Jewish law that governed their society.

We learned about the harsh implications for someone with leprosy.

That's Leviticus 13.

The next chapter, chapter 14, we get 32 verses on how to restore someone who's been healed from leprosy.

In the entire history that we have in Scripture, only two people were ever healed from leprosy.

One was Miriam in the Exodus, and the other was Naaman, who wasn't even Jewish.

This law has existed for about 1500 years at the time of Christ, and no one has ever used Leviticus 14.

Most people of that day would have wondered why it's even in the law, because obviously nobody gets cured from leprosy.

Nobody until today.

You need to know this.

The rituals associated with restoring someone are the most stringent, the most complicated, and the most time-consuming of anything in the entire Jewish law.

Guilt offerings, sin offerings, burnt offerings, restoration after uh you've committed murder, restoration after touching a dead body.

Nothing comes close to how time-consuming, stringent, and complicated restoration is from someone who's been healed from leprosy.

32 verses.

I'll give you kind of the highlights.

You have to have two birds.

You have to have blood, you have to have water, but living water from a spring.

You have to have a brush that you have to construct yourself.

You have to shave any hair on your body, and you have to destroy all of your clothes.

Seven days later, you gotta shave all the hair off your body again, and you have to wash all of your clothes again.

Then you present yourself to the priest, then you give three different offerings, and then the priest anoints you on your earlobes and on your thumb and on your big toe.

And all of that sounds weird to you because it's kind of weird.

So complicated and so time consuming.

There are two reasons for this.

Number one, this is not a process for someone who's been healed from disease.

This is a process for someone who has been resurrected from the dead.

Here's the second reason.

Everyone knows that you had leprosy.

And the purpose of the ritual is to get you ingrained back into your community, a community that is scared to death of leprosy.

And so the purpose of the ritual and how stringent and time-consuming it is, is that it is purposefully visible.

Everyone in your community sees the evidence of your healing, and it's purposefully communal.

And so I had to wrestle with this because I typically just end with the gospel, and it's a strong gospel because we are all the leper, and if we believe that Jesus is willing and we go to him, he will heal us.

But then Jesus orders the man.

He could have healed him and left him, but that man would have still had to live in exile.

He'd be healed, but he'd be alone.

And Jesus doesn't often order things, but he orders him to go through the process to get back into the community of God.

You might have seen uh on your way into our venues that we are highlighting our life teams today.

If you don't know what that is, uh, life teams are intentional opportunity for you to be in community with other believers.

Here's what we we believe at MetaCurch.

You need to know Jesus.

That's like step one.

You need to know Jesus, put your faith in him.

You need to get healthy, that's what we help with in the academy and some of our other processes.

And you have to be an intentional Christian community.

Let me make something clear.

What we're doing right now, Sunday service, this is not community.

Community doesn't happen dozens or hundreds of people at a time.

It just doesn't.

Uh, this is a service.

We've worked hard on this.

I always make the same joke, but it's like, this isn't your home.

We will never hold signs that say welcome home as you pull into our church.

You cannot change the channel here.

It's just me.

I'm sorry.

You cannot walk around in your underwear here.

This is not your home.

And you need community.

Community happens in these small circles of people who know you deeply and love you deeply, who you take all the masks off, who you are real with, who love you enough to hold you accountable to living out the purpose that God has on your life.

Some of you have that, and so you don't need to join a life team.

We don't want to pull you out of what God has organically given you to put you in one of our programs.

We don't need that.

You don't need that.

But many of you do not have that.

If you have community at all, it consists of people who are speaking the wrong things into your identity.

You need that.

When Jesus left earth, he could have died and rose again and gone.

Hey, here's the deal.

You believe in me?

Eternal life.

It'll be beautiful.

We'll live together forever someday.

And I'll come back.

So you guys wait for me.

And he could have just left us as individuals, but he didn't.

He went to great lengths to start the body.

The church.

The writer of Hebrews says, Do not neglect gathering together.

You need community in your life, the same way the leper was healed, but he was not yet restored.

And you do need to know this: Jesus does not just want to save you from your sins, he also wants to restore you to a community of believers.

It's critical, it's important, and it's implied on every page of Scripture.

I want to show you two verses and then we'll wrap up.

For those who do not yet know Jesus, you need to know that you are spiritually dead and that can change today.

Here's what John writes in his gospel: this is Jesus speaking.

Truly I tell you, anyone who hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life and will not come under judgment.

Listen, but has passed from death to life.

Amen?

I want to go to 2 Corinthians.

This is Paul writing to an already established church.

Here's what I want you to see in this passage.

It is implied that salvation happens to individuals, but it is also implied that those individuals are meant to be in community with one another.

Second Corinthians chapter 5, verse 17.

2 Corinthians 5:17

Here's the individual.

Therefore, if anyone that's an individual is in Christ, he that's an individual is a new creation, the old has passed away, and the new has come.

Now 18.

Everything is from God who has reconciled who?

Okay, we gotta do better.

Who has reconciled who?

To himself through Christ, and has given who?

The ministry of reconciliation.

That is, in Christ.

God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them.

And he's committed the message of reconciliation to who?

There's a me and there's an us.

And we are not meant to separate those out and have this modern Christian idea of, like, look, I believed in Jesus and I'm on my way to heaven, but you know, the church is corrupt and all the institutions are corrupt and Christians are phonies, and I don't really need, I got the Holy Spirit, and I'm gonna do my thing, and I don't need church, and I don't need a group, and I don't need a team.

Jesus healed him and he ordered him.

You are going to go through the very long, complicated, stringent process so that you can be reintegrated into community because we need community.

As we begin to close, um, we all deal with shame.

And shame is a very, very loud voice.

And my fear is that if you do not have the courage to throw yourself at the feet of Jesus Christ, then you will continue to live a life where shame gets.

A louder voice in who you are than Jesus.

For some of us, we have sins, we need to confess to God.

We might have some sins, we need to confess to others.

Coming to the end of yourself can be incredibly painful, but coming to the end of yourself is where you finally find freedom.

For some of you, you don't yet have a relationship with Jesus.

You've never come to that moment in time where you've been convinced in your mind and convicted in your heart that Jesus is who he claimed to be and has done what he claims to have done.

And what that means is that sin still permeates your life.

Jesus says at that moment of faith, a moment of intentional decision, that you are clothed with the righteousness of Christ.

Amen.

That your sins, all of them, are clothed, they are forgiven.

And that nothing now separates you from the love of God when you are in Christ Jesus.

And that is on offer to every one of us today.

Come to the end of yourself.

Take a moment and live like maybe there's nothing to lose.

Throw yourself at the mercy of God, and God will be there to catch you.

As we close across our venues, if you'd pray with me right where you're at, just bow your head, close your eyes.

If you're here and you know like that's me, I have never had a moment in time where I have decided that my only hope is Jesus.

My only hope for this life, my only hope for what comes next.

I want to give you an opportunity to start a relationship with Jesus today.

So with everyone's eyes closed, if that's you, my guess is that God's been working on your heart throughout this message.

I want to ask you for this moment of courage to just simply raise your hand.

If you're at one of our venues, raising your hand is just a symbolic gesture.

By raising your hand today, you're saying, Today I choose to put my faith in Jesus.

Amen.

Amen.

For those who raise a hand, I want you to know that God sees your faith and accepts it, forgives all of your sins, and has brought you into an eternal relationship with your Heavenly Father.

And all I want to do is help you acknowledge this moment through a simple prayer.

So if you just raised your hand, I'm gonna ask you to repeat this prayer with me.

And I'm gonna ask all believers across venues to pray this out loud as well.

Let's pray like this: Jesus, today I choose to put my faith in you.

I believe you are God that you died for my sins and rose from the grave.

I thank you for loving me and forgiving my sins.

I'm so glad you joined us for today's message.

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