Luke 5:12-26

When Jesus touched the desperate man with leprosy and cleansed him, it’s the same as our deep need for Jesus to help us, and cleanse us with a simple touch of his hand.

Luke five verses 12 to 26.
And the title of the message today is it’s time to get up and go, it’s time to get up and go.
Jesus in our teaching this morning is going to be touching two, very, very pathetic, very very weak men, men who have been ravaged by the difficulties of life and by disease and no doubt by sin as well as the Bible teaches that all of us have been ravaged by sin.
You know, you and I might be sitting here quite fine looking today.
But the fact of the matter is unless Jesus Christ takes control of our lives, sin, rules and reigns.
And we don’t like to admit that we would rather avoid going in that direction.
But the truth of the matter is if we’ll be honest, if we will really, really be true to ourselves, we would have to admit that even if we wanted to take the high moral ground on the issues of life, we still fail privately on our own.
That there is a life that comes against us that even as a Christian, we would argue with, I don’t want to be part of the old man.
I don’t want to be what I used to be and I’m happy to stand here before you this morning not being the same person.
I was some 30 years ago when I first came to Christ, I was a person that was given over to the things of this world.
I was young, 19, but I was living my life for my own pleasure and for what I wanted to do.
And I was, I was very good at what I did. The only problem is what I did was wrong.
And, uh, you might say, well, Jack, what was it? You got me curious.
Now, you’re not gonna know ever why?
Because you know what, I have a new life now in Christ. And I trust that you do too.
And what I love about what Jesus does and what about what Jesus says and the teachings of the Bible is that whenever, wherever Jesus did and said and went into a community, he never left it.
The same Jesus Christ changes the world around him and he does that by changing people.
And that’s a very encouraging word to us this morning that he changes the world by changing people.
And, uh, we need to keep that in mind.
We will go as far as we can this morning in our teaching.
Apparently based upon last service, we won’t get very far, but we’ll go as far as we can today.
Uh, it’s time to get up and to go. And we are in Luke chapter five, beginning at verse 12.
Follow along with me down to verse 26.
Luke tells us and it happened when he was in a certain city that behold a man who was full of leprosy saw Jesus and he fell on his face and implored him saying, Lord, if you are willing, you can make me clean, then he put out his hand to touch him, saying I am willing to be cleansed.
And immediately the leprosy left him and he charged him or challenged him, commanded that he tell no man but go and show yourself to the priest and make an offering for your cleansing as a testimony to them just as Moses commanded you.
However, the report went out around concerning uh Jesus and all the more the great multitudes came together to hear him and to be healed of him for their infirmities.
So he himself often withdrew into the wilderness and prayed.
And now it happened on a certain day as he was teaching that there were Pharisees and teachers of the law sitting by who had come out of every town of Galilee, Judea and Jerusalem and the power of the Lord was present to heal them.
Then behold men brought a man, a man on a bed who was paralyzed, whom they sought to bring him and lay before him.
And when they could not find how they might bring him in that is into Jesus because of the crowd, they went up on the house top and let him down with his bed through the tiling or the roof into the midst before Jesus.
And when Jesus saw their faith, he said to them, man, your sins are forgiven you.
And the scribes and the Pharisees began to reason saying who is this? Who speaks blasphemies?
Who could forgive sins but God alone.
But when Jesus perceived their thoughts, he answered and said to them, why are you reasoning in your hearts?
Which is easier to say your sins are forgiven you or to say, rise up and walk.
But that you may know that the son of man has power on earth to forgive sins.
And he said to the man who was paralyzed, I say to you arise, take up your bed and go to your house and immediately he rose up before them, took up what he had been laying on and departed to his own house glorifying God.
And they were all amazed and they glorified God and were filled with fear or awe reverence.
And this is what they said. We’ve seen strange things today.
I bet I would love to have been there.
It’s time to get up and go and that’s obviously a challenge to our hearts as believers.
We’re going to be coming to the end of the service and God’s going to speak to us and he’s going to say, get up and go now.
But for these two people and maybe not only you this morning, maybe you have needs this morning, physical needs, maybe you have great spiritual needs.
Maybe you don’t know Christ personally and your life and, and others around you perhaps can be told as it were this man who’s either crippled or the leper who’s cleansed.
But regardless concerned in the Bible, you and I do ourselves a great injustice.
If we do not approach the Bible with it open and believing that God’s gonna speak to us out of it, we must come to God’s word like this.
Lord speak to me and Lord, I have your Bible open.
So instruct me in the way that I should go. We’re gonna look at our first point this morning.
You can jot it down in your note, taking it’s time to get up and go and that’s found in verses 12 to 16.
And that is the Lord has his appointments.
God has appointments that he keeps the Lord has appointments that he keeps.
I’m gonna ask you to have your highlighter and your pin ready.
Uh So that you might see this more clearly. Why is this the case?
Why is it that God keeps His appointments and that he even has them?
Well, because listen, there’s a man in need of cleansing.
Look with me in verse 12, there’s a man in need of cleansing, not healing, not healing, cleansing.
There’s a big difference verse 12.
And it happened when he was, Jesus was in a certain city that behold, a man was full of leprosy that he saw Jesus and he fell down on Jesus at his face and implored him that his baked Christ saying, Lord, if you are willing, you can make me clean.
What I want you to look at right now.
Church is grab your pen and your pencil and look at the two words that I point know it is the word happened and it is the word certain that it happened, not an accident and that there was a certain city that is not an accident as well.
Keep this very thing in mind. God had an appointment to keep and it means this regarding this leper.
When you look at the word happened, it speaks to us that it sounds like to you and I that it’s an event that has befallen the man or the reader.
It’s not. So the word means that God had a plan that what God was doing was specifically predetermined by his own counsel.
So when you look at the word that it happened, God’s working and then look at the word city, it says not just the city, it says what church, a certain city that means that the Lord is at work.
So what he’s doing here is that there’s a plan that God wants to implement and it looks like an accident to the casual reader to the one that’s passing by.
It’s not an accident at all.
When the Bible tells us that there’s this man that God has in store for us to look at.
We need to understand the reason why.
And here it is, look at verse 12, it says that behold, a man man who was full of leprosy saw Jesus and he fell on his face and imploring that is begging Jesus when the Bible says and not this.
This is Dr Luke speaking. Remember Luke’s occupation was a doctor.
And we know this because he not only uh used terms of medicine, but we know from church history that Luke was a physician that was later Paul’s assistant when he uses the word full of leprosy.
No other author in the Bible uses this word that Luke does when it says full of leprosy.
This guy is completely covered with leprosy.
It is believed by the way that when you are so captured by leprosy that your skin is so white, you know, your skin turns white that when it fully consumes you, by the way.
Uh And there are certain leprosy that are contagious.
Most are not that when you are completely white, you are considered or viewed as being so consumed that you’re no longer contagious.
That’s neither here nor there. Keep this in mind.
This guy is a leper and the Bible tells us he’s very bad off.
He’s full of leprosy and that that disease that’s within has made its way out. And this is quite graphic.
Uh, when someone had leprosy, it would attack, by the way, their outer extremities first, though, it’s an inward disorder.
It attacked their fingers first, it attacked their toes, it attacked their ears, their nose extremities first.
And this is a very sad picture because it’s very slow growing. Leprosy is something that advances very, very slowly.
And so as this leprosy is advancing in the body, here’s the tragedy that it brings upon someone, it begins to deaden the nerve system and it begins to work, as I said, from the extremities inward, racing toward the heart and to the brain.
And when it does what it does, it creates an irreversible deadening, a numbing of the body nerve damage and it’s a very nasty thing.
Dr Paul Brand MD, very famous researcher on leprosy or Hansen’s disease.
He said it was because of this numbing that no pain could be felt in the hands of the leper and he would accidentally burn himself or cut his feet on sharp rocks without knowing infection would set in.
And this too, with the victim being unaware of any injury.
These self inflicted injuries were the major contributor to the leper’s gross disfigurement over time.
Josephus goes on to tell us in several areas that a that a Leper because his hands were numb his hands, he would reach into a fire to move the coals over or the wood over and he wouldn’t even realize he’s burning his hands.
He can’t feel it tragically gross.
But true, many leopards would wrap their hands and their feet up because of the swelling. For one thing.
The deadening. Yes. But at night when they would sleep, if they didn’t wrap themselves up, rats would come and consume their fingertips and their toes many times.
Lepers had their ears eaten off by rats. They never knew it.
They would wake up in the morning and it was so dead.
There would be just even a little bit of blood.
Many lepers died of gang green blood poisoning because of this terrible life that they lived. This man is full.
Luke says of leprosy. Now, listen, I want you to hear this and I won’t spend much time on it.
It is throughout scripture viewed by people.
We understand this from history and from suggestion that leprosy is a type. It’s a symbol.
It is a uh outward display of what sin does to somebody’s life.
I think for you Bible scholars, I don’t need to tell you that.
Um But even in the Bible, it talks to us about being cleansed, not healed.
You, you need to be you and I need to be healed of sicknesses and diseases.
Leprosy is never, you’re, you’re never healed from leprosy, you’re cleansed from it. You’re never healed of sin, right?
You can’t be healed from sin. You have to be what cleansed from sin.
He cleanses us with the washing of the water of his word.
The Bible also says that Jesus Christ cleanses us by his own blood.
Now, there’s a beautiful story that will come together soon as we go through this, but leprosy, they viewed it as a type of sin.
And that’s mean because you don’t get leprosy because of sin.
In fact, frankly, there’s a lot of that stuff going around today that if you’re a Christian and you’re sick, there must be sin in your life.
Explain that to Paul, the apostle who is sick, often explain that to job who was probably the most righteous man of his day and he was very sick.
Don’t let anyone ever tell you from this parasitical mind or viewpoint that if you are sick as a Christian and you’re suffering, you must have sin in your life.
That is a wrong thing to conclude.
Sometimes I believe God will allow a Godly believer to be sick, to test the hearts of the rest of his people as to how they might minister and receive that brother or that sister who is ill.
I think that more often than I think the other because God’s grace is able to work and able to get our attention and also to test our hearts about loving one another.
One thing I want you to see here that the scripture tells us that it says that behold the man, look with me there in the middle of verse 12.
And it happened when he was in a certain city that behold a man, can you, can you mark that in your Bible?
That behold a man? You know what this means?
Uh Technically in the Greek, it means one of two things are both number one, that his condition was extreme and that he was near the point of death.
Behold the man like remember when they said to Jesus on the cross, remember when he was there or when, excuse me, when he was beaten and Pilate came out and said, behold, the man.
Look, he’s near death. Shocking this word. Behold, the man could mean that he’s near death. Remember?
Luke says he’s full of leprosy which no doubt would mean that he’s near death. That’s true.
But number two, it could mean this, that he appeared suddenly. He surprised people, he shocked them.
Now, this almost sounds funny if the story wasn’t so tragic because by law, he’s not to be in the presence of anybody.
He’s a leper. Those of you who know your Bible, you know what he’s supposed to call out.
If he’s walking near someone, what’s he supposed to say?
Unclean three times, unclean, unclean, unclean, he would wrap himself up and boy, let me tell you you wanted the crowd to be cleared, just walk behind a leper.
Unclean. Boom. People moved out of the way, man couldn’t get near him.
He shouts three times as was required. Unclean, unclean, unclean everybody parted.
Can you imagine the callousness of heart that would create even regarding the callousness of heart that’s in the physical sense going on.
But the, the emotional side, no one was allowed to touch him.
Some lepers lived up to 40 years before they died. Nobody was allowed to embrace them.
Nobody was allowed to touch their hand or to help them.
No help isolated from life though you could see the world in front of you.
You could not dwell in it. You could not be part of it.
You were ostracized, you were cut out and in Judaism, you were excommunicated from the fellowship.
You couldn’t go to synagogue. You were banned.
The life of the leper was a tragic, horrible life that allowed you no comfort.
Josephus writes the Leper. And I quote, as if he were already dead was avoided as much as any corpse.
His burial was all that remained to finish the job.
But a tragic life, a leopard would be like a dead man walking. He’s breathing, he’s moving.
He’s got some sort of life in him. But as he goes, everything around him is cursed.
Everything around him is condemned. Everything around him is unclean and nobody wants to be near him.
He’s like a dead man walking.
And the Bible says that Ephesians chapter two verses one and two that you and I, if we’ve come to trust in Christ, you and I, he’s made us alive.
The word is he’s brought us back from the dead.
Christ has who were once dead on their trespasses and sins in which we once walked according to the course of this world, you and I, before Jesus came into our lives, we lived for ourselves and look, we may have looked good.
We were certainly younger than we are today and we might have felt better physically.
But the truth of the matter was we were like dead men walking to God. We looked pretty good.
But God said you’re dead and you’re dying and that’s how we are without Christ.
You might say, well, Jack, come on, I’ve got Christ. But are you alive?
What’s the proof that you have Christ?
That you name his name or that you walk in the power of his life?
You can name his name all you want. But are you truly a man living?
Does the very heartbeat of God possess you? Are you excited about the things of God?
Is that’s why is that the reason why you’re living that you live for God and that your job and your career and everything else is just simply a tool that he can use to glorify his name?
Don’t you think for a moment that if you and I were this poor leper man back then he’s got nothing.
Jesus is his only hope. He’s got nothing else left. This is his last chance.
Desperation. Is not always a bad thing.
Sometimes we’re desperate and it brings us right into the right spot.
You don’t need to jot it down or you can, if you want uh Mark’s gospel records, this event with a little bit more of intensity and accuracy because in Mark chapter one verses 40 to 42 there, the Bible tells us that the man came crying out and the word in the Greek is that he came imploring, asking, asking, asking how many listen church.
How many times did he have to declare that he was unclean?
How many times does Mark suggest he cried out three times an answer for every unclean, unclean, unclean and clean.
You can cleanse me, Jesus, you can cleanse me, Jesus, you can cleanse me, Jesus desperate.
It’s a good thing to be desperate.
It’s exactly what Jesus spoke about in Matthew chapter five verse three about being desperate.
Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs. Is the kingdom of Heaven.
Why did he put those two wonderful truths together? The poor in spirit receiving the kingdom of heaven.
The kingdom of Heaven is salvation, eternal life. Who gets it? The poor in spirit?
Who are the poor in spirit?
Those who see themselves, unable to save themselves, those who see themselves in great desperation. That’s who God saves.
I know you don’t want to hear this. I don’t want to hear it.
But when I’ve come to the end of my rope and I throw myself down and there’s no direction to go to.
And I say, God help me. He says, hi Jack. How are you, buddy?
Good to hear from you. Now, what do you need when I’m self sufficient?
God lets me go on my own.
But when we consider the leprosy of our soul sin, none of us can save ourselves.
We need him and we need his touch, but nobody touches a leper.
Well, that’s going to change in a moment.
The second thing we see here under this point in verse 13 is the Lord has an appointment to keep.
And that’s because the Lord desires to help. Why does he keep his appointments?
Why does he do that with us because he desires to help us?
Verse 13 says, then Jesus put out his hand and touched him. You guys, you don’t do this.
Jesus is a Jewish rabbi. He’s forbidden to touch a leper. You think Jesus cares about that?
You know what I love about God.
He, he gives the law to show us our need for saving the law, can’t save you.
And I, that’s what the book of Romans is all about. That’s what the book of Galatians is all about.
We cannot save ourselves. And the law as Paul said in the book of Galatians, he says, the law is our school master.
The word in Greek is a powerful word. The law is our, is our pedagogy.
It means the law shows up, opens the 10 commandments and says here they are and we look at them, oh, I’ll take four and 31.
and seven. Oops, the loss is these are the 10 commandments. Keep them live.
But excuse me, I just told you that I, I messed up on two and seven.
The law has no ears. The law has no feelings. The law has no emotion.
The law is stone. It’s as hard and cold as stone and it displays God’s perfect righteousness.
The law Christ comes in and to every person who says, I can’t do it.
God, I can’t live up to the commandments.
And then that church I go to, they’ve got no, there’s not only 10 commandments which are holy and great and wonderful, but I can’t keep them.
But on top of it, the church I go to strapped on 300 more rules that I can’t keep.
What am I going to do in heaven when it’s left into the hands of legalist gets further and further away until man has no hope.
God doesn’t care for the law in that light, in that respect. Is it holy? Yes.
Is it pure? Yes. But when it comes to human suffering and salvation, well, Jesus walks through the fields for example and breaks off heads of wheat on Sabbath day and gives it to his disciples who are hungry.
So did David regarding the show bread, you see you understand that, don’t say for a moment will.
Pastor I’m doing pretty good with God because it just came off a big prayer thing or a big fast deal.
Or I just put a zillion dollars in the bucket and I’m doing good.
It’s father, son, holy spirit and me and we’re here. Listen, you’re messed up. You’re in trouble.
Pastor and bible teacher Jack Hibbs here on real life radio with his message called It’s Time to Get up and go.
Part one. We’re glad you joined us today. You know, this message, it’s time to get up and go.
Part one is part of Pastor Jack’s new series called the Gospel of Luke.
It’s a series on the book of Luke and the unveiling of Jesus Christ to this world.
And we’ll continue on the next edition of Real Life Radio.
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