Word of Salvation – Vol. 30 No. 33 – Sep 1985
Lord, If Thou Wilt
Sermon by Rev. A. I. de Graaf on Luke 5:12-15
Scriptures: Psalm 103:1-4 (Intr.);
NT: Luke 5:12-15; OT: 2Kings 7:3-9;
Psalter Hymnal: 187:1,2; 44:2; 377:1,3; 452:1.3; 452:4
Lord, if it is your will…..!
That can be a question really bothering us, can’t it?
What is that… the will of God?
What does He want of me?
Especially in illness this can be a hard question.
The Lord is almighty, is He not? And He wants for His children the best, does He not?
Then why now THIS?
Mind you, let me straight away say that here on earth we’ll never quite get to the bottom of this problem.
We know that, because the Lord Jesus, the Beloved Son Himself, has had His struggle with the will of God and a disciple cannot claim to be better than his master.
He had His struggle with the will of God in the garden of Gethsemane when He prayed:
My Father, THY will, NOT MINE… be done
And yet in this record of healing by Jesus we hear very wonderful and comforting things about the will of God. Comforting… if not comfort-able. ‘Lord,’ – prays this leper, – ‘LORD, ruler, Mighty One… If You Will…!
The amazing thing is that he still can talk about the will of the Lord in his circumstances. For these circumstances were gruesome.
The illness was gruesome, that made the body sprout boils and infection till it was one mass of stinking rotting tissue, hands and feet losing fingers and toes, hair fallen out and eyes going blind, all sense lost to the dying of the nerves…!
But the illness was also gruesome in that it made you so lonely.
The stern law of Moses that saw in leprosy a symbol of sin – and of death in sin’s wake – sensibly made all cases of leprosy ISOLATE themselves, lest the whole nation be infected.
Declared dead, away from wife and children,
away from father and mother,
away from village and town,
away from friends and any human contact,
apart from food thrown somewhere on a rendezvous point.
A fate worse than any hostages ever had,
not even radio or television
to keep them in contact with the outside world…!
Is that not enough to make anybody hatefully anti-social?
Unclean… unclean…!
And if this happens to a child of the covenant;
what will he, so hurt, so hit,
still think sensibly about God… and about God’s will?
Can he come any further than at the most to what Isaiah 45:9 says:
Woe to him who quarrels with his maker
To him who is but a potsherd
Among the potsherds on the ground.
Does the clay say to the potter
“What are you making?”
The will of God for a man stained and spotted with rebellion and disobedience
what else can it be but Judgement?
WELL-DESERVED JUDGEMENT..!
Yes, and then into the life of such a man there comes Jesus,
the Saviour, the Liberator, the Maker of Room.
And then suddenly
such a man shackled to sin and its bitter consequences
learns to look differently at the will of God.
LORD, IF You WILL… You CAN make me clean…
Suddenly he learns to see another side to the fact
THAT GOD DOES NOT WANT SIN.
THAT GOD DOES NOT WANT SIN meant before only:
that He had let those who had loved and done that sin,
rot away in their own death.
But the fact THAT GOD DOES NOT WANT SIN
suddenly also begins to mean that God can take that sin away
and can take any bitter consequences of sin away too.
And that He may well WANT THAT.
That He does NOT want the death of the sinner…!
God is it possible that you don’t want the death of the sinner
never mind how well-deserved that death was?
Lord can you make a window
– Yes even a door –
In the wall of death which we erected ourselves?
And then Jesus comes in and begins to answer that, and life really begins…!
(1) Yes this man sees it right:
Jesus wants that this sick man gets clean
And of course HE can do it.
This fellow has discovered the tremendous power of Jesus,
he calls Him LORD.
And that power is the power of LOVE,
the seeking and saving love of God.
God is LOVE,
that is the message that still may give strength and joy
to any person sick or otherwise bent down
under the consequences of sin today.
Jesus gave a sign of that love and that power when He said: I Will, Be Clean…!
And still today that kind of thing happens.
Even when it happens through doctors, it happens at the behest of this Lord.
The Lord still does signs like that,
and still today God’s people may pray with hope to this Lord:
“Lord if it is your will…
you can make me…
or my brother… my sister… my loved one CLEAN.”
But it was a sign.
A sign of the cleansing from the death-rotting of sin.
It was a sign of the way a dead fallen sinner –
cut off from God and from men –
could again come back into the fellowship of God’s love.
Love – That is also the heart of the L A W.
Therefore Jesus did not care
that there was a law that said, “Don’t touch lepers”.
Where He came to love and to heal
there he could stretch out His hand and touch the leper.
He stretched out His hand
and touched a multitude of sin-stained doomed men and women
and took their illness upon Him.
God’s law had never been against that
as still today it is not against touching the sufferer in love.
But no-one did this as Jesus:
He took our sickness upon Him
and so – seeming to break the law, became its very fulfilment.
You may never kill someone with the law of God.
That law has come to give life,
It took living form in Jesus Who touched the leper.
Yet Jesus does not want the break-down of the law.
And so, after having healed this man, he says:
Now go and show yourself to the priest
and bring the offering that the law asks of you.
Show how grateful you are, surely it is worth a sacrifice?
Peter’s mother-in-law is barely healed by Jesus
when she gets up
and serves the Lord…
and serves the Lord’s people, too.
A churchful of people who say they are made clean
but who are too miserable to sacrifice anything to the Lord
surely must be an abomination in His eyes.
You may have read that “The Age” has a contest in writing short stories.
Oscar Wilde once wrote what he himself called
“the best short story in the world”.
It is not true… or is it? Here it comes:
“Christ came from a white plain to a purple city, and, as He passed through the first street, He heard voices overhead and saw a young man lying drunk upon a window-sill. “Why do you waste your soul in drunkenness?” He said.
He replied, “Lord, I was a leper and you healed me,
what else can I do?”
A little farther through the town
he saw a young man following a harlot, and said:
“Why do you dissolve your soul in immorality?”
And the young man answered,
“Lord I was blind and you healed me, what else can I do?”
At last, in the middle of that city,
he saw an old man crouching, weeping on the ground,
and, when He asked why he wept, the old man answered,
“Lord I was dead, and you raised me into life,
what else can I do but weep?”
Is not this a terrible parable
of how some people use the gifts of Christ,
and refuse to show that Jesus’ work HAS HAD RESULTS?
To the leper Jesus says: Go show yourself to the priests AS A TESTIMONY,
so that God’s people can truly see that the Messiah has come
not just with words but with power and deeds.
And you pay the Lord your offerings. Surely that is what you want to do?
Yes he does, we do not hear that he did not do so.
Never mind that it was the old law of Moses.
Never mind that in three years’ time the veil in the temple would tear up
and all these things would change.
Jesus is no revolutionary.
He came not to break the law but to fulfil it.
But why then did Jesus say:
“Be quiet… .. don’t tell anybody.
Didn’t He want the glad message told?
Doesn’t He want evangelism?
Sure He wants the glad message.
Sure He wants evangelism.
But He does not want to be misunderstood.
The land was teeming with guerrilla fighters
and self-styled political Messiahs in His day.
He does not want the nation in uproar,
expecting of Him that He shall use His power
to throw off the Jewish nation
the hated yoke of Roman occupation,
and so create a situation where everyone can take it easy.
Amazing that today there are again so many people
who see in Jesus nothing more than a revolutionary,
a bringer of revenge to the rich
and of an earthly paradise to the poor and downtrodden.
It is as if I hear Jesus say again:
Shush… don’t talk about Me like that.
I have come to liberate people not from people but from sin.
I have come to unite people … first of all with a holy God…
He does not want to be misunderstood,
and made into a guerrilla
or into a pale saviour of souls alone.
He heals from true disease,
but He heals those whose heart longs for God,
that they once again can live for HIM…!
Look at His own reaction, when He has been healing till late at night…
how He seeks – not sleep – but new fellowship with the Father…
when He withdraws to pray: Father Thy will be done… Thy will…!
Even a leper, when still a leper can become a messenger of Good News
like the four lepers in the old testament story we read.
That good news broke through the anti-social streak
their sickness had bred into them:
“This is no good: we must tell the people what GOD has done…!”
And sometimes that glad tiding has in it –
that here already I may be healed from sickness:
“I will … be clean!”
But for Jesus Himself that was only possible
because he drank the cup the Father gave Him –
the cup with MY uncleanness in it –
…all of it to the bitter bottom.
And sometimes His will, His good and gracious will,
is that a follower of His carries a cross after him
that is very dark and very heavy.
He CAN do everything He CAN take that cross away.
But He WILL that you shall be clean.
And sometimes for that cleansing He needs that cross.
How is a sinner… not only forgiven but also made clean?
Made clean – that he will not – CANNOT do evil any more,
and gets to perfection, so clean that he sees God?
I will… be clean… that is what Jesus still says.
That is as far as He will get with each of us.
But then we had better not misunderstand Him.
He calls us out of loneliness and out of rotting death.
But do we agree with His will
when He tells us He calls us INTO holiness,
INTO newness of life?
Where only GOD the LORD is God,
and all the idols are off their thrones?
I will… be ye clean…!
We catch new hope and new courage when we hear Him say that.
Whatever He will… He can.
Shall we then not lay trustingly in His hand…?
HOW He will do all this,
for you…
and for me?
Amen.