“Believe I Can Forgive You” (Luke 5:17-26)

Sermon Transcript

Today we are in Luke 5. So, turn your Bibles there, and I’ll give you a recap. Currently, we are in a series, and that series is called, “Who is Jesus and What Does He Want?” In this series, we are looking at the Great Commission. Essentially, you see, Jesus has said at the end of His life here on earth before He ascended back to the Father, He looked at all of us, His entire church, and He said, “All authority on heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them…and teaching them to obey all the commands that I have commanded you. I’m with you until the end of the age.” Now, this command that He has given us, “teach them to obey all the commands I’ve given you,” this is what we need to know. Well, what are the commands of Jesus?

And there are two types. One, there are the commands that have to do with belief. Two, there are commands of action. Now, Christians, we like the commands of action, right? We think those are the easy ones, and generally, they mostly are, I suppose. But there is another command. And the commands of belief are equally important because, without the proper commands of belief, how do you know you’re serving the right God?

You see, the commands of belief tell us who Jesus truly is. And today we’re going to tackle another command of belief. And the command, the main point of today’s sermon, is we must believe that Jesus has the authority to forgive our sins.

Okay. So rise, church. Rise with me as we read Luke 5:17-26. This morning I’ll be reading out of the Christian Standard Bible.

On one of those days while he was teaching, Pharisees and teachers of the law were sitting there who had come from every village of Galilee and Judea, and also from Jerusalem. And the Lord’s power to heal was in him. Just then some men came, carrying on a stretcher a man who was paralyzed. They tried to bring him in and set him down before him. Since they could not find a way to bring him in because of the crowd, they went up on the roof and lowered him on the stretcher through the roof tiles into the middle of the crowd before Jesus. Seeing their faith he said, “Friend, your sins are forgiven.” Then the scribes and the Pharisees began to think to themselves, “Who is this man who speaks blasphemies? Who can forgive sins but God alone?” But perceiving their thoughts, Jesus replied to them, “Why are you thinking this in your hearts? Which is easier: to say, ‘Your sins are forgiven,’ or to say, ‘Get up and walk’? But so that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins”—he told the paralyzed man, “I tell you: Get up, take your stretcher, and go home.” Immediately he got up before them, picked up what he had been lying on, and went home glorifying God. Then everyone was astounded, and they were giving glory to God. And they were filled with awe and said, “We have seen incredible things today.”

Heavenly Father, I come to You and I ask, Lord, that You would be with us and help us, Lord Jesus. Help us to be present in this sermon. I pray that You take away all of our distractions and that You would fill this room with the Holy Spirit right now and anoint us to hear the word of God to be moved and transformed so that our hearts would be filled with a desire to fulfill the Great Commission as we seek to make disciples, teaching them what it means to obey our Lord.

Jesus, will You please take our minds, take my mind, and take away all the distractions right now? Help us to focus on You. Help us to focus on Your return, to focus on the things of the kingdom. And Jesus, I pray that You would remove any dark powers or principalities that might be seeking to thwart today’s mission and expel them from here so that this room can be wholly devoted to You.

Lord, I pray that You would sanctify us by the power of Your word and that we would be moved to recognize what it means that You are King and that You forgive us of our sin. I pray that You would help me to speak in ways that our people can hear and that they would be given eyes to see and ears to hear. Lord, in Jesus’ name I pray. Amen.

All right. So, church, here we are. We are in this text. Last week we got to focus on the beautiful love of God. I had said to you last week how great it was that God had made it very clear to me that He wanted me to come in this church and tell you guys, “God loves you.” And He gave me a very clear message on how I knew that was the case. Three times in two days, I had someone come to me and tell me that they were absolutely moved by the love of God, and they had not heard that often. And I took that as a sign. The Lord, obviously, He wants me to tell His church, “God loves you.” And He does.

And yet there are times in our life where a sibling dies, where our children get addicted to drugs. There are times when we lose eyesight. Our blood gets struck with infirmities. Our bodies grow cancer cells. We lose our hearing. We get fired. And then we go, “But the preacher told me God loves me. Then why is all of this happening?”

And as I thought about this this week, I’ve been compelled to realize that the problem that we have when bad things happen to us is probably because we think we deserve better, right? Like, how dare God let this happen to me? Doesn’t He know who I am? I think rather what Jesus wants us to recognize today in this text is that we are pieces of His kingdom doing His work. And when bad things happen to us, He still loves us. He’s using those bad things to further His kingdom.

And if we can step out of our small circle where we only see our own problems and we can see the world at large, then perhaps we can get a glimpse of how God is moving things in our favor and for His glory. And, church, it is only with this kind of perspective can we truly look at the bad things that happen to us and think, “God still loves me.” So that’s my hope, and that is what I believe God wants you to see in this text.

The main point of today’s sermon is that we must believe that Jesus has authority to forgive sins. If you have a bulletin, you’ll notice there’s a sermon leaflet in there with blanks. We’re going to be going through that sermon leaflet, and you can fill in those blanks as we go through.

Looking at the Opponents of Forgiveness (v. 17)

Now, church, let’s begin looking at the opponents of forgiveness. And as we go through this, I’m going to flesh out this idea for you that I believe what Luke is doing. Luke is showing us that there are people who are in Jesus’s vicinity, and they are plagued with pain and hurt, and they’re expecting Jesus to do a thing, and Jesus does a different thing. And the whole reason He does this different thing is because He has a greater plan at play because this is sometimes how God works.

And the reason He does that different thing today in this text is because He has a greater truth to teach. His goal is not to prioritize the healing of the paralytic. His priority is to give us the comforting news that He has the authority to forgive your sin. So let’s look at this first. Let us begin.

First point in your bulletin, looking at the opponents of forgiveness. In this text, we are introduced. This is the first time we are introduced to the group known as the Pharisees and the experts of the law, also known as the scribes, the teachers of the law. This is the first time they pop up in Luke. So, who were the Pharisees?

The Pharisees were just one of the four major Jewish groups or sects of first-century Israel. Now, you also had the Essenes. The Essenes were pretty much, you know, the super fundamentalist monks of first century. They were the guys that said, “You know what? The world is going to hell in a handbasket, and we don’t want to be around when God comes back because there’s going to be so much damage and judgment here. It’s going to look like Sodom and Gomorrah by the end of it. And so, we’re going to hightail out of here.” So, they took their scrolls and they headed for the mountains in the Qumran caves, right? And they disappeared, but they left their scrolls in the Qumran caves, and that’s where we get the Dead Sea Scrolls from, is the Essenes.

The other group is the Sadducees. The Sadducees were a wealthy group of Jewish elite. They were aristocrats. They were very close with the politicians, and they were authoritative. And then you also had the Zealots. The Zealots we had a lot of experience with as we were going through the book of Galatians. The Zealots were the group of Jews who were so sick and tired of these foreign governments coming in and telling Israel what they could and could not do, how to eat, how to sleep, where to breathe. And so they just said, “You know what? Give me a dagger and a gun, and I’ll handle this myself.” And this is where we get the word zealous from. It describes a person who is filled with so much zeal they’ll inflict pain upon others to get their agenda through.

But the people we have today are the Pharisees. The Pharisees are the great ancestors of modern-day Orthodox Judaism. Their primary goal is to make sure that the people of Israel are being 100% faithful to the laws of Moses. Church, how many laws of Moses are there? 613. And so to make sure that they are following the laws, the Pharisees start bringing in other traditions, oral traditions. And those oral traditions are what I like to call law padding. Right?

So, for example, in modern day, if you want to pad the law, keep the Sabbath holy, you might say, well, that also means you can’t use your microwave because you’re making electricity move, and that’s work. Okay, that’s something modern Jews follow, right? Don’t want to create any electricity. This is why your ovens have a Sabbath mode. Who here knows that exists on their oven? It does. You can make your oven turn on automatically thanks to the Pharisees.

Okay, so that’s who the Pharisees are, and they’re in the picture. But who are the scribes? The experts of the law. The experts of the law are their legal assistants. These are the guys who know the law backwards and forwards. So, you know, it’s kind of like somebody says something scandalous in a Bible study. The Pharisee just looks over at his scribe and goes, you know, basically sign language for, “Is that true? Does that jive with the law of Moses?” So they’re their legal assistants there to back them up.

In a word, the Pharisees and the scribes are expert judgmentalists. They have perfected the idea of looking down on people over their nose like this. This is the Pharisees and scribes. And guess what? That’s the only reason they’re in the picture today. They are in the picture to judge Jesus because things have popped off since He has cured this leper. And He has done something that only God can do. And now that the Pharisees and the scribes are in the picture, they want to see what this Jesus has to do.

And you see what Jesus does instead, He does it intentionally to provoke the Pharisees and the scribes. And you’re going to see the friends of the paralytic, they’re going to do things along with Jesus’s response. These two things, when they’re put together, they are going to teach us a valuable and important lesson.

We Must Consider the Demand of Discipleship (vv. 18-20)

And, church, that’s the next point. We must consider the demand of discipleship. We must count the cost of being a follower of Jesus. Now, how do we get that application? Let’s look at the setup. The setup is, it says in verse 17 that the Lord’s power is on Jesus at this moment to do some healing. Okay.

Now He’s in a house, and He’s doing some teaching, and everybody from the town is crowding around Him, and they want to see what this guy’s got to say, and all the legal experts are coming there to judge Jesus. And when they get there to do all of their judgment, all of a sudden, you’ve got these super fantastic friends. I wish everybody in this room had, but they had men that were carrying a paralyzed man who is stuck to his bed. And they are pining to get through this crowd to bring him to Jesus because they recognize that Jesus has something and can do something that no other person on planet earth can do.

And what is that? He can heal their friend’s paralysis, his infirmities. No one on planet earth has been able to do this up to this point that we know of. They see it, and they recognize it. Can you imagine where their hearts are? Their hearts are probably stricken and hurting and mourning, and maybe this is it. All these years that he’s been going through this. Is this the moment that Jesus is going to take away all of his pain? Can you imagine it?

It’s kind of like you’ve been struggling with bouts of cancer on and on and on and on and another bout, and it won’t let up. And you see that Jesus is in the room, and you go to Him, and you say, “Maybe this is it. I’ll finally be healed.” And you say, “Jesus, will You do it like You did for the leper?” And what does Jesus do? He merely tells him, “Your sins are forgiven.”

“I thought You were going to heal me. My sins are forgiven?” And you know, I can’t imagine how much that must have hurt at first. Can you imagine, not hearing and getting what you were expecting the God who loves you to give you? But then, on top of that, you see that Jesus does something instead. He says, “Your sins are forgiven.” And when Jesus says, “Your sins are forgiven,” He did that to provoke the Pharisees and the Sadducees to say a thing. What is that thing they say when they come in? When He says this, He says, “Who is this man who speaks blasphemies? Who can forgive sins but God alone?”

Jesus knew they were going to say this. How does He know they were going to say that? Check this out. Verse 22, “perceiving their thoughts.” This guy is not just a backwoods carpenter from Nazareth. This is God in the flesh. He can read their minds. He knew exactly what the Pharisees and scribes were going to do when He said, “Your sins are forgiven.”

The man who is there for help and healing in all of his plight, Jesus knows he’s there and in pain. But what does He do? “Your sins are forgiven.” He says that just to make the professional judgmentalists angry. Jesus uses the man who is in pain to make someone else upset. Does that fit your understanding of Jesus and the God who loves you?

You see, we have to really step out of our own little boxes to truly understand that kind of category of God, that God is using all things for His purposes and for our good if you love God. All right. So why did I say that we must count the cost of being a disciple, the demand of discipleship?

Okay? Because what happens is after Jesus sees what these disciples have done, these disciples have fought tooth and nail to get through the crowd. They fought tooth and nail to climb a house. They also had to dig through a layer of mud in these homes, based on what archaeologists tell us. And then they had to build some kind of pulley system to lower this guy on a stretcher down to Jesus. That’s a lot of work.

I’m just being honest with you. I don’t know if I could do that. That’s how intentional these guys were to get before Jesus. And what does Jesus do? We already talked about what He says, but look at verse 20. It says, “Seeing their faith.” We must pay careful attention to this, church, because in America, for too long, we have taken God’s grace as an object that is cheap.

We simply will sit in our pews and say, “Jesus, I messed up. Forgive me.” And it looks nothing like trying to scale a building, break through a ceiling, dig through the mud, and lower ourselves on scaffolding to get before Jesus. Jesus calls that faith. You see, faith is an action. If you have faith in God, you will fight tooth and nail to get in His presence, and nothing will stop you unless it’s God Himself.

But God does not delight in the death of the wicked (Ezek 18:23). And He says He will save anyone who calls on the name of the Lord (Joel 2:32). But this is the kind of faith that God applauds, the kind that fights to get in His presence. And this, church, is what I would encourage us to adopt.

This is what Dietrich Bonhoeffer calls the grace that is free but it is not cheap. And that sounds like an oxymoron because if we say that something is free, it doesn’t have a cost. If it doesn’t have a cost, it can’t be cheap or expensive. But what he’s getting at is, and this is a beautiful quote, church. Remember this quote. “When Christ calls a man, He is bidding him to come and die.” This is the cost of discipleship.

If you want to follow Jesus, and I hope you do. I hope that you are pining for, like these men, to get before Jesus. But when He calls you to be His disciple, He is calling you to die to yourself. So while His grace is free, it will also cost you your life of comfort. You can no longer live for yourself and be a follower of Jesus.

Luke 9:23-26 says, Jesus speaks, Then he said to them all:

“If anyone wants to follow after me, let him deny himself, take up his cross daily, and follow me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life because of me will save it. For what does it benefit someone if he gains the whole world, and yet loses or forfeits himself? For whoever is ashamed of me and my words, the Son of Man will be ashamed of him when he comes in his glory and that of the Father and the holy angels” (CSB).

Church, I want you to know God loves you tremendously. He loves you so much. He died for you on the cross. But do not cheapen His grace by thinking He expects nothing of you in return. He expects your life. You are welcome to become a part of His family, but you must die. And with it comes a host of eternal rewards. And the greatest of those rewards is being in His presence for all of eternity. Where there’s no more pain, no more cancer, no more death, decay, destruction, famine, prostitution, child trafficking, all of it is gone. Addiction gone. Adultery gone.

So why did I say that the action of these friends really shows us the demand of discipleship? What does it mean to be a follower of Jesus? I say that because these men just spent their time, their energy, and their reputation. No matter what these men do from there on out in their lives, they will always be known as the desperate idiots who climbed a building and dug through a muddy roof to lower their friend before a backwoods carpenter. Do you see that?

Seeking to follow Jesus will cost you everything, especially your reputation. You will never be regarded as a high individual in this society. You know what I mean, great examples are, look at any Hollywood actor who then turned into a Christian. They got the boot. Never again were they in high positions in Hollywood. This is the world. The world is run by the prince of darkness. And the second you switch your allegiance from one king to another, you lose all the benefits of his kingdom. But following Jesus is much more worth it.

We Must Expect the Unexpected (v. 21)

All right, church. The next thing I want you to notice is we must expect the unexpected. And this is in verse 21. Why should we expect the unexpected? You see, in verse 21, look at these professional judges. Then the scribes and the Pharisees began to think to themselves, “Who is this man who speaks blasphemies?”

Now, a blasphemy, a blasphemy is something that you would speak against the Lord, like cursing the Lord. Sometimes it would be regarded as just saying the Lord’s name in vain. Our modern equivalent of the acronym GD, right? So, you speak this blasphemy, and scripture in the Old Testament law would have called for your death. You’re done for.

Okay? They see Jesus show up, and Jesus says, “You’re blaspheming because you’re doing something that we believe only God can do.” Okay. Who disagrees that only God can forgive sins? Well, nobody, not even Jesus. Jesus agrees with them. So, what is the real problem here? The problem is not that Jesus said, “Your sins are forgiven.” The problem is that they could not expect that Jesus would be God. That’s the real problem.

Now, how does that happen? That happens when you become so convinced that you have the right theology that when God does a thing that does not fit your theology, guess who’s wrong? It’s not me and my theology, it’s God. And that’s exactly what the problem is here with the Pharisees. They were so dead set in the way they were doing things that they can’t imagine that God would come in the form of a man, come from backwoods Nazareth, raised by a carpenter, and walk up and start healing people and then say, “Your sins are forgiven.”

Because they did not have that category in their minds, they thought Jesus was a blasphemer. But what is the real problem here, church? The problem is that you can study the Bible and know it better than the back of your hand. You can know the Bible better than you know anything in your entire life and still miss God.

Do not be like the Pharisees and say that you know and you understand God, and you actually completely miss all of His movement. Church, we are in an age where the Holy Spirit dwells inside of us. And if we live by the power of that Holy Spirit, we will not miss God’s movements. You see, if we are intimate, have an intimate relationship with the God who loves you, then you will not be surprised if you see a preacher wearing a hat with earrings and tattoos on his face proclaiming there is salvation in Jesus.

The only way that will be a problem for you is if you say, “No, no, I know the Bible. Bible says God don’t use people with tattoos.” Do you see my point here? We can have expectations about God’s expectations and wrongly assign them to God. And so when there is a revival popping off of former drug addicts, we’re not astonished because we know that we serve a God who does unexpected things, right?

Guess what He did for your pastor? He called a man that was into voodoo, witchcraft, tarot cards, pulled him out of New Orleans, living a life of drunkenness and debauchery, and He got me married by 19 years old, 19 and 20, kids by 21 years old. And now I’m preaching to a generation that has more wisdom than I’ve got years of my life. Right? I mean, this is God. It’s unexpected.

So we have to have our theology. We should know the Bible, but our palms should be slightly open, thinking to ourselves, “You know what? Maybe I don’t have it all figured out. Maybe my theology could be wrong. I don’t know.” Right. There are some people that I’ve encountered who said, “No, no, no. I know. I know what that says.” And that says this. And they completely miss the movement of God. It is heartbreaking, and I don’t want that for Christians, and neither does God.

So don’t be like the Pharisees who were really good at judging people because they were so firm and convicted that they understood the Bible perfectly that God could not be doing this thing. And ultimately, what they missed is they missed the King that stood before them.

We Must Bow to the King of Forgiveness (vv. 22-24)

And that brings us to our next point, church. We must bow before the King of forgiveness. Everything up until this point was to highlight one truth. Jesus is the fulfillment of the Son of Man from Daniel 7. And in being the Son of Man, He has the authority to forgive sins on earth. This is what He says in verses 22 through 24.

First, let me show you in verse 24, He says, “You may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth.” Jesus is referring to Himself as the Son of Man. So who is this? This comes from Daniel 7:9-14. Daniel is having a vision, and he sees the Ancient of Days. The Ancient of Days is the Lord of lords. It is God in all of His magnificence, sitting on His throne.

And as he continued to watch, he says:

“[S]uddenly one like a son of man was coming with the clouds of heaven. He approached the Ancient of Days and was escorted before him. He was given dominion and glory and a kingdom, so that those of every people, nation, and language should serve him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion that will not pass away, and his kingdom is one that will not be destroyed” (CSB).

And this backwoods carpenter from Nazareth just said, “That’s me. That’s a big claim, dude. How are you going to back that up? That’s a big claim.” And so Jesus actually backs it up. And He backs it up first by giving them a riddle. He says, “Which is easier to say? Your sins are forgiven, or pick up your mat and go home?”

Now, at first glance, this might be really confusing—“I don’t understand what Jesus is doing here.” But you see, He’s offering them two things that only God can do. The first one, to say, “Your sins are forgiven.” This doesn’t require any kind of immediate evidence. I could say your sins are forgiven, and it doesn’t prove anything. Right? And then you’ve got the second one that says, “Pick up your mat and go home.” Now, a charlatan can’t say that. Why? Because the guy can’t pick up his mat and go home.

So, there’s a third thing, though, church. And the third thing is an unspoken principle that’s in the back of everybody’s minds here. God does not use an impostor and a blasphemer. So when Jesus just said, “Your sins are forgiven,” if He is an impostor, then God will surely not use Him to heal the paralytic. So when God heals the paralytic, it throws everyone off their rocker, and they say, “Oh, that means He was not being an impostor and a blasphemer when He said, ‘Your sins are forgiven.’”

And that’s what Jesus is getting at. He takes the pain of this paralytic, and He finally gives him what he wants: healing. But He has to go through this whole rigmarole of proving that He has authority on earth to forgive sins and that He is the King, the King of Daniel 7, who has been given dominion, a kingdom that will not ever end.

So, church, I got to encourage you. Do not sleep on Jesus. Jesus does love you. He loves you tremendously. But do not sleep on Him. He is not a morally neutral figure. He’s not like some candidate for president that you can go, “Oh, I don’t like Him. That’s all right. I’ll wait four more years.” You see, Jesus and what you think about Him has eternal consequences.

He is not a neutral figure, and because He is King, He demands absolute kingdom loyalty and service. Either Jesus is your everything, or you stand under judgment. He loves you, but He will also judge you if you reject Him. Because He is establishing a kingdom of His people. His people are like the people of Israel who have suffered long enough in the book of Revelation. The martyrs of the faith have been constantly pressured and beaten up and battered and bruised.

And it says in Revelation, their prayer from the altar is going up and saying, “Lord, when will You avenge our blood?” (6:10). And God is going to establish a kingdom where He only rewards those who have expressed their fidelity to Him as their King because He is finally bringing justice to the world where all these bad things happen.

Christianity is the only worldview experience where all evils are righted, and they’re either righted by Jesus paying for them on the cross or eternal damnation. And I rejoice that we Christians will get to be in God’s presence for all of eternity, and we will get to bask in His presence because He is our King.

Is He yours? Is He your King? Does He have your entire allegiance? Have you considered the cost of discipleship?

We Must Rejoice Before Forgiveness (vv. 24-26)

The last point in your bulletin is that we must rejoice before forgiveness. And that is the reaction that the people got when they witnessed Jesus’s mighty miracle. They recognized this is the King, and they were struck with awe that God is in their midst.

And I hope that you today will have that same experience, that you will rejoice and praise the Lord in awe, knowing that He is the King that loves you, has died for you, and is beckoning you into His fold. Let’s go to the Lord.

Father, I thank You so much and tremendously for Your great gift of love that You have given us, Father. And I pray that You would rally us to consider the cost of being a disciple of Jesus. Help us to lay down our lives and pick up our cross, to put our hand to the plow and not look back to the life we’re leaving behind. Use us, Lord.

And also, I pray that when things go bad, when we lose our eyesight, when we get diseases, when our loved ones die, when all these things happen, Lord, that we would just step back out of our own little box and say, “Lord, will You remind me that You work all things for our good,” and help us to remember the bigger picture that You are the God that is orchestrating all things for the coming kingdom. And help us to find peace and joy in that. And Jesus, help us to be humble. In Your name we pray. Amen.