In biblical times, if you were diagnosed with That was physically, socially, and economically devastating. Essentially, it rendered you a walking dead man. Today on Truth for Life, we'll hear about a leprous encounter with Jesus, and we'll learn that all of us are spiritually leprous.
So what's the cure? Alistair Begg is teaching from chapter 5 of Luke's Gospel. And as he reaches one of these particular towns, he runs into a man who is covered with leprosy. No one who suffered from this disease could live within the community. They lived isolated from others.
Therefore, the individual knew nothing of the regular blessings of family life, didn't enjoy the company of friends or was not allowed the privileges of employment. So this man that Jesus meets here is, if you like, a dead man walking. He is a prisoner of his own skin.
And he knows what he needs. He needs to be cleansed and cured. It's therefore no wonder that coming face to face with Jesus, Luke tells us that he fell with his face to the ground, and he begged Jesus to cleanse him. The phraseology makes it clear that he's absolutely convinced of Jesus' ability to clean him up, to cure him, and the only question is whether Jesus is willing. And if you look at verse 13, you see there that Jesus does the unthinkable. He reaches out his hand and he touches the man.
No one touched a leper. The disease was dreaded. But in compassion, Jesus reaches out his hand and he touches the man, and he declares his willingness, addressing his hopeless condition. And in a drama with just one word in Greek, there is a catharsis takes place in the life of this man, and immediately he is healed. Now, there's more that follows in the story, but we'll leave the story at that point, because the rest of it is not germane to our consideration tonight.
We're asking the question, What is involved in becoming a Christian? And I found it helpful just to keep these three words in my mind as I thought of the man and as I thought of our question. First of all, the word condition. Secondly, the word compassion.
And thirdly, the word cure. First of all, considering what the Bible says concerning the condition of men and women. Actually, the cleansing of leper is a wonderful illustration of the spiritual cleansing that Jesus provides, and not only in the New Testament but also in the Old, we discover that leprosy is one of the clearest pictures, the clearest allegories that the Bible contains of the predicament of men and women as sinners. Like the leper, our lives are spoiled.
We suffer not from this physical ailment, but we suffer by our natures from the leprosy of sin, the leprosy that has spoiled our souls. The Bible tells us that when God made the world and put Adam and Eve in the garden, it was all good—no disappointment, no unhappiness, nothing wrong at all. But it wasn't to stay that way. And the man and the woman decided to disobey God. And the consequences of their self-centered decision were absolutely devastating. God had told them that if you disobey me and you act contrary to my plan and purpose for you, then in that day you will surely die. And of course, they didn't physically die.
We read on in the story, and they went on to have children, and so on. But Jesus makes it clear by the time he steps on the stage of history, referencing the historicity of Adam and Eve, that the death that entered into the world was this spiritual death, closing down the communion between a holy God and his creation, bringing alienation into that picture, bringing bondage into people's lives, bringing conflict into their circumstances, and all of that wrapped up in the human predicament, so that, if you like, in a moment, life was robbed of its wholeness, of its completeness, of its perfection. And since that day, every human being shares in the corruption of Adam and Eve, shares in the guilt of Adam and Eve. Every one of us is born with an inherent bias to sin. Every one of us, a sinner, in the same sinking ship with everybody else. And every day we are confronted by the ravaging nature of our condition. Now, so far nobody, I think, would be prepared to argue with at least the predicament. Any sensible man or woman living their life and reading the newspapers recognizes that there is some reason why, after all this time, with all the advances of technology, with all of the opportunities for the progress of humanity, that tonight we sit in a world that is ravished by epidemics that are directly related to man's inhumanity to man, we're at war with one another on every front, we're at war within our homes, we're at war within our own psyches, more money is spent on seeking to put people's heads back together again, metaphorically, than is spent in some countries on their whole gross national product.
Why is this? Well, the Bible says it is because of sin. And sin is not an intellectual problem. It is a moral problem. No matter your intellect, no matter your status, no matter whether you were highborn or lowborn, every one of you, like me, is just a miserable sinner.
Doesn't sound very nice, does it? But that is the Bible's description of our condition, alienated from God, justly deserving the judgment of God. In his holiness, God has decreed that sin must be punished and will be punished. And the Bible speaks of hell in such a way as to make it awfully clear that for us to die in this present condition will be to face the full force of God's wrath. And, of course, the gravity of our condition is such that, just like the leper, we're actually unable to rectify our circumstances.
If there's going to be a rescue, it must come from the outside. The man threw himself at Jesus' feet and begged him, If you are willing, you can make me clean. Jesus said, I am willing.
Be clean. From the condition, then, to the compassion. Jesus was filled with compassion, we're told. In fact, on one memorable occasion, as he looks out on the crowds that are milling around him, the Gospel writer records that Jesus was filled with compassion when he saw the crowds because they looked like sheep without a shepherd—which, of course, run a chord for him. He was the shepherd. He was the great shepherd of the sheep.
He was the one who declared, I haven't come to call righteous people to put together a religious club. I've come to call sinners to repentance. I am the good shepherd. I know my sheep.
They know me. I am the door by me. If any man enters in, he will be saved. He looks out on the crowd, and his heart is filled with compassion. And on account of that, Jesus comes to address our most basic needs. Alienated from God, we're in need of reconciliation. And stained and polluted by sin, our consciences testify to it, our minds speak to it even as I speak to you now.
Stained by sin, we're in need also of forgiveness. You see, if we're not careful, we'll begin to think in our twenty-first-century world that this kind of issue is a sort of marginal issue. It's an esoteric concern. It is somehow or another just to be put in a compartment somewhere, perhaps to be tackled at a later time on another day. But let's get down to the real issues of dealing with life.
After all, there are so many poor people in the world, and there are so many things that need to be addressed and so many complex problems that we need to go and rectify around the world—and of course, there are. But that is the great lie in the end, isn't it? We don't have time to go to the following story, but the following story is the remarkable story of how four men bring a fellow who's their friend who's paralyzed, and they drop him down through the roof so that he can meet Jesus. And Jesus says this very strange thing. He says, Your sins are forgiven. The average person will say, Your sins are forgiven?
What possible good is that? I'm a paralytic, for crying out loud. They brought me on a bed. I didn't come here to have a theological discussion about the condition of humanity.
I came here to get my legs. And that's the way many people think. And Jesus says to them, to the Pharisees who are so concerned about this, because they said, He shouldn't be saying, I forgive your sins, because only God can forgive sins, and they were pretty well convinced it couldn't be God who was present. He says to them, What's the easiest thing? To say, Your sins are forgiven, or to say, Get up and walk?
Well, it's far easier to say, Your sins are forgiven, because nobody would really know, would they? But to say, Get up and walk, puts you on the line. Get up and walk, if he doesn't get up and walk.
But he gets up and walks. And what does Jesus say? In order that you might know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins, he said to the paralyzed man, Take up your bed and walk.
What was the issue? The forgiveness of his sins. Because the condition that confronted him was his alienation from God and his sinful heart, which demanded a forgiveness that he couldn't provide. And what was true of him? It's true of the leper.
And again, as I say to you, it's not very palatable, but it's true of you and me tonight. That's why the story of the gospel—the Christian message of the gospel—is so tremendously compelling. God demonstrates, says Paul, his own love towards us in this, that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.
Peter takes up the theme in 1 Peter 3, and he says, For Christ died for sins, once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, to bring you to God. In other words, if our condition is alienated from God, what compassion on the part of God to provide in his Son the reconciliation needed? We need a reconciler. We cannot reconcile ourselves.
No more than the leper could pick his scabs away and see himself transformed. And when Paul addresses this in a passage of the Bible that I've given myself to trying to understand before I die, he says in a quite memorable statement, All this is from God. All this good news, all of this intervention, all of this grace is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation—that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting men's sins against them.
How can that possibly be? And the answer comes in this phenomenal verse. God made him—that is, Jesus—who had no sin, to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. Because Jesus was sinless, he could take our sins. And the gospel is the story of this great exchange—an exchange that takes place at the cross. Jesus taking our place and bearing the wrath which our sins deserve, so that in exchange we might receive the righteousness which none of us deserves. You see, it's only when we realize that Jesus died in our place, taking our sin, that we can then make sense of his death as an example of self-sacrificial love. In fact, in reaching out to the leper, Jesus is demonstrating the way in which his kingdom comes.
In touching the leper, it's almost as if Jesus is saying to him, I'm prepared to become like you, a man under judgment, in order that you might become like me in all of the freedom and forgiveness that I provide. My condition was irremediable. Unless someone comes from outside to do what I cannot do for myself, then I am lost, I am enslaved, I am dead, and I am finished.
And the good news is that at just the right moment, when we had no way of escape, Christ comes. Finally, a word about the cure. Because I could have all kinds of ointments with me here tonight, and you could have all kinds of rashes, and I could tell you that the ointment that I have indeed, it is a family—it's almost a great family joke, which I shouldn't let you in on. But there is not a condition known to humanity that I cannot provide a solution for in a particular medication that comes from Scotland. And my children, they know before it's even out of my mouth. No matter what it is, have you tried on that? And I could tell you about the efficacious nature of this potion, and you could actually believe what I tell you.
And you could scratch yourself raw all through the night, believing me in the entirety of what I say. No, you see, for a cure to be effected, there has to be appropriation. There has to be response. In the case of the leper, the mere knowledge of Christ's ability to cure was not enough to cure him. And so, for us, assent to certain pieces of information is not enough to save us. Giving assent, giving intellectual—acknowledging intellectually that certain things may be true is not the same as saving faith. Well, you say, What is saving faith? How may I know this cure in my life?
If that is my condition, and Christ is so compassionate, and he sent you and others to tell me, how is this cure effected? Well, to become a Christian, trusting in what Jesus has done on the cross as our only basis for acceptance with God, will involve at least these three elements. One, acknowledging that I am absolutely helpless and cannot rely on any righteousness of my own. Now, to become a Christian involves not having a righteousness of my own.
In fact, there are only two religious systems in the whole world, if you think about it. One that produces a righteousness of your own, and one that says, There is no righteousness of my own that could avail me one iota with God. Therefore, if I do not have credited to my account the righteousness of someone else and based my acceptance on that, then I am without hope. Acknowledging that I am absolutely helpless and cannot rely on a righteousness of my own. Secondly, believing that Jesus has died and has provided the very gift of righteousness that I've just admitted that I need. And thirdly, that on the strength of that, I must then cast myself upon his mercy. Appropriate Christ to me.
And of course, this is the very language that Jesus used, wasn't it? I am the bread of life. He who eats of me will never hunger. In other words, he says, I want you to appropriate me. I want you to receive me as I am.
I want you to welcome me as Savior and Lord and King. If there has to be the acknowledgment of my helplessness, my belief in Jesus as my only righteousness, and the casting of myself upon him, how can that possibly be done? Because if we've just understood accurately the state of our condition, we are lost, we are enslaved, and we're actually dead. It's not our nature to trust Christ. It's our nature to disobey him. Well, says the thinker, if there's going to be a Christian experience, it's going to take a miracle. The gospel is miraculous. God works within us. God works within us to create in us things that cannot be produced by our own dead, enslaved humanity. And God does this always in the same way. He does it through his Word, and he does it by his Spirit. In other words, God speaks to men and women inwardly. He imparts life to our dead souls, and he brings us to new birth. God does that.
You don't do that. God does that. That's why you have to ask him to be gracious and merciful to you. Not sit in your own smug self-confidence, saying, One day, when I'm good and ready, I'll give God a chance at my life.
Don't you hate those things? Give God a chance. As if somehow or another, God is helpless, standing, waiting to see whether any of us are going to decide to seek him. The way the gospel is proclaimed, it's as though Adam and Eve were seeking God in the garden. No, God was seeking Adam and Eve in the garden. It wasn't that people were running around Judea looking for Jesus. It was that Jesus was moving around Judea looking for lost sheep. And he comes tonight, and the Word of God comes home to the heart, comes in the voice of someone, maybe the preacher. The preacher preaches and comes and knocks at the door of the human heart, calling for a response, saying, as I said this morning, I implore you, I beseech you in the mercies of God, be reconciled to God. Here I come with the Bible, trying to explain it to you, pointing it to you, confirming it to you, urging you to trust its promises. And the Holy Spirit comes to the human heart with a key, and turns the key, and diffuses the ray. And what cannot be accomplished by the mouth of a man is accomplished by the work of God. You see why a Christian should be a humble person? Evangelical Christians, if they really are evangelical, if they believe this doctrine, we should be the most humble people on the face of God's earth. Because we know. You know every sin I've ever done, but your blood has covered everyone.
O God, such love! In fact, it's one of the marks of genuine Christian experience, not the smug, self-satisfied proclamations of what we've done and how well we've done. Well, somebody may be asking, and I must close, how would I ever know if this miracle is in process? Well, let me ask you, are you beginning to see that you've done wrong and that God is rightly angry with you? Are you beginning to sense that Jesus has been sent by God the Father to bring you forgiveness?
If so, that is the work of God's Spirit. We could never believe such things without his help. And the salvation that he provides, he provides completely, because no sin is too shameful. He provides permanently, separating us from our sins forever. He provides unconditionally, because none of us can make ourselves worthy of forgiveness.
The work of the gospel is totally uninfluenced by our status or our lack of it. And he saves us immediately. Our sins are gone. The leper was full of leprosy in every sense of lost cause.
No amount of picking at his scabs could solve his problem. And maybe that's how you are tonight. You've been a great sinner. The loathsome nature of it all makes you feel that you've gone so far, so far, so far that Jesus would never take it all away. But I want to assure you that if your sinning conscience cries out in the leper's words, Lord, if you are willing, you can make me clean. You will hear him say, I am willing.
He's still willing. You're listening to Truth for Life. That is Alistair Begg with a message titled, Becoming a Christian. Today's teaching is part of our study called, The Basics of the Christian Faith. This is a collection of messages from Alistair that teach what it means to be a follower of Jesus. As you listen today, maybe you thought of someone you'd like to share this teaching with. Maybe you have a friend who's curious about Jesus, someone who is new to Christianity. Well, I want to recommend to you a companion discipleship course that goes along with the teaching we're hearing. It makes it easy for you to introduce someone you know to the life-saving message of the gospel. When you use the discipleship course, you and a study partner will each listen to a message from this series, and then you get together and discuss what you've learned. Ask for your copy of The Basics of the Christian Faith study when you donate to support the Ministry of Truth for Life online at truthforlife.org slash donate, or call us at 888-588-7884. We are glad you joined us today. Tomorrow we'll learn why it's necessary for Christians to know what they believe and why they believe it. The Bible teaching of Alistair Begg is furnished by Truth for Life, where the Learning is for Living.
