SIMPLE FAITH

"WHEN Jesus saw their faith, he said to the paralytic, 'Son, your sins are forgiven'". These glorious words come from St.Mark's Gospel, chapter 4 and verse 5, and are from Mark's record of the incident where four men brought their paralysed friend to Jesus for healing. The crowd was so large in and around the house in which Jesus was teaching, so in order to get to Jesus they made a hole in the roof of the house and let the paralysed man down through the hole in the roof.

Forgiveness of our sins is the greatest need anyone of us has. It was in reality much more important for this man than the healing of the paralysis of his body. Sin paralyses the soul. Our sins also paralyses for eternity, where as bodily paralysis is only an affliction in time and for this life.

The paralysis of soul our sins cause destroys the quality of our earthly life also. They separate us from God and his love, and this is experienced, in that although all of us know there is a God, we don't know him or have any real contact with him. Our sins stunt our ability to love others and be loved. They destroy relationships or at least upset them. They cause all our work and efforts to be below their proper potential. They impair all our thinking, so we are less wise and understanding than we could be.

In time and in eternity our sins destroy us. Our greatest need is for them to be forgiven, for forgiveness restores us to fellowship with God where we receive new life from God and a title to a place in heaven in the life to come. Thus sins forgiven renews our life on earth, and assure us of life in heaven.

It is the simplicity of receiving forgiveness which is revealed here and is so exciting. "When Jesus saw their faith". Faith was all that was required. All five believed in Jesus, and no doubt it was the paralytic who initiated the whole event, getting his friends to do for him what he could not do for himself, which was to get to Jesus.

What was this faith Jesus saw in them. It was simply a trust in Jesus as the one who had power to help them, and a child-like committal of themselves to him for help and healing. They knew there was no help or healing anywhere else. They were at their wits end. But they believed Jesus could help them, and so they rested all their hope in his willingness to do so, which was expressed in this desperate desire to come to him.

It was a total faith. They brought nothing to Jesus. They knew they had nothing to offer to him. Empty handed they relied solely on his mercy and love. He was their last hope and only hope, and they could only put their trust in him to help them.

Their faith must have lacked a great deal in understanding. They probably only dimly perceived who Jesus really was. This was not important. What was important was their total trust in him and the giving of themselves into his care without reserve. Their faith was a submission to his total authority over them.

This is all that Jesus looks for in us to bless us with forgiveness and eternal life. He requires no effort of reformation. He requires no promise or resolution. He requires no pleadings of worthiness we haven't got. Just faith in him that surrenders all to him, and expresses our desperate desire that he should deliver us from our sins.

Faith requires no payment, but on the other hand requires the surrendering of our very selves to Jesus as his slave, but strangely this means freedom and life.

How gracious Jesus is to us in our struggles to believe. The teachers of the Law had no such faith in Jesus that these five men had. They saw Jesus as nothing more than a man like themselves; and no doubt, in their pride and arrogance, felt him as a lesser man than themselves. They accuse him of pride and arrogance in claiming, by forgiving sins, to be God or equal to God.

Jesus graciously accommodates himself to their problem. He faces them with the two options, either forgiveness of sins or healing of the body. Both required divine power. The healing of the body was only possible by the power of God as much as was the healing of the soul which forgiveness produces. The healing of the body required a miracle of creation, and would be a revelation of the deity of Jesus.

Jesus says to the unbelievers and to all those who struggle with faith today - "but that you may know the Son of Man (myself) has authority on earth to forgive sins ..." I will heal this paralysis of body. He turns to the paralysed man and with words of divine power, tells him to get up and walk. In view of them all he does so, walking as if he had had no paralysis whatsoever.

This demonstration of divine power is unlike all claims made by faith healers today. The man's healing was so complete that there was no sign of paralysis or that there had been any paralysis before. The man became physically normal in a moment.

So Jesus demonstrated his deity, and graciously met the need of the unbelieving teachers of the law, proving his authority on earth to forgive sins. He did it in full view of them all (v.12), so that there would be no doubt about it.

Here is the bedrock of the Good News in Jesus. It is faith which comes to Jesus and places ourselves completely on his mercy. Such faith brings upon us total forgiveness - all our sins, past, present and future, are included, because our trust is forever - and we know life in the family of God.

This is becoming and being a Christian, no more and no less.