Followers | Luke 5:12-26

Good morning, you guys.

Please stand stay standing with me for the reading of God's Word.

Our scripture today is going to come from the book of Luke, chapter 5, verses 12 through 26.

Luke 5:12–26

While Jesus was in one of the towns, a man came along who was covered with leprosy.

When he saw Jesus, he fell with his face to the ground and begged him, Lord, if you are willing, you can make me clean.

Jesus reached out his hand and touched the man.

I'm willing, he said, Be clean.

And immediately the leprosy left him.

Then Jesus ordered him, Don't tell anyone, but go, show yourself to the priests and offer the sacrifices that Moses commanded for your cleansing as a testimony to them.

Yet the news about him spread all the more.

So the crowds of people came to hear him and to be healed of their sickness.

But Jesus often withdrew to lonely places and prayed.

One day Jesus was teaching, and the Pharisees and teachers of the law were sitting there.

They had come from every village of Galilee and from Judea and Jerusalem.

And the power of the Lord was with Jesus to heal the sick.

Some men came carrying a paralyzed man on a mat and tried to take him into a house to lay him before Jesus.

When they could not find a way to do this because of the crowd, they went up to the roof and lowered him on his mat through the tiles in the middle of the crowd, right in front of Jesus.

When Jesus saw their faith, he said, Friend, your sins are forgiven.

The Pharisees and the teachers of the law began thinking to themselves, Who is this fellow who speaks blasphemy?

Who can forgive sins but God alone?

Jesus knew what they were thinking and asked, Why are you thinking these things in your hearts?

Which is easier, to say your sins are forgiven, or to say, get up and walk.

But I want you to know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins.

So he said to the paralyzed man, I tell you, get up, take your mat, and go home.

Immediately he stood up in front of them, took what he had been lying on, and went home praising God.

Everyone was amazed and gave praise to God.

They were filled with awe and said, We have seen remarkable things today.

The word of the Lord, you guys may be seated, and kiddos, you guys are dismissed to head to your classrooms.

Thank you, Delaney.

Thanks, Brie.

Kids, see y'all later.

Awesome.

Welcome, welcome.

Hello, everyone.

Hey, good morning, good morning.

Um I'm Nate Shade, one of the pastors here on staff.

Um prior to this uh series of followers, uh Ben did a short series uh called The Spectators.

And so we went from this short little thing of spectators, what it looked like to have this spectacle, this event, uh, what it looked like for people to want to go and see said thing, and then even sometimes the preparation that leads up to it, like a good tailgate or something like that, where that starts to become uh more important than the event itself.

And then we move from there into what we have now spec or followers, right?

And so Ben has been going through the book of Luke, showing what it looks like to be a follower of Jesus.

And as we read through Luke, we start to see that there are people that had an idea of what the Messiah would look like.

This is what the Messiah is going to do, he's gonna show up, he's gonna be triumphant, Rome is going to leave, we'll get our land back, things will look so much better.

And when Jesus shows up, he's very different than what their expectations were.

But he had authority and he had this mission and this vision, and he would teach and speak and heal and do all these things, and for a lot of people, they had to wrestle with this idea of this is what I thought the Messiah would be, this is who Jesus is saying he is, and I can either accept Jesus for who he is or run the risk of missing the one who came to save us.

And so uh what we have today is I'm gonna start with a question.

Are you following Jesus?

Are you following Jesus?

And I'm gonna run through a bunch of different questions as we go through this sermon, but as we get ready, let's pray.

Master and Lord, we are diving into your word.

Your word is sharper than any two-edged sword, and it cuts deep, um, deep into our hearts and pierces us in a way that convicts us.

Shows us who you truly are.

Your word is truth, your word is life.

God, use this now in the midst of us that we can hear and see from you properly.

We pray that your spirit will give us this ability uh to see the things that you want to reveal about yourself to us.

And we pray, God, for those in this room that have been walking with you for a really long time, may you show them something new and give them a deeper desire to know you more.

For the person that is a newer follower of you, uh Lord Jesus, we pray that they will grow today.

And for the person that has walked into this room that may not know you yet, I pray, God, that you will reveal yourself the truth about you in such a way that they will see what we what the rest of us see.

That you are the way, the truth, and the life, and may they give their lives to you.

We pray in Jesus' name.

Amen.

All right, so are you a follower of Jesus?

And if you are, can you explain it?

If someone were to ask you what it looks like, what it is that you do as a follower of Jesus, would you be able to lead them through those types of things?

We're going to get into a bunch of different questions, and some of my questions may frustrate some of you.

Can almost guarantee a little bit of that.

For others in this room, it might confuse you.

I will tell you, my questions are not meant to confuse or frustrate, but they are meant to make you think.

I would like you to think about the things that I'm asking.

Think about what it looks like to walk with Jesus, follow him, and even wrestle with some of the things that maybe you had stored up in your mind and beliefs about Jesus.

But I'm praying that this will shift your thought process in such a way that when someone were to ask you, Are you following Jesus?

and what does it look like?

you would have a more confident answer as to what that is.

You heard Delaney read through the scriptures today and what we'll be walking through there in Luke 5.

So if you have your Bibles, you can flip open to that.

In Luke 5, the first conversation that we have, the first story that we had, leads me to ask this question: Was Jesus ever ceremonially unclean?

Was Jesus ever ceremonially unclean?

Now, I know for most of you, that was not on your bingo card.

When you walked in here, bingo card of what is Nate going to say from stage today, that wasn't on there.

And so, how in the world, Nate, did you get to this type of a thought process?

And what I wanted to do is to kind of explain a little bit about the story, because it the story contains a man who has leprosy.

He's a leper.

Leprosy at the time, uh, it's different than what the leprosy is what we see today, but it would turn your skin, it would discolor your skin, it would become flaky, and it was very contagious and it would spread.

And so it was dangerous for all the people in the camp, all the people that are around this person, if you had this skin disease.

And so, if you had leprosy, it led to an issue.

The first issue being that you are in a camp and it can spread really easily, and we want to protect our people.

The second issue is that this is also the home of God.

The tabernacle is here, and God comes and dwells with us.

And because God is holy and cannot be in the presence of anything other than when you had certain types of impurities, somebody that is not whole, they can't be in that area.

The reason why they can't be in that area is because if God does come down to dwell, it could put that person's life at risk.

They could die.

So we have rules and laws.

And if you go to the book of Leviticus, you would find in Leviticus chapters 13 and 14 rules and laws about leprosy.

Leviticus 13 · chapter mention

Now, if any of you have dug deep into the book of Leviticus, you haven't.

But here's the thing.

So most of you have at least woken up at one point and said, I'm going to do a Bible reading plan, and I'm going to go through the entire Bible in a year.

And Leviticus is where Bible plans go to die.

Right?

And the thing is this, but once you see Jesus in Leviticus, you can't unsee it.

And I'm hoping you can see some of it today.

In Leviticus 13, you start to hear all these rules and laws.

This is what happens if you have leprosy, and this is how you have to behave if you have leprosy.

What it the priests would have to go and say, declare this person to actually have this disease.

And if they do, according to Leviticus 13, the person would have to wear torn clothes, they would have to let their hair be loose, they would have to cover the top of their lip and shout, unclean, unclean, anytime someone would come by, and they would have to live outside of the camp alone.

Leviticus 14 talks about the ceremony that would take place, the sacrifices that would take place if someone was healed of leprosy.

And this was you would do these actions and these things at the temple, and you would be welcomed back into the presence of the people and in the presence of God.

But not just leprosy, but also other situations would show up where people could become unclean.

That would be an issue.

And some of those are found in Leviticus 5.

And I'm going to summarize some of this, but Leviticus 5, 2 and 3, uh 2 and 3 kind of goes on this idea of what happens if you touch anything unclean.

If anyone touches anything unclean and it goes through a whole bunch of animals and things like that, and then in verse 3, or if he touches human uncleanness of whatever sort of uncleanness, he becomes unclean.

And if it's hidden from them and they recognize it and they know their guilt, and on and on it continues to talk about what it looks like.

And long story short, if you touch something unclean, you're unclean.

And when it talks about someone's human, like if there's blood on the person's arm, if it's coming out of their nose or whatever, and you wipe your, you're unclean.

Like you couldn't touch blood, you couldn't touch salat.

There's all these different types of things that you couldn't do because, again, you live in the camp where God dwells.

Because you live in the camp where God dwells.

This is taken very seriously.

You want to be clean.

You want to know that if God were to show up, you're safe.

And it has to be dwelt dealt with.

Because God lives there.

So in the story, we see that this leper shows up.

The leper walks up to Jesus, falls on his face, and says, begging, Lord, if you are willing, you can make me clean.

And Jesus touches him.

Now, the story does not tell us how long he's been a leper.

It does not tell us where he's from.

It doesn't tell us about his family.

It doesn't say a whole lot of things about the man other than he has leprosy.

And because he has leprosy, and because we just talked about you can't touch something that's unclean because you'll become unclean.

If he's an outcast and lives outside the city and you touch him, you have to go outside the city.

There's so much that has to take place because uncleanliness has to be dealt with.

And because of that, this man is unclean and he shows up in the city.

And what we can know is that this man, since he has been diagnosed, has not been touched.

Not a single person has touched this man since that day.

And he comes before Jesus.

And I could see the people around Jesus stepping back.

No! And Jesus reaches his hand out.

No, no, he's unclean! And Jesus touches him.

So the question is does Jesus become unclean?

He does not.

Now, initially it looks like he's doing something that is going to make him unclean.

Yet, the holiness of God spreads.

Not the uncleanness.

But the holiness of God.

And the man is made whole.

The leprosy goes away.

He's restored.

And Jesus tells him, go.

Show yourself to the priest.

Do the sacrifices that you see in Leviticus, as Moses commanded, and be restored.

And he has this opportunity now to go back into the camp.

He's no longer an outsider.

He will be welcomed home.

He gets his family back.

He gets his friends back.

Everything is going to be restored.

And he has a story to tell of how God was gracious to him.

When something is unclean and it touches something that's clean, both are unclean.

And the people of the day were so focused, so enamored with the idea that uncleanliness had to be dealt with that they refused to touch someone who was unclean.

And Jesus saw this as a problem.

Jesus reached out and touched the unclean person as a way to show us that it was never about being clean.

The laws in Leviticus are not there to show you that you have to do everything you can to be preserved and to be clean.

The laws are there to show you that when you are unclean, there's a way back to God.

So every time we have this moment where we decide that we are no we are going to walk past another human being because they are unclean.

So with Jesus, he teaches us to touch those that need it.

The healing comes after.

We're going to pick back up in a minute, but in verse 17, we see that Jesus is now in someone's home.

He's in the house of this people, and these people have come.

There's probably tens of people inside the room.

It's a house.

It's not, you know, out in the field like the feeding of the 5,000 or anything like that, but there's a lot of people in this room.

The Pharisees and those are probably sitting in front of him at his feet because that's the seat of honor and that's what you would give them as Jesus' teaching.

And there is a guy by the name of Rabbi Foreman that has an idea that he believes he believes he can tell you what Jesus was teaching about.

This man's theory is fun to me, and so I'm going to run with it because I like it.

The idea is that Jesus was teaching on forgiveness.

The reason why he thinks that Jesus was teaching on forgiveness is because when a rabbi would teach, if something happened around him, he would use that to further his instruction.

He would not use it as an interruption.

Rabbis never saw things as an interruption, only an opportunity for God to further what they were teaching.

So when this man is lowered down through this roof and presented before Jesus, Jesus answers, your sins are forgiven.

Jesus has a lot to teach about forgiveness.

And the world has much to learn.

Your sins are forgiven you.

Can you imagine hearing anything more beautiful than that?

Jesus tells this man when he sees the faith of his friends, it says in the scriptures, Jesus saw their faith.

And this leads to my next question.

Is there a difference between uncleanliness and sin?

Are they treated the same?

We mentioned what it looked like to be unclean in the previous story.

Does it carry the same weight as sin?

Can you become unclean without sinning?

There's a law for that.

Leviticus.

Leviticus chapter 15, starting in verse 19, going to 22.

Leviticus 15 · chapter mention

When a woman has a discharge, and the discharge in her body is blood, she shall be in her menstrual impurity for seven days.

And whoever touches her shall be unclean until the evening.

And everything on which she lies during her menstrual impurity shall be unclean.

Everything also to which she sits shall be unclean.

And whoever touches her bed shall wash his clothes and bathe himself in water and be unclean until evening.

And whoever touches anything on which she sits shall wash his clothes and bathe himself in water and be unclean until the evening.

And I bet none of you thought you'd hear that taught in a sermon on a Sunday.

And yet here we are.

He was uh Dr.

Ed Dobson.

Dr.

Ed Dobson was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig's disease and passed away from it in 2015, but not before spending a year living as Jesus would.

And in 2009, he published a book called A Year of Living Like Jesus.

In the midst of this year, after being diagnosed, he decided instead of wondering which muscle in my body is not going to work today, I'm going to instead focus on what is it that Jesus would want me to do today.

He started wearing the clothes that Jesus would wear.

He would eat the food that Jesus would eat.

He was trying to draw as close to his Savior in that relationship as he possibly could.

On one particular day, he came home from work.

And as he went to go sit down in his chair, his wife let him know that he could not sit in that chair.

Because she sat there earlier that day and she was unclean.

So he got up and walked to the couch.

To which as he got there, she said, You can't sit there either.

As he walks to the kitchen and gets ready to sit down in one of the kitchen chairs, she says, You also cannot sit there.

This woman sat in every chair in his house, making them all unclean to where the floor is now his place to sit.

Does a woman become unclean because of sin?

No.

It's just a physical situation.

It's part of life.

Can you be unclean and have sin?

Yes.

Both can be true.

Becoming unclean is often physical and mostly unavoidable.

And it's temporary.

Sin is a moral violation against God's law.

Notice that the leper did not get the same treatment as the paralytic.

The leper was touched.

The paralytic was not.

The leper was cleansed.

The paralytic was forgiven.

There were differences.

The leper was unclean.

He was an outcast that had not been touched, but he needed to be.

No one saw him, and he was finally seen.

He was healed and he was restored.

The paralyzed man had friends that loved him and wanted him to be whole again, and his sins were forgiven.

So now it's time for uncomfortable questions by Nate.

The part of the show where Nate comes out and asks uncomfortable questions.

First question is this Is there anyone in your life that you are this desperate to get them to the feet of Jesus?

The second question is like it.

Do you have friends in your life that would carry you when you can no longer walk?

I say this because we have community groups at our church that meet throughout the week at all different places in the city and at all different types of times.

But we only have 30% of our church that has signed up for any of them.

I say this because it is in these community groups where Jesus shows up and meets people in their homes.

And if you feel disconnected, depressed, or alone, I will say that if you're not part of a group that meets with Jesus regularly, you won't get more connected or cared for when something difficult happens and you need to be carried.

Sometimes it's an invite to a church that gets somebody to the feet of Jesus.

Sometimes the most convenient place for someone to meet them is in your home.

But we have to be so desperate for our friends to be in front of him that we bring them to the church or to the home that he is present in.

This man looks up and sees Jesus and hears, your sins are forgiven.

But who can forgive sins?

Only God can do that.

It's easy to say, right?

Your sins are forgiven.

I mean, blasphemy back then, but for us, easy to say.

You can't measure it.

There's no chime that goes off.

There's no song that starts playing when someone's sins are forgiven.

Your sins are forgiven.

Did it happen?

I don't know.

But what if the person that said that then did something that you could see?

That was miraculous.

Like telling someone who could no longer walk to stand up, pick up their bed, and go home, and they do it.

If that happens, do you then believe the part about the sin?

The person that is unclean needs to be touched by Jesus.

The person that is sinful needs to be forgiven by Jesus.

Both need Jesus to be restored.

So the next question.

But now even more of the report about him went abroad, and great crowds gathered to him and to be healed of their infirmities.

But he would withdraw to desolate places to pray.

What does it look like to follow Jesus?

It means withdrawing to places to pray.

Many of you in this room, you pray when you eat.

Maybe you pray when you go to bed.

Maybe if somebody asked you for prayer.

Have you ever considered going somewhere where no one else is around and just talking with God?

And if you do, do you do it often?

If you connected to God as much as you connect to your phone, what would your prayer life look like?

Would you hear him?

I believe that if we withdraw more and get in time with prayer, that when the lepers of this day and the paralytics show up in our lives, we will touch them and carry them to Jesus.

Spectators want to show Jesus wanted the Father.

Let's be followers of Jesus.

The way of Jesus was never about keeping us from being unclean.

It was to show us that when we are clean, God has given us a way back to the Father.

He's provided us a path to walk with Him again and to be in His presence.

So, what do followers of Jesus do?

They get alone with God and pray.

They meet in each other's homes.

They touch those that are considered unclean.

And they carry those that can no longer walk.

And they get them to Jesus who heals them.

Only Jesus can provide us the way back to the Father.

Followers of Jesus will go to great lengths to leave the camp and find those that need to be brought into the camp.

And they want them there because that's where God decides.

And he is the only one that can make us clean, whole, and forgiven.

Jesus showed us the way.

Are you following Jesus?

Let's pray.

Our Lord and our God, it is in your word that we find your way.

We find the truth.

We find this gospel message.

Where the Hound of Heaven continues to seek after us.

We recognize that you are more than we could have imagined.

You continue to do things, you still do things even today that show us that you're here and that you move.

And that you invite us into this way of life.

Lord, I pray for my friends in this room, may they not leave today without seeing and hearing from you in a way that transforms them forever.

May we put aside the things that distract us and allow you to be the focus of our attention, the center of our hearts.

May we walk into the places where the unclean are.

Touch them and guide them to your presence.

We thank you for the way that you have handled our sins on the cross.

And we know that only you can do that.

So, Lord, it is with grateful hearts that we stand before you in awe of all you've done.

We love you.

Amen.