Carter Conlon from the historic Times Square Church in New York City.
A certain blind man sat by the road begging. They warned him he should be quiet, but he cried out all the more, Son of David, have mercy on me. He had nothing to lose and everything to gain by calling out for the mercy of God. Welcome to A Call to the Nation and this week's message from Pastor Carter Conlon. Today Carter takes us to Luke chapter 18. It's a message about a blind man sitting by the roadside begging. When Jesus walked by, he called out to him.
Then something happened immediately after. It not only changed the blind man's life but also those around him. Let's join Carter now as he shares how important it is to call out Jesus is near. Now I want to start in Luke chapter 18 at verse 35. Luke chapter 18 verse 35. Then it happened as he, that's Jesus, was coming near Jericho that a certain blind man sat by the road begging and hearing a multitude passing by, he asked what it meant. So they told him that Jesus of Nazareth was passing by.
God help us. God help us to recognize when Jesus is passing by. And he cried out saying, Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me. Then those who went before warned him that he should be quiet. You know, when you start calling out to God, you'll have every voice that hell can raise against you, giving you reasons why you don't have the right to call out to God.
You know, there was a spiritual theory back then that if you were born blind perhaps, like remember when the disciples said to Jesus, who sinned, this man or his parents that he was born blind, there was a thinking at the culture of that time that if you were blind that there was some sin that either you or somebody else had committed. So be quiet. That the inference being that there's a sin here and don't bother God with this, it will never change.
But he cried out all the more. There's a point in life where it doesn't matter what people say. I couldn't care less what people say. I care what God says. He says, if you pray, if you seek me with all your heart, you're going to find me. If you ask, it will be given you. If you seek, you will find.
If you knock, it will be open. Whatever you ask in prayer, believing you shall receive. I choose to believe God over my own heart. I choose to believe God over every voice that will be raised against me calling out to him.
And you should feel that way too, those that are afflicted, addicted, depressed, discouraged, broken. And you're in line saying, why would God ever bother with me? Good question.
He just did and does. I don't get it either. Neither do the angels.
It's a mystery they desire to look into. In the sight of heaven, we must look like an anthill and we must look so confused and broken. Yet we are the center of God's attention and affection.
Isn't it amazing? He loves you. God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son. God so loves you that he gave his son for you and for me. God so loves you in your struggle. God loves you. Jesus is waiting to speak your name to his father. When you open your heart to him, he'll cleanse you of everything that you've ever done that has separated you from God.
The Bible calls that sin. He'll cleanse you from that, bring you back into right relationship with God, and then the miracles start to happen. The change. If anyone be in Christ, he's what? The Bible says a new creation. If you turn to Christ, he comes to indwell your physical body by his Holy Spirit and God begins to change you from the inside out.
It's amazing how it happens. What do I have to do, you say? Read his word and what he says, believe it. Every promise he makes, say that belongs to me.
I want that in my life and he will make it a reality in your life and give you a reason to live and give you an assurance that when you die, heaven will become your home. So don't let anyone stop you from crying out. Don't let anybody in your home tell you you're too big a loser to ever believe that God would change you. Oh no, don't listen to those voices.
Don't even entertain them for a second. They warned him he should be quiet, but he cried out all the more, Son of David, have mercy on me. You know, when you got nothing to lose, he had absolutely nothing to lose. He had already lost everything. Dignity, the ability to see his way forward. He had to beg by the roadside. He'd lost the ability to hold maybe any of the jobs that might have been available to others in his time. He had nothing to lose and everything to gain by calling up for the mercy of God.
I love the verse 40, it says, so Jesus stood still. I mean, the whole crowd is trying to move him in their direction. You know, there's some people who want him to overthrow Rome right on the spot. Others see financial gain from being associated with Jesus, very much like our day we're living in. Others have a political agenda and they think, wow, we got the guy with the power. Others just wanted free bread.
They knew he could multiply a few loaves and fish and they thought, hey, we hang out with this guy, we're going to have free bread for the rest of our lives. We can start bakeries. We can make money.
We can do all kinds of stuff. You know, everybody had a reason and I could just see everybody's kind of pushing it. You know, as they're walking, they're pushing it and suddenly this guy who has nothing to offer the kingdom of God starts crying out and they're just saying, just be quiet.
Just be quiet. Can't you see there's great things going on here? This is a miracle worker. This is a man with power. This is a man who can help us fulfill all of our personal agendas.
And of course, others saw themselves sitting at the right and left hand and such like with titles and names and seats. Oh God, his mercy is beyond my comprehension sometime. So he stood still and said, bring him to me. And when they come near, he asked him and said, what do you want me to do for you? And he said, Lord, then I may receive my sight. And Jesus said to him, receive your sight.
Your faith has made you well. And immediately he received his sight and followed him. Glorifying God and all the people when they saw it gave praise to God. When they saw Jesus, they weren't really praising God. But when they saw the blind man who saw Jesus seeing, I know that's a lot of seesawing in this statement. But when they saw the blind man who saw Jesus seeing, they began to give glory to God. And when you get your miracle, when God raises you, when you get delivered from that which afflicts you, people will see Jesus because of you glorifying God, because of you testifying of what God has done in your life. You know, it's amazing how we can be in a place that has such a history of God's faithfulness, such as Jericho, his faithfulness and his power, and though being aware of it, at the same time blind to the presence of God returning to visit again.
Isn't it amazing? Jericho, where the walls came down, where finally another generation coming out of the wilderness came across the Jordan and they were confronted by this stronghold in their place of promise. Walls so thick that some say that some of the, whether it's true or not, they do say that a chariot could be driven on the walls. They were so thick.
They were thick enough to have homes inside of the wall and impenetrable in the natural. And God gave them another one of his, as I call it, ridiculous battle plans to just walk around and say nothing. You know, that'd be a miracle for the church right now and not for any church. Just say nothing. Just say nothing.
Just walk around your problem and say nothing. And when I tell you to shout, shout. And they did and the walls fell down and they saw the power of God. And now fast forward many years later at Jericho is a blind man begging. I want that picture to sit in your mind that what had happened there, the power there, what God had done. And Psalm 44 verse 3 tells us that the children of Israel did not get this land in their possession by their own ability, their own sword. It was given to them by God. They inherited this place by the power of God. And similarly in the United States in 1620, 103 pilgrims came across from a foreign land with a promise of a new land of freedom where they were going to be able to worship God freely according to conscience and according to his word. They would be free from tyrannical dictatorship as they saw it, dictates of what they could say or preach or how they could pray. They wanted to be free and they wanted to be able to worship God according to how they interpreted the scriptures.
And America as it is today was their land of promise just as Israel was the land of promise for the children of Israel. But by the first year's end, only 51 of them were left alive. 53 had died of cold, hardship, starvation, disease, whatever it was. And they were so emaciated and so weak they were surrounded by what they thought to be enemies. As a matter of fact, they were so desperate that they actually in the wintertime, they tied their dead to trees so that their enemies as they saw it would think that they were more than they were. They couldn't bury their dead because the ground was frozen. So they simply tied them to trees.
The obstacles were high. The situation was impassable and impossible, but they prayed. We had the privilege in 2020 of going to the house, which was the building the foundation of the first home in America. The address is lot number one America where these 51 survivors gathered to pray. And there's an undeniable presence of God in that room, in that house. It was stunning that when I first walked into it, you could just like any sanctuary in any church, you could literally feel the lingering presence of God. It was in that front yard of that house the first Thanksgiving in America was held.
There are sketches of it still on the wall in that particular home. Yet they had no go forward strategy, but they prayed. They were weak. They were emaciated, penniless. The environment was too harsh for them to know how to survive in it, but they prayed.
I don't know if you get a weaker prayer meeting. I don't know what they prayed, but I suspect it was along the lines of God, we're finished if you don't intervene. You told us you're going to give us a place of promise. We dedicated this land to you.
This was supposed to be a place where you were going to be glorified. So we're asking you now, have mercy on us. Jesus, son of God, son of David, have mercy on us.
And do for us what only you can do. And history tells us and we know now that out of that prayer meeting of 51 people, on lot number one America came one of the greatest nations arguably in the history of the world, able to accomplish things that other nations in thousands of years of history have not been able to accomplish in just a few hundred years. God answers prayer.
He answered their prayer back then. So here at Jericho sat a blind man now begging. And just as in America, we've lost sight of our purpose. We've lost sight of the God who gave us this place of freedom.
And we took that freedom and we did some terrible things with it. We lost sight of God as a people and we sit begging as a society for our daily needs now, just like the blind man outside of Jericho begging. We are a population in America that is now begging. We're begging for provision. We fear for the future. We're begging for peace because peace seems to be eluding us in our cities, our towns, our schools.
Incivility is on the rise. We are begging for stability in our homes and our families. We're begging for our children to find a sense of morality and civility and decency. We're begging for soundness in our country, righteous leadership and truth, just to name a few things.
We are very much like this man on the side of the road, blind, blind to our history. But oh God, I pray that we can see who's passing by, that we can understand that we have a mercy moment in this nation. Jesus is passing by.
And if the man had not cried out, he would have just passed by. I'm convinced that he would have passed by, but the man had the courage, the humility, the burden to cry out, Jesus, son of David, have mercy on me. Son of David, don't pass me by. We sing that hymn, pass me not, O gentle savior, hear my humble cry, while on others thou art calling, do not pass me by. That's based on that scripture, I'm sure. That hymn that was written many, many years ago. Now this man at Jericho was about to have a spiritual awakening for the simple reason that he was aware that Jesus was passing by. I find it ironic that the people who could see were not aware of who they were walking with, but the blind man saw who it was.
It's amazing. Why is it always the person that everybody says, I'll just be quiet. You're never going to amount to anything. You're not going to do anything. God's not interested in you.
Look at us with our robes and our degrees and we're movers and shakers. Look at you sitting there begging. What do you know about God? Jesus, son of David, have mercy on me. Jesus, and he just kept crying out, son of David, have mercy. Everything within and certainly without came against him to stop him from crying out. But in Psalm 22 verse 24, Psalm as David says, when this man cried out to him, he heard. Oh God, I hope you remember the day you cried out to him.
I do. I hope you remember the day. I was a young police officer heading off to training school and things were not going right in my life. And I turned on the radio in my car and I was heading out.
I had about an eight hour drive ahead of me and it might be the first time I'd ever really prayed, I think. And I was in my car and Billy Graham was on. I don't know how I got on that station. It just happened to be on. I turned it on and I didn't even know it was Billy Graham until later on.
But this guy is, you know, you may be trying all this stuff and it's not working. You know, Billy Graham, you know, it was very simple. And I listened for only about a minute or two. And then I just said, God help me.
It was my blind man on the side of the road moment. Jesus, son of David, have mercy on me. And Jesus heard the man and stopped. It's the whole, everything stops when you cry out. Everything stops. Don't let the devil ever tell you he doesn't care about you. Everything stops.
I want you to picture it for a moment. I don't know how many thousands are with him. How many thousands are pushing him in every direction trying to get him to fulfill their agendas? But one guy cries out. And this is the guy who's going to get the miracle. The strange thing is nobody else gets a miracle that's recorded on that day. But this guy gets it.
The one guy who's not, he can't even follow the crowd because he can't see. But he hears that Jesus is passing by. And everything stops.
Everything stops. That's how much he loves you. So much he cares.
When you call out, everything stops. I know he's running the universe. I know he has a lot to do. He does.
He does. I mean, in my father's house there are many mansions. I go to prepare a place for you. So obviously there's some construction going on somewhere.
Right? And he seems to be the supervisor because I go to prepare a place for you. So he's the construction supervisor of my mansion, by the way, right now.
And yours. There's a lot going on out there. But the moment he hears you in your dorm, the students, everything stops.
Everything stops. He says, bring him to me. He cannot turn away from a cry. And when a prayer becomes a cry, something happens to the heart of God. Oh, we pray a lot of prayers.
A lot of perfunctory stuff. It's very King James-y. It's very, you know, we think if we string enough phrases together, somehow God's going, oh, I'll answer him or he'll never shut up. You know, that kind of prayer. But this guy gets a miracle with just a couple of words. Jesus, son of David, help me.
Just help me. That's his prayer. It's not much of a prayer, but I tell you in my life, it's the one that God has answered repetitively over the years. I have prayed that prayer so many times. I still pray it. Jesus, help me. I get up, Jesus, help me.
Even when I try to put on my shoes now in the morning, Jesus, help me. And he's always answered that prayer. Always.
Always. And I never really fully understood that everything can come to a stop when you just pray that. I wonder if that's the prayer he's longed to hear from so many of us for so long. And he said, what do you want me to do for you? I want to see. I want to see, for me, I want to see a spiritual awakening in my time. I want to see the name of Jesus Christ glorified.
I want to hear praises in the house of God. I want to see families at tables with moms and dads opening the Bible and reading it to their kids again. I want to see marriages restored. I want to see prisoners set free and given transformed lives. I want to see drug addicts set free from the power of drugs. I want to see our children praying in their schools again and taught about the ways of God.
Oh God, I want to see. I want to see a greater purpose for my life than I've ever known. I've had a good life. I thank God for it. It's been a marvelous journey, but there's much more to see. And that's been my prayer.
God, I want to see something deeper, fuller than I've ever known before. And I don't care what it costs me to see it, but I want to see it. I'm tired of your name being mocked. I'm tired of you not being honored.
I'm tired of hearing your name as a curse word, even in G rated movies. I'm tired of it all. I'm tired of the broken homes, the broken families.
I'm tired of the fentanyl coming across our borders. I'm tired of the incivility in our society. I'm tired of dysfunctional government in this country.
I'm tired of it all. I want to see a spiritual awakening in this nation one more time. One more time for the glory of God. David, the Psalmist says, I was sinking in a horrible pit.
God lifted me up and set my feet upon a rock and he put a new song in my mouth, a song of praise unto God. Then he says something interesting. Many will see it. He didn't say they'll hear it.
They will see it and they will fear and turn to God. Isn't that amazing? A song that can be seen before it's heard. A change of countenance, a change of ability, a change of heart, a change of mind, a change of direction, a change of understanding. This man was no longer a beggar. He was part of the crowd everywhere. I could just see him in the crowd. I was blind and now I see, and everyone else there is just, oh, I wish he'd be quiet. But the common people saw it. The hungry saw it.
The religious never see anything. But the prisoners saw it. The depressed saw it.
The addicted saw it. So why should we settle for less than what God is willing to do in each of our lives to bring his own name to glory? What is spiritual awakening you say? It's when we recognize the nearness of God.
It doesn't come because we do more of stuff and there's lots we can do. You can read the Bible till your eyes go across. That's not necessarily spiritual awakening. You can pray until you lose your voice. It's a good thing. Give it a shot sometime.
I've done it. But a spiritual awakening comes when we awaken to the fact that Jesus is near. He's not far away from us. And if we don't cry out, we might miss the moment. I personally believe, and it's my conviction, you can agree or disagree, your liberty to do that, that we will know one moment of mercy in this nation before Christ comes. It could be bigger than anything we've ever thought.
It could be, I don't know. I don't know fully what it's going to look like, but I do believe that we're going to experience a moment of mercy. I believe in my heart that God is going to raise up the addicted, the afflicted, the marginalized, the depressed, the nobodies, the nothings of this society, and he's going to confound this world with what he's going to do in each of our lives.
I do believe that and I believe it with all of my heart. I believe the end time awakening is going to be rank and file people like this blind man that just cries out and says, help me, Jesus. And he's going to say, what do you want me to do? Tell him. Tell him what you want. You know, there's an old Pentecostal song we used to say years ago, Jesus on the mainline, tell him what you want. Like he's listening. You've called out. He's answered. What do you want me to do for you? Tell him.
Tell him. Years ago, I was a brand new believer in Christ and I had suffered from panic attacks for nine years. Nine years of hell on earth.
That's the way I describe it. Started when I was 15 years of age and lasted until I was 24 years of age. And panic attacks, if you've ever had them, it is literally hell on earth.
I would have them in class. Sometimes I was taken by ambulance to the hospital twice. One time my blood pressure was so high, the nurse dropped the blood pressure machine on the floor and ran out to get a doctor thinking I was going to die right on the table. I was going to have a heart attack or a stroke.
My blood pressure was so high. That's how deep fear had gotten ahold of my life. Then I came to Christ. And I read in the Bible that God's not given me a spirit of fear, but of power and love and a sound mind.
And Paul the apostle said, if God be for us, who can be against us? And I believed it. And one night when I was at home and I'm a brand new believer in Christ and I felt a panic attack coming on, now up to this point before getting saved, when a panic attack would happen, I would take Valium and whiskey at the same time.
I don't ever recommend it under any circumstance. It would just so dumb me down that it would help me get through it. But no more whiskey. I was now a Christian and no more Valium. I said, I'm not taking pills and I'm not taking booze. You know, I'm going to stand up and fight. And I went into my living room and I said these words. I said, Satan, you throw whatever you got at me.
And if you kill me, I'm going home to be with God. So I win tonight. I win tonight. I win. You lose, I win.
Either way. And I said, so you throw at me everything you've got, but I throw back at you what I now have in the name of Jesus Christ, the son of God, I resist you. And as God lives, a heat, not a fuzzy warmth, an actual heat, as if you took a heater and you put it over the top of my head, started and it went right and it went right through my body.
It started down the lower part of my body and went right through my chest, right through my head, out the top of my head. And I have never had a panic attack since. I was completely set free. And the Bible says immediately he received his sight and followed him. Immediately, not 10 weeks later, immediately glorifying God.
And all the people when they saw it gave praise to God. Jesus is near and he's willing to do something in your life and in mine that people will see it and they will glorify God. Thank you for joining us this week for A Call to the Nation with Carter Conlon from Times Square Church in New York City. For more information, log on to tsc.nyc. That's tsc.nyc. You can count on a powerful message each week on A Call to the Nation with Carter Conlon.
