Coney Hill Baptist Church
Demonstrating God’s Love Together
28th September 2008
What Am I Doing Here? What’s Church All About?
3. Getting Things Sorted …
Luke 5:17-26
Intro:
Most of the stories of the gospels are about people meeting Jesus. Very often they are surprise or unexpected encounters. The point of many of them is that the people who were always around him, or who assumed they had kind of exclusive access to him, often missed the point of what he was about. It took strangers, unlikely candidates, those who thought that they’d failed, or never even been in contention in the first place, those who’d run away to a far country or who lay paralyzed on a mat, to reveal the truth about him…. That he was there, he is here, for everybody … perhaps especially for those who struggle to believe it.
Immediately after this story he says as much, Jesus says explicitly, "Who needs a doctor: the healthy or the sick? I'm here inviting outsiders, not insiders—an invitation to a changed life, changed inside and out."
Admitting We're Sick...
That’s the thing though. The sick! No-one likes to be sick, or to admit they’re sick. Especially men, things usually need to be falling off before we get to the doctors! A report this week said that admissions to A & E departments have gone through the roof. But mostly because people were in the wrong place, but didn’t know where else to go. Maybe coming back to church is a step in finding the right place to be made well.
Of course coming to, or coming back to, church is one thing. Coming to Jesus is something else. It may be that some of us, who are always attending services, need to come back to him.
The Right Remedy...
But why? What for? Most of us aren’t interested in religious duty, we can do without lectures on morality, some of us find friendship and companionship in all sorts of other places. Why do we need to come here?
Over these weeks I’ve been suggesting a number of reasons; that we’re all on a search for something bigger/greater than ourselves, that we have a kind of inbuilt desire to express appreciation, wonder, amazement … that we might call worship. Today I want to suggest something else – that we all feel a need to make things right, to be better. We may not call ourselves sick, but we are all aware that not only are we not perfect, we’re not what we should be, what we’d like to be, what, in some sense we feel we could be or were meant to be. And if it’s not something about, or within, us maybe it’s to do with our relationships or something else in our experience. Getting our lives sorted is high on everyone’s agenda.
The Healing of Forgiveness...
That’s what this story is about; a helpless man, supported by his friends, having his life restored. But his physical healing was only an illustration of what was really going on. Jesus wanted to make an even bigger difference to him than that. The religious leaders recognised it and didn’t like it …. It was something only God could do they thought, and they were right. Jesus was saying I can do whatever it takes to put people’s lives back together, to give them life ‘in all its fullness.’
Key to this was the offer of forgiveness. He wasn’t saying it was the man’s sin that was the reason he was paralysed. He was saying that it’s not only the obvious things that debilitate us. Not everyone in that room had to be lowered in through the roof because they couldn’t walk. But they all knew that if they could be forgiven, offered a fresh start and a clean slate then their lives would be transformed. And that’s just what Jesus wanted.
Conc.
Here today, the opportunity to set our lives straight exists again. For some the needs are obvious, for others not so. But whatever it is, God is in the business of putting things right, whatever’s gone before, in the here and now, he can restore all that you could possibly be. That’s especially true if you feel its too great a task, that’s what church is for, its why it’s good for us all to be here.
Office Address:
Coney Hill Road
West Wickham
Kent
BR4 9BU