Is Sin Contagious?

This sermon can be watched or listened to at www.templebaptistchurch.ca.

This sermon might be one of those church-emptying ones. It is kind of getting crowded in our auditorium so I am going to pray and if anybody wants to leave, you can make your escape with all of our heads bowed and eyes closed. Actually, you wouldn’t mind if I left as well because this sermon has been convicting to me too as I had to live it these past couple of weeks. PRAY!

Are you contagious? I am not trying to freak out the hypochondriacs in the audience, but there is a lot of sickness going around. Nowadays, we have those alcohol-based hand-sanitizing dispensers that try to curtail the spread of germs, yet we can’t eliminate all “bugs.” I think we make great efforts to avoid these little nasties we can’t see that make life miserable and try to kill us. However, I am less concerned about bacteria and viruses in my body and more concerned about the real nasty that makes life miserable and that will kill my soul. These nasties can be summed up in one word: sin. Here is why I am so concerned about sin in my life and yours. Sin is less out there and more in here – inside. In other words, sin is cancerous before it is contagious! That is unnerving. It is shocking because many of us have understood sin as a place or a person to avoid when it is a parasite living inside us. It was like what happened to me a few weeks ago. When I went out to our van in the morning in order to leave for work, I noticed that the van door was open. I looked inside and somebody had rummaged through the van and taken all the loose change they could find. It must have been a kid because our GPS was left behind or as my discipleship group reminded me yesterday, maybe our GPS wasn’t worth stealing. Now whose fault was it for the theft? The thief is responsible but mostly the problem was my family and I. We left the door open, it was like a welcome sign! We let the robber inside!  My friends, this is exactly what happened to us and our human family. Our first parents, Adam and Eve when they sinned, let the Robber, Satan, inside. They left the door open for him to come and “steal, kill and destroy” (John 10:10) when they broke God’s commandment not to eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Yes, sin is contagious and infects other people. What you and I do ALWAYS has a ripple effect! But you will never deal with sin unless you look in the mirror and not just out the window. Let’s get to the diagnosis so we can find the treatment for sin. In order to find the diagnosis and treatment for sin, we need to look to Jesus. Jesus clearly explains the diagnosis in Mark 7:14-23. Read Mark 7:14-23!

In the context, Jesus had just been confronted by some religious people and leaders who were very concerned that He wasn’t making His disciples use the alcohol dispensers on their hands before entering the worship sanctuary. They weren’t working hard enough with elbow grease to get rid of what was polluting their society. Jesus called these religious rule-keepers hypocrites and quoted them Scripture. By the way, it is always a good strategy to use God’s law to deal with the religious rule-keepers. Only God’s Word will convict the religious and soften their hard hearts. Jesus has done this on many occasions with the hypocrite standing before you today. The Scripture Jesus quoted to the religious leaders was from Isaiah, “This people honours me with their lips, but their heart is far away from me. But in vain do they worship Me, teaching as doctrines the precepts of men.” (Mark 7:6-7) In other words, Jesus was saying that these religious people’s love and worship for God was only “tongue deep” as someone has said.  Why was their love only “tongue deep”? As Jesus explained in our memory verse last week, “Neglecting the commandment of God, you hold to the tradition of men.” (Mark 7:8) They literally “let go” of the commandment of God, which could be summed up as loving God and loving others, and instead tried to protect God with their rules and traditions. “The Jews called tradition ‘the fence of the law.’ It was not the Law that protected the tradition, but the tradition that protected the Law,”[1] like a moat does a castle. However, does God and His Word need protecting with our rules? He is big enough to take care of Himself, so why do we try to help Him out with our rules? I think it is because the same fence we erect to try and protect God also is an attempt to protect us from God. A wall keeps people out but also in. We find ourselves trapped. In our self-effort to become holy we have become less holy. You see a wall doesn’t work when the criminal is already inside. We wanted to be like God and found ourselves further from Him. Remember, in the Garden of Eden after Adam and Eve sinned they became aware of their nakedness and were ashamed and hid. They had nowhere to run. We can’t ever outrun God. So when cornered, we try to blame others or things. Think about how we try to avoid food, or that computer, or that TV screen or that person, thinking then we will be okay. However, I taught you a few weeks ago, when we ate the forbidden fruit, sin came into us. It infected every part of us. It became a part of us, as food always does after digestion. This is why Jesus teaches the crowd, “There is nothing outside the man which can defile him, if it goes into him, but the things which proceed out of the man are what defile the man.” (Mark 7:14) I needed to give you the background going all the way to Genesis and the Fall of our first parents, so that this makes sense. Our problem is that we think human nature is basically good. But then bombings during marathons show otherwise. As Tim Keller says, “According to Jesus, in our natural state we’re unfit for the presence of God.”[2] This is because we fall short of the glory of God, which is absolute perfection. (Romans 3:23) We may do good often enough to make ourselves feel good, but we certainly don’t do good all the time.

Let me take a time-out for a second. Some of you might be thinking, but what about drugs, alcohol, pornography or even unhealthy food? They all go into our bodies and defile us. In order to combat this defilement, people detox or go through a “cleansing.” Aren’t there bad things out there that we need to avoid? Of course, but you wouldn’t put bad things in your body, if your heart didn’t crave what is bad for you. I heard some of the young people in our church at our Drop-in on Wednesdays talking about a cleansing of their bodies through a special diet. Meanwhile, they were cooking French Fries. Do think I wanted the fries or the special diet? I am coming to the realization by hanging around people who eat healthy that I love dessert so much not just because it tastes good, but also because it is my comfort food. You know what the Bible calls comfort food – an idol! An idol is anything that replaces God. We make idols in attempt to gain control but they end up controlling us and cause others to stumble, especially those we influence. If I go to food for comfort rather than God, I need to say that it is an idol in my life. I see how it affects my kids who love sugar. They always need a bedtime snack and crave the sugary cereals. But then we take a trip to the dentist and the bill last month came to around $2000 with all the repairs for cavities.

The Apostle Paul made it clear in 1 Corinthians 6:13, “Food is for the stomach and the stomach is for food, but God will do away with both of them. Yet the body is not meant for immorality, but for the Lord, and the Lord is for the body” and then in Romans 14:20, “Do not tear down the work of God for the sake of food.” Food is to sustain life but it may bring death if we rely on it or use it to love ourselves and not others. As one of the early Christians Origen once said, “We are made unclean by what comes out of our lips, not by what goes into our mouth.”[3] But I don’t want to just pick on food. Food is just one of many idols. Our idols are often moored to our desires. There is the desire to control, the desire for approval, the desire for security, the desire of amassing things. As John Calvin writes, “Our heart is a perpetual idol-making factory.”[4] Or as the prophet Jeremiah declares, “The heart is more deceitful than all else and is desperately sick; who can understand it?” (Jeremiah 17:9) “Jesus reveals what a cesspool the human heart is.”[5] And if “’heart’ is the term most commonly used in biblical literature for the essential personality,”[6] this means everybody has personality issues … not just those weird people. Everybody is sick at some level. It is not only the people on the prayer list who need healing but all of us. Sin is cancerous before it is contagious. We have cancer of the soul and it metastasizes in our behaviours!

This is why avoiding evil is next to impossible unless the evil in us has been dealt with. We work so hard to create safe environments for our families to protect them from the evil out there when we really should be praying, “Lord, protect them from themselves and the evil within!” Lord David Cecil declared after the Holocaust, “Barbarism is not behind us, it is within us.” Jesus describes this barbarism as “evil thoughts, fornications (includes “all forms of sexual immorality”[7]), thefts, murderers, adulteries, deeds of coveting and wickedness, as well as deceit, sensuality, envy (lit. “The evil eye”), slander, pride and foolishness.” G. Campbell Morgan says, “Some of these sins are in good standing in the church.” Some of them are apparent and some are non-detectable. Some of these are the biggies and others we tend to gloss over as not so bad. We all agree theft is wrong but what if by slandering someone you stole their reputation. Having an evil eye towards somebody through envy means you can’t lovingly look at them. We may say that we never murdered anybody but if you have an evil thought and are “angry with your brother” as Jesus teaches in Matthew 5:22, then you are “guilty before the court” – God’s courtroom. You know this to be true. None of us stands perfect before God. It isn’t externals that will save us, but the Eternal Saviour and His internal work in us.

But we still try! Our own disciplines and traditions won’t save us. In fact, they might end up entrapping us. As David Garland explains, “One can compare tradition to the shell of the blue crab. To live and grow it must shed its shell from time to time. Until it creates a new shell, the crab is extremely vulnerable. But if the shell becomes so strong and rigid that the crab cannot escape, that is the shell in which it dies. Losing traditions that make one feel safe and comfortable can cause great anxiety. But hanging on to traditions so that one becomes ‘hard-shelled’ is fatal.”[8] This is the diagnosis. Sin is terminal. Proverbs 14:12 declares, “There is a way which seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death.”

So if the diagnosis is that sin is fatal then what is the solution? We know “outside in doesn’t work.”[9] Religion and purity will not make us perfect. So that eliminates Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism and every other “ism.” We need an inside out solution. So what inside out solutions are there? Some try spirit guides. Beloved, spirit guides are evil spirits “masquerading as light.” (2 Corinthians 11:14)  They can never save you. Don’t invite them in. Another common inside out solution is through psychology and trying to figure out who you are from your past. In other words, “Know yourself!” However, the Bible warns “not to think more highly of ourselves than we ought.” (Romans 12:3) I have taken graduate level courses where I had to assess myself and taken many psychological tests. I found that more I studied myself and focused on knowing who I was, I would get depressed for two reasons. The first reason is that knowing yourself fully is impossible. We have blinders. Too much self-study is depressing, whereas being in community lifts the fog. One of the ways to stop depression is to stop thinking about yourself and serve somebody else. Besides, we need others to help us reveal who we are. The second reason is that when I looked in the mirror, I didn’t like all that I saw. As we already learned from Jesus, “All these evil things proceed from within and defile the man.” (Mark 7:23)

None of these solutions heal the cancer of the soul. However, what if we went for treatment from our designer – the One who knows every last part of us? Jesus understands our problem exactly. But in order for us to have an inside-out solution, it would mean that He would have to be one of us without being defiled inside or outside. And this is exactly what happened. Jesus came to earth and lived a perfect life. Jesus was the only human ever to life soul-cancer-free. Sin radicals never entered His soul. He always loved purely.

Some might be saying, “Okay Jon, Jesus was never sick with sin but how does that help me in my soul-sickness.” What if the One who knew no sin, became sin for us? He became sin on our behalf so that we might become the righteousness of God. (2 Corinthians 5:21) That sounds good! But what about the stuff inside? Well, after Jesus died and rose again, He promised that He would leave His Holy Spirit who would come inside us and clean us up from the inside out. Listen to Titus 3:5-6, “He (God) saved us, not on the basis of deeds which we have done in righteousness, but according to His mercy, by the washing of regeneration and renewing by the Holy Spirit, whom He poured out upon us richly through Jesus Christ our Savior.”

Do you have the only inside-out solution? Do you know Jesus? He is the only one who will change you from the inside out! But Jesus just doesn’t want to change you; He wants to change the world. Did you catch the parenthetical note that Mark makes in verse 19, “Thus He declared all foods clean”? This declaration was later fully realized after Jesus died and rose from the grave and ascended into heaven. It came true after Pentecost when the Holy Spirit birthed the Church. The Apostle Peter in Acts 10 received a vision with all the sorts of animals on a great sheet from heaven, both clean and unclean animals, both holy cows and dirty pigs and Peter was told “Get up, Peter, kill and eat.” (Acts 10:13 – which is one of the verses we hunters use to justify harvesting animals.) When Peter was told to kill and eat the animals, he argued, but a voice said, “What God has cleansed, no longer consider unholy.” (Acts 10:15) The purpose in Peter receiving this vision was not so he could finally have some bacon. It was for extending Christ’s kingdom and mission to the Gentiles. Peter was to go and proclaim the Good News to Cornelius, a God-fearing Gentile and Roman Centurion. Cornelius and his household then trusted in Christ and were saved. The inside-out work of God done at the Cross and then through the Holy Spirit was not just for you but for you to carry on His mission. In other words, our freedom that was won at the Cross to no longer be a rule-driven person is not just for ourselves to avoid sin but to win freedom for others with soul cancer. Our freedom should not lead to legalism or license, but light-bearing. The call to come out and be separate is to be salt and light. We live different to make a difference in others’ lives. You and I are not to be in partnership with the world but get close enough to infect it with good.

How? We let Jesus change us from the inside out. This can be painful as Jesus kills the evil desires inside us and replaces it with His own. Spiritual chemotherapy will mean that the idol that you have tried to find comfort in will need to be eliminated. You will be restricted but in a good way. Jesus will place loving limits on you. Tim Keller in his book The Reason for God states, “In many areas of life, freedom is not so much the absence of restrictions as finding the right ones, the liberating restrictions.”[10] Think about that, you who are married limited your love to one person and have experienced a greater love. You who have limited your time to focus on practicing have learned to play an instrument or become a better athlete. Jesus now has given you freedom so that you can properly channel your restrictions for good, not bad.

Do we see how we are reaping the benefits of Jesus’ declaration that all foods are now considered clean doesn’t mean you should eat all the chocolate cake you want but it means that you are free to live out of the Gospel? Jesus’ plan of saving us was revealed in this passage. By declaring that outside things aren’t the problem, these 12 Jewish disciples were able to be saved and bring salvation to the world, including you and me. Bad News turns to Good News. Soul cancer is cured and replaced with the contagious life-saving message of Jesus Christ. Is sin contagious? Yes, but the Gospel is more contagious. Will you be contagious with good? The inside-out solution is to bring those outside of Christ inside.

Who Are You Bringing to Jesus?

This sermon can be watched or listened to at www.templebaptistchurch.ca!

Has Jesus ever changed your direction? Have you ever been heading toward a place, a goal, or a promotion and Jesus makes you do a hard right or hard left? Have you found yourself in a different place than you planned? Some of the folks in Boston this past week have experienced a radical change of direction in their lives due to the Boston Marathon bombing. Some of you might be saying that right now, I also am experiencing a new direction. If you had told me that I was going to be here at Temple Baptist Church a year ago, I would have thought you were crazy. But you’re here today! Hey, you know what. I thought that too! If you would have told me 18 months ago that I was going to be one of the pastors at Temple Baptist Church in Cambridge, I would have thought you were crazy. I was happy at the church I was serving. But Jesus does that! You may have been heading in one direction, Jesus shows up and now you are going with Him to a totally different place than you expected. This is what happened to the disciples in Mark 6:53-56! Let’s read about and discover how God’s hard rights or hard lefts, those 90 degree turns bring us to places where Jesus wants you to join Him in the movement of people coming to salvation. Read Mark 6:53-56!

In order for us to understand a little bit better what I meant when I said that Jesus caused the disciples to head in a different direction, I have a map to show us where the disciples were. Mark 6:45 describes that Jesus sent the disciples in the direction of Bethsaida. You can see it up on the map. Bethsaida was a small desolate place that meant “House of Fishing.” This would have been like going to the fishing cabin. However, I wonder if Jesus was trying to get the disciples’ attention once again by sending them to the House of Fishing. We must be careful not to read too much into the text, but I find it interesting that Jesus miraculously feeds the 5000 with 5 loaves of bread and two fishes and Jesus tells them to go to the house of fishing. Could have this been a reminder that they were to be “fishers of men”? (Luke 5:10)

I think there is something to this, because after Jesus appears walking on the water, we find that Jesus immediately puts the boat on overdrive and the disciples find themselves in Gennesaret – a place where there were lots of people (v. 53). In other words, “After reaching the middle of the sea in an easterly direction, the disciples headed back west and arrive with Jesus at Gennesaret.”[1] Why did Jesus not continue crossing the sea in the original direction? Why go west young men? Some interpret this symbolically and considered the trip on the lake as “an aborted voyage to Bethsaida; a failure of Jewish disciples to carry out a mission to the Gentiles.”[2] Now that is reading way too much into the text. Instead, the lesson is simply this: when hardened hearts have an encounter with Jesus the result is usually a direction change (v. 52). Has Christ softened your heart and turned you around? Have you gained a new understanding of Him and He has pointed you in a different direction than you were going?

We must use the Bible to interpret the Bible to find this truth. The disciples gained a deeper understanding of who Jesus was as we discover in Matthew 14:32-33, “When Jesus and Peter got into the boat, the wind stopped and those who were in the boat worshiped Him, saying, “You certainly are God’s Son!” The disciples’ mistaken identity of Jesus turned into praise and proclamation that He was God’s Son. Yahweh had shown up.

And when Yahweh shows up, it has a ripple effect! When you come to a deeper understanding of Jesus and what He can do for you, He often takes you to a place to minister to others. John 6:21 alludes to this truth, “So they were willing to receive Him into the boat, and immediately the boat was at the land to which they were going.” Receiving Jesus means you are no longer striving for your own rescue and salvation. Receiving Jesus brings you from danger to safety! Receiving Jesus carries you to where He wants you to go. Receiving Jesus carries you to a place where you can witness God’s work. Receiving Jesus refocuses and repurposes you to fishing for men with Jesus’ new message. And receiving Jesus means that He will take you through a journey of former places of serenity which have become new places of terror to finally seeing who He is. Remember the disciples would have felt safe on the lake they grew up on and then a storm came and threatened their lives. The sea of calm became the sea of calamity. But then Jesus shows up. I believe that this is what Bostonians could be experiencing. Their famous marathon run on Patriot’s Day was a symbol of celebration and it became a place of terror. Now if the people will turn to Jesus, He can calm their inner storms.

Please know Jesus is working miracles all around you. If you have eyes to see, you could experience a “miracle mania.”[3] I feel Jesus has done this in my life. It has only been in the last couple of years that I have understood the Gospel and how Jesus is carrying me every second of life. I don’t have to struggle and strive to live life on my own in my strength anymore. Jesus has become my life. Galatians 2:20, “For I have been crucified with Christ and it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me; the life which I now live, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself up for me.” I used to pray Jesus help me to do this or help me to do that. Now, I pray, “Jesus just live your life fully through me!” And the help automatically comes. But it is more than help! Jesus starts to do miracles all around you. I am not saying life becomes easy or you don’t get tired, but Jesus starts to make a difference in ways that will blow you away. I see these miracles all around me at Temple Baptist Church. People who have been diagnosed with cancer have had their lives prolonged. People are getting saved and baptized. There are more commitments to the church. We are sending out missionaries across the globe. The next generation is showing up and even asking to receive training. God is entrusting us with His people! All of this is happening just because Jesus has shown up with a fresh start and called us to a powerful new way. We haven’t even launched any major outreach campaigns or shepherded the community yet, like I hope we will. In fact, I feel like I have played more defense than offense but Jesus is winning people. It is awesome! He gets all the credit!

I hope this encourages you! If not, then I need to lovingly ask you, are you recognizing Jesus? The people at Gennesaret did! Mark 6:54 records that “when they had come out of the boat, immediately the people recognized Him.” Contrast this to a few hours earlier in Mark 6:49 when the disciples thought He was a ghost. How could the disciples who hung around Jesus all the time, mistake Him for a ghost while the crowd, of whom many had never even seen Jesus, knew who He was immediately? I believe it was because the people were hungry for more of what Jesus was providing. Feeding 5000 people with only 5 loaves and 2 fish would cause word to spread rapidly that a miracle-worker was in their midst. We know from John 6:22-25 that even the ones who had been fed wanted more: “The next day the crowd that stood on the other side of the sea saw that there was no other small boat there, except one, and that Jesus had not entered with His disciples into the boat, but that His disciples had gone away alone. There came other small boats from Tiberias near to the place where they ate the bread after the Lord had given thanks. So when the crowd saw that Jesus was not there, nor His disciples, they themselves got into the small boats and came to Capernaum seeking Jesus. When they found Him on the other side of the sea, they said to Him, “Rabbi, when did You get here?” In other words, “We saw you Jesus send Your disciples away and disperse the crowd so how did You get over here to Gennesaret so quickly? You would have had to go through Capernaum. How did you get by us?” It would be interesting to know when the disciples chose to tell the story of Jesus walking on the water. Was it now or later? We are only left to guess but that it is one of those things that you would want to tell right away. “Hey, last night Jesus sent us across the lake to Bethsaida. We were about 3 or 4 miles out when a storm came up that threatened out lives. We struggled most of the night but then Jesus, who had been praying, came to our rescue by walking on the water.” No wonder the multitude that was fed wanted more of Jesus. They were seeking Jesus. They literally ran to Him. Maybe Jesus has provided for you and now you want more? Maybe He has done a miracle in your life and you want more? Maybe you are exploring Christ? Maybe you feel like running to see what Jesus is going to do next? If that describes you here today, we are thrilled you are here. We hope that you do what those early seekers of Christ did – tell others about Jesus. The people at Gennesaret “carried the sick on their mats to the place where Jesus was.” (Mark 6:55) Today, I hope that you will carry the hurting, whether physically, emotionally, relationally or spiritually to Jesus. But where will you find Him? Here! At Temple! We are the Body of Christ! I have Good News! Christ is here through the Holy Spirit. Who are you bringing to Jesus?

However, it just isn’t at church that we should bring people to Jesus. Notice that the people brought their loved ones to Jesus in the marketplaces. Are you bringing people to Jesus in the marketplaces of life? I love markets. I usually don’t like huge crowds but there is something exciting about markets with all the activity. I have been to the Iron Market in Port au Prince, Haiti, the market in Jerusalem, the market in Kolkata, India and even the farmer’s market in St. Jacob’s and Cambridge. There are usually lots of people with lots of money. They have come to buy and sell, to barter but to also meet others. It’s a fascinating place of human interaction. The sick would have been brought to the marketplace. Some maybe came to beg for money! If their illnesses were contagious, the marketplace would have been off-limits because they made others unclean for worship. We do know that many had to be carried there so they were in pretty bad shape. Now Jesus shows up and Jesus starts to work miracles very openly. The disciples had earlier wanted the people to go and find food in such marketplaces. Jesus had them stay and fed them and now He was going to market Himself to offer up “Good News to the poor, to proclaim release to the captives, recovery of sight to the blind and to set free those who were oppressed.” (Luke 4:18) This was happening wherever Jesus went. As Robert Gundry explains, “all the verbs in the passage are in the imperfect tense…these things take place time after time in place after place.”[4] It really was miracle mania! Just touching the fringe of His cloak meant healing. (Mark 6:56)

Doesn’t this remind you of earlier episodes in Jesus’ ministry? The man carried by his friends and lowered through a roof! (Mark 2:3-4) And then remember, when Jesus was going to heal Jarius’ daughter and He shocks everyone when He stops to speak to a woman who suffered from continual menstruation and who stealthily touched the fringe of His garment (Mark 5:27-28). The woman was healed but Jesus still called her out on it. Why? Because He wanted to restore her to honour! She had lived with shame. Everybody was focused on Jarius’ daughter when Jesus wanted to establish the woman as His daughter who He would take care of. Now, word had gotten around that just touching Jesus brought healing. However, “what was involved was not simply material contact with Jesus’ clothing, but the touch of faith.”[5] This wasn’t magic. This was faith! It was people who believe in Him that Jesus sought. Jesus wasn’t trying to become a food bank. Jesus wasn’t trying to be a doctor. Jesus was seeking those with faith! Do you need to reach out to Him in faith?

Yesterday, I just happened meet an old friend and her family who reached out to God in faith and God rescued her. She had to tell me this story and gave me permission to pass it onto you. She and her husband recently moved in with her daughter and husband in one of the those houses with an in-law suite. Her husband was out running errands and she was at home knitting. However, the yarn got away from her and she got up to fetch it. When she did, she tripped on the yarn and the knitting needle went right throw her neck. She yelled and her son-in-law came down, and had the presence of mind to call 911. She was rushed to the hospital and they could extract the needle so she was rushed to Sunnybrook Hospital in Toronto where their best trauma surgeon just happened to be there and was able to surgically remove the needle. Three weeks later she was sharing a Happy Meal with her 1-year-old grandson and the rest of her family. Two millimetres more and the needle would have punctured her carotid artery. Jesus protected her and healed her. As an aside, this is why I don’t knit. It is way too dangerous. I’ll stick to hockey and an occasional white-water rafting trip.

Back to the story in Mark! A problem arose with all these healings! Many were only going to Jesus for their physical needs. They couldn’t find a family doctor so they went to the Emergency Room to find Jesus. Others were looking for more free Filet o’ Fishes.™ We know this because in John 6:26-27, Jesus said to the seekers, “Truly, truly, I say to you, you seek Me, not because you saw signs, but because you ate of the loaves and were filled. Do not work for the food which perishes, but for the food which endures to eternal life, which the Son of Man will give to you, for on Him the Father, God, has set His seal.” That doesn’t sound like the best sales strategy. Jesus didn’t seal the deal. This is not how to evangelize. Or maybe Jesus does evangelism different than we do? Jesus wanted to do more than meet their personal needs. Jesus was using a net to catch men. He wanted to see if these fish were keepers. He had already taught the crowds that the kingdom of heaven is like a dragnet that catches all sorts of fish but only the good fish are kept in the end. (Matthew 13:47-49) Those who are good would be the ones who came for the gift of Him. This is why in John 6:53 it says, “Truly, truly I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood, you have no life in yourselves.” We read soon after, “as a result of this many of His disciples withdrew and were not walking with Him anymore.”  (John 6:66) I have seen this as a pastor. People will come to Jesus when He blesses them with what they think they want most, but leave Him when He only offers them what they need most! Can I just speak to all of you who are seeking Jesus but are holding back from fully following Him … from letting Him be your life? “Procrastination tends to breed passivity.”[6] I want to create a sense of urgency because if Jesus is calling you to follow Him and you say no now, it will be easier to say no the next time. “A survey of 250,000 people from a 1000 different churches revealed that 40% of those exploring Christ after 5 years felt stalled.”[7] In other words, the longer people sat comfortably in church without ever making a decision to follow Jesus, the more likely they never would. Too many people check out Jesus without ever checking in! I am calling you to believe in salvation by grace that you can do nothing to earn salvation but instead to trust Christ alone for your salvation. I am calling you to believe in the Trinity – one God in three persons. I am calling you to serve in the church at least once a month. I am calling you to pray for guidance frequently. I am calling you to reflect on Scripture and how it impacts your life.

Jesus is the Messiah. He has shown up. Do you recognize Him? Are you running to Him and whom are you bringing with you? Do you need to reach out to Him? The last word in verse 56 translated “healed” could also be translated “saved. Jesus has come to save. He reached out to you when He stretched out His arms on a Cross for you. Reach out to him and be saved, every last one of you and every last part of you. This is the new direction for your life!