Grace Baptist Church, Nokomis, IL.

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These last few days have been worrisome for me and my family.

Abby has been in the hospital with our youngest daughter since Thursday. She thought she was just taking her in for one of her many routine doctor’s visits, but they didn’t like how some of her tests came back, so they admitted her and don’t seem to know the best course of action to take. They’ve already prescribed that she’ll need calcitonin shots twice a day for awhile until her Calcium levels come down, and possibly for the rest of her life. They could try adjusting her diet, or adjusting her meds, but they’ve tweaked these things so many times that I’m not too hopeful that simply tweaking diet or meds will make much of a difference. They could do a surgery so that her food will bypass her stomach and go directly into her intestines, but that would mean that she would have to be fed at a much slower rate, and she would have to eat basically around the clock.

Now, this hasn’t been her longest stay in the hospital. Not even close. And she’s actually not even in the worst condition she’s ever been in. But we’re getting to the point where we just don’t know how to go forward. It just seems so hopeless. The journey has been so long, and there doesn’t seem to be a light at the end of the tunnel. We need hope. We need healing.

How we feel right now is how so many people feel every day. We have so many hurts. And life sometimes just feels so hopeless. But there’s good news. Jesus gives hope to the hopeless.

You see, everyone who comes to Jesus comes to Him with hurts and pains. Sometimes people think that they need to have everything in life together before God will accept them. But the opposite is actually true. You will only finally embrace Jesus when you realize that you don’t have it all together. When you realize that you, in reality, have nothing together. That you’re broken beyond healing. That’s when we realize that we need forgiveness. We need hope. We need healing.

These needs often consumed us, because we didn’t know how we were going to cope without them. But even knowing that we needed them, we often tried to obtain them for ourselves, by our own strength. We thought, “If I can just be good enough, God will accept me.” Or maybe, “If I just try hard enough, I can get through this on my own.” But it never works that way. We can’t be good enough. We can’t get through it on our own.

And then we found that Jesus could satisfy these needs for us. Jesus is loving and gracious and powerful, and if when turn to Him, we find forgiveness, hope, and healing, because He freely gives us these by His love and power.

Read Luke 6:17-19

Let’s back up just a few verses so we can get a better picture of what’s going on in our passage today. If you go up to verse 12, you read that Jesus “went out to the mountain to pray.” And then in verse 13, we read that Jesus “called His disciples” to Him, and then selected 12 of them from His disciples to become apostles. And apparently, when Jesus did this, He was not yet fully down the mountain, because at the beginning of verse 17, it says that “He came down with them and stood on a level place.”

So Jesus went up the mountain, prayed all night, and then called His disciples to Him, perhaps from the very top of the mountain, or perhaps somewhere on the side of the mountain, but either way, He expected His disciples to come to Him when He called for them. As Jesus was on the mountain, He called out. “My disciples, come to Me! Come here! Meet me on the mountain! Go to the place where you saw me heal that one guy that one time.” Right?

So let me ask you this: do you hear when Jesus calls to you? Jesus would say in another place, “My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me.” (John 10:27) Do you ever wonder if other believers hear Jesus more clearly? Do you ever wish that you could hear Jesus clearly tell you what to do and where to go? Jesus said, “My sheep hear my voice!” Do you ever wonder if you’re really one of His sheep, because maybe you don’t hear His voice like other people say they hear His voice?

I don’t know if you know this or not, but sheep don’t speak English. They don’t! I’ve never heard a single sheep say a single word in English. And, I don’t have any proof about this, but I really doubt sheep can understand English all that well either. When a shepherd herds his sheep, he might say something like, “Come here my beautiful sheep, follow me and I’ll take you to a lovely pasture where you can graze and eat grass, and clovers, and the plants of the field.” But all the sheep heard was, “Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah.”

But if a sheep has been following his shepherd awhile, he gets to know his shepherd’s voice. And while the sheep will never understand English fluently, he may start to catch a few words here and there. “Blah blah blah blah come, blah blah blah sheep, blah blah blah blah follow me, blah blah blah eat.”

So when the Jesus said, “My sheep hear my voice,” I don’t think Jesus was saying that we can just close our eyes and listen and hear Jesus talking to us as clearly as I’m talking to you right now. I think Jesus was saying that we will recognize His voice. We’ll recognize when He’s calling. And we’ll follow.

And apparently, quite a few of Jesus’s disciples heard Him calling to them. Because they came! Jesus called to them, and they came. Jesus did not remain the only person on that mountain. We don’t know how many came, but we do know that it was more than the twelve He would select to be the apostles, because it says in verse 13 that He chose “from them” twelve. And then, even more disciples came to meet Jesus as He came down the mountain, because it says in verse 17, “He came down with them,” talking about the apostles Jesus had just selected, along with the many disciples who also came when Jesus called to them early in the morning, and then it continues in verse 17, “and stood on a level place, with a great crowd of his disciples and a great multitude of people from all Judea and Jerusalem and the seacoast of Tyre and Sidon.”

Jesus didn’t have any trouble drawing a crowd. People came from all over to hear Him! There was a great crowd of His disciples. And also a great multitude of people from all over the region came to hear Jesus.

It’s interesting what you find, when you look at a map of this region. You see, when we find Jesus in this passage, He was probably near Capernaum, because verse 1 of chapter 7 says that after Jesus spoke to the people, He entered Capernaum. So Jesus was probably on one of these mountains near Capernaum. So geographically, Jesus was closer to Tyre and Sidon, but religiously, they couldn’t have been further away. They were both pagan cities, with their own gods, their own rituals. But it’s interesting that both of these cities were supposed to be part of the land of Israel. But when Israel was taking possession of the land, they didn’t fully take it, and they didn’t proceed north far enough to take these cities. And yet, even though these cities were not part of Israel, people from these cities came to be healed by Jesus, and if they were genuine in their faith, they became part of God’s people. People from all walks of life came to hear Jesus!

And so sometimes I wonder, what are we doing wrong? We have the same Jesus. Why aren’t the multitudes coming to hear His Word?

Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m grateful for all of you. Every Sunday morning, and Sunday night, and Wednesday night, I never know how many people will be here until we all get here. And by God’s grace, I’ve never been the only one here. God calls us to worship and serve in community with one another. He doesn’t call us to be lone ranger Christians.

But, even being grateful for all of you, I don’t think by any estimation, we can call ourselves a great multitude this morning. You know, we could start naming the reasons why we’re not a great multitude. We’re just a small church. We’re in such a small town. People are so busy nowadays, and our culture is becoming more and more antagonistic toward Christianity. I get it.

But Jesus could have given all sorts of reasons, too, right? Jesus could have scolded His disciples for their lack of faith, saying, “Where is your faith?” Jesus could have insulted the religious leaders of the day, calling them “a brood of vipers.” And Jesus could have criticized the entire generation of people that He was living among, calling them, “A wicked and perverse generation.” In fact, Jesus said all of these things, and yet the multitudes still flocked to see Him. To hear Him. Why?

Because there was no denying that Jesus had power (v. 18-19). The crowds, once again, pressed in on Jesus to touch Him, and be touched by Him, because Jesus had power. Jesus could heal. Jesus taught with authority. Jesus forgave sins. And Jesus could do all of these things because Jesus was God and is God.

We also need to live by the power that comes from Jesus. Paul didn’t preach with wise and persuasive words, but with a demonstration of the Spirit’s power. And maybe we sometimes try to convince people with fancy arguments when we witness, or think that we need to have all the answers before we even try, rather than just living day by day by the strength of God.

I mean, the Bible has all the answers, because God is light, God is truth, but more often than not, people won’t even be concerned about truth until they know that God is powerful. That God cares about them. That God can heal them.

And maybe we haven’t fully allowed the power of God to heal us.

Maybe we should be pressing in on Jesus to touch Him, and be touched by Him, because we know that power and healing comes from Jesus. He’s the only one who can heal us, forgive us, and strengthen us so that we can live joyfully in Him to the glory of God. Because we have hope in Jesus, even though these last few days have been difficult for my family, we’re not hopeless. We know that Jesus has a purpose, even for our sorrows. And so, even during our trials of many kinds, we can have great joy in Jesus! He forgives! He heals! He gives hope! He strengthens us so that we can face every hopeless circumstance by His power and grace.

And yet, so often, we settle for just a little bit of Jesus. We want a just little bit of His power, a little bit of his hope, but not so much that it demands that we live much differently. We want His grace to cover our sins, but not change our lives.

You can’t have it both ways! If you want God’s grace to forgive you, you must also want it to change you. God’s grace, when truly received, changes us. God’s grace is powerful. Power comes from Jesus, so that we can face hard times. So that we can have hope and healing, even when nothing seems to be going right. Even when our lives seem like they’re falling apart. Even when our precious children are going through hopeless pain and suffering.

I don’t share the story about our daughter in the hospital so that you will feel sorry for us, or think we’re saints for caring for her, because if you think that about us, you’d be wrong. We’re just normal sinners, amazed by our awesome God, and we want to glorify Him by caring for others as He cares for us. So I don’t share about my family so that you will think of us at all, but I pray that you will see that no matter what you’re going through, you can have hope in Jesus Christ.

Give Jesus your life. Find your hope, your strength, your forgiveness in Him.