Originally blogged on 25 February 2008
"Faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see." (Hebrews 11:1, NIV)
One
of the most basic truths of the Christian gospel is that we are saved
by grace through faith. We read this in the well-known words of
Ephesians 2:8-9: "For it is by grace you have saved, through faith—and
this not of yourselves, it is the gift of God—not of works, so that
no-one can boast."
It is important to realise that when
we talk about being saved by faith, what the Bible means is not that it
is our faith—faith in something, no matter what—that saves us, but that
it is Jesus Christ who saves those put their faith in him as their
Saviour and Lord.
The Bible also calls having faith in
Christ "believing in Christ". In Acts 16:31, Paul’s answer to the
question, "What must I do to be saved?" is: "Believe in the Lord Jesus,
and you will be saved." At other times, this faith or belief is termed
"trust"—"Trust in God, trust also in me" says Christ in John 14:1.
So,
we are saved through faith, and we also know that the Bible is clear
that the opposite also holds true, that "whoever does not believe stands
condemned already because he has not believed in the name of God’s one
and only Son." (John 3:18).
Obviously in light of both
of these teachings it is of some importance to understand what this
"faith" – that is so important – actually is and what it isn’t! The
classic definition of faith in Protestant theology, summing up what the
Bible teaches, has been well stated by the German Lutheran Reformer, Philip
Melanchthon:
"Saving faith involves three things: knowledge, intelligent assent, and trust."
Each
of these elements matters: knowledge, intelligent assent and trust. It
is hard to overstate how revolutionary this rediscovery of the biblical
view of faith was in the 16th century, opposed as it was to the medieval Catholicism of the day.
There
is an element of knowledge in faith, according to Protestantism. We do
not have a blind faith in whatever the Church believes, even if we
haven’t a clue what that is. (This is what the Catholic Church
mistakenly believed.) We can only have faith where we know what we
believe. The American preacher A W Tozer said: "Faith is the gaze of the
soul upon a saving God." Far from being "blind faith", true faith
starts with gazing upon God and seeing him as he really is. We don’t
need to know everything but we do need to know at least some things. At
the very least it would be hard to see how anyone can have faith in
Christ who does not understand what Paul summarises as "the gospel"
about what Christ did for us:
"For what I received I
passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins
according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on
the third day according to the Scriptures." (1 Corinthians 15:3-4)
The
second element in faith is what Melanchthon called "intellectual
assent". This just means that as well as knowledge what the Bible about
Christ, we actually agree that what it says is true. There are many
academics who know all there is to know about the biblical languages and
what the biblical writers meant in the books of Scripture that they
wrote, but they don’t actually believe that what the Bible says is true.
They have knowledge without intellectual assent, and therefore cannot
be said to have faith. This intellectual assent is the element of faith
Christ emphasised when he said to Martha: "I am the resurrection and the
life. He who believes in me will live, even though he dies and whoever
lives and believes in me will never die," (John 11:25-26) and then asked
her "Do you believe this?" In other words: "Do you accept this is true,
what I’ve just told you?"
But important though
knowledge and intellectual assent are, by themselves they are not what
the Bible means by faith. According to the Bible, real faith, saving
faith, is not just in the mind, it must also be in the heart. This is
where the third element of faith comes in, the element of personal trust
in Jesus Christ.
You see, there is a kind of faith
that has the appearance of faith, but there’s something missing. It has
no heart; it has no affection, no emotion to it. According to the Letter
of James, even the demons can have this kind of false faith: "You
believe that there is one God. Good! Even the demons believe that—and
shudder." (James 2:19). The demons know and in their minds accept that
there is a God—they "believe in God" in that sense—but they do not have
faith in him!
To have real faith in Christ is to trust
Christ with your salvation, your eternity, your whole life. Trust is to
depend on him, to rely on him, to be committed to him and to be happy
and contented to be so.
A patient who has been told
that John Smith is a doctor and actually believes that he is a doctor,
but who won’t take the medicine Dr Smith prescribes, doesn’t really have
much real faith in Dr Smith because there is no trust or reliance.
The
story is told of the 19th century acrobat, Blondin, whose death-defying
feats on the tightrope made him very famous. Blondin used to put a
tightrope up right across Niagara Falls. To fall from it would mean
certain death. Huge crowds would gather and watch Blondin go out onto
the rope and walk from one side of the Falls to the other. And then
Blondin would offer anyone who wanted it, the chance to go on his back,
piggy-back, and be carried across the falls.
No one
ever took up the offer, except one man, Blondin’s manager, Harry
Colcord. He made the trip on Blondin’s back many times. The crowd knew
that Blondin was supposed to be able to do this, and they could see with
their own eyes that it was true, but only Colcord had the faith to
actually put his life in Blondin’s hands and be carried over safely.
Having
true faith in Christ means we are willing to put our lives in his hands
and let him carry us through life safely and over to eternity in
heaven.
Showing posts with label Saving Faith. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Saving Faith. Show all posts
Monday, 25 May 2015
Monday, 25 February 2008
Saving Faith
This was the magazine editorial in our parish magazine for March 2008.
"Faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see." (Hebrews 11:1, NIV)
One of the most basic truths of the Christian gospel is that we are saved by grace through faith. We read this in the well-known words of Ephesians 2:8-9: "For it is by grace you have saved, through faith—and this not of yourselves, it is the gift of God—not of works, so that no-one can boast."
It is important to realise that when we talk about being saved by faith, what the Bible means is not that it is our faith—faith in something, no matter what—that saves us, but that it is Jesus Christ who saves those put their faith in him as their Saviour and Lord.
The Bible also calls having faith in Christ "believing in Christ". In Acts 16:31, Paul’s answer to the question, "What must I do to be saved?" is: "Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved." At other times, this faith or belief is termed "trust"—"Trust in God, trust also in me" says Christ in John 14:1.
So, we are saved through faith, and we also know that the Bible is clear that the opposite also holds true, that "whoever does not believe stands condemned already because he has not believed in the name of God’s one and only Son." (John 3:18).
Obviously in light of both of these teachings it is of some importance to understand what this "faith" – that is so important – actually is and what it isn’t! The classic definition of faith in Protestant theology, summing up what the Bible teaches, has been well stated by the German Reformer, Philip Melanchthon:
"Saving faith involves three things: knowledge, intelligent assent, and trust."
Each of these elements matters: knowledge, intelligent assent and trust. It is hard to overstate how revolutionary this rediscovery of the biblical view of faith was, as opposed to the view of medieval Catholicism.
There is an element of knowledge in faith, according to Protestantism. We do not have a blind faith in whatever the Church believes, even if we haven’t a clue what that is. (This is what the Catholic Church mistakenly believed.) We can only have faith where we know what we believe. The American preacher A W Tozer said: "Faith is the gaze of the soul upon a saving God." Far from being "blind faith", true faith starts with gazing upon God and seeing him as he really is. We don’t need to know everything but we do need to know at least some things. At the very least it would be hard to see how anyone can have faith in Christ who does not understand what Paul summarises as "the gospel" about what Christ did for us:
"For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures." (1 Corinthians 15:3-4)
The second element in faith is what Melanchthon called "intellectual assent". This just means that as well as knowledge what the Bible about Christ, we actually agree that what it says is true. There are many academics who know all there is to know about the biblical languages and what the biblical writers meant in the books of Scripture that they wrote, but they don’t actually believe that what the Bible says is true. They have knowledge without intellectual assent, and therefore cannot be said to have faith. This intellectual assent is the element of faith Christ
emphasised when he said to Martha: "I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me will live, even though he dies and whoever lives and believes in me will never die," (John 11:25-26) and then asked her "Do you believe this?" In other words: "Do you accept this is true, what I’ve just told you?"
But important though knowledge and intellectual assent are, by themselves they are not what the Bible means by faith. According to the Bible, real faith, saving faith, is not just in the mind, it must also be in the heart. This is where the third element of faith comes in, the element of personal trust in Jesus Christ.
You see, there is a kind of faith that has the appearance of faith, but there’s something missing. It has no heart; it has no affection, no emotion to it. According to the Letter of James, even the demons can have this kind of false faith: "You believe that there is one God. Good! Even the demons believe that—and shudder." (James 2:19). The demons know and in their minds accept that there is a God—they "believe in God" in that sense—but they do not have faith in him!
To have real faith in Christ is to trust Christ with your salvation, your eternity, your whole life. Trust is to depend on him, to rely on him, to be committed to him and to be happy and contented to be so.
A patient who has been told that John Smith is a doctor and actually believes that he is a doctor, but who won’t take the medicine Dr Smith prescribes, doesn’t really have faith in Dr Smith because there is no trust or reliance.
The story is told of the 19th century acrobat, Blondin, whose death-defying feats on the tightrope made him very famous. Blondin used to put a tightrope up right across Niagara Falls. To fall from it would mean certain death. Huge crowds would gather and watch Blondin go out onto the rope and walk from one side of the Falls to the other. And then Blondin would offer anyone who wanted it, the chance to go on his back, piggy-back, and be carried across the falls.
No one ever took up the offer, except one man, Blondin’s manager, Harry Colcord. He made the trip on Blondin’s back many times. The crowd knew that Blondin was supposed to be able to do this, and they could see with their own eyes that it was true, but only Colcord had the faith to actually put his life in Blondin’s hands and be carried over safely. Having true faith in Christ means we are willing to put our lives in his hands and let him carry us through life safely and over to eternity in heaven.
"Faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see." (Hebrews 11:1, NIV)
One of the most basic truths of the Christian gospel is that we are saved by grace through faith. We read this in the well-known words of Ephesians 2:8-9: "For it is by grace you have saved, through faith—and this not of yourselves, it is the gift of God—not of works, so that no-one can boast."
It is important to realise that when we talk about being saved by faith, what the Bible means is not that it is our faith—faith in something, no matter what—that saves us, but that it is Jesus Christ who saves those put their faith in him as their Saviour and Lord.
The Bible also calls having faith in Christ "believing in Christ". In Acts 16:31, Paul’s answer to the question, "What must I do to be saved?" is: "Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved." At other times, this faith or belief is termed "trust"—"Trust in God, trust also in me" says Christ in John 14:1.
So, we are saved through faith, and we also know that the Bible is clear that the opposite also holds true, that "whoever does not believe stands condemned already because he has not believed in the name of God’s one and only Son." (John 3:18).
Obviously in light of both of these teachings it is of some importance to understand what this "faith" – that is so important – actually is and what it isn’t! The classic definition of faith in Protestant theology, summing up what the Bible teaches, has been well stated by the German Reformer, Philip Melanchthon:
"Saving faith involves three things: knowledge, intelligent assent, and trust."
Each of these elements matters: knowledge, intelligent assent and trust. It is hard to overstate how revolutionary this rediscovery of the biblical view of faith was, as opposed to the view of medieval Catholicism.
There is an element of knowledge in faith, according to Protestantism. We do not have a blind faith in whatever the Church believes, even if we haven’t a clue what that is. (This is what the Catholic Church mistakenly believed.) We can only have faith where we know what we believe. The American preacher A W Tozer said: "Faith is the gaze of the soul upon a saving God." Far from being "blind faith", true faith starts with gazing upon God and seeing him as he really is. We don’t need to know everything but we do need to know at least some things. At the very least it would be hard to see how anyone can have faith in Christ who does not understand what Paul summarises as "the gospel" about what Christ did for us:
"For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures." (1 Corinthians 15:3-4)
The second element in faith is what Melanchthon called "intellectual assent". This just means that as well as knowledge what the Bible about Christ, we actually agree that what it says is true. There are many academics who know all there is to know about the biblical languages and what the biblical writers meant in the books of Scripture that they wrote, but they don’t actually believe that what the Bible says is true. They have knowledge without intellectual assent, and therefore cannot be said to have faith. This intellectual assent is the element of faith Christ
emphasised when he said to Martha: "I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me will live, even though he dies and whoever lives and believes in me will never die," (John 11:25-26) and then asked her "Do you believe this?" In other words: "Do you accept this is true, what I’ve just told you?"
But important though knowledge and intellectual assent are, by themselves they are not what the Bible means by faith. According to the Bible, real faith, saving faith, is not just in the mind, it must also be in the heart. This is where the third element of faith comes in, the element of personal trust in Jesus Christ.
You see, there is a kind of faith that has the appearance of faith, but there’s something missing. It has no heart; it has no affection, no emotion to it. According to the Letter of James, even the demons can have this kind of false faith: "You believe that there is one God. Good! Even the demons believe that—and shudder." (James 2:19). The demons know and in their minds accept that there is a God—they "believe in God" in that sense—but they do not have faith in him!
To have real faith in Christ is to trust Christ with your salvation, your eternity, your whole life. Trust is to depend on him, to rely on him, to be committed to him and to be happy and contented to be so.
A patient who has been told that John Smith is a doctor and actually believes that he is a doctor, but who won’t take the medicine Dr Smith prescribes, doesn’t really have faith in Dr Smith because there is no trust or reliance.
The story is told of the 19th century acrobat, Blondin, whose death-defying feats on the tightrope made him very famous. Blondin used to put a tightrope up right across Niagara Falls. To fall from it would mean certain death. Huge crowds would gather and watch Blondin go out onto the rope and walk from one side of the Falls to the other. And then Blondin would offer anyone who wanted it, the chance to go on his back, piggy-back, and be carried across the falls.
No one ever took up the offer, except one man, Blondin’s manager, Harry Colcord. He made the trip on Blondin’s back many times. The crowd knew that Blondin was supposed to be able to do this, and they could see with their own eyes that it was true, but only Colcord had the faith to actually put his life in Blondin’s hands and be carried over safely. Having true faith in Christ means we are willing to put our lives in his hands and let him carry us through life safely and over to eternity in heaven.
Sunday, 1 April 2007
Loyalty to Christ
This is an edited version of a sermon preached at a Guild meeting on 13th March 2007.
Loyalty is sometimes harder to define than it is to recognise. It can be hard to put into words, but we know when someone has been loyal to us and we feel it when someone has betrayed us and been disloyal. If I was going to take a picture of “loyalty” and show it to you tonight, I would take a picture of my dog. A good dog’s relationship with its human masters is about as good a picture of loyalty as you can get. Loyalty of course is the state of being loyal, and in Chambers Dictionary, loyal is defined like this: “faithful, true, firm in allegiance, personally devoted to a sovereign.” And to this I would add another factor: that loyalty involves some degree of obedience whether out of duty or out of love. In each of these things my dog is loyal. She is devoted to me. Every time I walk in the door she greets me with affection as if she hasn’t seen me in months. She is firm in allegiance – she is on my side against any dog or any person outside the family pack who stands against us or is a danger to us. She is obedient – if I tell her to come she comes, if I tell her to sit, she sits – and not because she’s afraid of me, but because she enjoys obeying my commands.
The blue and gold border on the badge of the Guild is about another kind of loyalty: Our loyalty to Christ as our Lord and Saviour, and to God our Father as our Creator and Provider. When I was thinking about a Bible passage that would have something to say to us about loyalty, I decided on this passage near the end of the Book of Joshua, in Joshua chapter 24. It would be good if you had the passage open in your bibles as we look at some of the things this passage teaches us about our loyalty to God.
In the chapter just before this, Joshua delivers his farewell address to the nation as he nears the end of his life. And now in chapter 24 he gathers the people together at a place called Shechem, to establish anew under a covenant whether they are indeed going to be loyal to the LORD, the God of Israel, or not.
In this passage in Joshua chapter 24 we see a number of aspects of loyalty very clearly outlined for us and there are four I want to look at this evening, which I’ve labelled appreciation, allegiance, service and obedience. And each of these four things together, make up the character and attitude of a loyal Christian today, just as much as they made up the attitude of a faithful Israelite in Joshua’s day.
The first thing for us to notice is that loyalty involves appreciation of what our God and King has done for us in the past and will do for us in the future. In order to be loyal to God, we need to recognise who God is, what he has already done for us in our lives and especially in our salvation, and then grasp his promises for what he has in store for us in the future as his covenant people. We see this in verses 1-13 of our passage. Here Joshua gives a brief summary of one of the most exciting periods of history for God’s people in the Old Testament, to remind the people what the God who demands their loyalty now, has done for them and their forefathers in the past.
I don’t know about you, but I’m a big fan of those American television shows like “24” and “Prison Break” that run for half a year on the TV (though I usually cheat and watch them on DVD much quicker than one episode per week!). At the start of those shows there’s always a brief segment with “the story so far” to remind viewers what’s already happened before the next episode starts.
The first thirteen verses of Joshua 24 are a bit like one of those brief segments reminding us of the story so far. It takes us from before the time when Israel as a nation even existed, up to the then present day, with the nation having its own homeland in Canaan.
Joshua goes away back to the very first glimmerings of Israel as a people – to the father of the nation, Abraham, and even further back to his father, Terah. He looks back into antiquity to a point where the ancestors of the Israelites did not even worship the Lord, but other false gods.
But Joshua explains how God raised up Abraham, Isaac and Jacob to establish the nation of Israel, through their sons and other descendants. You’ll remember at the very end of the book of Genesis Jacob and his Sons settled in Egypt where Joseph was established as one of the national leaders. The Israelites prospered in Egypt until a new Pharaoh came to power who did not know Joseph. He feared that Egypt was going to be taken over by Israelites and so he put the Israelites into the hard bondage of slavery. Later, as verse five says, God sent Moses and Aaron to deliver the people from slavery.
And so the story continues, with the people’s time in the wilderness of the desert, until Moses died and Joshua became the leader of the people. They crossed over the Jordan and entered into the promised land of Canaan. They have fought battles at Jericho and Ai and established a new nation under God in the land of Israel after defeating the Canaanites who used to live there.
Hopefully you can grasp the point Joshua is making here. Before he goes on to question the people about their loyalty and faithfulness to God, he deliberately highlights what God has done for them; how faithful and loyal God has been to Israel. The reason for this is very simple. If we stop to consider what God has done for us, we are much more likely to want to be his loyal and faithful people, because he has done so much for us.
Appreciating God for what he is and what he has done is a very important step in establishing a relationship of trust and loyalty with him. Joshua pointed out to the people that they owed their freedom, their land and even their very existence solely to God’s goodness and mercy.
What about us, God’s people in the 21st century? Do we take the time to consider what God has done for us and our nation? Do we appreciate him for who he is and where we would be without him?
Joshua took the Israelites through a quick tour of their history to make his point. Couldn’t we do the same? Where would we be if God had not worked in the lives of Celtic missionaries like Columba, Cuthbert and Ninian who came to a harsh and violent land further north than civilisation stretched in those days, to bring the gospel to the “barbarians” who lived there? Where would we be had God later not sent Protestant Reformers who rediscovered the message of the gospel, the message of salvation by grace alone through faith, buried under layers of false Catholic teachings and medieval superstitions? But God raised up the likes of Patrick Hamilton, George Wishart, John Knox and Andrew Melville to reform the Church in Scotland and bring it back to the truths of God’s Word, to be the brightest light of the Reformation, known as “the land of the book” – the land where the purity of doctrine and worship according to the Bible was unsurpassed in the world.
And the list could go on and on. From the big national picture to our own local parish and church. Where would we be without the likes of Sidney Warnes who came to this building with only a handful of members left and renewed the building and the congregation leaving it strong and thriving for future ministers to take up the torch and keep a light in Bridgeton. Where would we be without the ordinary men and women who went before us in the race and worked to keep this church alive when others wanted it dead.
Above even these great things God has done for us in the ordinary course of history stands those amazing things God has done for us in the pages of Scripture. He created the world for us and sustains it by his mighty hand for us. He planned our salvation for us and in his eternal decree, settled before the world was made, he purposed that we should be brought to salvation. He sent his Son, Jesus Christ, into this world to save us, to die for us on the cross and rise again from the dead so that we might have eternal life. And he sent his Holy Spirit into each of our lives so that at the right time, in the right way, one day we heard the gospel and actually came to faith in Christ for ourselves.
God has done all these things for us. If we come to the point where we acknowledge this and appreciate the magnitude of what God has done for us, how can we not then feel not just a duty to be loyal and faithful to him in return, but a delight and passion to recognise him and stay loyal to him out of love? We owe him at least that, and many times that.
So loyalty first and foremost consists of appreciating what God has done for us. Secondly, loyalty involves allegiance. It means lining up in public, with determination and courage, on God’s side. You see Joshua it in verse 15: “Decide today whom you will serve...As for my family and me, we will serve the LORD.” Then in verse 23: “Pledge your loyalty to the LORD, the God of Israel.”
There is a diving line that runs through life – and it’s between those who are on the Lord’s side, and those who are against him. As Jesus says in Luke 11:23: “Anyone who is not for me is really against me; anyone who does not help me gather is really scattering.”
At another place, in Matthew’s Gospel (25:31-33), Christ says: “When the Son of Man comes as King and all the angels with him, he will sit on his royal throne, and the people of all the nations will be gathered before him. Then he will divide them into two groups, just as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. He will put the righteous people at his right and the others at his left.”
In Ephesians 6, Paul paints a picture of the universe as a battle between the forces of God and the forces of Satan. “For we are not fighting human beings but against the wicked spiritual forces in the heavenly world, the rulers, authorities, and cosmic powers of this dark age. So put on God’s armour now!”
Loyalty involves allegiance. It involves taking sides and being willing to show which side you are on. You cannot sit on the fence where Jesus is concerned. You can’t be for him a little bit. You can’t be a Christian up to a point. As one saying puts it, if he isn’t Lord of all, he isn’t Lord at all. Meaning, if you won’t have him as your King ruling every part of your life, then you have a problem, and need to examine your attitudes and your faith.
And why wouldn’t you want him to be Lord of your whole life? The only reason is sin. There’s no good reason why he shouldn’t be Lord of all your life. His yoke is easy and his burden is light. You see the choice isn’t really between being ruled by Christ or remaining free. The choice is between being ruled by Christ and being free, or being a slave of sin, in bondage to evil and ruled by Satan.
Paul wrote in Romans 10:9: “If you confess that Jesus is Lord and believe that God raised him from death, you will be saved.”
Jesus said in Luke 12:8-9, “I assure you that those who declare publicly that they belong to me, the Son of Man will do the same for them before the angels of God. But those who reject me publicly, the Son of Man will also reject them before the angels of God.”
The question each of us faces is this: are we really prepared to stand up for Jesus when it comes to the crunch? Not in church where to stand up for Jesus is the norm, but out there in the world, where standing up for Jesus will lose us friends, cost us dearly, leave us misunderstood, hated, persecuted, sometimes imprisoned, or maybe even martyred?
What a question! How can any of us answer it truly until we are in that kind of situation? But leaving aside the big life and death situations, how many of us aren’t even prepared to stand up for Jesus in the little things of life. How many of keep silent when God or Jesus are dismissed as a joke? How many of us pretend it’s okay what someone is saying in mixed company when we know deep down it isn’t okay? How many of us would be embarrassed if acquaintances or friends knew we were Christians who actually believe what the Bible teaches. How many of us are willing to stand up and say that’s wrong, or you shouldn’t be living that way?
But God demands more than that from us. He wants us to show our true colours all the time, and line up on the battlefield under God’s standard, as loyal soldiers, committed to his cause and willing to be attacked in defence of God’s truth and God’s way.
That’s what true allegiance is. That’s the mindset of these Israelites in Joshua 24. They are for God all the way here.
The third aspect of loyalty that the passage brings out clearly for us is that loyalty involves service. If we are to be loyal to God, we must be willing to serve God. The theme of serving God runs throughout our passage in Joshua 24 like a refrain. In verse 14 Joshua says, “Now then, honour the LORD and serve him sincerely and faithfully.”
In verse 21 the people are adamant, “We will serve the LORD,” they cry.
Service is not a popular concept in our day. Everyone’s supposed to look after number one. Life is a rat race to get to the top of the tree, to be rich and famous so that you can have people to serve you, not so you can be someone else’s servant. But God calls his people to serve him. Part of our being loyal to God is being willing to serve God. If you look back to the very beginning of Exodus when God appeared to Moses in the burning bush, the main reason God decided to free his people from bondage in Egypt was so that they could come and serve God by worshipping him on the sacred mountain of Sinai.
Later, in the desert, Moses says to the Israelites: “"Now, people of Israel, listen to what the LORD your God demands of you: Worship the LORD and do all that he commands. Love him, serve him with all your heart, and obey all his laws. I am giving them to you today for your benefit.”
The heart of serving God is worship. In the Old Testament the tribe of Israelites who had responsibility for serving God as priests were the Levites (Moses and Aaron were Levites). But in the New Testament, every believer is a priest to God. In the sense of offering up sacrifices of atonement there is of course only one priest we recognise – Christ who sacrificed himself on the cross. But in the sense of giving God worship, and living a life of service to him, all God’s people are priests.
As Paul wrote in Romans 12:1: “So then, my brothers and sisters, because of God’s great mercy to us I appeal to you: Offer yourselves as a living sacrifice to God, dedicated to his service and pleasing to him. This is the true worship you should offer.”
Everything we do should be done to give God glory – and everything we do does give God glory if it is done with the right attitude and for the right reasons. Baking a cake, or mowing the lawn glorifies God if done with the right heart – it’s not just “religious” things. As we saw last time when we looked at holiness – in God’s eyes there are no sacred and secular areas of life. Everything we do is to be holy. In the same way, everything we do should be to serve God, and that includes all the acts of love, kindness or goodness we show to other people. For as we serve other people we are serving God too, for we know that the greatest commandment is both to love God with all our heart and to love our neighbour as ourselves. We can’t truly do the first unless we also do the second, and likewise we can’t truly do the second without doing the first. Both love to God and our neighbour go hand-in-hand.
Paul sums this up in 1 Corinthians 10:31 by saying, “Whatever you do...do it all for God’s glory.”
Jesus said that we are to worship the Lord and “serve only him.” So, not only are we to serve God, we are to serve only God. We are to be single-minded in our devotion to God and in our worship of him. Nothing else is to be worshipped. Not Mary, not the saints, not statues or relics, not money or fame, not our careers, or our health, our bodies or anyone else’s body. Only God deserves our worship, and our exclusive service in this world. And part of being loyal to God is to keep ourselves free from idols. That’s very clear in our passage, where several times, Joshua brings the people back to a sharp reality. If you are God’s people – if you really want to serve him, then get rid of the idols.
As one old hymn puts it: “The dearest idol I have known, whate’er that idol be; help me to tear it from thy throne and worship only thee.”
If we are truly to be devoted to God’s service and worship, what sort of things do we need to think about in our lives? Well one obvious thing is that we should be committed to coming to church every Sunday to worship God. Hebrews 10:25 says: “Let us not give up the habit of meeting together, as some are doing. Instead, let us encourage one another all the more, since you see that the Day of the Lord is coming nearer.” Coming to church can be a habit – but let’s make sure it is a good habit, not done just out of habit, but because we really want to gather to worship God, praising him from the heart, and eagerly expecting to learn about him as his word is read and preached.
But there are aspects of service maybe we need to think about. Maybe we need to think about how little time we spend in prayer or in reading the Scriptures? Or maybe we need to think about how much time we spend doing certain things so that we end up not having enough time to go to church and meet our responsibilities to the church. Perhaps we need to think again about how we use our money and see if we are giving to God’s work sacrificially and generously. At this time, during a Stewardship campaign, we have the perfect opportunity to look again at ourselves, to see if we are serving God as we should with our time, our skills and abilities, and yes our money, but most of all – are we loving and serving God with all our heart, mind, soul and strength?
So far we’ve seen that loyalty to God involves appreciating who God is and what he has done, having a true allegiance to him and showing it, and being single-minded in serving him as our God. The last aspect of loyalty we’re going to look at tonight is in some respects the most straightforward, and yet it can be the hardest of all. If we are loyal to Christ the king, we should live in obedience to Christ the king. Being loyal to God, means obeying God. Loyalty involves obedience.
Once again we see this in our passage. The Israelites realised that it was impossible to be loyal to God or to serve God unless they obeyed God. In verse 24 they say: “We will serve the Lord our God. We will obey his commands.”
If serving someone is an unpopular concept, the idea of obeying someone else in authority over us is even more unpopular! Everyone wants to be his or her own boss. The idea that God isn’t just a big teddy bear who will give us a cuddle when we’re feeling sad, or who will slip us a bar of chocolate when we’ve done something good, is shocking to some people today, sadly even some people in the church. Sadly some people take something that’s true, like God is love, and twist it with their definition of what love is, to the point where this god of love (and now I’m using a small “g” for god by the way), where this god of theirs wouldn’t possible punish anyone, or even have the cheek to tell someone how they should live. The idea that there’s a problem in living in a way which God says is wrong is shocking to these people.
But our God is not an idol invented in the mind of sinful men. He is the sovereign Lord of heaven and earth, the Creator of the universe. The earth and everyone in it belong to him and he has the sovereign right to command his creatures to obey him. His commandments are not voluntary guides that we can choose to obey or disregard as we see fit. No, they are eternal laws that every human being is bound to obey or face punishment for disobedience.
But as God’s own people, loyal to him as our king, these laws are not to be obeyed by us out of cold duty or fear, but out of love and thankfulness for all he has done for us. And we are not left on our own to sink or swim. God has given us his Holy Spirit to empower us and help us to live in obedience to his will.
Joshua challenged the people of Israel gathered at Shechem. “Pledge your loyalty to the LORD, the God of Israel,” he said to them. What about us today? Knowing that being loyal to Christ Jesus involves recognition of what he has done for us and will do for us; making our allegiance with him, being on his side even when that’s unpopular, even when that’s misunderstood, even when that’s hard; serving him in our acts of worship and in our acts of charity and mercy for other people; and obeying his will even when we cannot see why we should or why he wants us to do certain things or stop doing certain things. Knowing all that, are we prepared to stand up and pledge our loyalty to the Lord? Are we prepared to take a stand and say, with Joshua, “As for my family and me, we will serve the LORD”? Are we loyal to the King of Kings, or are we part-time Christians, half for him, half against him, or are we traitors to his cause, spies in the camp, whose hearts are not faithful and true to him, but serve another master? That’s a very important question for us. In our own strength, we cannot stay loyal to him; but by his grace, we can. By grace we are more than conquerors through him who loves us. May we all live by grace, live by faith, in the shadow of the cross, in the light of God’s purity and holiness, bound by loyalty to the King of Kings.
Loyalty is sometimes harder to define than it is to recognise. It can be hard to put into words, but we know when someone has been loyal to us and we feel it when someone has betrayed us and been disloyal. If I was going to take a picture of “loyalty” and show it to you tonight, I would take a picture of my dog. A good dog’s relationship with its human masters is about as good a picture of loyalty as you can get. Loyalty of course is the state of being loyal, and in Chambers Dictionary, loyal is defined like this: “faithful, true, firm in allegiance, personally devoted to a sovereign.” And to this I would add another factor: that loyalty involves some degree of obedience whether out of duty or out of love. In each of these things my dog is loyal. She is devoted to me. Every time I walk in the door she greets me with affection as if she hasn’t seen me in months. She is firm in allegiance – she is on my side against any dog or any person outside the family pack who stands against us or is a danger to us. She is obedient – if I tell her to come she comes, if I tell her to sit, she sits – and not because she’s afraid of me, but because she enjoys obeying my commands.
The blue and gold border on the badge of the Guild is about another kind of loyalty: Our loyalty to Christ as our Lord and Saviour, and to God our Father as our Creator and Provider. When I was thinking about a Bible passage that would have something to say to us about loyalty, I decided on this passage near the end of the Book of Joshua, in Joshua chapter 24. It would be good if you had the passage open in your bibles as we look at some of the things this passage teaches us about our loyalty to God.
In the chapter just before this, Joshua delivers his farewell address to the nation as he nears the end of his life. And now in chapter 24 he gathers the people together at a place called Shechem, to establish anew under a covenant whether they are indeed going to be loyal to the LORD, the God of Israel, or not.
In this passage in Joshua chapter 24 we see a number of aspects of loyalty very clearly outlined for us and there are four I want to look at this evening, which I’ve labelled appreciation, allegiance, service and obedience. And each of these four things together, make up the character and attitude of a loyal Christian today, just as much as they made up the attitude of a faithful Israelite in Joshua’s day.
The first thing for us to notice is that loyalty involves appreciation of what our God and King has done for us in the past and will do for us in the future. In order to be loyal to God, we need to recognise who God is, what he has already done for us in our lives and especially in our salvation, and then grasp his promises for what he has in store for us in the future as his covenant people. We see this in verses 1-13 of our passage. Here Joshua gives a brief summary of one of the most exciting periods of history for God’s people in the Old Testament, to remind the people what the God who demands their loyalty now, has done for them and their forefathers in the past.
I don’t know about you, but I’m a big fan of those American television shows like “24” and “Prison Break” that run for half a year on the TV (though I usually cheat and watch them on DVD much quicker than one episode per week!). At the start of those shows there’s always a brief segment with “the story so far” to remind viewers what’s already happened before the next episode starts.
The first thirteen verses of Joshua 24 are a bit like one of those brief segments reminding us of the story so far. It takes us from before the time when Israel as a nation even existed, up to the then present day, with the nation having its own homeland in Canaan.
Joshua goes away back to the very first glimmerings of Israel as a people – to the father of the nation, Abraham, and even further back to his father, Terah. He looks back into antiquity to a point where the ancestors of the Israelites did not even worship the Lord, but other false gods.
But Joshua explains how God raised up Abraham, Isaac and Jacob to establish the nation of Israel, through their sons and other descendants. You’ll remember at the very end of the book of Genesis Jacob and his Sons settled in Egypt where Joseph was established as one of the national leaders. The Israelites prospered in Egypt until a new Pharaoh came to power who did not know Joseph. He feared that Egypt was going to be taken over by Israelites and so he put the Israelites into the hard bondage of slavery. Later, as verse five says, God sent Moses and Aaron to deliver the people from slavery.
And so the story continues, with the people’s time in the wilderness of the desert, until Moses died and Joshua became the leader of the people. They crossed over the Jordan and entered into the promised land of Canaan. They have fought battles at Jericho and Ai and established a new nation under God in the land of Israel after defeating the Canaanites who used to live there.
Hopefully you can grasp the point Joshua is making here. Before he goes on to question the people about their loyalty and faithfulness to God, he deliberately highlights what God has done for them; how faithful and loyal God has been to Israel. The reason for this is very simple. If we stop to consider what God has done for us, we are much more likely to want to be his loyal and faithful people, because he has done so much for us.
Appreciating God for what he is and what he has done is a very important step in establishing a relationship of trust and loyalty with him. Joshua pointed out to the people that they owed their freedom, their land and even their very existence solely to God’s goodness and mercy.
What about us, God’s people in the 21st century? Do we take the time to consider what God has done for us and our nation? Do we appreciate him for who he is and where we would be without him?
Joshua took the Israelites through a quick tour of their history to make his point. Couldn’t we do the same? Where would we be if God had not worked in the lives of Celtic missionaries like Columba, Cuthbert and Ninian who came to a harsh and violent land further north than civilisation stretched in those days, to bring the gospel to the “barbarians” who lived there? Where would we be had God later not sent Protestant Reformers who rediscovered the message of the gospel, the message of salvation by grace alone through faith, buried under layers of false Catholic teachings and medieval superstitions? But God raised up the likes of Patrick Hamilton, George Wishart, John Knox and Andrew Melville to reform the Church in Scotland and bring it back to the truths of God’s Word, to be the brightest light of the Reformation, known as “the land of the book” – the land where the purity of doctrine and worship according to the Bible was unsurpassed in the world.
And the list could go on and on. From the big national picture to our own local parish and church. Where would we be without the likes of Sidney Warnes who came to this building with only a handful of members left and renewed the building and the congregation leaving it strong and thriving for future ministers to take up the torch and keep a light in Bridgeton. Where would we be without the ordinary men and women who went before us in the race and worked to keep this church alive when others wanted it dead.
Above even these great things God has done for us in the ordinary course of history stands those amazing things God has done for us in the pages of Scripture. He created the world for us and sustains it by his mighty hand for us. He planned our salvation for us and in his eternal decree, settled before the world was made, he purposed that we should be brought to salvation. He sent his Son, Jesus Christ, into this world to save us, to die for us on the cross and rise again from the dead so that we might have eternal life. And he sent his Holy Spirit into each of our lives so that at the right time, in the right way, one day we heard the gospel and actually came to faith in Christ for ourselves.
God has done all these things for us. If we come to the point where we acknowledge this and appreciate the magnitude of what God has done for us, how can we not then feel not just a duty to be loyal and faithful to him in return, but a delight and passion to recognise him and stay loyal to him out of love? We owe him at least that, and many times that.
So loyalty first and foremost consists of appreciating what God has done for us. Secondly, loyalty involves allegiance. It means lining up in public, with determination and courage, on God’s side. You see Joshua it in verse 15: “Decide today whom you will serve...As for my family and me, we will serve the LORD.” Then in verse 23: “Pledge your loyalty to the LORD, the God of Israel.”
There is a diving line that runs through life – and it’s between those who are on the Lord’s side, and those who are against him. As Jesus says in Luke 11:23: “Anyone who is not for me is really against me; anyone who does not help me gather is really scattering.”
At another place, in Matthew’s Gospel (25:31-33), Christ says: “When the Son of Man comes as King and all the angels with him, he will sit on his royal throne, and the people of all the nations will be gathered before him. Then he will divide them into two groups, just as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. He will put the righteous people at his right and the others at his left.”
In Ephesians 6, Paul paints a picture of the universe as a battle between the forces of God and the forces of Satan. “For we are not fighting human beings but against the wicked spiritual forces in the heavenly world, the rulers, authorities, and cosmic powers of this dark age. So put on God’s armour now!”
Loyalty involves allegiance. It involves taking sides and being willing to show which side you are on. You cannot sit on the fence where Jesus is concerned. You can’t be for him a little bit. You can’t be a Christian up to a point. As one saying puts it, if he isn’t Lord of all, he isn’t Lord at all. Meaning, if you won’t have him as your King ruling every part of your life, then you have a problem, and need to examine your attitudes and your faith.
And why wouldn’t you want him to be Lord of your whole life? The only reason is sin. There’s no good reason why he shouldn’t be Lord of all your life. His yoke is easy and his burden is light. You see the choice isn’t really between being ruled by Christ or remaining free. The choice is between being ruled by Christ and being free, or being a slave of sin, in bondage to evil and ruled by Satan.
Paul wrote in Romans 10:9: “If you confess that Jesus is Lord and believe that God raised him from death, you will be saved.”
Jesus said in Luke 12:8-9, “I assure you that those who declare publicly that they belong to me, the Son of Man will do the same for them before the angels of God. But those who reject me publicly, the Son of Man will also reject them before the angels of God.”
The question each of us faces is this: are we really prepared to stand up for Jesus when it comes to the crunch? Not in church where to stand up for Jesus is the norm, but out there in the world, where standing up for Jesus will lose us friends, cost us dearly, leave us misunderstood, hated, persecuted, sometimes imprisoned, or maybe even martyred?
What a question! How can any of us answer it truly until we are in that kind of situation? But leaving aside the big life and death situations, how many of us aren’t even prepared to stand up for Jesus in the little things of life. How many of keep silent when God or Jesus are dismissed as a joke? How many of us pretend it’s okay what someone is saying in mixed company when we know deep down it isn’t okay? How many of us would be embarrassed if acquaintances or friends knew we were Christians who actually believe what the Bible teaches. How many of us are willing to stand up and say that’s wrong, or you shouldn’t be living that way?
But God demands more than that from us. He wants us to show our true colours all the time, and line up on the battlefield under God’s standard, as loyal soldiers, committed to his cause and willing to be attacked in defence of God’s truth and God’s way.
That’s what true allegiance is. That’s the mindset of these Israelites in Joshua 24. They are for God all the way here.
The third aspect of loyalty that the passage brings out clearly for us is that loyalty involves service. If we are to be loyal to God, we must be willing to serve God. The theme of serving God runs throughout our passage in Joshua 24 like a refrain. In verse 14 Joshua says, “Now then, honour the LORD and serve him sincerely and faithfully.”
In verse 21 the people are adamant, “We will serve the LORD,” they cry.
Service is not a popular concept in our day. Everyone’s supposed to look after number one. Life is a rat race to get to the top of the tree, to be rich and famous so that you can have people to serve you, not so you can be someone else’s servant. But God calls his people to serve him. Part of our being loyal to God is being willing to serve God. If you look back to the very beginning of Exodus when God appeared to Moses in the burning bush, the main reason God decided to free his people from bondage in Egypt was so that they could come and serve God by worshipping him on the sacred mountain of Sinai.
Later, in the desert, Moses says to the Israelites: “"Now, people of Israel, listen to what the LORD your God demands of you: Worship the LORD and do all that he commands. Love him, serve him with all your heart, and obey all his laws. I am giving them to you today for your benefit.”
The heart of serving God is worship. In the Old Testament the tribe of Israelites who had responsibility for serving God as priests were the Levites (Moses and Aaron were Levites). But in the New Testament, every believer is a priest to God. In the sense of offering up sacrifices of atonement there is of course only one priest we recognise – Christ who sacrificed himself on the cross. But in the sense of giving God worship, and living a life of service to him, all God’s people are priests.
As Paul wrote in Romans 12:1: “So then, my brothers and sisters, because of God’s great mercy to us I appeal to you: Offer yourselves as a living sacrifice to God, dedicated to his service and pleasing to him. This is the true worship you should offer.”
Everything we do should be done to give God glory – and everything we do does give God glory if it is done with the right attitude and for the right reasons. Baking a cake, or mowing the lawn glorifies God if done with the right heart – it’s not just “religious” things. As we saw last time when we looked at holiness – in God’s eyes there are no sacred and secular areas of life. Everything we do is to be holy. In the same way, everything we do should be to serve God, and that includes all the acts of love, kindness or goodness we show to other people. For as we serve other people we are serving God too, for we know that the greatest commandment is both to love God with all our heart and to love our neighbour as ourselves. We can’t truly do the first unless we also do the second, and likewise we can’t truly do the second without doing the first. Both love to God and our neighbour go hand-in-hand.
Paul sums this up in 1 Corinthians 10:31 by saying, “Whatever you do...do it all for God’s glory.”
Jesus said that we are to worship the Lord and “serve only him.” So, not only are we to serve God, we are to serve only God. We are to be single-minded in our devotion to God and in our worship of him. Nothing else is to be worshipped. Not Mary, not the saints, not statues or relics, not money or fame, not our careers, or our health, our bodies or anyone else’s body. Only God deserves our worship, and our exclusive service in this world. And part of being loyal to God is to keep ourselves free from idols. That’s very clear in our passage, where several times, Joshua brings the people back to a sharp reality. If you are God’s people – if you really want to serve him, then get rid of the idols.
As one old hymn puts it: “The dearest idol I have known, whate’er that idol be; help me to tear it from thy throne and worship only thee.”
If we are truly to be devoted to God’s service and worship, what sort of things do we need to think about in our lives? Well one obvious thing is that we should be committed to coming to church every Sunday to worship God. Hebrews 10:25 says: “Let us not give up the habit of meeting together, as some are doing. Instead, let us encourage one another all the more, since you see that the Day of the Lord is coming nearer.” Coming to church can be a habit – but let’s make sure it is a good habit, not done just out of habit, but because we really want to gather to worship God, praising him from the heart, and eagerly expecting to learn about him as his word is read and preached.
But there are aspects of service maybe we need to think about. Maybe we need to think about how little time we spend in prayer or in reading the Scriptures? Or maybe we need to think about how much time we spend doing certain things so that we end up not having enough time to go to church and meet our responsibilities to the church. Perhaps we need to think again about how we use our money and see if we are giving to God’s work sacrificially and generously. At this time, during a Stewardship campaign, we have the perfect opportunity to look again at ourselves, to see if we are serving God as we should with our time, our skills and abilities, and yes our money, but most of all – are we loving and serving God with all our heart, mind, soul and strength?
So far we’ve seen that loyalty to God involves appreciating who God is and what he has done, having a true allegiance to him and showing it, and being single-minded in serving him as our God. The last aspect of loyalty we’re going to look at tonight is in some respects the most straightforward, and yet it can be the hardest of all. If we are loyal to Christ the king, we should live in obedience to Christ the king. Being loyal to God, means obeying God. Loyalty involves obedience.
Once again we see this in our passage. The Israelites realised that it was impossible to be loyal to God or to serve God unless they obeyed God. In verse 24 they say: “We will serve the Lord our God. We will obey his commands.”
If serving someone is an unpopular concept, the idea of obeying someone else in authority over us is even more unpopular! Everyone wants to be his or her own boss. The idea that God isn’t just a big teddy bear who will give us a cuddle when we’re feeling sad, or who will slip us a bar of chocolate when we’ve done something good, is shocking to some people today, sadly even some people in the church. Sadly some people take something that’s true, like God is love, and twist it with their definition of what love is, to the point where this god of love (and now I’m using a small “g” for god by the way), where this god of theirs wouldn’t possible punish anyone, or even have the cheek to tell someone how they should live. The idea that there’s a problem in living in a way which God says is wrong is shocking to these people.
But our God is not an idol invented in the mind of sinful men. He is the sovereign Lord of heaven and earth, the Creator of the universe. The earth and everyone in it belong to him and he has the sovereign right to command his creatures to obey him. His commandments are not voluntary guides that we can choose to obey or disregard as we see fit. No, they are eternal laws that every human being is bound to obey or face punishment for disobedience.
But as God’s own people, loyal to him as our king, these laws are not to be obeyed by us out of cold duty or fear, but out of love and thankfulness for all he has done for us. And we are not left on our own to sink or swim. God has given us his Holy Spirit to empower us and help us to live in obedience to his will.
Joshua challenged the people of Israel gathered at Shechem. “Pledge your loyalty to the LORD, the God of Israel,” he said to them. What about us today? Knowing that being loyal to Christ Jesus involves recognition of what he has done for us and will do for us; making our allegiance with him, being on his side even when that’s unpopular, even when that’s misunderstood, even when that’s hard; serving him in our acts of worship and in our acts of charity and mercy for other people; and obeying his will even when we cannot see why we should or why he wants us to do certain things or stop doing certain things. Knowing all that, are we prepared to stand up and pledge our loyalty to the Lord? Are we prepared to take a stand and say, with Joshua, “As for my family and me, we will serve the LORD”? Are we loyal to the King of Kings, or are we part-time Christians, half for him, half against him, or are we traitors to his cause, spies in the camp, whose hearts are not faithful and true to him, but serve another master? That’s a very important question for us. In our own strength, we cannot stay loyal to him; but by his grace, we can. By grace we are more than conquerors through him who loves us. May we all live by grace, live by faith, in the shadow of the cross, in the light of God’s purity and holiness, bound by loyalty to the King of Kings.
Tuesday, 8 August 2006
Encounters with Jesus: The Centurion
When preparing for tonight’s service I read something that J C Ryle said that I thought was very interesting – one of those things that sounds quite obvious once you hear it, but I had not really considered before. He said that the events of these chapters of Matthew were very significant because they follow right after the three great chapters of the Christ’s teaching in the Sermon on the Mount. After the teaching comes a series of great miracles performed by Jesus to show everyone, including anyone reading this Gospel today, that the authority of Jesus’ words are backed up by the authority of his actions.
That’s the key I think to understanding the miracles of Jesus. Certainly they demonstrate Christ’s power and authority, they proclaim his deity as God the Son, but they are far more than mere divine magic tricks. They back up his teaching and more often than not they present to us his teaching in visual form. And finally they display the character of Jesus – his compassion, mercy and love for people – and I think we will see all these elements in our readings tonight and over the next two Sunday evenings.
Now, as we look at this passage from Matthew’s Gospel this evening it would be very helpful to have the words of Scripture before you in the printed order of service as I will be referring to the passage quite a lot.
It is apparent even on a cursory reading of this passage that it is all about faith. Twice at key points in the passage, Christ mentions faith explicitly. In verse 10: "With no one in Israel have I found such faith." And again in verse 13: "Let is be done for you as you have believed."
Like so many passages of the Bible the more you meditate on a passage like this and study it, the more you see in it. So in the first part of this sermon I would like us to think about the man of faith in this passage, the Centurion; and then in the second part of the sermon I think we should consider some very important things this passage tells us about the one in whom the Centurion put his faith.
Let us begin then by thinking about this Centurion who comes to Jesus at the beginning of the passage. Now as you probably know as centurion was a rank in the Roman army – an officer placed in command of one hundred men. Actually many centurions commanded more men than this, but the name comes from the fact that an officer of this rank commanded one hundred men. It is almost certain that there would be a Roman garrison in a town like Capernaum and it could well be that this centurion is the garrison commander. The commentators tell us that Centurions were the "working officers, the backbone of the Roman army," lower than a colonel or general but higher than a mere lieutenant - something like the rank of Captain in the British army. So here was a fairly important man in the Roman occupied town of Capernaum.
But there’s something different about this particular Centurion that made him stand out, and caused the Gospel writers to record this passage for us to read all these years later. The thing that stands out is that this Centurion is a man of faith. Whether he had heard the Sermon on the Mount, or whether he had seen or heard of other miracles that Jesus had performed before this we don’t know. But we do know that he certainly knew of Jesus and probably he knew quite a lot about Jesus as well. And on the basis of whatever knowledge he has, he uses it, leading to faith and action.
Before we go any further I’ll just briefly address the supposed contradiction between Matthew’s account of this incident and Luke’s account. In Luke’s account the Centurion and Jesus do not meet face-to-face, but communicate through messengers. The commentators get worked up about this. The best explanation it seems to me is simply that Luke’s account gives the details that there were go-between messengers involved, whereas Matthew simply omits this detail. This doesn’t make Matthew’s account inaccurate. He just distils the story down to the essentials. In the ancient world, when a messenger conveyed the words of one person to another it was regarded as if they had spoken personally to each other. Just as if in our day we say we talked with so-and-so, we might omit the detail that we spoke on the telephone. It doesn’t mean we did not speak. So here the messengers that Luke mentions were really the telephones of their day and are omitted from the story in Matthew’s version.
There are several aspects of this Centurion’s faith that merit our attention this evening. In fact there are five aspects of his faith I would like to mention.
Firstly, this Centurion has a practical living faith. We’ve seen that already. In verse 5, the Centurion "came forward to him, appealing to him." This man’s faith obviously affects how he lives his life. It’s not just something intellectual or emotional for him. So when his young servant is laid low with a terrible crippling illness, in verse 5 the Centurion seeks out Jesus to make his appeal to him. "To beg him" wouldn’t be too strong a translation, such is the strength and intensity of the Centurion’s appeal. And what is his heart-felt appeal? To heal "his servant." The words translated "my servant" are literally "my boy", so it is likely it was a young male slave in the Centurion’s household who was lying in bed, literally "thrown down onto his bed," paralysed and in a lot of pain. Calling the servant "my boy" surely indicates that the Centurion had real affection for him. He thought of him as more than just a commodity to do work for him. This in part probably explains why the Centurion went to such lengths to try to get him healed. And there’s a lesson here for employers I think, who no longer think of the people who work for them as "personnel" but merely "human resources"! But we’ll not go any further down that road tonight, except to note that this important military man is concerned for his servant and takes the time to do what he believes will be of most benefit to him and that was going to him and asking Christ to heal him.
This is not to downplay the importance of medicine. I am not advocating "faith healing" over modern medicine. I am reminded of a story I read about how some people get the wrong idea about what real faith is. There was once a great flood somewhere in the Southern United States and one farmer’s house was flooded right up to the rooftop. And on the roof the farmer stood clinging the chimney. A rescue boat with two fireman in it came along and they shouted to the farmer to come over and climb in the boat. But the old farmer shook his head. "I’m trusting in the Lord for rescue," he said. They tried to persuade him to come with them, but he was having none of it and finally they had to go off in the boat to see if they could find someone else needing rescued. The water continued to rise and even the roof began to go under water and the farmer had to climb right up on top of the chimney stack to keep dry. Just then a helicopter flew over and started to hover overhead. The pilot shouted down on a loud hailer, "Hold on and we’ll lower down a man on a winch to get you." But the old farmer waved the helicopter off. "No way, I’m trusting in the Lord for rescue," he shouted. Well the helicopter was running low on fuel and couldn’t stay over the farmer’s house any longer so it flew away. Not long afterwards the flood went over the top of the house and old farmer drowned. When he got to heaven and met God the first thing he said to him was this: "Lord, I trusted in you real hard. I never doubted you for a second. I never thought you would fail me like this and let me drown." And God replied, "Fail you? Didn’t you see the boat and the helicopter I sent to rescue you?"
Well modern medicine is a bit like the boat and the helicopter in that story. Just because something is discovered or invented by the hand of man doesn’t mean that the hand of God isn’t behind it.
But let’s get back to our Centurion now. We’ve seen that the Centurion’s faith expresses itself in real love for other people. Our faith too must be practical and loving if it is to be a living and not a dead faith, which the Letter of James tells us will is useless. We should be looking for opportunities to help our neighbours and show them practical care and support. And of course where there is sickness and suffering we should take the time to seek out Jesus and bring those in need to our Saviour in prayer. Whether he chooses to heal through normal medicine or through something that modern medicine can’t explain is up to him.
Then secondly, in verse 8 we see that the Centurion had a humble faith. "Lord, I am not worthy to have you come under my roof," he says. He comes to Jesus not proud and arrogant as we might expect an officer in an occupying army to behave. But filled he comes to Jesus full of humility and self-deprecation. Even though a Roman officer used to soldiers obeying his orders, he is not too proud to come to a poor Jewish Rabbi for help. That must have taken a big heart to do that, not knowing what his men, or the other officers, or his superiors would think if news got back to them. To me that’s probably the best piece of evidence that this Centurion’s faith in Christ was not merely the faith a patient might have in a doctor. Because the human heart is not humble, not genuinely humble, by nature. By nature we want to make ourselves the centre of attention. By nature we’re number one and we want people to know it. But when a person is born again by the Holy Spirit, given a new heart and made spiritually alive, their whole perspective on life changes. No longer are they number one: Jesus is number one in their lives. And, like John the Baptist says, as he "increases" we must "decrease". Our selfishness diminishes. Our whole life view alters and we begin to see that it is God’s glory that counts in life, not our own glory, for we have none.
Thirdly, the Centurion has a strong faith. The whole passage demonstrates this. It is quite clear this Centurion really believed that bringing his servant’s illness before Christ would be a way of bringing relief from suffering and real healing to the young man paralysed. In verse 8 again, "Only say the word and my servant will be healed," he says. It is a confident faith – and by that I mean not a faith confident in itself, but a faith supremely confident of the one in whom his faith is placed. "Just say the word, Lord and it will happen" is his attitude. There’s no doubt in the Centurion’s mind or heart. He believes Jesus can heal his servant and he believes Jesus will heal his servant, even though he is too ashamed to have the Saviour even come into his house. Perhaps this because the Centurion knows that his life is not all it should be, perhaps because having heard parts of Jesus’ teaching, he knows he does not deserve to receive any blessings from God. So combined with a strong trust is a strong sense of unworthiness and a realisation perhaps that his relationship with Christ is based entirely on grace. Merit doesn’t come into it. And that’s certainly something we need to keep constantly in mind as well. We should never take God’s help for granted. He doesn’t owe it to us. He blesses us only out of grace and love because he wants to.
Fourthly this Centurion has a faith built on knowledge. In other words, this Centurion’s faith is not ignorance, it is not a blind faith. It is built on what he knows about Christ. In verse 9 the Centurion shows a remarkable understanding of who Jesus is and what authority he has from God. It’s really quite a deep insight that the Centurion displays here. He has a rather profound theological understanding it seems to me to make the comparison he does between his life as a Captain in the Roman army and Christ’s ministry on earth. And he certainly does make that comparison. "I too am a man under authority," he says. He realises that Christ is under the authority of God the Father. In John chapter 17, verse 4 Christ himself says as much as he prays to the Father: "I glorified you on earth, having accomplished the work that you gave me to do." And in the Great Commission at the very end of Matthew’s Gospel, chapter 28, verse 18, "All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me," he said, which clearly implies that Someone gave Christ all authority, and that can only be God the Father. In some way, we don’t know how sketchy his knowledge is, but at a basic level at least, this Centurion grasps something of that truth: "I too am a man under authority."
But the second piece of knowledge the Centurion has about Jesus, and upon which his faith is built, is the knowledge that as well as being under someone else’s authority - and indeed because of it - the Centurion also realises that Christ has authority over other people, events, illness, over everything in fact. And as a result, Christ has authority to tell people what to do – even to tell illnesses what to do. "I say to one, ‘Go’ and he goes, and to another ‘Come’ and he comes, and to my servant, ‘Do this’ and he does it." And of course what the Centurion is really saying here is that Jesus has that kind of power and authority not over junior soldiers but over things that only God has power over: to say ‘Go’ and demons will leave the person they are possessing, or to say ‘Come’ and a paralysed man will rise from his bed, or to say ‘Do this’ and sinners dead in trespasses and sins will be born again, come to faith in Christ and be saved.
Every indication here is that the Centurion realises this Jesus is far more than just a popular Jewish teacher and healer. He surely sees him as the Son of God, His Lord and Saviour. And that leads us on to our last point. Fifthly, this Centurion has an unexpected faith. A professional solder is perhaps not the kind of person we would think of as most likely to come to faith in Jesus, or the kind of person whose way of life we would tend to think of as being godly. But more than that this man was a Gentile, not a Jew at all. Both of these facts make it all the more amazing that such a man had come to genuine, life changing faith in Jesus Christ. Jesus himself proclaims that he had not come across such faith even among his fellow Jews. In verse 10 he says, "with no one in Israel [that’s the Jewish nation] have I found such faith."
Today we are used to the fact that the Gospel has gone out to the Gentiles – the non-Jewish people like us – and we know that God’s plan of salvation is to bring people from all the nations into his covenant people. But in Jesus’ time it would have been astonishing for Matthew’s first readers for not only a Gentile, but a member of the hated occupation army, to be singled out and praised by the Jewish Messiah.
It is this last aspect of the Centurion’s faith – the remarkable fact that here is a Gentile soldier trusting in the Jewish Messiah – that Jesus focuses on to make a beautiful, encouraging and challenging prophecy in verses 11 and 12. "Many will come from east and west and recline at table with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven," Jesus says. These are words we should treasure because it is a prophecy that is directly fulfilled in we Scottish Christians! There is much we could say about this verse, but time is short. We can be certain of one thing from this verse: the Gospel coming to the Gentiles was no accident and it was no afterthought – it was part of God’s plan and Christ knew it even here. The Centurion is a forerunner of millions of Gentiles who would put their faith in the Jewish Messiah and find salvation. Those who have faith in Christ have eternal life, whatever their race or background or whatever they have done. They are safe and blessed now and in heaven they will enjoy the great feast of the Lamb forever, even reclining at table with the Jewish Patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. But where verse 11 contains a wonderful promise, verse 12 contains a stern warning. Those who do not believe in him, those who reject Christ and his gospel, no matter who they are, no matter how entitled they are think they are to call themselves God’s people, no matter what a great history their earthly nation has of glorifying God, if they do not have Christ they will not be blessed. They will be cursed in hell, which Jesus here describes as a dark and terrible place like a Roman dungeon, damp, dirty, full of disease and the stench of death, cut off from God and form every good thing in this world. Here Jesus has primarily in mind the Jewish nation which rejected him, but it equally applies to everyone who thinks of themselves as religious, but doesn’t know Jesus Christ as their Saviour and Lord.
That’s the real challenge this Centurion’s faith makes to us. The question this passage forces us to ask of ourselves is whether we have a faith like this in the Lord Jesus Christ. Do we have a practical living faith? A faith built on knowledge of God revealed to us in the teachings of the Bible? A humble faith that realises God owes us nothing and any blessing we have from the Saviour is pure grace? A confident trust in Christ as our Lord and Saviour, able to meet all our needs in this life and all our hopes of heaven in eternity? An unexpected faith that challenges us to do things we would never do naturally, like turning from our sins, and doing good to others, and confessing Christ and witnessing to God’s love in Christ before the entire world?
This is the kind of faith this Centurion had. This is the kind of faith that saves us if we have it – not because it is great faith, but because it is true faith in a great Saviour. This is the kind of faith that Christ blesses. Let us not forget that our passage ends with the servant beings healed. Even though Christ doesn’t meet the servant face-to-face, he does speak the word and the servant is healed – at that very moment. Christ’s word is shown to be powerful and effective.
Just as Christ prophesied, this faith is now possessed by people of every nation, tribe and language. This is the faith that will be shared by all the saints who will gather in heaven to praise God at the end of time. Echoing Jesus words in this prophecy, the apostle John in his vision of glory in the Book of Revelation, says this about the worldwide church of God gathered in heaven in Revelation, chapter 5:
"And when he had taken the scroll, the four living creatures and the twenty-four elders fell down before the Lamb, each holding a harp, and golden bowls full of incense, which are the prayers of the saints. And they sang a new song, saying, "Worthy are you to take the scroll and to open its seals, for you were slain, and by your blood you ransomed people for God from every tribe and language and people and nation, and you have made them a kingdom and priests to our God, and they shall reign on the earth."
We do not know this Centurion’s name, or anything about him except his military rank and that he was a man of deep personal faith in Jesus Christ. But one day, we will meet him in heaven along with the vast multitude of the redeemed who have trusted in God for salvation through Christ down, through the ages. Remember Jesus’ gracious words:
"Many will come from east and west and recline at table with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven."
Rejoice if you are among their number. Repent and believe the gospel if you are not. Come to Christ now and put your faith in him. Nothing in life is more necessary or more important.
That’s the key I think to understanding the miracles of Jesus. Certainly they demonstrate Christ’s power and authority, they proclaim his deity as God the Son, but they are far more than mere divine magic tricks. They back up his teaching and more often than not they present to us his teaching in visual form. And finally they display the character of Jesus – his compassion, mercy and love for people – and I think we will see all these elements in our readings tonight and over the next two Sunday evenings.
Now, as we look at this passage from Matthew’s Gospel this evening it would be very helpful to have the words of Scripture before you in the printed order of service as I will be referring to the passage quite a lot.
It is apparent even on a cursory reading of this passage that it is all about faith. Twice at key points in the passage, Christ mentions faith explicitly. In verse 10: "With no one in Israel have I found such faith." And again in verse 13: "Let is be done for you as you have believed."
Like so many passages of the Bible the more you meditate on a passage like this and study it, the more you see in it. So in the first part of this sermon I would like us to think about the man of faith in this passage, the Centurion; and then in the second part of the sermon I think we should consider some very important things this passage tells us about the one in whom the Centurion put his faith.
Let us begin then by thinking about this Centurion who comes to Jesus at the beginning of the passage. Now as you probably know as centurion was a rank in the Roman army – an officer placed in command of one hundred men. Actually many centurions commanded more men than this, but the name comes from the fact that an officer of this rank commanded one hundred men. It is almost certain that there would be a Roman garrison in a town like Capernaum and it could well be that this centurion is the garrison commander. The commentators tell us that Centurions were the "working officers, the backbone of the Roman army," lower than a colonel or general but higher than a mere lieutenant - something like the rank of Captain in the British army. So here was a fairly important man in the Roman occupied town of Capernaum.
But there’s something different about this particular Centurion that made him stand out, and caused the Gospel writers to record this passage for us to read all these years later. The thing that stands out is that this Centurion is a man of faith. Whether he had heard the Sermon on the Mount, or whether he had seen or heard of other miracles that Jesus had performed before this we don’t know. But we do know that he certainly knew of Jesus and probably he knew quite a lot about Jesus as well. And on the basis of whatever knowledge he has, he uses it, leading to faith and action.
Before we go any further I’ll just briefly address the supposed contradiction between Matthew’s account of this incident and Luke’s account. In Luke’s account the Centurion and Jesus do not meet face-to-face, but communicate through messengers. The commentators get worked up about this. The best explanation it seems to me is simply that Luke’s account gives the details that there were go-between messengers involved, whereas Matthew simply omits this detail. This doesn’t make Matthew’s account inaccurate. He just distils the story down to the essentials. In the ancient world, when a messenger conveyed the words of one person to another it was regarded as if they had spoken personally to each other. Just as if in our day we say we talked with so-and-so, we might omit the detail that we spoke on the telephone. It doesn’t mean we did not speak. So here the messengers that Luke mentions were really the telephones of their day and are omitted from the story in Matthew’s version.
There are several aspects of this Centurion’s faith that merit our attention this evening. In fact there are five aspects of his faith I would like to mention.
Firstly, this Centurion has a practical living faith. We’ve seen that already. In verse 5, the Centurion "came forward to him, appealing to him." This man’s faith obviously affects how he lives his life. It’s not just something intellectual or emotional for him. So when his young servant is laid low with a terrible crippling illness, in verse 5 the Centurion seeks out Jesus to make his appeal to him. "To beg him" wouldn’t be too strong a translation, such is the strength and intensity of the Centurion’s appeal. And what is his heart-felt appeal? To heal "his servant." The words translated "my servant" are literally "my boy", so it is likely it was a young male slave in the Centurion’s household who was lying in bed, literally "thrown down onto his bed," paralysed and in a lot of pain. Calling the servant "my boy" surely indicates that the Centurion had real affection for him. He thought of him as more than just a commodity to do work for him. This in part probably explains why the Centurion went to such lengths to try to get him healed. And there’s a lesson here for employers I think, who no longer think of the people who work for them as "personnel" but merely "human resources"! But we’ll not go any further down that road tonight, except to note that this important military man is concerned for his servant and takes the time to do what he believes will be of most benefit to him and that was going to him and asking Christ to heal him.
This is not to downplay the importance of medicine. I am not advocating "faith healing" over modern medicine. I am reminded of a story I read about how some people get the wrong idea about what real faith is. There was once a great flood somewhere in the Southern United States and one farmer’s house was flooded right up to the rooftop. And on the roof the farmer stood clinging the chimney. A rescue boat with two fireman in it came along and they shouted to the farmer to come over and climb in the boat. But the old farmer shook his head. "I’m trusting in the Lord for rescue," he said. They tried to persuade him to come with them, but he was having none of it and finally they had to go off in the boat to see if they could find someone else needing rescued. The water continued to rise and even the roof began to go under water and the farmer had to climb right up on top of the chimney stack to keep dry. Just then a helicopter flew over and started to hover overhead. The pilot shouted down on a loud hailer, "Hold on and we’ll lower down a man on a winch to get you." But the old farmer waved the helicopter off. "No way, I’m trusting in the Lord for rescue," he shouted. Well the helicopter was running low on fuel and couldn’t stay over the farmer’s house any longer so it flew away. Not long afterwards the flood went over the top of the house and old farmer drowned. When he got to heaven and met God the first thing he said to him was this: "Lord, I trusted in you real hard. I never doubted you for a second. I never thought you would fail me like this and let me drown." And God replied, "Fail you? Didn’t you see the boat and the helicopter I sent to rescue you?"
Well modern medicine is a bit like the boat and the helicopter in that story. Just because something is discovered or invented by the hand of man doesn’t mean that the hand of God isn’t behind it.
But let’s get back to our Centurion now. We’ve seen that the Centurion’s faith expresses itself in real love for other people. Our faith too must be practical and loving if it is to be a living and not a dead faith, which the Letter of James tells us will is useless. We should be looking for opportunities to help our neighbours and show them practical care and support. And of course where there is sickness and suffering we should take the time to seek out Jesus and bring those in need to our Saviour in prayer. Whether he chooses to heal through normal medicine or through something that modern medicine can’t explain is up to him.
Then secondly, in verse 8 we see that the Centurion had a humble faith. "Lord, I am not worthy to have you come under my roof," he says. He comes to Jesus not proud and arrogant as we might expect an officer in an occupying army to behave. But filled he comes to Jesus full of humility and self-deprecation. Even though a Roman officer used to soldiers obeying his orders, he is not too proud to come to a poor Jewish Rabbi for help. That must have taken a big heart to do that, not knowing what his men, or the other officers, or his superiors would think if news got back to them. To me that’s probably the best piece of evidence that this Centurion’s faith in Christ was not merely the faith a patient might have in a doctor. Because the human heart is not humble, not genuinely humble, by nature. By nature we want to make ourselves the centre of attention. By nature we’re number one and we want people to know it. But when a person is born again by the Holy Spirit, given a new heart and made spiritually alive, their whole perspective on life changes. No longer are they number one: Jesus is number one in their lives. And, like John the Baptist says, as he "increases" we must "decrease". Our selfishness diminishes. Our whole life view alters and we begin to see that it is God’s glory that counts in life, not our own glory, for we have none.
Thirdly, the Centurion has a strong faith. The whole passage demonstrates this. It is quite clear this Centurion really believed that bringing his servant’s illness before Christ would be a way of bringing relief from suffering and real healing to the young man paralysed. In verse 8 again, "Only say the word and my servant will be healed," he says. It is a confident faith – and by that I mean not a faith confident in itself, but a faith supremely confident of the one in whom his faith is placed. "Just say the word, Lord and it will happen" is his attitude. There’s no doubt in the Centurion’s mind or heart. He believes Jesus can heal his servant and he believes Jesus will heal his servant, even though he is too ashamed to have the Saviour even come into his house. Perhaps this because the Centurion knows that his life is not all it should be, perhaps because having heard parts of Jesus’ teaching, he knows he does not deserve to receive any blessings from God. So combined with a strong trust is a strong sense of unworthiness and a realisation perhaps that his relationship with Christ is based entirely on grace. Merit doesn’t come into it. And that’s certainly something we need to keep constantly in mind as well. We should never take God’s help for granted. He doesn’t owe it to us. He blesses us only out of grace and love because he wants to.
Fourthly this Centurion has a faith built on knowledge. In other words, this Centurion’s faith is not ignorance, it is not a blind faith. It is built on what he knows about Christ. In verse 9 the Centurion shows a remarkable understanding of who Jesus is and what authority he has from God. It’s really quite a deep insight that the Centurion displays here. He has a rather profound theological understanding it seems to me to make the comparison he does between his life as a Captain in the Roman army and Christ’s ministry on earth. And he certainly does make that comparison. "I too am a man under authority," he says. He realises that Christ is under the authority of God the Father. In John chapter 17, verse 4 Christ himself says as much as he prays to the Father: "I glorified you on earth, having accomplished the work that you gave me to do." And in the Great Commission at the very end of Matthew’s Gospel, chapter 28, verse 18, "All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me," he said, which clearly implies that Someone gave Christ all authority, and that can only be God the Father. In some way, we don’t know how sketchy his knowledge is, but at a basic level at least, this Centurion grasps something of that truth: "I too am a man under authority."
But the second piece of knowledge the Centurion has about Jesus, and upon which his faith is built, is the knowledge that as well as being under someone else’s authority - and indeed because of it - the Centurion also realises that Christ has authority over other people, events, illness, over everything in fact. And as a result, Christ has authority to tell people what to do – even to tell illnesses what to do. "I say to one, ‘Go’ and he goes, and to another ‘Come’ and he comes, and to my servant, ‘Do this’ and he does it." And of course what the Centurion is really saying here is that Jesus has that kind of power and authority not over junior soldiers but over things that only God has power over: to say ‘Go’ and demons will leave the person they are possessing, or to say ‘Come’ and a paralysed man will rise from his bed, or to say ‘Do this’ and sinners dead in trespasses and sins will be born again, come to faith in Christ and be saved.
Every indication here is that the Centurion realises this Jesus is far more than just a popular Jewish teacher and healer. He surely sees him as the Son of God, His Lord and Saviour. And that leads us on to our last point. Fifthly, this Centurion has an unexpected faith. A professional solder is perhaps not the kind of person we would think of as most likely to come to faith in Jesus, or the kind of person whose way of life we would tend to think of as being godly. But more than that this man was a Gentile, not a Jew at all. Both of these facts make it all the more amazing that such a man had come to genuine, life changing faith in Jesus Christ. Jesus himself proclaims that he had not come across such faith even among his fellow Jews. In verse 10 he says, "with no one in Israel [that’s the Jewish nation] have I found such faith."
Today we are used to the fact that the Gospel has gone out to the Gentiles – the non-Jewish people like us – and we know that God’s plan of salvation is to bring people from all the nations into his covenant people. But in Jesus’ time it would have been astonishing for Matthew’s first readers for not only a Gentile, but a member of the hated occupation army, to be singled out and praised by the Jewish Messiah.
It is this last aspect of the Centurion’s faith – the remarkable fact that here is a Gentile soldier trusting in the Jewish Messiah – that Jesus focuses on to make a beautiful, encouraging and challenging prophecy in verses 11 and 12. "Many will come from east and west and recline at table with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven," Jesus says. These are words we should treasure because it is a prophecy that is directly fulfilled in we Scottish Christians! There is much we could say about this verse, but time is short. We can be certain of one thing from this verse: the Gospel coming to the Gentiles was no accident and it was no afterthought – it was part of God’s plan and Christ knew it even here. The Centurion is a forerunner of millions of Gentiles who would put their faith in the Jewish Messiah and find salvation. Those who have faith in Christ have eternal life, whatever their race or background or whatever they have done. They are safe and blessed now and in heaven they will enjoy the great feast of the Lamb forever, even reclining at table with the Jewish Patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. But where verse 11 contains a wonderful promise, verse 12 contains a stern warning. Those who do not believe in him, those who reject Christ and his gospel, no matter who they are, no matter how entitled they are think they are to call themselves God’s people, no matter what a great history their earthly nation has of glorifying God, if they do not have Christ they will not be blessed. They will be cursed in hell, which Jesus here describes as a dark and terrible place like a Roman dungeon, damp, dirty, full of disease and the stench of death, cut off from God and form every good thing in this world. Here Jesus has primarily in mind the Jewish nation which rejected him, but it equally applies to everyone who thinks of themselves as religious, but doesn’t know Jesus Christ as their Saviour and Lord.
That’s the real challenge this Centurion’s faith makes to us. The question this passage forces us to ask of ourselves is whether we have a faith like this in the Lord Jesus Christ. Do we have a practical living faith? A faith built on knowledge of God revealed to us in the teachings of the Bible? A humble faith that realises God owes us nothing and any blessing we have from the Saviour is pure grace? A confident trust in Christ as our Lord and Saviour, able to meet all our needs in this life and all our hopes of heaven in eternity? An unexpected faith that challenges us to do things we would never do naturally, like turning from our sins, and doing good to others, and confessing Christ and witnessing to God’s love in Christ before the entire world?
This is the kind of faith this Centurion had. This is the kind of faith that saves us if we have it – not because it is great faith, but because it is true faith in a great Saviour. This is the kind of faith that Christ blesses. Let us not forget that our passage ends with the servant beings healed. Even though Christ doesn’t meet the servant face-to-face, he does speak the word and the servant is healed – at that very moment. Christ’s word is shown to be powerful and effective.
Just as Christ prophesied, this faith is now possessed by people of every nation, tribe and language. This is the faith that will be shared by all the saints who will gather in heaven to praise God at the end of time. Echoing Jesus words in this prophecy, the apostle John in his vision of glory in the Book of Revelation, says this about the worldwide church of God gathered in heaven in Revelation, chapter 5:
"And when he had taken the scroll, the four living creatures and the twenty-four elders fell down before the Lamb, each holding a harp, and golden bowls full of incense, which are the prayers of the saints. And they sang a new song, saying, "Worthy are you to take the scroll and to open its seals, for you were slain, and by your blood you ransomed people for God from every tribe and language and people and nation, and you have made them a kingdom and priests to our God, and they shall reign on the earth."
We do not know this Centurion’s name, or anything about him except his military rank and that he was a man of deep personal faith in Jesus Christ. But one day, we will meet him in heaven along with the vast multitude of the redeemed who have trusted in God for salvation through Christ down, through the ages. Remember Jesus’ gracious words:
"Many will come from east and west and recline at table with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven."
Rejoice if you are among their number. Repent and believe the gospel if you are not. Come to Christ now and put your faith in him. Nothing in life is more necessary or more important.
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