As Christians, we have no doubt as to the power of God… but the question we all have in the deepest, most secret places of our hearts is this: Is He WILLING to use it for me? It is an honest question that deserves and answer…. We are going to explore that answer in this episode.
Kingdom Community TV Podcast
We Know He’s Able… But Is He WILLING?
Good morning everyone. So, we're going to be continuing our series. This is now episode seven of Making the Journey from Distant Deity to Dear Daddy, Finding the Healing Power of the Father's Love. So, today we're going to take a look and we talked about this last week. Jesus said to Philip, Philip said to him, "Just show us the Father and that that will be enough." That's sufficient, right? You know, we basically, Philip was saying, "Hey, we think you're great and it's awesome and it's great, but we really want to see the Father." And so, Jesus said to him, "Philip, all this time I've been with you and you haven't recognized me basically. You don't know that it's me." And he said, "He who has seen me has seen the Father." So, we talked about how Jesus and the Father are one. And so, now what I want to do in the next few weeks as the Lord leads me is take snapshots or snippets of Jesus' life and his interaction with people to give you so that to give you an idea of how the Father is, right? So, if you see Jesus doing certain things, his interaction with people, his compassion and his love, I want you to see the Father, Abba, Daddy God in Jesus. Because that's very important. And as we talked about last week, a lot of us know that Jesus died for us, we know that Jesus cares for us, we know that Jesus has compassion for us, but we're not always so sure that the Father kind of feels the same way towards us. And so, what I want us to do is I want us to see the Father, Abba, Daddy God and Jesus as one, one, right? A triune, but one God, right? One thought process, one purpose, one heart towards us. That's super important. So, let's dive in. And this week, we're going to take a look at a specific scripture that is in Matthew 8, verse 1 through 3. When he came down from the mountain, large crowds followed him. He meaning Jesus. Right away, a man with leprosy came up and knelt before him saying, "Lord, if you are willing, you can make me clean." Verse 3, "Reaching out his hand, Jesus touched him saying, I am willing, he made clean." And immediately, the leprosy was cleansed. Now, this is what we're going to be looking at today, but I want to take this verse by verse and I want to kind of break it down. Okay? So, let's look at this first verse. It says, "When he saw the crowds, so a bunch of people have been following him, you know, he's been healing and people are just, he's been preaching and the mob is just following him." Right? So, when he saw the crowds, he went up. Right? He was in a sea of people. He went up to go somewhere elevated above the people. He went up on the mountain and after he sat down. His disciples came to him. Now, I want you to see this portion, this. He went up. Think of Moses going up to the mountain to receive the Ten Commandments. God dwells upon a mountain top in the Old Testament, Mount Sinai. That's when he gave the law to the Ten Commandments to Moses. He also gave him the 660-some-odd commandments that we see in Leviticus. So, he goes up to a mountain. He's been in the sea of humanity, if you will. Okay? And then he goes up. Right? Because he is God. He is fully man and fully God. He's divine. So, he goes up. But I want you to see something here. And it's something that I had shared with you in the previous episodes that in the tabernacle of meeting in the Old Testament, in the Holy Place, there were no seats. Right? When the priest would have to wash their hands and wash their feet, remove the dirt and the filth, remember, dirt is symbolic of the cursed ground that humanity came from. They had to cleanse themselves, right? They wore linen garments because they would not supposed to, they couldn't sweat in the presence of the Lord. Right? On the left hand was the golden lampstand with seven candles, which is symbolic of the Holy Spirit and the seven-fold attributes of God. On the right hand was the table of showbread. The bread that was baked once a week put on that table and it remained warm for an entire week and it grew no worms. And then when it was swapped out after seven days, that bread was eaten by the priest. Then right in front, as soon as you walk in was the altar of incense, where the priest will offer incense and prayers for the nation of Israel. Behind that was the entrance to the holy of holies, which is where the ark of the covenant was, where the mercy seat and then God dwelt in between the two cherubs, where the high priest would go in there once a year to sprinkle blood on the mercy seat for the whole nation, then come out and bless them. Okay? So it was a lot of order and structure in the Old Testament, laws and things, in other words, how to approach God. Very important. And Jesus had said, and we discussed this in the previous episode, that Jesus said, and he does in this section that he's about to do with the Beatitudes beginning after this, right? Is he came to fulfill the law, not to abolish the law. So why am I telling you all this? I want to, I want to pay the picture for you, because what a lot of us seem to forget is that when Jesus was on earth, the law was still in full effect. They hadn't been abolished. When Jesus died on that cross, all the ordinances that was against us, which is the law, was nailed to the cross with him. But right now, everything's in full effect. Jesus is fulfilling the law and so his disciples that are following him, right? Are under that covering until he dies and with his own blood, washes their sins away. And we see when he resurrects from the dead and he meets them in the upper room. He breathed upon them and they receive the Holy Ghost. That's when they became born again. They're not born again yet. But Jesus is, in other words, because they're with him and they're in his disciples, he's covering their sins are being covered because those sins that they've committed up until that point and they'll commit for all their life, even after they become born again, are all going to be nailed on the cross. So he goes up on the, on the mountaintop and he sits down. Now, sitting down is a symbolism of the completed work that he is about to do in about three years, right? It also speaks to his divinity and his kingship. He sits down. Then we see his disciples came to him, right? They came to him, they were drawn to him, right? I think about Matthew 11, 28, right? Pastor Sharon, come unto me. Oh, you have labor and a heavy, yes. Pastor Sharon is back there. You can't see her. Oh, come unto me. Oh, you did labor and a heavy laden and I will give you rest. Come to me. The invitation that God gives everyone is to come to him, right? Specifically in this time frame, right? Jesus has come to me. The invitation was come because he hadn't died yet. So you had to go to him, right? There's paces in the Old Testament says that God waits to be patient and compassion to you. Unfortunately, many of us who preach use that terminology to say, you know, you're a far off and you need to get close to God. We once were a far off, Paul said, but now you have been drawn night by the blood of Christ. Nobody's a far off from God anymore. Nobody. I don't care what mess you're in right now. I don't care what you're doing. If you are truly born again in a child of God, you will not go to hell. You may lose reward when you go to heaven, but you will not die a second death. You'll die once and then you'll go to be with the Lord because you're born again. You cannot undo that anymore. Then you've heard me say, if you've been following this ministry for any length of time anymore, then I can change my DNA and deny my mother and my father. I am their son. Like it or not, it is what it is. You may love your parents. You may not love your parents. You may have all kinds of issues with your parents, but you have your parents' DNA and you cannot undo that. My friends, if you are born again, if you have accepted Jesus Christ as your savior, you are born again. You're born of water and spirit. You cannot undo that. Cannot. You cannot sin your way out of heaven. You can sin your way out of reward, but you cannot sin your way out of heaven. The gifts and calling of God are without repentance. You are born again. And that's super important because many of us think that, you know, maybe I'm sick because of something I did or because, you know, God's displeased when we stop disqualifying yourself for what Jesus paid on that cross to give you. Stop. Forget about what mess and what you did wrong didn't. Maybe you did something to somebody and you offended them, a loved one, a parent, a spouse, whatever. And now they're gone. They've went into eternity. You can't ever apologize to them. Listen, you need to learn to forgive yourself because Jesus, the Father through Jesus has forgiven you. But we're always slow to forgive ourselves. Always. We always don't want to punish ourselves for something we did. Stop. Because I guarantee you that's what's keeping you from being healed, regrets, you know, all kinds of, I don't know and I don't understand. You don't need the only thing you need to know is that you're loved. And that love can never be changed, can never be broken. It is without repentance. He will never leave you and never forsake you. And his disciples were drawn to him because now they've been for him for a while. They've slept with him. They've eaten with him. They know his heart. They know that when they see Jesus, they're seeing the Father and so they're drawn to him with baited breath because they're waiting, like little eagles that are waiting to be fed by their mother Eagle. So they come to him. They came to him. Then he began to teach them. Notice the concept of the Sermonum amount that we see in images and pictures and movies is Jesus on a mountain preaching to a whole group of people. That is not what that says. He saw the crowds and he went up. He didn't go up to preach them. He went up and he sat down and his disciples came to him. Okay. Now he had 12 but on top of the 12 he had more than 12 because at the end in the upper room there was 120 of them up there that received the baptism of the Holy Spirit. But he did have disciples at this time and the Scripture says later on that they stopped following him when he started just talking about eating my flesh and drinking my blood. But we know out of all those people, we don't know the exact number, there were 120 of them up in that upper room in the beginning of the book of Acts. So you had the 12 and then add another, you know, 100 and whatever that were up there. 108 that probably were sitting around standing to listen to him. And then of course there's the crowds. There's the people. There's everybody, the wannabes, the one that want to hang out to get a free loaf of bread and a fish, the ones that want to get healed. They have no interest in his kingship, his authority or his power. They just want to get in. You know, he's the rock star of this time and they want to be in on the action. They want to see what's going on. But he had loyal followers, the 12 and the other 108 that were there with him following him, staying close to him. They came and he began to teach them. So from this is in the beginning of chapter 5 all the way through to the end of chapter 7. This was not to the general public. This was not, you know, the sermon on the Mount. There was no sermon, people. That is what man has interpreted. There was no sermon. He sat down and his disciples came to him and he began to teach his disciples. So when he says to him, "Your father in heaven knoweth that you have need of these things." He wasn't talking to the crowd. He was talking to his disciples. When he said the next thing, "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted." He was speaking to his disciples, not to the crowd. God is the father of you and I. He is not the father of the world. They have their own father, the devil. You and I are born again of water and spirit. We have a father. The world is not. They don't acknowledge our father, not his fatherhood. They can't be, they can't be his children unless they're born again or his authority or his Godship. But you and I are different. We have a father in heaven, a daddy who loves us. And we see his character and his heart through Jesus. And that's the purpose of this series. This is why the Lord impressed it upon my heart to begin this series and to start this series, is for you to see him. So he began to teach his disciples everything he said. Now, I want you to understand something, that what he said and everything he said was before the cross. He said, "You have heard it said, not commit adultery, but I say that if a man looketh unto a woman and lusteth for her in his heart, he has already committed adultery." God's standard is up here. It wasn't just enough to, "Oh yeah, I don't sleep on my wife, but meanwhile I lust after every woman that walks by." God's standard, man's standard. You have heard it said, you have heard it said, he said it multiple times. Even about that if you call your brother a fool, you're guilty of hellfire. God's standard is up here. The true intent of the law was to show you and I that we cannot meet God's standard in the flesh. It was to show man the fruitfulness of our efforts to try to approach God through our works. And because we couldn't do it, Jesus needed to come fully man fully God in the flesh to fulfill the law and die as an innocent man for our guilt so that we might receive his righteousness. See from Adam, all the way to Jesus, to the cross, everybody was born in this world already a sinner. David said, "I was conceived in iniquity and born in sin." Children did no sin, knew no sin, committed no sin, but were born in sin. Everybody is born in sin. When we become born again, all of those sins are wiped away and the old man which Paul talks about is wiped away and a new man is born in its place. Hence the terminology Jesus used in John chapter three, you must be born again. Now we're living in the same old body. We still have the same old thoughts that we had before in some cases, right? Our past, the things that we struggle with or whatever. They're still there, right? So when Paul talks about later on in the Epistle, "Seek ye your own soul salvation with fear and trembling," he's not saying like, "Oh my God, you have to pursue your salvation and hang on to it because you might lose it." He's talking about this. This is what needs to be still be saved. You're saved. Your heart, if you're born again, your heart is pure. You are pure. You cannot be any more pure, any more holy, any more sanctified than you are right now. And you'd be like, "What pastor?" Listen, if I had the time, I would go through verse after verse after verse in the Epistles to prove that point. You are born again, you are a child of God. God cannot dwell in dirty houses. If you've been following this ministry any length of time, you've heard me say this over and over and over again. I did a series on it where I proved it through the Old Testament. God cannot dwell in a dirty house. If you were still dirty, if you still needed to be saved, if you could still lose your salvation, God would not be dwelling inside of you, and hence you would not be a child of God. But you are, and you are holy. Just because you do things that are unholy and unsanctified does not make you unholy and unsanctified, because sanctification holiness is about the Spirit. The soul, this is where you need repentance, which means metanoia, to change the way you think. A lot of people talk, it's always about the heart, it's about the heart, it's about the heart. It's about the heart from the point of salvation. But after you're saved, this is what needs to be renewed. You need to start thinking heavenly thoughts. You're thinking in terms of how you see God and how you see yourself has to be in line with the Word of God. If there's any hope of healing flowing into your body of any things that your hang-ups, bad attitudes, or whatever that you have got going on, for any of that to be of any efficaciousness for the cross and the blood of Jesus to be efficacious for you and I, we need to start thinking the right way, in line with the Word of God, with the doctrines of heaven. Like Paul talks about in Colossians 3, "Set your thoughts on things above and out on things of the earth where Christ sits." For you are dead and your life is hidden in Christ and that word life is bio. So I mean, your physical life is hidden in Christ. Your spirit is born again, but not your spirit needs to take dominion over your flesh through the power of the Holy Spirit, through your thoughts. Your thoughts have to be above in heaven where he sits and where he lives, right? So we see this. He began to teach them. Let's continue. Now, when he came down from the mountain, large crowds followed him. Now this is the Beatitudes. He's done all of the preaching that supposedly preaching. It's not really preaching. He was teaching his disciples. They came around him. He was sitting down and the crowds were there listening, right? But he wasn't directing his conversations to them. So now he says, "When he came down from the mountain, large crowds followed him." Now I've seen videos and images of this particular mountain where they believe Jesus sat and taught his disciples. I say sat and taught because in most cases they said that he was there and he stood and he preached and there was the acoustic value. Look, stick to the word, okay? Stick to the word. Trust me, it works. I have for 50 years, the word works. If you stick to it, don't add and don't subtract. Don't surmise and what about this and what about that? It says he sat down and his disciples came to him and he began teaching them saying, "That's it. Forget about, he didn't stand up and, you know, man does that. Man draws attention to himself. Jesus did not." So now he's up on this mountain and now he's going to move, right? He came down from the mountain, large crowds followed him. He's at the top and he starts to go down. So now they want to follow him, okay? And it's probably from what I've seen in the images of Israel. It's a mountain and it has trails. The interesting thing that I saw in these videos that I saw at that location is that there were these little caves. There were these little like natural paths that were created and there were these little alcoves on the side as you take it all the way down to go back down to the valley, right? Now this is what I think happened here. This leper, he couldn't be seen in public. I believe that this leper hid in one of those little alcoves along that path that Jesus took to come down. And then he says, "Right away, a man with leprosy came up and knelt before him." I think he hid when he saw Jesus, he jumped out. And he said, "Lord, if you are willing, you can make me clean." He said, "Lord, he had heard everything Jesus was saying. And I believe that he probably had heard things, overheard things, or maybe was often a distance and heard what Jesus was saying. He knew the sovereignty that Jesus was the Son of God, therefore he called him a Lord. He knew that Jesus had the power to heal because he'd seen it. But what he did not know is his willingness to heal him. He said, "You can make me clean." And why is that? Why did this man had to ask him, "Are you willing to heal me?" I know you can, but are you willing to heal me? Well, let's look at leprosy. Leprosy was a curse in the Bible. It was symbolized sin separation and destruction. In the Old Testament, with the exception of the Syrian who dipped in the Jordan seven times, nobody got healed from leprosy. Am I correct in that? Pastor Sharon? See, I got my Bible checker back there. That was the only one. Seven times dipped and it wasn't. It was an incurable disease. Up until the time of Jesus it was incurable. You had leprosy. You were cursed. You knew that something was wrong with you. You did something. That's why he said, "Are you willing?" I know you can because I've seen you do that, heal the sick, raise the dead, but are you willing to heal me? Am I good enough to be healed? And you know, you may be a child of God and you may be struggling with some type of illness or infirmity or something for a long time. And you've been to prayer lines and been anointed and did all these other things and nothing's worked. And you're wondering what's wrong with me. I'm here to tell you there is nothing wrong with you. You are a child of God, born a water and spirit, washed by the precious blood of Jesus. If we are sick, it's because our minds, there's something there that's stopping us from receiving that grace that was freely flowed from that cross. I'm telling you that with God, there is no respecter of persons. His love is unending and free flowing because of that cross. And this man had heard, had seen, but was wondering, "Wow, is it for me? Are you willing to heal me?" And so, if I can get this thing to work, right away, see, are you willing? Jesus said, reaching out His hand, Jesus touched and said, "I'm willing, be made clean." And immediately his leprosy was cleansed. Jesus could have spoken it and said, "Be clean." But this man hadn't felt a human touch in a long time to touch someone is the ultimate act of compassion, of connection. And Jesus went and reached out and touched Him and He was cleansed. "I am willing, be made clean." He healed him of something that was incurable, that was a punishment, that was a curse, and God, Jesus was willing to do it. A few years ago, I had been diagnosed with an illness that was incurable. And I was told that I'd have to be on medication for the rest of my life, that I could not walk a few feet without being medicated because the room would start to spin, I would start to vomit, and I was desperate, desperate, wondering what was wrong with me. And I had even contemplated a very, very dangerous surgery that they said might, might get rid of it, but I would be deaf in one year for the rest of my life. And Sharon, Pastor Sharon was not for it, obviously, and I prayed and I cried out to the Lord. I got desperate and I asked the Lord, "What's going on? Why is this here? Why can't I not receive healing?" Prayerless people, church praying, whatever, you name it. And He told me what? And I was stunned when He told me what He told me. But when I searched my heart, I knew He was telling me the truth because God never lies. And it's very personal, so I'm not going to get into the ugliness of it or whatever it was, because don't take this the wrong way, it's really not in your business. But what you need to know is that man couldn't do anything for me, and I went to the one who could, and I opened up my heart to Him, laid my soul bare to Him, willing to receive correction if that's what I needed. And He spoke to me and told me exactly how the enemy came in and struck me with this illness. And I said, "Well, I don't know how to come back from this. What do I do?" He said, "I'll lead you." And it took me 18 months that what didn't happen overnight, because remember how I got into that mess didn't happen overnight. They had to do a lot with this, with thought processes, with the way I saw myself, the guilt and condemnations that I carried. You'd be surprised. Paul talks about being sober, be vigilant, be watchful, and pray for your adversary, the devil, as a roaming lion, seeketh whom he made devourer, whom resists steadfast into faith. And that faith, that word "faith," it's "pistous," it's trusting and believing in the goodness and the character of God, and constancy in that profession. And there was an area of my life that I wasn't really trusting God in. And when Paul talks about giving no place to the devil, I gave place to the enemy. And the enemy had a right to afflict me with this infirmity, because I opened that door. And through the help of the Holy Spirit and the Lord Himself, it took me a year and a half. But in a year and a half, God closed that door forever. And I stand before you healed and whole and humbled. But I'm here to tell you that God loves you and I. And when we get really honest with Him, when we really come down to it, and we really open up our hearts and say, "Lord, I want to know," and deal with things. And sometimes you have to think about things and think about the way maybe you treated people and the way you interacted with people and things that you said. And this, yeah, you got to own it. You can't just brush it and sweep it under the table and say, "Oh, well, that's in the past. I don't want to bring up the past." Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. Now, we don't know what the issue was with this man, but the way he came to him and said, "Lord, if you are willing, you can make me clean." He didn't say, "heal me clean." He needed to be clean, because leprosy speaks of the spiritual leprosy, which is sin. And Jesus was willing and he cleansed him. So I speak to you today, they say, "God's hands are stretched forth to heal and to restore." Anything that you hear otherwise, anything that causes you to disqualify yourself, anything that you stop to think, "Well, but, you know, something must be wrong with me. There's nothing wrong with you." Remember, you're not your body, your spirit that dwells in that body. And one day, the outside will look like the inside. But until that day, there is healing, there is restoration, there is the goodness of God to flow through your life because of the Lamb of God, because in everything that we go through, it's always been the blood and nothing but the blood of Jesus. That is what saved us, that is what cleanses us, that is what keeps us, that is what restores us, is his blood. So my friends, do not let the enemy disqualify you. Don't you disqualify yourself. Don't judge yourself by what you did or what you're doing, but judge yourself by the precious blood of the Lamb of God that took away your sins for all time and made you a child of God. My friends, until we meet next week, the Lord bless you and keep you and we'll chat together again soon.