Exhortation, September 7

The exhortation from September 7, 2003:

A Pharisee and a publican went to the doctor, and both learned that they needed surgery. The publican agreed to the surgery, and, after a long and painful recovery, regained his health. The Pharisee also agreed to the surgery, but at the last moment began to have doubts. Groggy from the anesthesia, he sat up on the surgical table, grabbed the surprised surgeon’s scalpel, and said, “I’ll take it from here.”

Truly I say to you, the publican went home healthier than the Pharisee, because the Pharisee didn’t go home at all.

Salvation, we confess, is by grace through faith. We are not saved by our own obedience or works. This is a basic affirmation of this church and of all Protestant churches. Yet we often get all tangled up with this affirmation. We often hear Protestants say that we need to do nothing to be saved, only believe. But how can we do nothing? And isn’t “believing” something that we do?

A large part of the problem is that we try to think about these things in a way that is detached from the concrete images and events of Scripture. In the sermon text this morning, Luke uses the word “faith” for the first time in his gospel, and it is used in the context of a healing. When the men bring the paralytic to Jesus to be healed, Jesus “saw their faith,” raised the man, and forgave his sins. Shortly after, Jesus speaks of Himself as the physician come to heal sinners.

Jesus can see much that we cannot, but in this case their faith is visible to everyone. Their faith became visible by what they did. The men carrying the paralytic believed that only Jesus could heal their friend, and so they were determined, despite all the obstacles, to get their friend to Jesus. They had to do a lot of things before the paralytic could be healed. They had to carry him to the house where Jesus was, they had to think of a way to get around the crowd, they had to pull up tiles from the roof, and they had to lower the man through the roof to the floor in front of Jesus.

Did these men with faith act ? Did they do things? Yes, and without doing these things the paralytic would not have been healed. Would they have done any of these things if they had no faith? Of course not. Did their actions heal the man? Or did their confidence in Jesus heal the man? Of course not: Jesus did.

We get into problems as soon as we forget that in our salvation Jesus is the Physician, and we are not. The God who inhabits eternity, who does not dwell in temples, who needs nothing from us — we can’t offer Him any workmanship to meet His needs. On the contrary, He has put all of His infinite resources into doing work for us . Salvation is not by our works because we are not the workmen. Salvation is of the Lord, because He is the Workman. So, the issue is not whether we do things or not. We are always doing things. The issue is whether the things we do arise from our confidence in our Physician, whether they arise from faith in the competence of the Divine Workman. The issue is, are we doing the things appropriate to a patient, or are we, like the Pharisee in the parable, trying to do things that only a Physician can do?