Luke 17:11-19
Pray with me. Our great God,
we come before you, thankful for everything that you have
done for us. Our lips today are full of praise
for you are our creator, our redeemer, and our provider. And
so now we come before you and offer ourselves to you as living
sacrifices. Make us holy and pleasing by
your word and spirit so that we can do good in the world,
showing love to our neighbor and giving glory to your great
name. Accept your tithes and our offerings into your storehouse,
that they may be for the good of the work of the church, so
that the name of Christ is exalted to the ends of the earth. This
we pray in Christ’s name, amen. You may be seated. Please turn
in your copy of the scriptures to Luke chapter 17. Today’s reading
is Luke 17, verses 11 through 19. One of the first things I asked
for when I came to be the pastor here several years back for the
pulpit that’s in the sanctuary was a desk on the pulpit that
was big enough for a Bible, a hymnal, and my notes. And now my telephone
has to be up here so that I can record the sermon. And so this
thing is about a third of the size of the one over there. So
if you see me fumbling around, that’s what all this is about.
But over there, man, we got good over there. This is a tough one. We give our attention now to
the word of God. This is Luke chapter 17, beginning
at verse 11, and it tells us of this great account of Jesus’
work of redemption. On the way to Jerusalem, Jesus
was passing along between Samaria and Galilee. And as he entered
a village, he was met by 10 lepers who stood at a distance and lifted
up their voices saying, Jesus master, have mercy on us. When he saw them, he said to
them, go and show yourselves to the priest. And as they went,
they were cleansed. Then one of them, when he saw
that he was healed, turned back, praising God with a loud voice. And he fell on his face at Jesus’
feet, giving him thanks. Now he was a Samaritan. Then
Jesus answered, we’re not ten cleansed. Where are the nine? Was no one found to return and
give praise to God except this foreigner? And he said to him,
rise and go your way. Your faith has made you well. Pray with me. Lord, in this important hour,
we come before you in this great moment of our week. We recognize
the voice of the king, the voice of the shepherd. And we say with
all our hearts, speak, oh Lord, your servants are listening.
Lord, let your word call to mind, let it point out to us your commands,
your promises, your love for us. And may by your Holy Spirit,
we leave this place this day, not the same as we entered, but
changed eternally. May your word today save souls,
but may it build up your church in their most holy faith to go
into the world and to serve you with great joy and with great
zeal. Hear us and help us. And we make
our prayer in the name of Jesus. Amen. Some of you have read articles
in recent weeks or months about the effects of the lockdown,
right? You’re hearing about people’s
mental health. You’re hearing about school-age
children and the lack of social engagement. You’re hearing about
the health of people being neglected because they’re deferring important
matters related to their bodies. You are seeing the effects of
what government into our freedoms. And so the effects of lockdown
are many. They are varied and depending
on your opinion or what life you were able to live, they for
sure have great effects upon us all. Now think about the leper
in our story. quarantine for well as long as
he had been sick or as long as they had been sick. There are
10 of them. I like to think of just one really because one’s
all who came back to be healed, but they lived a full time life
of quarantine. You know, we put on our mask
and we go in the grocery. We put on our mask and we go
into close quarters with other people. We have ways to cover
ourselves and make it possible for us to get close to others.
But a leper in Jesus’ day could never be more than six feet or
could not be more than six feet close to somebody. And if the
wind was blowing a certain way, they had to stay 150 feet away
lest their breath or lest their skin touch another
and transmit this disease. Now today we know of leprosy
as Hansen’s disease. Someone discovered, I think in
the 1800s, what was really going on in leprosy, but understand
today in the terms of this disease, three to 4,000 years ago, when
the book of Leviticus was written and the laws of purity and cleanliness
were put forward in God’s word. You notice in our passage today
some very operative words. There’s the word cleansing, the
word healing, the word saving, the word restoring. All these words are there and
they’re significant to our understanding of God’s work. in salvation. But you understand, as we’ve
experienced in these last many months, lockdowns and quarantines,
what it must have been like for these 10 men who lived with this
bacteria, this disease, that if they touched something, if
they breathed on something, they would transmit their leprosy. And so they were outcasts. They
were unclean. Their life with really no life
at all. And so in our passage today,
we see Jesus continuing to make his way to Jerusalem. He continues
to go to Jerusalem to do the work of redemption. We know from
our study in Luke that Jesus, we’ve seen the birth narratives.
We’ve seen Jesus as a little boy. We’ve seen his preparation
by his parents. We see his temptation in the
wilderness, the time of the ministry of John the Baptist. We saw Jesus
doing his work of redemption in Galilee, his choosing of the
12. And now he’s passing through the countryside on his way to
Jerusalem, and he stumbles through a foreign territory. If you were
a good Jew in Jesus’ day, you would bypass the area of Samaria. You would bypass the area where
there were foreigners who were considered by Jews unclean. And
it’s going to be very interesting today to see who Jesus does make
clean. In fact, it’s a foreigner. It’s
a Samaritan. It’s not someone of Jewish descent. But here is Jesus on the way
to Jerusalem to do the work of redemption. And as he enters
the city gate, there are 10 lepers. You might say this is the little
beggar’s corner that we might see underpass as we pull into
a town. This is a little colony of men
who together, though they were of different national origins,
they had one great thing in common. They were cast out. They were
put away from society. And so they gathered somewhere
near the city gate. And together they etched out
a life. You might say birds of a feather flock together. They
lived together in misery. They couldn’t go out into the
public, but they could congregate together. And so they heard about
Jesus. They heard about Jesus as he
made his way from village to village and from town to town
through the countryside on his way to Jerusalem to do the work
of the ministry. And they had heard about Jesus
through social media. At least back then, social media,
right? The grapevine from village to village as people walk to
and from each village. Did you know Jesus, the healer?
Jesus, the physician, he’s making his way to your town. This man
called Jesus who could make the blind receive their sight. The lame could walk again. The
lepers were cleansed. The deaf could hear. The dead
were raised and the poor received the good news of the kingdom
of Jesus Christ. Imagine these lepers looking
off in the distance. It’s him. It’s the teacher. It’s
the master. It’s the healer. And they cry
out, maybe he’ll hear us today. And what do they say? Jesus,
master, have mercy on us. When you come into membership
in this particular church, as it’s in our form of government
from the Associate Reform Presbyterian Church, we ask you several questions. The first question is this. Do
you acknowledge yourself to be a sinner in the sight of God
and justly deserving His displeasure and that you’re without hope
and that your only, only way out of this great predicament
is in the love mercy of God shown in Jesus Christ? That’s the first
question we ask. And isn’t that the question these
lepers had to ask themselves? Do we believe this man can heal
us? Do we believe that with his touch or with his voice, as we
have heard tell throughout the villages and towns of Judea and
Samaria, and now as we know in our day, to the ends of the earth,
that this Jesus alone can save and he can redeem. The second
question we ask to our church members is this, do you believe
in the Lord Jesus Christ as the Son of God and Savior of sinners,
and do you receive him and trust in him alone for your salvation
as he is offered in the gospel. You see, these two questions
that we ask, there are five more that we ask as well, but these
first two get at what these lepers had to get straight in their
minds and in their hearts. Jesus, the master, he can have
mercy on us who are lepers and who are sinners. It is well known
in our Christian beliefs that we have to have knowledge of
ourself and knowledge of our God in order to live faithful
Christian lives. We have to know ourselves that
we are who God says we are. We are created in his image.
We are male and female. We were put on this earth to
spread the love and glory of God from Eden to the ends of
the earth. But we know that the Bible teaches
We know it to be true that Satan entered that garden. Satan tempted
Eve and Adam and they sinned against God. And so they fell
from that original righteousness. They fell from that original
intent that God had given to them. And so God in Christ has
to come in the form of Jesus, the second Adam. and obey where
Adam failed and to live a righteous life in order that we might be
the righteousness of Christ through faith. And so we know ourselves
and we know it to be true from the Bible, but don’t we know
it to be true from our experience? The Bible says that we are sinners,
but we experience it every day in our lives. We know what the
word says and we know that we live contrarily to it. And so
we know it’s true of us that we are sinners in need of a savior.
And so as we know ourselves, we also must become full of the
knowledge of God. He is a God of justice. Sin cannot be overlooked. It
must be paid for. He’s a God of mercy. He sent
his own son, the Lord Jesus, to die in our place in order
that we might receive eternal life. by putting our faith in
Him. And on and on we could go about
ourselves and about who God is, but to know ourselves and to
know our God leads us to the very place where these lepers The Holy Spirit comes to us. He opens our eyes to see our
sin and our misery. He opens our eyes to behold wonderful
things in his glorious gospel. It’s like the great hymn says,
my chains fell off. My heart was free. I rose, I
went forth and I followed thee. We sing another hymn. about the
light coming into the dungeon. Thine eye diffused a quickening
ray. My chains fell off. My heart
was free. We have these wonderful hymns
of the faith that let us sing of our experience spiritually
as God has healed us of our leprosy. Now, today is Reformation Sunday. It’s November 1st, but yesterday,
the Reformation. And we know that during the Protestant
Reformation, There were two things at stake. If you were in John
Calvin’s camp, it was worship. Worship must be reformed so it
can be Christ-centered and for the glory of God. And so Calvin
said, get rid of all the empty ceremonies that mean nothing.
only do what God commands in worship. And on the other hand,
you had Martin Luther and his great issue was justification
by faith alone. Now, both of these are dear to
us. As members of the Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church,
we love pure worship, but we also love justification by faith.
So to say Calvin was this and Luther was that aren’t against
one another. We love both of what came from the Reformation,
but think about Martin Luther’s great joy and his great fight
in the Reformation. Justification by faith alone.
Luther personally struggled. How can a righteous man, or maybe
put it in the context of our passage today, how can an unclean
person with leprosy, with the leprosy of sin, stand before
a holy God? How can an outcast, come into
the presence of a holy and almighty God. And so Martin Luther preached
from the gospels. He preached from the letters
of Paul that righteousness was outside of us. We have an alien
righteousness, we like to say. We have a righteousness that
is outside of us. God and his love sent his son
Jesus into this world. He lived and he obeyed. perfectly. He did what Adam failed to do.
And so he became the perfect sacrificial lamb to die on the
cross. All the blood of bulls and goats from all those centuries
could not save. But that pointed to the great
lamb who offered himself at Jerusalem for our sins. And so when we
come to faith in Jesus, we are justified. And we like to say
it this way. It’s just as if I’ve never sinned. but it’s also just as if I’ve
always obeyed. God sees us as he sees his beloved
son. He doesn’t see our sins, he doesn’t
see our disobedience, he doesn’t see our black hearts. No, he
looks upon us in the same way he looks upon his own son, the
Lord Jesus. And so the Reformation brought
for us this great doctrine of justification by faith alone. And faith is really what we are
to think of in this passage today. How could the lepers be made
clean? How could they who were cast out and unclean and in great
pain and suffering, how could they be brought near to Almighty
God? And we think of faith in three
parts. We think of the content of faith.
There’s Jesus. We think of the conviction of
our faith. Is Jesus really real? And then we trust him. And if
you’re into the fancy theological Latin words, the content of faith
is the notitia, what you could say it’s the notes, Jesus, Savior,
Messiah, suffering servant, and on and on you could go through
the list, taking note of who Jesus is and what he’s done.
Then there’s the conviction or the assensus, we get the word
assent from it. If the facts about Jesus are
true, my mind and my heart must assent that this Jesus is the
Savior who can make me whole again, whether it’s leprosy or
spiritual deadness. And then there’s the trust word
or fiducia. You go to the bank, you go to
first bank and trust, right? Why do you want them to be a
trustworthy place? Well, you’re putting your life
savings there. You dug it up out of the backyard. It wasn’t the
brim coffee can. You’re going to entrust it to
the fiduciaries. They have a fiduciary responsibility. And so faith is believing what’s
true. It’s assenting to it, but it’s
trusting in it. And we say these words very often
in our worship service, don’t we? Grace to you and peace or
greeting. God greets all those who love
him in Christ. And we say it after the confession. alone for your salvation. Hear
now God’s words of assurance of pardon. Faith is a wonderful
thing. And these men, these ten lepers
who were on the fringes of society, who had hopeless and lonely lives,
they believed that Jesus could deliver them. That Jesus was
a Savior. They understood that He was the
Master. Maybe they heard He had calmed the waves on the Sea of
Galilee when in the boat with His disciples. They understood and the old covenant that he
was creator. And they have heard word that
he is the redeemer. And so his word, when he speaks,
the wind and the waves obey him. And for sure, he can make our
spots and our sores and our pains go away. He is the merciful one
who can heal and help and give us his great compassion. So what did they expect Jesus
to do? Well, who knows? Maybe they thought
he would touch them and they would be made well. Maybe he
thought that he would say, you’re a bunch of sinners. You stay
over there in your little leper camp. Jesus says, go and show
yourselves to the priest. And as it would happen in the
words of Jesus, but also Luke, under the inspiration of the
Holy Spirit chronicling an orderly account to give to Theopolis,
and then he’s going to do the same when he writes the book
of the Acts of the Apostles. There’s a couple of things that
we ought to understand in this phrase. Go and show yourselves
to the priest. These ten have to assume if we’re
going to start walking towards temple, where unclean people
are not allowed, And there’s actually even a death penalty.
Jesus must mean business. Let me read to you an inscription
of what would have been on the doors or the gates of the temple. Because you’ve already seen,
right, that one of these guys is a Samaritan. He’s a foreigner. This is what it says to foreigners
at the temple of God, where they must go and show themselves to
the priest. No foreigner may enter within the balustrade around
the sanctuary. and the enclosure. Whoever is
caught on himself, shall he put blame for the death which will
ensue. And so when Jesus says to these
10 lepers, go show yourselves to the priest, they have to assume
that with this word, they’re going to be made well. But they
have to assume that Jesus has given them entrance into the
temple. By the time they get there, it won’t matter their
nationality, their spots and their sores will be clean. By
faith, they went. And here’s where the story gets
even more amazing. Jesus has a sense of humor, you
must understand. The unbelieving priest. who would
be associated with all the unbelieving Jews that we have seen him encounter
along the way as Jesus makes himself or makes his way to Jerusalem
to be the Redeemer. Every one of the unbelieving
priests will see the work of Messiah in these 10 lepers, and
they will have to affirm God is real. And God has healed the
disease of these men. They’re going to go to Jerusalem
and Eight days of inspections. You know how this goes with the
COVID thing. Some of y’all have been for your MRIs and your colonoscopies
and all, and you’ve told me to pray for you. You go take your
test, you hide at home, and then you go get your colonoscopy.
And then, you know, if you want to go back in public, you get
another test and another test and another test. Well, that’s
what these guys, they’re going to go through eight days of pins and needles.
Does the priest say I’m clean or not? You can imagine their conversation
as they make their way to the temple. One of them says, when
I get better, I’m going to Vegas. When I get better, I’m going
to go see mom. When I get better, I’m going to go see my kin folks.
When I get better, I’m going to go back to work. You can imagine
their hopes and their dreams were soon to be restored. When
I get better, I’m going to do everything that I never could
do before because I was an outcast. We can speculate what took place. But here’s something I think
we’re pretty sure of is they made their way to Jerusalem.
Their disfigurements began to go away. Their hands opened up.
The sores on their bodies began to disappear. Their nerves and
their pain subsided as they made their way to Jerusalem, obeying
the voice of Jesus, the master, who indeed was having mercy on
them. And that’s the way our conversions
come to us. We come to church and we hear
the word of God read and proclaimed and that truth that we understand
the word of God, what it says about us and the word of God,
what it says about Jesus come true in a glorious conversion
by the power of God’s Holy Spirit. We understand that we are sinners.
We understand that the way we are living is not OK. We understand
that our shame must be covered over. in order to enter the presence
of Almighty God and that the distance between him and us is
great, but we who were far off in Christ can be brought near
and we are made new creations. If anyone is in Christ Jesus,
Paul writes to the Corinthians, he is a new creation. The old,
the leprosy is gone and the new has come. What does our passage
tell us? It tells us that nine of these
lepers, they go on to Jerusalem. That’s what we’re left to. believe. They go on to the priest, but
one, one returns to Jesus. Our passage says one, seeing
that he was healed, he turned back and he praises God with
a loud voice. He falls at the feet of Jesus
and he gives him thanks. We have a little saying around
here and it’s, it’s the title of the sermon. at least if that’s
what I sent in on Tuesday, it is. You check and verify. And that is this, saved people
sing. And I like to say it an even
stronger way, saved people sing loud. Saved people know who they
once were and who they are now in Christ Jesus. Think of John
Newton, the Englishman, the slave trader, who came to faith in
Jesus after great success in the commercialization of people. He came to faith in Jesus, and
we sing one of his great hymns, Amazing Grace, How Sweet the
Sound, that saved a wretch like me. I once was lost and now am
found. I was blind, but now I see. We also have a wonderful hymn
in the hymnal that we usually use. It’s one of the hymns by
the great James Montgomery Boyce, who passed away, I think, in
2000 or 2001. And he writes these words for us to sing. How marvelous,
how wise, how great, how infinite to contemplate Jehovah’s saving
plan. He saw me in my lost estate,
yet purposed to regenerate this faithless, fallen man. For known before the world began,
according to his gracious plan, God destined I must be. conformed to Jesus Christ, the
man who lived and loved as no man can, a glorious decree. He bore my sin on Calvary’s tree
in righteousness, bestowed on me that I might see his face.
God justified me, set me free, and glorified I soon will be. How marvelous this grace. What
have I now but to embrace the God who saved me from disgrace? and love him evermore. And with
contentment run my race, my eyes fixed ever on his face to praise
him and adore. Dear friends, saved people sing. Some of you will remember back
in the spring and into the summer, our study of the Psalms of Ascent. And one of the best ways to understand
those Psalms, 121, I think to 133, 120 might have been one of them,
I’ve forgotten already. But the common way to break up the whole
section of those psalms, but also each one individually, was
to understand trouble, the psalmist was in trouble, trust, the psalmist
trusts God, and then there’s deliverance. And in all the psalms
we see where there’s trouble and trust and deliverance, there’s
usually a phrase by King David or whoever the psalmist is, is,
God, I’m in trouble, I trust you, get me through this, and
next time I’m in church, I’m going to tell everybody. And
friends, that’s why we have these hymnals. That’s why one of the
great. blessings of being a pastor is
you get to pick hymns that will help people who are saved sing. And so saved people sing, saved
people sing loud, saved people tell of the deliverance of Almighty
God in the congregation. And isn’t it wonderful that God
in his mercy has given us the rhythms and the days and the
ordinances. He’s given us six days to work,
one day to rest. He’s given us the Sabbath day
to rest and to worship, and He has given us His ordinances so
that week by week by week, we who are forgetful will have opportunity
to give thanks to Almighty God for the wondrous works of redemption. That’s really what the church
is for. You know, you look at all these
churches in the world, they got the basketball clubs and the this
and the that and all these little side things, and they’re missing
the main point. Our job is to put the worship
of God in reach of God’s people. And we’re simply to provide a
service where if you are saved and you come, you’ll be able
to sing praise to God, the Redeemer for the work of redemption brought
forth in your life. We provide opportunities to give
praise to God. And Jesus says, we’re not 10
cleansed. Where are the other nine? We
can’t help but think, can we, of the decline in church attendance.
Before COVID, 7% a year. You do the math, seven times
seven times seven times seven, you’re going to get to zero very
quickly. And all these big houses of worship,
remember in the 60s and the 70s and 80s, we built big because
that’s American Christianity. And these days people are busy. I hear the excuses all the time.
The kids are in town. We’ll see you the week after.
And they’ll take their kids to their favorite restaurant on
Friday night. but they’ll fail to bring them to church to meet
their favorite redeemer. You see how our logic has gotten
all out of whack. Friends, saved people sang. Was no one found to return and
give praise to God except this foreigner. Let us pray together. Our God, we are mindful of how how sick we once were. Worse
than leprosy, our souls were sick. Our hearts were hearts
of stone. And we were like those in the
book of Romans. We did not acknowledge God, nor
did we give him thanks. Lord, may it never be said of
us who call on your name to be people of ingratitude, but help
us day by day to count our blessings, to name them one by one, and
to remember all of your given to us, most especially in the
person and the work of Jesus, our great Savior. Hear us and
help us as we come to your table and we come to these emblems
of your death and your work of redemption for us. We pray all
this in the name of Christ. Amen. We want to prepare for
the Lord’s table and we will stay seated and sing number 427
amidst us, our beloved stands.