2 Kings 5:1-15a; Romans 12:16-21; St Matthew 8:1-13
Reaffirmation of Faith Susan Smith
In the Name + of JESUS. Amen.
It all depends on the Lord’s will, on His being willing, on our Lord wanting to do it. If the Lord doesn’t want to do it, it won’t be done. If He wants to do it, it will be done. Lord, if you will, you are able to cleanse me. But is He willing? The leper believed that He was. How about you?
It all depends on the Lord speaking, on Him saying the Word, as the Psalmist says, By the Word of the Lord the heavens were made and by the breath of His mouth all their host (Ps 33:6). God said, Let there be . . . and there was. The Lord says it and it is so. Jesus didn’t have to go anywhere to heal the servant of the Roman centurion, He had only to say the word and it would be done. This is what the centurion believed. What do you believe?
It all depends on the Lord’s will and His Word. And as far as we are concerned, they are exactly the same. Can you know the will of the Lord apart from or without His Word? Can you know what God wants if He doesn’t tell you what He wants? Do you know what is on God’s mind? You cannot know unless He tells you. For who has known the mind of the Lord, St Paul asks. Or who has been His counselor? (Rm 11:34) The answer: No one. You can only know what God the Lord chooses to tell you, what He reveals to you. And the only Word we have from God is the Word that He gave to His prophets and apostles; the Word that they, by inspiration of His Spirit, recorded for us in Holy Scripture. This is the ground and norm of faith.
For faith trusts in God’s good and gracious will. Faith trusts in the power of His Word. The leper illustrates the first. The centurion illustrates the second. The leper was a man who was the lowest of the low. He was ceremonially unclean. He was helpless. He was segregated from society, from the Temple, from his family. The most familiar words to him were: “Keep away. Stay back.” He was required by Law to shout out, “Unclean! Unclean!” whenever he came near healthy people. There was no cure for him, only more pain, more misery, more loneliness and rejection.
But the man was not afraid to go to Jesus. He knew that Jesus would not reject him. How did he know this? He had heard the true word concerning Jesus. There is no other possible explanation for his bold approach. He had heard the Word about the Christ. And someone had to have told him. That’s how it works: Faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of Christ (Rm 10:17). You want your relatives, your children, your friends to know that Jesus loves them, died for them, forgives their sins? For them to trust His Word? Then tell them His Word. They can’t believe any other way.
The centurion, like the leper, was also an outsider. He was a Gentile, not a Jew. He came to Jesus to intercede for his servant, who was like a child to him - the Greek word pais can also mean son (Ac 4:30). It’s not that uncommon. Did you listen to how Naaman’s servants addressed him? My father, it is a great word the prophet has spoken to you. And this is the same reason for which the centurion goes to Jesus - on account of faith in His great and powerful Word to heal and save his paralyzed servant. And Jesus marveled at the man’s faith as being greater than any He has seen in all Israel.
Only a few times is this word - marvel - used in the New Testament. Usually the crowds are marveling at Jesus or His teaching. Only twice is Jesus marveling at man. When He went to His hometown of Nazareth and the synagogue took offense at Him, Jesus marveled because of their unbelief (Mk 6:6). Here He marvels at the great faith of the outsider, the Gentile. No doubt this is what people would want most to hear from the lips of their Savior, but so often their conceptions about a great faith, a strong, good, and true faith, are entirely false.
What does Jesus mean by a great faith? A great faith believes nothing great about itself. Lord, I am not worthy to have you come under my roof. The centurion believed that he was the most unworthy sinner; not unlike the tax collector praying in the Temple - Lord, be propitiated toward me, the sinner. But this man isn’t a tax collector; he’s an officer! He had served in the field of battle. He was brave, courageous, had served with honor. Others said of him, He is worthy to have You do this for him, for he loves out nation, and he is the one who built us our synagogue (Lk 7:4). But the centurion will not say it of himself. He will not boast in himself. He knows his weakness and what he lacks. He trusts in the gracious will of the Lord and in His powerful Word to heal and save.
And this, beloved, is the ground and foundation of our Christian faith. Faith is trust in the Word and promise of God to help and save us. A great faith, a faith at which Jesus marvels, is not one that has great faith in itself, but is a faith that believes great things about Christ Jesus and His Word. These two are inseparable - God’s Word and His will. If you have God’s Word you know His will.
Apart from God’s clear promises we are in darkness, left only to rely upon ourselves. We can pray for help. We can wish for help. We can imagine help will come. But without Him speaking to us and promising His help, our prayers are no more than wishes with no more solid foundation that our own imaginations. Simply put, it doesn’t matter what you want from God if He hasn’t promised to give it to you.
But this doesn’t stop the delusional machinations of fallen man. Our hearts are idol factories, constantly churning out false gods. In the beginning, God made man in His image. Ever since the Fall, man has been trying to return the favor. We create our own gods and then invent promises from them. We imagine that God’s will is identical to our own. What I want is what God wants and He will give me what I want. This is idolatry. From such false belief and wrong faith, repentance is needed.
Look at the faith of the leper. When he said, Lord, if You are willing, You are able to cleanse me, he was confessing that Jesus is God. He called Him kyrie, Lord. And when he said, If You are willing, he wasn’t questioning that Jesus was willing to show him mercy, but was appealing to God’s good and gracious will, which above all, is to have pity, to show mercy. He was confessing that Jesus was the God who could help him and acknowledging that he could not help himself in any way. The Lord does not help those who can help themselves. He helps and save those who are utterly and completely helpless.
Listen up faith healers! Listen to the leper and learn from him what true faith really is. Its right here in the text. The problem with today’s faith healers, to the WordFaith guys, is that they won’t be bound by the text of Scripture. If they, rather than St Matthew, were to have written this account it would go like this: “Jesus, if I am willing, you can make me clean.” And Jesus would say, “That’s right you poor, wretched man. I can’t do anything unless you will it. So, do you really want to be clean? Do you really believe? Have you really decided? Are you sufficiently yielded or devoted to Me so that I will be able to help you?”
Utter nonsense! Such teaching is from the devil. The source of faith is not your own will, but God’s. Let those who celebrate and bow down at the altar of man’s free will be silenced and give up their idol. It is not our will, but God’s. His willingness, not ours. Because our will, our wants, our desires can accomplish nothing at all. It is God’s will, what He wants, what He desires for us, that is everything.
And His will - what He wants for you - is revealed in His Word. It is given in His Word. His Word alone makes it happen. His Word bespeaks you righteous. His Word bestows life and light and peace. And remember this dear Christians, His Word and will cannot be separated. If we could only remember this, we would be spared of so many delusions and trouble.
Every so often I meet folks who think they can discover God’s will for them apart from His Word to them. They imagine that God’s tells them His will on matters where His written Word says nothing at all. You know such people. They pray a prayer and wait until they have a certain kind of feeling or sign or message that they think is from God. Then they act on the feeling, sign or message asserting that God has directed them, that God has revealed His will to them.
But if you were to ask such people, “How do you know this is what God wants you to do?,” they’ll say, “I prayed for guidance and God gave it.” If you persist and ask, “Where does the Bible, where does the Word of God, tell you that this is His will?,” they’ll reply that God can tell us all sorts of things that aren’t in the Bible. Ad if you question that, they’ll question your faith. “Don’t you believe that God guides and directs your life? Don’t you believe in the power of prayer?”
Yes, we do believe that God directs our lives and we certainly believe in the power of prayer. But God directs our lives by His will, not our own. This is why our Lord Christ has taught us to pray, Thy will be done. Or as Gerhardt has taught you to sing, “Leave all to His direction; His wisdom rules for you in ways to rouse your wonder at all His love can do. So He, His promise keeping, with wonder working powers will banish from your spirit what gave you troubled hours” (LSB 754:4). The power of prayer is not that it gains information about God’s will apart from His Word, but precisely the opposite. Prayer always flows from faith in Christ’s Word and promises. As Jesus says, If you remain in Me and My Word remains in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you (Jn 15:7).
Faith does not expect from God what He has not promised. Faith expects and trusts in what He has promised. There is a world of difference. It is the difference between playing god and trusting in God. It is the difference between trying to bend God’s will to conform to yours and submitting in faith to His will, trusting that it is good an gracious even as He is good and gracious toward you. When you pray, Thy will be done, you are praying against yourself, even as St Paul exhorts in today’s Epistle reading: live in harmony, do not be haughty, live peaceably with all, never avenge yourselves, feed your hungry enemy, overcome evil with good. These are commands from God in His Word. You can be certain they are His good and gracious will.
For true faith believes that God knows better than we do what we need. You can be sure of this: if God hasn’t promised something to you in the words of Holy Scripture, you don’t need it. If He has promised it to you, He will surely give it. Both the leper and the centurion prayed to Jesus. Both prayed in faith. That faith was expressed by appealing to His will and His Word.
And in healing these men, Jesus revealed His glory. Not the glory of God which is that unapproachable light that would destroy all who seek Him. But the glory of God the seek out to save those who suffer from their sin and its rotten fruit. His miracles reveal the power of His divine Word, but it is His suffering that reveals His goodwill toward us sinners. He can give you forgiveness of sins and eternal life. He is God. He wants to give you forgiveness of sins and eternal life. He bore your sin on the Cross. And He reveals to you this day His same glory.
He has not promised to remove every sickness from your bodies in this life. That is why we pray, “If it is Your will,” when we pray for our sick and shut-in. But He does promise forgiveness for every sin. So we don’t pray, “If it is Your will, forgive us our trespasses.” It is His will! And He does. He said you need forgiveness, so He sent His Son to die in your place and win it for you. He give you the forgiveness of all your sins through the very Word He speaks to you as He baptizes you, as He absolves you, as He gives you the Body and Blood of His Son Jesus Christ to eat and to drink. You are not worthy that He should come under the roof of your soul, but He speaks the Word and you are saved. These two are inseparable. This is His good and gracious will.
In the Name of the Father and + of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Reaffirmation of Faith Susan Smith
In the Name + of JESUS. Amen.
It all depends on the Lord’s will, on His being willing, on our Lord wanting to do it. If the Lord doesn’t want to do it, it won’t be done. If He wants to do it, it will be done. Lord, if you will, you are able to cleanse me. But is He willing? The leper believed that He was. How about you?
It all depends on the Lord speaking, on Him saying the Word, as the Psalmist says, By the Word of the Lord the heavens were made and by the breath of His mouth all their host (Ps 33:6). God said, Let there be . . . and there was. The Lord says it and it is so. Jesus didn’t have to go anywhere to heal the servant of the Roman centurion, He had only to say the word and it would be done. This is what the centurion believed. What do you believe?
It all depends on the Lord’s will and His Word. And as far as we are concerned, they are exactly the same. Can you know the will of the Lord apart from or without His Word? Can you know what God wants if He doesn’t tell you what He wants? Do you know what is on God’s mind? You cannot know unless He tells you. For who has known the mind of the Lord, St Paul asks. Or who has been His counselor? (Rm 11:34) The answer: No one. You can only know what God the Lord chooses to tell you, what He reveals to you. And the only Word we have from God is the Word that He gave to His prophets and apostles; the Word that they, by inspiration of His Spirit, recorded for us in Holy Scripture. This is the ground and norm of faith.
For faith trusts in God’s good and gracious will. Faith trusts in the power of His Word. The leper illustrates the first. The centurion illustrates the second. The leper was a man who was the lowest of the low. He was ceremonially unclean. He was helpless. He was segregated from society, from the Temple, from his family. The most familiar words to him were: “Keep away. Stay back.” He was required by Law to shout out, “Unclean! Unclean!” whenever he came near healthy people. There was no cure for him, only more pain, more misery, more loneliness and rejection.
But the man was not afraid to go to Jesus. He knew that Jesus would not reject him. How did he know this? He had heard the true word concerning Jesus. There is no other possible explanation for his bold approach. He had heard the Word about the Christ. And someone had to have told him. That’s how it works: Faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of Christ (Rm 10:17). You want your relatives, your children, your friends to know that Jesus loves them, died for them, forgives their sins? For them to trust His Word? Then tell them His Word. They can’t believe any other way.
The centurion, like the leper, was also an outsider. He was a Gentile, not a Jew. He came to Jesus to intercede for his servant, who was like a child to him - the Greek word pais can also mean son (Ac 4:30). It’s not that uncommon. Did you listen to how Naaman’s servants addressed him? My father, it is a great word the prophet has spoken to you. And this is the same reason for which the centurion goes to Jesus - on account of faith in His great and powerful Word to heal and save his paralyzed servant. And Jesus marveled at the man’s faith as being greater than any He has seen in all Israel.
Only a few times is this word - marvel - used in the New Testament. Usually the crowds are marveling at Jesus or His teaching. Only twice is Jesus marveling at man. When He went to His hometown of Nazareth and the synagogue took offense at Him, Jesus marveled because of their unbelief (Mk 6:6). Here He marvels at the great faith of the outsider, the Gentile. No doubt this is what people would want most to hear from the lips of their Savior, but so often their conceptions about a great faith, a strong, good, and true faith, are entirely false.
What does Jesus mean by a great faith? A great faith believes nothing great about itself. Lord, I am not worthy to have you come under my roof. The centurion believed that he was the most unworthy sinner; not unlike the tax collector praying in the Temple - Lord, be propitiated toward me, the sinner. But this man isn’t a tax collector; he’s an officer! He had served in the field of battle. He was brave, courageous, had served with honor. Others said of him, He is worthy to have You do this for him, for he loves out nation, and he is the one who built us our synagogue (Lk 7:4). But the centurion will not say it of himself. He will not boast in himself. He knows his weakness and what he lacks. He trusts in the gracious will of the Lord and in His powerful Word to heal and save.
And this, beloved, is the ground and foundation of our Christian faith. Faith is trust in the Word and promise of God to help and save us. A great faith, a faith at which Jesus marvels, is not one that has great faith in itself, but is a faith that believes great things about Christ Jesus and His Word. These two are inseparable - God’s Word and His will. If you have God’s Word you know His will.
Apart from God’s clear promises we are in darkness, left only to rely upon ourselves. We can pray for help. We can wish for help. We can imagine help will come. But without Him speaking to us and promising His help, our prayers are no more than wishes with no more solid foundation that our own imaginations. Simply put, it doesn’t matter what you want from God if He hasn’t promised to give it to you.
But this doesn’t stop the delusional machinations of fallen man. Our hearts are idol factories, constantly churning out false gods. In the beginning, God made man in His image. Ever since the Fall, man has been trying to return the favor. We create our own gods and then invent promises from them. We imagine that God’s will is identical to our own. What I want is what God wants and He will give me what I want. This is idolatry. From such false belief and wrong faith, repentance is needed.
Look at the faith of the leper. When he said, Lord, if You are willing, You are able to cleanse me, he was confessing that Jesus is God. He called Him kyrie, Lord. And when he said, If You are willing, he wasn’t questioning that Jesus was willing to show him mercy, but was appealing to God’s good and gracious will, which above all, is to have pity, to show mercy. He was confessing that Jesus was the God who could help him and acknowledging that he could not help himself in any way. The Lord does not help those who can help themselves. He helps and save those who are utterly and completely helpless.
Listen up faith healers! Listen to the leper and learn from him what true faith really is. Its right here in the text. The problem with today’s faith healers, to the WordFaith guys, is that they won’t be bound by the text of Scripture. If they, rather than St Matthew, were to have written this account it would go like this: “Jesus, if I am willing, you can make me clean.” And Jesus would say, “That’s right you poor, wretched man. I can’t do anything unless you will it. So, do you really want to be clean? Do you really believe? Have you really decided? Are you sufficiently yielded or devoted to Me so that I will be able to help you?”
Utter nonsense! Such teaching is from the devil. The source of faith is not your own will, but God’s. Let those who celebrate and bow down at the altar of man’s free will be silenced and give up their idol. It is not our will, but God’s. His willingness, not ours. Because our will, our wants, our desires can accomplish nothing at all. It is God’s will, what He wants, what He desires for us, that is everything.
And His will - what He wants for you - is revealed in His Word. It is given in His Word. His Word alone makes it happen. His Word bespeaks you righteous. His Word bestows life and light and peace. And remember this dear Christians, His Word and will cannot be separated. If we could only remember this, we would be spared of so many delusions and trouble.
Every so often I meet folks who think they can discover God’s will for them apart from His Word to them. They imagine that God’s tells them His will on matters where His written Word says nothing at all. You know such people. They pray a prayer and wait until they have a certain kind of feeling or sign or message that they think is from God. Then they act on the feeling, sign or message asserting that God has directed them, that God has revealed His will to them.
But if you were to ask such people, “How do you know this is what God wants you to do?,” they’ll say, “I prayed for guidance and God gave it.” If you persist and ask, “Where does the Bible, where does the Word of God, tell you that this is His will?,” they’ll reply that God can tell us all sorts of things that aren’t in the Bible. Ad if you question that, they’ll question your faith. “Don’t you believe that God guides and directs your life? Don’t you believe in the power of prayer?”
Yes, we do believe that God directs our lives and we certainly believe in the power of prayer. But God directs our lives by His will, not our own. This is why our Lord Christ has taught us to pray, Thy will be done. Or as Gerhardt has taught you to sing, “Leave all to His direction; His wisdom rules for you in ways to rouse your wonder at all His love can do. So He, His promise keeping, with wonder working powers will banish from your spirit what gave you troubled hours” (LSB 754:4). The power of prayer is not that it gains information about God’s will apart from His Word, but precisely the opposite. Prayer always flows from faith in Christ’s Word and promises. As Jesus says, If you remain in Me and My Word remains in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you (Jn 15:7).
Faith does not expect from God what He has not promised. Faith expects and trusts in what He has promised. There is a world of difference. It is the difference between playing god and trusting in God. It is the difference between trying to bend God’s will to conform to yours and submitting in faith to His will, trusting that it is good an gracious even as He is good and gracious toward you. When you pray, Thy will be done, you are praying against yourself, even as St Paul exhorts in today’s Epistle reading: live in harmony, do not be haughty, live peaceably with all, never avenge yourselves, feed your hungry enemy, overcome evil with good. These are commands from God in His Word. You can be certain they are His good and gracious will.
For true faith believes that God knows better than we do what we need. You can be sure of this: if God hasn’t promised something to you in the words of Holy Scripture, you don’t need it. If He has promised it to you, He will surely give it. Both the leper and the centurion prayed to Jesus. Both prayed in faith. That faith was expressed by appealing to His will and His Word.
And in healing these men, Jesus revealed His glory. Not the glory of God which is that unapproachable light that would destroy all who seek Him. But the glory of God the seek out to save those who suffer from their sin and its rotten fruit. His miracles reveal the power of His divine Word, but it is His suffering that reveals His goodwill toward us sinners. He can give you forgiveness of sins and eternal life. He is God. He wants to give you forgiveness of sins and eternal life. He bore your sin on the Cross. And He reveals to you this day His same glory.
He has not promised to remove every sickness from your bodies in this life. That is why we pray, “If it is Your will,” when we pray for our sick and shut-in. But He does promise forgiveness for every sin. So we don’t pray, “If it is Your will, forgive us our trespasses.” It is His will! And He does. He said you need forgiveness, so He sent His Son to die in your place and win it for you. He give you the forgiveness of all your sins through the very Word He speaks to you as He baptizes you, as He absolves you, as He gives you the Body and Blood of His Son Jesus Christ to eat and to drink. You are not worthy that He should come under the roof of your soul, but He speaks the Word and you are saved. These two are inseparable. This is His good and gracious will.
In the Name of the Father and + of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
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