Meet Jesus with the Paralysed Man

Luke 5:17-26. Jesus forgives and heals a paralyzed man. One day Jesus was teaching, and Pharisees and teachers of the law were sitting there. They had come from every village of Galilee and from Judea and Jerusalem, and the power of the Lord was with Jesus to heal the sick. Some men came carrying a paralyzed man on a mat and tried to take him into the house to lay him before Jesus.

When they could not find a way to do this because of the crowd, they went up to the roof and lowered him on his mat through the tiles into the middle of the crowd right in front of Jesus. When Jesus saw their faith, he said, friends, your sins are forgiven. The Pharisees and the teachers of the law began thinking to themselves, who is this fellow who speaks blasphemy? Who can forgive sins but God alone? Jesus knew what they were thinking and asked, why are you thinking these things in your hearts?

Which is easier to say, your sins are forgiven, or to say, get up and walk? But I want you to know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins. So he said to the paralyzed man, I tell you, get up, take your mat, and go home. Immediately, he stood up in front of them, took what he had been lying on, and went home, praising God. Everyone was amazed and gave praise to God.

They were filled with awe and said, we have seen remarkable things today. Thanks very much, Erica, and good morning again, everyone. It's really great to be back with you all this morning. Please keep your Bibles open or your devices out, whatever you've been reading it on, as we're gonna be walking through that passage today. But let me pray as we begin.

Heavenly Father, we do thank you so much that you have given us your word. We pray that as we come to it now, that you would be speaking to us through it, helping us to understand what is happening in this story and how that should be changing and shaping the way that we think, the way that we act, and the way that we love you and others. We pray it all in Jesus' name. Amen. Well, today, as we get into the Bible, I want to give you all a little bit of a taste of some stuff that we've been doing on campus this year, not just here on the Gold Coast, but actually all around Australia.

As Quentin said, I work for an organization called AFES, and AFES runs Christian groups at university campuses all around Australia. So at all the major campuses we have groups at, and almost at every single campus we have groups. At some of the smaller ones, there are only, you know, 20 to 50 students, so we don't have a group, but at all the big ones we do. And all around Australia this year, we've been doing this national mission called Meet Jesus.

Now, hopefully, it's gonna work. And so what we've been doing is inviting students to come and meet Jesus, to meet Him in God's word, the Bible, as we read that with them. And by God's grace, we've had lots and lots of students come along. Some of them have come literally because they're wondering if Jesus is gonna be in the room, which is you kinda laugh, but then you go, well, yeah, like, if you don't have much of a church background, you might wonder something like that. Others have come because they got questions about God and about spiritual stuff, and some have come just because their friend invited them and they were too polite to say no.

We'll welcome them all anyway. And our Focus meetings, so I run the Focus group, which is for international students. And our Focus meetings this year, we've had this girl from Vietnam coming along since week one in first semester. Now she's not a Christian, and she didn't really know much about Jesus at all when she first started coming. I actually met her in a line for free ice cream in O Week.

I was chatting to another guy who's also from Vietnam, and she turned around and was like, oh, you're from Vietnam. I'm from Vietnam too, and joined our conversation. And I invited them both to come along, and he didn't come, but she did. So God was obviously wanting to connect me with her. But as she's come along, she's learnt about the Bible, she met Jesus in the Bible, and we've just been watching God change her right in front of our eyes.

A few weeks ago, we interviewed her as part of our meeting. Every week, we interview one of the students just so that new students, because we often have new students, can get to know somebody. And we interviewed her, and the question I think was, what's something that you've enjoyed about Focus this year? And she was like, I've just loved getting to know Jesus. Like, I've learned all this stuff that He's God's Son and that He's come to die for our sins.

She basically just explained the gospel in about two minutes. And I was sitting there going, wow. Like, here's a girl who knew almost nothing at the start of the year, but she's met Jesus. And I don't know if she would call herself a Christian yet, but she looks to me like she's very, very close. It's just been really, really exciting seeing that happen.

Well, today, as we read this passage in Luke, we're gonna meet Jesus with a couple of very different people. We're gonna meet Jesus with a paralyzed guy and also with some religious leaders. And the big question in this story, and the religious leaders put it so beautifully for us, is who is this fellow? When I first read that, I picture it with a British accent like, who is this fellow? But I work with international students, so I'm used to accents.

It's fun. But let's kinda get into it. Chapter five of Luke's gospel. If you read through from chapter one, you've seen a lot about Jesus already. And in particular, in chapter four and five, we've seen him doing some pretty big things.

Like, he's done a lot of teaching in chapter four and five. In chapter four, he drives out a demon, which is a pretty unusual thing to be able to do, and he's also been healing lots of people. And so as we pick up the story in verse 17, we see that Jesus has drawn quite a crowd. Like, he's already famous. People wanna come and see him, and particularly in this story, he's drawn a big crowd of religious leaders.

He's drawn them actually from all sorts of different places. If you have a look at the map behind me, it says in verse 17 that they had come from every village of Galilee, that's up in the North there. They've also come from Judea, down in the South, and from Jerusalem, the Jewish capital city. So Jesus has drawn religious leaders, these Pharisees and teachers of the law, from all over the Jewish territory, and they've all come to hear him teach. Now this is the first time in Luke's gospel that the Pharisees and teachers of the law are mentioned.

They're gonna get mentioned over 40 times in total. So they're really important characters in the book, but this is the first time we meet them. And so as we read this story, it's gonna be important to think about, well, what is Luke telling us about them, and how are they reacting to Jesus? But we also find in this first verse, as Luke sets up the story, that the power of the Lord is with Jesus to heal the sick. And that kind of sets some expectations for us, doesn't it?

We're expecting someone's gonna come and meet Jesus, and they're gonna get healed of something. So as we keep reading in verse 18, we see some men come carrying a paralyzed man on a mat. They're trying to get him to Jesus, and so already we're assuming, oh, here's the guy who's gonna get healed. Cool. Jesus is gonna heal a paralyzed guy.

This will be fun. But straight away, there's a problem. The crowd is so big that they can't get him to Jesus. There's no way in. They're trying to push through the crowd, but the crowd's not parting.

They're like, sorry, guys, we were here first. You'll have to wait. That doesn't stop them though, does it? They go up on top of the roof. Jewish houses in those days had flat roofs, so it's a little bit safer to do this, and there are often stairs up onto the roof, so you could use it as kind of like an outdoor area.

But they go up on the roof, and they start pulling tiles off the roof and making a hole. They're so desperate to get their friend to Jesus that they're literally starting to demolish someone else's house in order to do it. And you can just imagine all the attention that this is getting from the people inside who are listening to Jesus. Because they're sitting there, Jesus is talking, that's all great, and all of a sudden, dust starts falling down from the roof, some light comes in, they're like, what's going on here? We didn't realize the weather was this bad, but then the hole gets bigger, some heads are poking through, they're like, okay, now the hole's big enough, and they work it out really well because they open up a hole, and they'd lower their friend in right in front of Jesus.

Alright? So perfect. They couldn't get through the crowd, but they managed to get their paralyzed friend right in front of Jesus in the middle of the crowd. Success. Surely now, Jesus is going to heal him.

Right? Well, as we read on, we see not so fast. In verse 20, when Jesus sees their faith, he does something a little bit shocking. He says, friend, your sins are forgiven. Luke has set us up, crafty little author that he is, to expect a healing, and then instead, Jesus forgives this man's sins.

So straight away, we're wondering, what's going on? Now if you've heard this story before, and many of you probably have, because it's a very common one to hear in Sunday school and all the way through church, you've probably heard people say that Jesus is showing us our biggest need here, that sin is worse even than paralysis and being unable to walk. Now that is true. Sin is a much, much bigger problem because it breaks our relationship with God. When we sin against God, it breaks that relationship.

It has ever since Genesis chapter three, and that causes a huge issue. Because all of a sudden, now our most important relationship, that with God, is in trouble. But we often don't think about that as our biggest problem, do we? I mean, I don't know what you think your biggest problem in life is right now. I mean, there's lots of big issues in the news, like the cost of living crisis, the housing crisis.

Maybe you, some of you have been affected by that. Maybe just having issues at work or issues with family, broken relationships, health issues. I've got three sons. My eldest is 10, and his biggest problem right now is a bit more serious than most 10 year olds' problems. He has a growth condition called Sever's, which affects his heels, and so essentially what this means is that he has constant pain along the growth plates in his heels.

Now, as a 10 year old who is absolutely obsessed with cricket and literally gets bored of watching TV and goes outside to run around, this is really frustrating for him because every single day when he runs around, his feet get really sore, and he has to ice them often multiple times a day. My wife, who's a physio, has really been put to work at home, massaging his calves and his feet every single day just to manage the pain because it's not something that you can cure. It only goes away when they stop growing. That's pretty frustrating for him. That affects every part of his life, and particularly the favourite parts of his life, cricket and sport.

But sin's even worse because it breaks our relationship with God, and its consequences are a lot longer than just the growth period of a growing boy. It actually stretches beyond this life. And so forgiveness is what all of us need. But what we don't often realize is that as Jesus does this, the crowd who's watching this, they're almost certainly assuming that there's a link between this man's sin and the fact that he is paralyzed. Either this guy has done something wrong or his parents have done something wrong, and that is probably why he's paralyzed.

We see this in John chapter 9, verses one to two, which is a different guy, a different story. But as Jesus goes along, he sees this guy who's blind from birth, and Jesus' disciples ask him, Rabbi, who sinned? This man or his parents that he was born blind? This is a very common attitude at that time. And it's a little bit like the idea of karma, in that in karma and I met lots of students from a Buddhist background or a Hindu background who have this kind of way of thinking.

In karma, something that you've done in your previous life affects your life now. And so if you were really bad in your previous life, then when you get reincarnated, you feel the effects of that. And sometimes you'll even feel the effects of it in your current life, and so suffering or misfortune will come upon you because of something that you previously did or that your parents did. Now in Luke chapter five, Jesus makes no comment on any link there. In John chapter nine, Jesus goes on to say that there is no link in that situation.

Jesus says, no. This guy was born blind so that God's work could be shown in his life. Now Jesus doesn't make a comment here in Luke five, so we don't know. But for the crowd watching this, if there's a link, and they're probably assuming that there is, then any healing that might happen may not be permanent if the sin isn't dealt with. Because if the sin caused the paralysis and Jesus just heals him, but he doesn't deal with the issue behind it, then the paralysis might come back.

A little bit like treating the symptom of an illness without treating the cause, the cause may cause the illness to come back. You can take Panadol when you've got a bacterial infection, and that might make you feel better for a few hours, but pretty soon, you're gonna be feeling rubbish again. And so Jesus forgives him first, but it's not just shocking because he doesn't heal him first. The reaction of the Pharisees and teachers of the law actually shows us a lot here. Have a look at verse 21.

They say to themselves, who is this fellow who speaks blasphemy? I think Jesus actually wanted to get a reaction from them here. He says this first, that your sins are forgiven, because he knows there's a big crowd of religious leaders here, and they'll think this. Now, blasphemy is pretty serious. Blasphemy is a charge that carries the death penalty in the Old Testament.

Here's some verses from Leviticus 24 where it says, say to the Israelites, anyone who curses their God will be held responsible. Anyone who blasphemes the name of the Lord is to be put to death. The entire assembly must stone them, whether foreigner or native born, when they blaspheme the name, they are to be put to death. So blasphemy, where you either curse God's name, or you claim to be God when you're not, or you attribute something evil to God, that is a really serious sin in Jewish law. And the Pharisees and teachers of the law, they know that only God can forgive sin.

And so here, they're seeing that Jesus is claiming to be able to do something that only God can do, and they're calling it blasphemy. Now Jesus hasn't quite gone as far as claiming outright that he is God, but the stakes are very, very high. And Jesus knows it. He's done this because he wants to prove something to them, which we see in verse 22, where Jesus asks them, which is easier, to say to this man, your sins are forgiven, or to say, get up and walk? And he says, I want you to know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins.

Obviously, with that rhetorical question, only one of those things can be proven visibly, can't it? If Jesus says to him, your sins are forgiven, no one really knows if they have been or not because only God can forgive. But if Jesus says, get up, take your mat, and walk, and he doesn't, well, then Jesus is gonna look pretty silly, or maybe just very normal like the rest of us, because if I said that to somebody, it's not gonna happen. But Jesus wants them to know that he has authority on earth to forgive sins. That is actually the main point of this whole story, and he uses this really important title for himself to show it.

He calls himself the Son of Man. And this is a reference to Daniel 7, which is up on the screen again, where Daniel says, in my vision at night, I looked, and there before me was one like a Son of Man, coming with the clouds of heaven. He approached the Ancient of Days and was led into His presence. He was given authority, glory, and sovereign power. All nations and peoples of every language worshipped Him.

His dominion is an everlasting dominion that will not pass away, and His kingdom is one that will never be destroyed. So in this passage, we see that the Son of Man is this end time figure who comes to God, and he receives an eternal kingdom from God. The Son of Man is God's promised king or God's promised Messiah. These are the other titles for Him in the Old Testament. And the Son of Man is actually Jesus' favourite way of speaking about himself in Luke.

He uses it many times. So in Luke chapter 9, verse 22, Jesus says, the Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, the teachers of the law, and he must be killed, and on the third day raised to life. Now that might sound a bit weird for a promised king to come and suffer and die, but it actually fulfils a promise that God made about His Messiah in Isaiah 53, verses 4 to 6 and 11 to 12. And I won't read all these out for you, but you can look them up or read them on the screen. Basically, in these verses, God promises that His Messiah is gonna come and take the punishment for our sins.

So if you look at verse 5 there, he was pierced for our transgressions. He was crushed for our iniquities. The punishment that brought us peace was upon him. By His wounds, we are healed. Or verses 11 and 12, where he says, by His knowledge, my righteous servant will justify many, and he will bear their iniquities.

This prophecy in Isaiah, Jesus says, the Son of Man, me, I am fulfilling that when I suffer and die. And then in Luke chapter 24, after he's died and risen back to life, Jesus says, the Son of Man must be delivered over to the hands of sinners, be crucified, and on the third day be raised again. This is what was written, and this has now been fulfilled. Jesus says everything that was written about Him in the Old Testament has been fulfilled. And the point of all this is that because Jesus is the Son of Man, because He personally dies and takes the punishment for our sin and then rises again in victory over sin and death, He can forgive the sins of people.

He has authority on earth to forgive sins because He's the Son of Man, and He deals with our sin personally. And so Jesus turns then, and he says to the paralyzed man, get up, pick up your mat, and go home. And you can kind of feel the tension in the room at this point in the story. Right? He's claimed to forgive this guy's sin.

He's called out the Pharisees for their accusation of blasphemy and not believing him. Everything hangs on what is about to happen. And immediately, Luke says, immediately, there's no delay. There's no like a pause for effect of thirty seconds or something, people are like, oh, did that work? This is a bit awkward.

Immediately, this guy stands up, and as he stands up and is healed, all the tension in the story is released. It's not just the tension of the fact that Jesus healed him before that Jesus forgave him, sorry, before he healed him. It's also the tension of this accusation of blasphemy. The tension of who is Jesus. The healing proves Jesus' authority to forgive, and it proves who He is.

And Jesus does all of this just with words. There's no medicine. There's no surgery. There's no massage. There's not even any religious rituals that you might expect in a situation like this.

I mean, a lot, I work with a lot of students doing medicine and physiotherapy, occupational therapy, dentistry, that kind of thing. They can tell you, this is insane. Like, in medicine, you don't learn particular words to say to make people better. You learn how the body works and how medicines work and how surgery works and all that kind of thing. Here is Jesus, just with words, healing a paralyzed guy and forgiving his sin.

He has incredible authority. I'm not sure how that makes you feel because Australians don't really like authority. I know a lot of you come from other places like South Africa and stuff, but Australians don't really like authority. And I'm sure having lived here for a little while, you understand this. Australians love to consider everyone as equals.

I think it was Gough Whitlam who famously said that if he ever met God, he'd treat Him as an equal. Clearly, Jesus is not our equal. I can't do that with my words. He heals this guy with just a word, and that alone is extreme authority. But he does it to prove something even bigger, which is His authority to forgive sins.

That's bigger authority than your boss. It's bigger authority than the government, than the police, than anything else in this world. And that means we need to think really carefully about how we treat Jesus, about how we respond to Jesus, because we can't treat Him as an equal. He's clearly not our equal. But thankfully, there's a whole bunch of different responses to Jesus from different people in this story, different reactions to Him, which, if we unpack them, will help us see how we should actually be responding to Him.

So we're gonna look at a few different people in this story. There's more than just the two, the paralyzed guy and the religious leaders. We're gonna start with the friends of the paralyzed man. As they drop their friend through the roof, in verse 20, Jesus says Luke says that when Jesus saw their faith, he said to the man, your sins are forgiven. They demonstrate what is required for the forgiveness of sin, which is faith in Jesus.

We need to trust in Him, depend only on Him. And they demonstrate it by the lengths that they go to in order to get their friend to Jesus. They don't rock up and go, oh, the crowd's too big. Sorry, buddy. We'll have to come back another time.

Right? They're getting their friend to Jesus if they have to rip the whole house down. This is the response that you and I need to have as well, this personal faith in Jesus. Not depending on other stuff. I mean, there's all sorts of things that our culture says you should be depending on in your life that'll give you security, things like your money, your family, your house, your job, your friends, whatever.

But what's your first response when something goes wrong? Because that often tells you what your faith is in. Like, if your first response is, oh, how much money is in my bank account? Or what people around me do I have to support me? They're different responses, but they tell you what you're kind of relying on.

Something that's been really encouraging to me recently, our eldest son, Ethan, the one with the foot pain, is I catch him praying, like, so many times every single day. Almost every half hour or something, I'll look over at him, and he makes it really obvious because he sits there, and he bows his head, and he puts his hands together and closes his eyes, and then you can see his mouth moving. My goodness. He's like, he's praying, but he'll pray about everything.

Like, if his feet are hurting, he'll pray about it. If he's just had some fun playing with friends and he's gotten home, he'll pray about it and thank God. Like, I see him do this in so many different situations. It just warms my heart. But here is my son trusting in Jesus in everything.

It's wonderful. And that's the kind of response that we need to be having as well. But there's lots more responses. Next one you see is the paralyzed man. He obeys.

Jesus tells him to do three things, and so he just does them. There's no delay. There's no he doesn't lie there and go, hey, Jesus. I know you just told me to get up, but I'm not sure if you know. I can't walk.

It's been, you know, twenty years or however long. There's none of that. He just obeys. And this gives us a glimpse of the fact that forgiveness of sin leads to obedience and not the other way around. Here's this guy who has who can't even get himself to Jesus.

He has to be brought there by his friends, but he gets a far greater and more complete healing than he was probably hoping for when he came. He doesn't just get his legs back. He gets forgiven as well. And so he goes home praising God. And, again, this is something that we should be doing, obeying Jesus.

He doesn't obey Jesus, and then Jesus heals him. He doesn't obey Jesus so that Jesus will forgive him. The order is really important. Jesus forgives him, heals him, and he obeys as a response to what Jesus has already done. And he does it joyfully because you can see how good Jesus is here.

He is the Son of Man with so much authority that He can just speak and things happen, and He uses that power and that authority for the benefit of others. Even this guy who lots of people probably go, oh, wow. That guy probably did something real bad in his past. Jesus doesn't know this guy. He's never met him, and yet He uses His authority for his benefit.

And that's really important, I think. This is really hard to obey someone if you don't understand what they want you to do. Like, my kids have that issue all the time, although sometimes it's not because they don't understand. Sometimes they do understand. They just don't want to obey anyway.

But it's hard to obey if you don't understand. It's even harder to obey if you can't trust somebody. But here you can see, you can trust Jesus because He's not just powerful, not just has all the authority. He is good. He is generous.

He gives this man even more than what he came for. So we can obey Him. The international students that I work with, I think, show me what this looks like a lot better than I understand myself as an Australian because they just they understand that when you have a parent, you obey them. Now in Australia, my church recently did a series on the 10 Commandments, and we did this, like they had these little Vox Pop videos before each sermon where they'd go around and they'd ask people, what do you think about this commandment? And when it got to the commandment, honour your father and mother, it was kind of disturbing and insightful about Australian culture both at the same time because you had all these people going, oh, yeah.

Is that really in the Bible? Or or maybe if, you know, maybe if my parents deserve it, then I'll honour them, but they've got to show me that they deserve it. Right? Whereas the students that I work with, they're like, oh, yeah. Mum and Dad.

Absolutely. Like, I obey them. I listen to them. I do whatever they say. Most of them are here on Mum and Dad's money.

Like, their parents are funding them to be able to study in Australia. Their fees to study here are crazy high, and their parents are paying for that. But they obey their parents, not just because their parents are paying for them to be here, whatever, but because they love them. They respect them. They're honouring them.

They know from their parents' actions and words that their parents love them, that they want what's best for them, and so they obey. And I think they've taught me a lot about what that should look like with God, who is our Father. There's a couple more reactions here. The crowd is the next one. They are amazed, and they're filled with awe, as they should be, really.

I mean, when was the last time you saw a paralyzed person get up and walk healed instantly with just words? This does not happen every day. If this happened today, it would go viral. I mean, they would have been livestreaming Jesus with the teaching anyway, and then when the roof opens up, it would have started to go viral because people were like, what's going on? The house is falling down around Jesus.

But then when the guy gets up and walks out, you can just imagine how viral this video has gone. Crowd praises God, and rightly so. It is interesting that they don't praise Jesus, but I think that fits because Jesus has just proved that He has authority on earth to forgive sins. Such authority can only come from God, and so the crowd praises God where the authority comes from. And so I think this is an encouragement for us to do that, to praise God, and not just here on a Sunday morning when you come to church and you're singing, but at all times throughout the week.

God does amazing stuff for us all the time, big things and little things. It's great to just be able to take time out and thank Him for that. I already mentioned how I've seen my son do that. You can do it in all sorts of ways. Something that I personally like to do, and this may not be you, that's totally okay.

You can find your own way to do it. Something I personally like to do is just put some music on when there's no one around in the house. I'll put some music on, and I just sing. I do it when no one else is around because my singing voice is not so amazing. Sometimes my kids say it's really good, but I think they're just being nice.

But I'll just do that just to have some time with God. So I encourage you, find a way to do that. Build it into a routine or a habit or something, and just take some time to praise God for what He's done. But the last people we see in terms of reaction is the Pharisees, the teachers of the law, these religious leaders. And interestingly, their reaction in this story is a little bit mixed.

Initially, they are very anti Jesus. Right? They're, like, accusing him of blasphemy. They're like, where are the biggest stones we can find so we can drag this guy out and stone him? But they should be reacting like that.

Jesus has set him up. He wants this response from them, I think, so that he can prove his authority to forgive. But afterwards, at the end of the story, you see down in verse 26, everyone was amazed and gave praise to God. And I think that includes them because they've just seen something absolutely amazing. And we've got to remember, this is the first time in Luke's book that they've been mentioned.

They're gonna come up another 40 odd times through the book. And as you do, as you read through it, if you pay attention to their reactions, you see that their reaction changes. So initially, it's very opposed to Jesus, and then it seems to be very positive by the end of the story. But then a little bit later in chapter 5, verses 30 and chapter 6, verse 2, they start to question Jesus. He's doing stuff that they don't understand.

And, like, if you're the Son of Man, why are you doing this stuff? Then in later on in chapter 6, verses 7 and 11, and then later in chapter 11, verse 53, they start to explicitly oppose Jesus. They've gone from questioning to now they're like, we do not agree with you. And eventually, of course, by chapter 22, they get rid of Jesus. They arrest him.

They crucify him. They kill him. And so we see here that an initial reaction to Jesus is not necessarily a lasting one. An initial negative reaction doesn't have to stay that way, but an initial positive reaction may not also stay that way. And I think that gives us a little bit of a warning.

Make sure you don't stop responding rightly to Jesus. We need to keep trusting Him, keep obeying Him, keep listening to Him. It's not enough to just do it once. But as we finish, this passage raises a question for me. I don't know if this raises this question for you, but as I get to the end of this story, I'm scratching my head a little bit because Jesus has made a huge deal out of the fact that He can forgive sins.

And at the end of the story, no one else is asking for forgiveness. That just seems a bit strange. Now Luke doesn't make a comment on it, so I don't really know what to make of this. But when Jesus has made such a big deal out of the fact that He's got this authority to forgive, and then no one else is like, hey, Jesus, I'd like some forgiveness, that just seems a bit weird to me. And I think we need to remember that's the biggest thing we need to do.

The biggest thing we need to do with Jesus is ask Him to forgive us. That's our biggest issue. That's what we really, really need from Jesus. So as we finish, I'm gonna pray, and I'm gonna ask Jesus that He would do that and that He would then help us to trust Him, obey Him, all the other things. But please join me as we pray.

Heavenly Father, we thank you so much for this part of your word. We thank you for the authority that you gave Jesus to forgive sin on earth. Lord Jesus, we do ask that you would forgive us too for the many and varied ways in which we reject you and disobey you and go our own way. We thank you that you have personally dealt with our sin, and so your forgiveness is not just on offer but is certain. Please help us to trust you each and every day to obey you in all things, remembering just how good you are, and as we do that, to be able to praise and honour you so that others might also know of just how incredible you are.

We pray all of this in Jesus' name. Amen.