Good morning. If you would, for
this morning's call to worship, turn to Matthew chapter 13. We're gonna start at verse 10
through 23. The beginning of this chapter
is a well-known parable of the sower, where seeds are sowed
and some fall by the wayside, some on stony places, some among
thorns, and some on good ground. And the parable ends at verse
nine, with who hath ears to hear, let him hear. And the disciples
came and said unto him, why speakest thou unto them in parables? He
answered and said unto them, because it is given unto you
to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but to them
it is not given. For whosoever hath to him shall
be given, and he shall have more abundance. But whosoever hath
not, from him shall be taken away, even that he hath. Therefore speak I to them in
parables, because they seeing see not, and hearing they hear
not, neither do they understand. And in them is fulfilled the
prophecy of Isaiah, which saith, by hearing ye shall hear, and
shall not understand, and seeing ye shall see, and shall not perceive. For this people's heart is wax
gross, and their ears are dull of hearing, and their eyes they
have closed, lest at any time they should see with their eyes
and hear with their ears, and should understand with their
heart, and should be converted, and I should heal them. But blessed
are your eyes, for they see, and your ears, for they hear.
For verily I say unto you, that many prophets and righteous men
have desired to see those things which ye see, and have not seen
them, and to hear those things which ye hear, and have not heard
them. Hear ye, therefore, the parable
of the sower. When anyone heareth the word
of the kingdom and understandeth it not, then cometh the wicked
one and catcheth away which was sown in his heart. This is he
which received the seed by the wayside. But he that received
the seed in stony places, the same is he that heareth the word
and anon with joy received it. Yet hath he not root in himself,
but doreth for a while, For when tribulation or persecution ariseth
because of the word, by and by he is offended. He also that
receiveth seed among the thorns is he that heareth the word,
and the care of this world and the deceitfulness of riches choke
the word, and he becometh unfruitful. But he that receiveth seed into
the good ground is he that heareth the word and understandeth it,
which also beareth fruit, and bring forth some 100-fold, some
60, and some 30. Let us pray. Dear Lord, we thank you for the
message we heard this morning, for Jeff and for Greg, and for
those men who bring us messages each week. We pray, Lord, that
you bless the words that they preach to us. May it be your
will that those words come to us and bear fruit. that we be
good ground. We pray, Lord, that this message
which come this afternoon be just as fruitful and that you
give us the ears to hear and give Greg the words to preach.
In your most holy and perfect name we pray, amen. Let's stand together. We'll sing
hymn number 224 from your hardbacked hymnal, 224. I know not why God's wondrous
grace to me he hath made known, nor why unworthy he Christ in
love redeemed me for his own. But I know whom I have believed
and am persuaded that he is able to keep that which I've committed
unto him against that day. I know not how this Savior ♪
To me he did impart ♪ Nor how believing in his word ♪ Brought
peace within my heart ♪ But I know whom I have believed in that
he is able to keep that which I've committed unto him against
that day. ♪ I know not how the spirit moves
♪ Convincing men of sin ♪ Revealing Jesus through the word ♪ Creating
faith in him But I know whom I have believed and am persuaded
that he is able to keep that which I've committed unto him
against that day. I know not what of good or ill
may be reserved for me. Of weary ways or golden days
before His face I see. But I know whom I have believed
and am persuaded that he is able to keep that which I've committed
unto him against that day. I know not when my Lord may come
at night or noonday fair, nor if I'll walk the avail with Him
or meet Him in the air. But I know whom I have believed
and am persuaded that he is able to keep that which I've committed
unto him against that day. Please be seated. morning let's open our Bibles to John
the gospel of John chapter 4 John chapter 4 every time we sing that hymn
it's blessing to my heart I know not. I know not. I know
not. Each one of those stanzas starts
out with, I know not. I don't understand it. I don't
know how it works. But I believe. I believe. We really don't understand anything
we believe. But we believe it because we've
been taught of God. We know it's true. And most importantly,
we we believe him. It's not what we believe, it's
who we believe. And we get the who right, the
what will be right too. I want to try to bring a message
this morning on what the real miracle of God
is. And I've prayed and I pray now
and hope that our God will perform a miracle among us today. That he will do a work of grace
in our hearts, causing us to come down off our high horse
of pride and self-righteousness and independence, that's a miracle. That he would give us eyes to
see what he has done in coming down from heaven to accomplish
our salvation. This is... This is the miracle
of God. And thirdly, that he would give
us faith. It's a miracle that those who
are by nature at enmity with God, those who hate God, those
who don't believe God would be brought to bow before him and
to believe every word that he says. That's a miracle. And that's
the real miracle. I looked up the word miracle
in the dictionary and it says an event that is contrary to
the established laws of nature attributed to a supernatural
cause. An event that's contrary to the
established laws of nature and is attributed to a supernatural
cause. That's a good definition. But
the event is not an event that can be seen with the eyes. We look, the Bible says we look
not upon those things which can be seen. For the things which
can be seen are temporal. They're just worldly, they're
temporary, they're fleshly. But we look upon those things
which cannot be seen. For the things which cannot be
seen That's a miracle. To have eyes to see that which
cannot be seen by the natural eye, the natural man. They that
are after the flesh, they that just judge everything by fleshly
means and what they see and what they hear, what they experience,
they that are after the flesh do mind the things of the flesh.
But they that are after the spirit, the things of the spirit. The
world may be looking for a miracle that they can experience in the
flesh. May God give us eyes to see the
real miracle. I pray, as I said, that the Lord
would be pleased to perform a miracle for us today. If he does, that miracle won't
make the newspapers. Some cardinal won't be coming
down from Rome to investigate the evidence of it, to canonize
someone for having performed it. That's what the Catholics
do. No, that miracle will be known
only by those who have eyes to see, ears to hear, and it'll
be experienced by the supernatural in their hearts. That's the miracle
we look for. You have your Bibles open to
John chapter 4. Let's read a few of these verses
together. Verse 46, so Jesus came again
into Cana of Galilee where he made the water wine and there
was a certain nobleman whose son was sick at Capernaum. And he heard that Jesus would
come out of Judea unto Galilee and he went unto him and besought
him that he would come down and heal his son for he was at the
point of death. Then said Jesus unto him, except
ye see signs and wonders ye will not believe." Unless you just
experience a physical miracle, you won't believe. You are looking
for something to give proof to what God has already
said. In another place, the Lord tells
the crowd, a wicked and perverse generation is seeking after a
sign. No sign will be given unto it
except for the sign of Jonah, who spent three days and three
nights in the belly of the whale. What was the Lord referring to
there? He was referring to the miracle of the resurrection. Now we don't have, we weren't
there. at the tomb. We weren't in the
upper room when the Lord appeared to those disciples 2,000 years
ago. We didn't see it with our physical
eyes. We didn't stand there with Thomas
and be invited to put our hands into the wounds of his side.
We weren't there. And yet we hang all the hopes
of our immortal soul on the truth of that miracle, of that event. That's a miracle. That's a miracle. I think about the rich man and
Lazarus. And that wasn't a parable. When
the Lord gives parables, he doesn't give names to the characters
in the parable. But the rich man and Lazarus
was an actual story, it wasn't a parable. Lazarus got a name. And they both die and the rich
man goes to hell. Lazarus goes into the bosom of
Abraham. And the rich man looks up and
he sees Lazarus and he cries and remembers that he had brothers
back on the earth. And he asked that someone would
go and warn his brothers of this place where he was. Do you remember
what Abraham said? Abraham said, they have Moses
and the prophets. If they won't believe them, neither
will they believe though one be raised from the dead. The
rich man wanted Abraham to send Lazarus back from the dead to
warn his brothers. But the Lord said, they've got
the scriptures. They've got Moses and the prophets. They've got the word of God.
If they won't believe the word of God, they won't believe though
one be raised from the dead. You see, faith doesn't come Saving
faith doesn't come by having experienced a physical miracle.
Saving faith comes when the miracle of grace does a work in the heart causing
us to bow and to believe what God has said. That's the miracle. I know whom I have believed and
I'm persuaded. persuaded that he's able to keep
that which I've committed unto him. I've committed everything
to him. I'm trusting him for all my salvation. So here we have this nobleman
who has a child that's dying and comes to the Lord and I ask
him to come and the Lord rebukes him and says to him in verse
48, except you see signs and wonders, you will not believe.
And the nobleman sayeth unto him, sir, come down there. My
child die. And Jesus sayeth unto him, go
thy way. Thy son liveth. And the man believed
the word that Jesus had spoken unto him and he went his way. And as he was now going down,
the servants of this nobleman met him and told him saying,
thy son liveth. And then the nobleman inquired
of his servants of what hour his son began to amend. And they
said unto him yesterday at the seventh hour, one o'clock in
the afternoon, we noticed that the fever broke. And so the father knew that it
was at that same hour in which Jesus saith unto him, thy son
liveth and himself believed and his whole house. This again, this is again, I'm
sorry, the second miracle that Jesus did when he was come out
of Judea into Galilee. What was the real miracle? Well, to begin with, the real
miracle is what the Lord did in the heart of this nobleman.
Now, the word nobleman means royalty, royalty. This man was either a member
of the family of the king or he was part of the royal court
This man was somebody very high up. And if you'll notice in verse 49, our translators have
the word sir there. that's translated here, Sir,
is most often translated to the word Lord. Lord. It is true that in the original
Greek that the word Kyrios, which is Lord or Sir, is much like
the word Senior in the Spanish language. We have people here
that speak Spanish and To the English-speaking person it seems
odd to refer to a man as Señor and to refer, you hear a Spanish
brother praying and you hear the word Señor because it means
Lord as well. But the vast majority of time
that this word curios is translated in the New Testament, it is the
word Lord, not Sir. And I don't know why the translators
put Sir here. But here's my point. I see this
nobleman being brought down off of his lofty heights to say something
that he's never said in his life. I mean, this man walked around
in royal robes and would have had the common people moving
out of his way and bowing to him And the common man would
have dared make eye contact with this man. And here this man comes
into the presence of the Lord Jesus Christ who in the flesh
was made in the likeness of sinful flesh. He didn't look like anyone
else, any different from anyone else. He was a commoner. He was a carpenter from an obscure
village, Nazareth. He was nobody in the eyes of
men. For this nobleman to say to him,
Lord, come down, ere my child die, that's a miracle. That's a miracle. It is a miracle when God takes
those who are to themselves proud, self-righteous, arrogant, and cause them to bow before
the Lord Jesus Christ and cry out to him as Lord. to be stripped of our arrogance, to be stripped of
our self-righteousness. You know, the highest, or I guess
I should say the lowest form of arrogance is not some loud,
defiant, rebellious, attitude, the lowest form of self-righteousness,
the lowest form of arrogance, the lowest form of human independence
is free will. It is, it's free will. It's for
a man to believe that he can make God subject to him. that God is just waiting for
him to let God have his way. Is that not the lowest form of
arrogance that can be? You see, a person doesn't have
to be raising their fist to heaven and hurling curses toward God
to be a nobleman, to be arrogant. They can be a very humble acting religious person
but if they believe that somehow God is subject to their will
and to their works and to their wisdom and that their salvation
is in their hands and that God is obligated to respond to their
demands, that's the lowest form of arrogance. And the Lord Jesus said, it's easier for a camel to go
through the eye of a needle than it is for a rich man to enter
into heaven. The disciples said, Lord, who
then can be saved? Who then can be saved? Because
we're all rich in our own righteousness, we're all rich in our own feelings
of of independence and in our own self-righteousness. Who then
can be saved? And what did the Lord say? With
man it is impossible, but with God, with God, a miracle can
be done. A work of grace can be performed
in the heart and only God can do it. You find a sinner, you
found a miracle of God. You find a nobleman, a rich man, who gets on his knees before
the Lord Jesus Christ and cries out to him, Lord, come down,
come down, come down to where I am. That's a miracle. For one who thinks too highly
of themselves, which we all do by nature, to loathing ourselves,
which can only be done by grace, that's a miracle. That's a miracle. For one who thinks that he has
something to offer God, to one who comes to believe that
he's completely dependent upon God's grace, for all of his salvation. That's a miracle. You see, the
miracle is not the healing of the child here. This happened 2,000 years ago.
I don't know how many years this child lived after this, but I
can guarantee you this, at some point in not too long a distance
of time after this, that child, if he grew to man, an old man,
eventually got sick again and died. That was just a temporary miracle.
The real miracle is seen in what this nobleman confesses when
he cries out to Jesus Christ as Lord. The Lord must bring
us down to where he came down for us to be taken up to where
he is. The Lord Jesus came down into
our sin and he has to bring us down. Truly the way up is down. He must confront us and he must
convince us of our sin before he can comfort us with his grace. being convinced of our sin is
his grace. But before the comfort of grace
can come, the conviction of sin must come. We've got to be made
dead before we can be made alive. We see it illustrated so many
times in the Bible, don't we? Saul of Tarsus. Oh, he was like
this nobleman. He was a member of the Sanhedrin.
He was a Pharisee of Pharisees. He was somebody. Saul of Tarsus
walked around Jerusalem with letters from the high priest
and everybody bowed to him and he breathed out threatenings
against the church and was sent by the high priest to have them
arrested and brought back and put to death until the Lord Jesus spoke to
him from heaven. knocked him off his high horse. Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou
me? It's hard to kick against the
pricks, isn't it, Saul? The Spirit of God had been doing
a work, a miracle in Saul's heart ever since Saul, I don't know
when it started. It at least started when Saul
watched Stephen be stoned. and the Spirit of God began to
prick his heart, prick his heart. Saul's beginning to question
what's going on and then God speaks. Who art thou Lord? Curiosity,
he didn't say sir, he said Lord, who art thou Lord? I am Jesus
whom thou persecuteth. And he goes from breathing out
threatenings to saying, Lord, what would you have me to do?
That's a miracle. That's a miracle. But it is the
miracle that God does in the hearts of his people. This is
the miracle. This is the miracle that we need done
in our hearts, isn't it? because we can fall back on our self-righteousness
and our independence and our arrogance very quickly. And what
a blessing it is, what a blessing it is when God the Holy Spirit
continues to perform this miracle of grace in our hearts and brings
us down You remember Naaman, the Syrian?
He was a captain of the army of Syria. Now at this time, Syria
was the most powerful country in the world. So Naaman was the
most powerful military man and under the king
of Syria, the greatest man in the world who had leprosy. And
Naaman thought that he was a great man who just happened to have
leprosy. But the truth was that Naaman
was a leper who just happened to be a great man. Oh, he came
down to the prophet. I thought the prophet would come
out to me. Well, there's your problem, Naaman,
you thought. You thought, I thought he would
come out to me and I thought he would perform a ceremony out
here and do something great. He sent his servant out to me
and told me to go down to the river Jordan and bathe. Well,
we've got better rivers than that back in Syria. He's finally persuaded to do
it. And then what's he wanna do? He just wants to take dirt
back to Syria from Israel with him so that he could have a place
to kneel down and worship Jehovah, the God of Israel for having
healed him. That's a miracle. But the miracle
was not in the physical healing. The miracle was in the change
of heart. And that's the miracle that you
need. And that's the miracle I need. I need God to change
my heart, to give me a new heart. Someone asked me recently, what's
really behind Moses killing the Egyptian back in Egypt before
he fled into the backside of the desert? Well, the picture
there is that Moses knew that he was an Israelite, but now
he's a great man. He's the son of the Pharaoh,
the greatest man on the earth. And Moses, like Naaman, and like
this nobleman, and like Saul of Tarsus, would have walked
around the common folks with his robes and garments. People
would have moved out of his way. And Moses saw an Egyptian abusing
an Israelite. This is my chance. I'm gonna
use my power, my influence. Moses is 40 years old. He's been
educated in the greatest schools of the world. He's the son of
Pharaoh. I'm going to deliver the Israelites. And so he slew this Egyptian. God sent him on the backside
of the desert for the next 40 years. And now at 80 years old,
at 80 years old, God has Moses where Moses needs to be in order
for Moses to be able to come back to Egypt and bring the children
of Israel out. He couldn't do it in his own
strength. He had to do it as a man who confesses before God,
I can't even speak. Lord, are you going to send me
back? You see, he's had 40 years now in the desert to be humbled
by God. That was the miracle. The miracle
was the work of grace that God did in Moses' heart. And now
he goes back humbly. You remember Jonah? God sent Jonah to preach to Nineveh. Lest Nineveh be destroyed by
the wrath of God. Jonah has a better idea. Nineveh is this way. Joppa's this way and the scripture
says that Jonah flees down to Joppa and then once he gets to
Joppa he goes down to the ship and once he gets to the ship
he goes down in the belly of the ship and finally we find Jonah at
the bottom of the ocean down in the belly of the whale and
there Jonah cries, salvation is of the Lord. That was the
miracle. All that the Lord does to cause
us to do like this nobleman. Lord, come down, ere my child
die. or come down to where I am. You've got to come to me because
I'm in the bottom. Story after story in the Bible
is given to us in order to tell us this glorious truth. Nebuchadnezzar,
the king of Babylon, The greatest nation, every one of these stories
is about the greatest nation and the greatest king and the
most powerful men and Nebuchadnezzar thought that he had built that
kingdom and he walks around his kingdom with his nose in the
air and his head held high believing that he had something to do with
it. And then God turns him into a
beast. He crawls around like an animal
humbled by God. And then the scripture says that
God brings him back into his right mind. And what does Nebuchadnezzar
say? Turn with me to Daniel chapter
four, look at it real quickly. Daniel chapter four. This is the miracle, brethren.
This is the miracle that you need, this is the miracle I need.
Lord, I don't, I wouldn't be convinced if I saw some physical
miracle performed. I need eyes of faith to see this. Look at what Nebuchadnezzar says
in Daniel chapter 4. beginning at verse 34. And at the end of the days, after
God had humbled Nebuchadnezzar and brought him down off his
lofty perch, I, Nebuchadnezzar, lifted up
my eyes unto heaven. Lord, come down. Come down. Rim the heavens, come down, perform
a miracle in my heart. Strip me of my righteousness. I lifted up my eyes into heaven,
my understanding returned unto me, and I blessed the most high,
and I praised and honored him that liveth forever, whose dominion
is an everlasting dominion, and his kingdom is from generation
to generation, and all the inhabitants of the earth are reputed as nothing,
nothing, Lord, that's what I am, nothing. That's what Paul, in me, that
is in my flesh dwelleth nothing, no good thing. He doeth according to his will
with armies of heaven and all the inhabitants of the earth
and no man can stay his hand or say unto him, what doest thou? How many times have you been
tempted to question God? Doubt God? You see, we're full
of it, aren't we? This is a miracle that the Lord
does in the hearts of his people, but it's not a one-time miracle.
It's a continual miracle. Lord, come down. Come down to where I am. that God would enable us to see
ourselves down. Isaiah said it like this, remember
the pit from which thou arts digged and the rock from which
thou arts hewned. Lord left myself, my heart is
rock. It's dead, it doesn't feel anything. It's cold, it can't believe.
Lord, the pit that I've been digged from is the pit of sin
and the pit of hell. And God says to you and me, remember
that. Remember that. That's the miracle. God would cause us to believe
that. Now, can we fully understand
how filthy the pit is? No, we looked at that last Sunday,
didn't we? When the Lord Jesus went across that sewer, Kidron,
and He, weeping, dropping sweat of blood. Only
the Lord Jesus understands the depth of our sin, but we believe
it. We believe it. Because God said
it. How do I know I'm a sinner? Because
God said I'm a sinner. And faith just believe, believing
God that you're a sinner, that's a miracle. We're not gonna believe
that on our own. We're gonna find something good
in us. We're gonna compare ourselves to ourselves and believe that
we're getting better. We're gonna compare ourselves
to one another and believe that we are better than someone else. I had a sad experience the other
day in my driveway. I had a man come to the house,
someone I had talked to several times in the past. His name was
Ray. And I'd done business with him. And I invited him to church again. And he's my age, and we were
talking about our ailments, as old men do. and he was in worse
physical condition than I'm in so we're talking about, you know,
how little time we've got left in this world and he was expressing
his concern for when he would die and how he would die. And
I said to Ray, I said, you know, Ray, it doesn't really, when
and how doesn't matter, it's what happens after you die. And he got real sober for a moment
and then he looked down at his feet and he said, well, I don't
think I've been bad enough to go there. And that's exactly what you would
think and what I would think, left to ourselves. I don't think
I've done anything bad enough to go there. Surely I'm not held
deserving. Has God performed a miracle in
your heart? Has he caused you to believe
because he said so? That every thought and imagination
of the heart is only evil and that continually? Has he caused you to believe
that you are hell deserving? That you've sinned and you've fallen
short in every part of your life to the glory of God and that
the wages of sin is death, eternal death, separation from God for
all eternity? I said, Ray, we've all done enough
to go there. That's where we go. apart from
the grace of God and apart from knowing Christ, he didn't understand. But I pray
the Lord would do for him what the Lord's done for me, a miracle,
a miracle. You see, we're all like Ray,
aren't we? We're all like the prodigal, taking our inheritance
and going out into the world and living riotously until finally
we find ourselves in false religion, teaching a Sunday school class, telling lies on God. That's the way I relate to the
prodigal because where was he? He was in a pig pen eating the
husk that the swine do eat. And that's where I was. And then he came to himself.
That was the miracle. All the servants back at my father's
house had it better than me. I'll go back and just ask him,
father, Lord, could I just be your servant? You just put me
in the back room, back house, back on the backside of the barn
somewhere. I can't live this way anymore. That's the miracle. The fact that this nobleman came
down when he asked the Lord to come down. Have you been made to lay low
before God? Have you been stripped of your
fig leaves, of your self-righteousness, of your free will? Oh Lord, come down. Come down. This is a life-and-death
situation. Ere my child die, come down. The miracle is that God has come
down. No man hath ascended up to heaven. The Lord Jesus said. No man can
build a tower like Babel to reach up into the heavens. No man can
build a ladder that will climb up into the heavens. No, Jacob's
ladder had the Lord, had the angels walking up and down. And
that ladder is Christ. The Lord Jesus is the only one
that came down. No man ever ascended up into heaven but he that came
down from heaven, even the Son of Man, which is from heaven." I am the bread that came down
from heaven. That's the miracle. That God would be made flesh
and that he would dwell among us. That the Lord Jesus Christ,
the Son of God, was so humble himself, that he would leave his lofty,
glorious place in heaven and be born of a woman in a stable,
put in a feeding trough, that he would suffer the contradiction
of sinners in this world, that he would walk around this
world not like you and me, blind to the rotten depravity of this
world, but that he was, he had his eyes wide open. He was sensitive
to all the evil that was about him, all the unbelief and all
the sin. And he that knew no sin suffered
the contradiction of sinners every day. That's a miracle. and then that he would be made
sin. He'd be made sin. I don't understand that. But I know that God made him
who knew no sin, sin. That we might be made the righteousness
of God in him. That's a miracle. All that happened in the life
and the death and the resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ. Something we can't see with our
physical eyes and something we don't demand proof of. How do
we know it to be true? Because we have God's word. We
have Moses and the apostles and the prophets. And we have one who has raised
from the dead. Lord, give me this daily bread.
Come down, feed my soul with Christ. Every day for 40 years,
the children of Israel in the wilderness went out and gathered
up the manna. Every day, except on the Sabbath, they rested.
That's what you and I need. We need for God to come down.
He came down 2,000 years ago. We need him to come down in the
power of his spirit and cause us to set our affections on things
above where he is seated at the right hand of God, not on things
of the earth. That we would look up like Nebuchadnezzar
did and see the Lord Jesus seated at the right hand of God as our
advocate before God, as our sin bearer, as our satisfaction before
God. That's a miracle. David prayed this in Psalm 144,
verse three. He said, bow the heavens, O Lord,
and come down and touch the mountains that they might smoke. Now what
were the mountains? It was Mount Sinai. Lord come
down and touch that mountain and satisfy the demands of God's
holy law because I can't live up to one of them. I couldn't
resist the one law that was given to me in the garden. I had full
reign of everything in the garden and you said just don't eat of
one tree and I couldn't do it. I can't keep God's law. Lord,
I need you to come down and touch that mountain and make it to
smoke. And I mean for you to come down
and touch Mount Calvary. I need you to do this in my heart.
This is the miracle. Though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became
poor that we might be made rich by his poverty. He didn't consider his claim
to be equal with God to be blasphemy and yet he made of himself no
reputation And he took upon himself the form of a servant and was
made in the likeness of sinful flesh and was obedient unto God
even unto death, yea, even the death of the cross. That's a
miracle. That the Lord Jesus would do
that. That he would come down from heaven. Here, brethren,
this is a noble prayer. And it's a prayer that I pray
the Lord will put in our hearts and on our lips constantly. Lord,
come down lest I die. Lord, come down. Come down and give me, give me
faith. To believe God is a miracle. The man believed God. He believed
God. He believed the word that Jesus
had spoken unto him. And what we just read in John
chapter four, that's a miracle. He just believed God. He believed
every word that the Lord Jesus spoke and he went back home. He wasn't surprised that his
child was healed. He just wanted to know exactly
when it happened. When did it happen? One o'clock
yesterday. Yep. And he believed. Oh. The miracle is that the death
The dead, I'm sorry, would live. The deaf would hear. The blind
would see. Those who were lame would walk. That was the miracle. You see,
it's not the things that we see with our physical eyes. We look
not upon those things which can be seen, for the things which
can be seen are temporal. We look upon those things which
cannot be seen for the things which cannot be seen are eternal. And many other signs did Jesus
that are not recorded in this book, but these have been written
in order that you might believe and that believing you might
have life through his name. Well, that's the miracle. that
faith would come by hearing, and hearing would come by the
word of God, and God would cause us to say, yes, Lord, and that we would be brought
to hang all the hopes of our life here and our life to come on the promises of God. fulfilled
in the person of the Lord Jesus Christ. For all the promises
of God are yea and amen in Him." That's the real miracle. The real miracle is not that
the Lord Jesus cleansed 10 lepers, the real miracle was that one
of them turned around and came back. The real miracle is not that
the Lord took five loaves and a few small fishes and fed 5,000
people. The real miracle was that the
disciples believed and that he would take the bread of life
and feed our souls and cause us to believe. Now, in our text, the last verse
says that this is the second miracle that the Lord performed
when he came back into Galilee. And the first miracle was the
what? The turning of water to wine.
And nobody knew what had happened. Turn with me to, let's just close
with this, John chapter 2. John chapter 2. Verse 11, this beginning of miracles
did Jesus in Galilee, in Canaan of Galilee. The governor of the
feast didn't know where the wine came from, nobody knew. The miracle had been performed
but nobody knew because the miracle was not changing the water and
the wine. Here's the miracle. He manifested forth his glory
and his disciples believed on him. That was the miracle. That God would manifest his glory
in our hearts and that we would believe on him, that's the miracle. We're not gonna do that unless
the Lord performs a miracle. That's the miracle we look for.
That's the miracle we need. And so we cry continually with
this nobleman who had been put in his rightful place. Lord, come down, ere my child
die. For this is life and death. I need you to come down. And I need you to make me to
believe what you've told us about what you did when you did
come down. Our Heavenly Father, forgive
us for our unbelief. Lord, cause us, cause us to be brought down to
where we are dependent upon thee. Lord, we pray that your Holy
Spirit would continually bring what you did when you came down
to our hearts and cause us to believe. Ere we die, we ask it in Christ's
name. Amen. Number 30 on the Sproul Hymnal.
Let's stand together. Glory, glory, I'm forgiven. All my sins are washed away. Christ, by his great blood atonement,
all my sin has put away. Sin imputed to my Savior when
He died upon the tree. As the substitute for sinners,
God will not impute to me. Glory, glory, I'm accepted, robed
in Christ's own righteousness. I'm a child, an heir of heaven,
saved by God's almighty grace, Christ's obedience to The Father
is imputed now to me. In God's sight I'm pure and holy. He declares me so to be. ♪ Glory, glory, I'll not perish
♪ In Christ's hands I am secure ♪ He who saved me sure will keep
me ♪ By God's grace I shall endure ♪ This is not a vain presumption,
I just think ♪ Him at his word Christ has sworn ♪ They shall
not perish ♪ Who believe on me their Lord ♪