from Dining with Jesus
In Luke chapter 14, Jesus is again having a meal with a Pharisee:
One Sabbath, when he went in to eat at the house of one of the leading Pharisees, they were watching him closely. There in front of him was a man whose body was swollen with fluid. In response, Jesus asked the law experts and the Pharisees, “Is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath or not?” But they kept silent. He took the man, healed him, and sent him away. And to them, he said, “Which of you whose son or ox falls into a well, will not immediately pull him out on the Sabbath day?” They could find no answer to these things.
He told a parable to those who were invited, when he noticed how they would choose the best places for themselves: “When you are invited by someone to a wedding banquet, don’t recline at the best place, because a more distinguished person than you may have been invited by your host. The one who invited both of you may come and say to you, ‘Give your place to this man,’ and then in humiliation, you will proceed to take the lowest place.
“But when you are invited, go and recline in the lowest place, so that when the one who invited you comes, he will say to you, ‘Friend, move up higher.’ You will then be honored in the presence of all the other guests. For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and the one who humbles himself will be exalted.”
Luke 14:1-24
Several years ago, one of my grown adopted children called me on the phone, “Dad, I need to ask you about something. I’m hoping you can give me some scriptures to read on this. I’ve recently been hearing about the doctrine of pre..pre..um, predestined or something like that.”
This is a young man who’s heard me teach for years. He’s in my family. When he graduated from high school and went off to another part of the country, suddenly, things that I had been trying to teach him for years were starting to sink in. Somebody else was obviously communicating with him in a way that was reaching him.
He told me, “I know Andrew believes in it.” So, at least he had picked up on the fact that his brother, who is theologically trained, believes in predestination. Yet, somehow no matter how many times I had taught on this, the fact that his dear old dad also believes had just zipped right over his head.
When you read the word “predestined,” please don’t you tune me out. Predestination is not some nasty negative doctrine that says that God is really mean. Jesus makes it very, very clear in this passage that predestination is God’s amazing grace toward the undeserving. God saves people who are not inclined to say “yes” to His kind invitation.
First of all, Jesus is dining with a prominent Pharisee, again. He’s in this guy’s home. The fact that Jesus didn’t get along with these people didn’t mean that he refused to eat with them. Jesus knew they refused to accept him as the Messiah, and he knew they were looking for an opportunity to accuse him, but he was spending time with them again. The amazing patience of God continues to astound me.
Jesus knows the Pharisees are aggressively looking for an opportunity to accuse him, and here He is with them on a Sabbath day. There’s a guy there who is obviously in need of healing, and the Pharisees are watching to see what Jesus is going to do.
Jesus asks them a question: “Is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath or not?”
Nobody answers Him. Nobody answers! Here’s a group of guys who feel very strongly that this healing is work and work is inappropriate on the Sabbath, but they didn’t want to have to answer Jesus, because their position was, while dear to their hearts, embarrassing to defend. They couldn’t defend their position biblically, but that doesn’t mean they didn’t feel passionately about it. When Jesus asks them a pointed question, “Is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath or not?” nobody answers Him.
So, “taking hold of the man” – I love that! Jesus took hold of him, healed him and sent him away, because he shouldn’t have had to endure what was to follow.
Jesus asks, “If one of you has a son or an ox that falls into a well on the Sabbath day, will you not immediately pull him out?” This is meant as a rhetorical question.
Everybody knows the answer! Of course, they would. The Mosaic law specifically allows for that. But there is another reason that even a Pharisee would rescue his son or animal. “I value that which is mine. Jesus speaks of my son, my animal, but this guy who’s sick, I don’t value him. He’s just a poor, unfortunate. He’s one of the many. He’s not my relative, not my spouse, not my child. So, the fact that he’s suffering has no great urgency for me.”
Now they weren’t saying he should never get healed. They’re just saying not now. It’s not worth doing on the Sabbath. His healing is not important. Not important enough to interrupt my sense of decorum. Not important enough to mess with my upbringing, my traditions. I don’t want this guy’s need to take precedence over my emotional comfort and sense of control. We may not want to identify with the Pharisees, but do we ever have that attitude intruding in our lives when it comes to worship?
I’ve said before, to various churches over the years, that we may offer prayers for God to move in a supernatural way in our midst, but many of us would be very unhappy if something unusual or out of our control happened. Do you know what would happen if lots of people started being supernaturally, miraculously, instantaneously healed at your church on Sunday? Your worship service would become a magnet for sick people, troubled people and spectators. I mean, do you think it’s tough to find parking now? If 10 to 15 people were being supernaturally, instantaneously healed of certifiable, observable, medical problems, things would seem overwhelming very fast. If they were instantaneously healed in your congregation on a Sunday morning? Watch out!
Naturally, you’d be happy for the healing of people who were your friends and family. And, if you were suffering with something, you’d be happy to get healed immediately. But, who are all these other people? And why are they coming to our church? We really don’t want that.
I was interim pastor for six months at a church in Chattanooga that was in a real identity crisis. Their neighborhood had changed, but they were still commuting into where the church had always been. They were concerned that they didn’t seem to be reaching the new neighbors. “We’d like to attract the people from around here and get them to come to our church, but you know, they’re just not coming.”
I did something that most of them had not done, and that was to walk around the neighborhood, door to door, and introduce myself to the neighbors. I asked things like, “How long have you been here? Have you ever been to visit this church up the street?” If the answer was no, “Do you have any interest in coming?” “No, not really.” “Do you go to church anywhere?” “Yes.” “Where do you go to church?” “We go to thus and such a church.” “Oh, well, that’s great. God bless you.”
What I found was, there was another congregation that had a bunch of people from that neighborhood, but they were meeting in a facility several miles away that they’d completely outgrown; they were totally landlocked and were interested in purchasing the church facility in their neighborhood where I was serving as Interim pastor. However, the people I was serving, who’d been in that church for generations, didn’t want to sell the building to those people.
I asked the deacons to explain why not. “Well, you know, we just, we, we don’t want to turn the facility over to somebody else. We just want to stay here and welcome our neighbors.” I said, “Well, okay, there’s about 150 of y’all on any given Sunday. The congregation that wants to buy your facility has about 450 on any given Sunday. So suppose that instead of their buying your facility, they all just join? If 450 of your neighbors, instead of going to their church this Sunday, came to your church and walked the aisle and requested membership, would you have any problem with that? Would that be okay with you?”
“You don’t think they’d do that, do you?”
Well, no, actually, they didn’t do it, but it was a Baptist church, and they could have. Over time, they eventually came to the point where they were willing to sell the facility, and God blessed everybody in the process. After over two thousand years, some things will never come naturally. We have to see things God’s way.
We have a desire to lunch with Jesus, we’d like to interact, but we really get uncomfortable if He starts addressing other people’s needs in ways that interfere with our sense of the familiar. We just don’t like that.
I am persuaded that one of the reasons why God doesn’t do more astounding, supernatural, visible stuff in our churches is because we really don’t want Him to. “We just don’t have room for that. It’s not just that we can’t fit God’s supernatural works into the timeline, but we have to keep the order of service moving. We have time constraints, and we really don’t want God to do anything too extraordinary, do we?
