And I've titled our message this
morning, Be Opened. Be Opened. Now the man we just
read about that the Lord healed was a man who up to this point,
he had never heard a sound in his life. And he couldn't speak
clearly because he couldn't hear. He just made random sounds, you
know. He couldn't say cow because he
never heard anybody say cow before. He didn't know how, you know,
to say the word correctly because he'd never heard it. And, you
know, I've said this before and I feel like it's a good thing
to say every once in a while. You know, the mouth needs the
ear if it's going to work properly, doesn't it? I know preachers
who love to talk about how much people need them. And that's
true. I mean, you know, we need to
hear from God. If we're going to hear from God,
we're going to hear from a preacher. But I need you just as much. You know, the preacher needs
hearers. I know this for a fact. I preach
a whole lot better when I see you listening, when you're listening
and being blessed. I preach better. That's just
a fact of the matter. That's one of the reasons I'm
so thankful for you all. And this man had never heard
a sound and he couldn't speak because he couldn't hear how
to do it. So this man's friends and his family, they did a very
wise thing. They brought him to the Lord.
You know, this man couldn't hear, could he? But his family could.
His friends could. And I'll tell you what they'd
heard. They heard that the Lord healed
so many different diseases and sicknesses. They knew that the
Lord was the only hope that their friend had. So they brought him
to the Lord. And when they brought him to
the Lord, the Lord took that man aside so he was alone with
the Lord. And the Lord put his fingers
in his ears. Now, some people say that the Lord spit on his
finger and then put his finger on the man's tongue. John Gill,
for what it's worth, says that the original means that the Lord
spit directly onto the man's tongue. And his fingers were
already in the man's ear, so he spit directly onto his tongue. Gill says that's what the original
means. But either way, the Lord put some of his spit on this
man's tongue and his fingers in his ears. And he looked up
to heaven and he sighed and said, Ephetha, be opened. And immediately the man's ears
were opened. Immediately he could hear. Immediately,
he could speak plainly. He didn't have to be like a toddler,
you know, and learn language slowly. He could immediately
speak plainly and clearly. Now this man could hear. I mean,
you think about standing there watching this, you know, go on.
The Lord put his fingers in this man's ears. Those were the fingers that formed
Adam from the dust of the ground. Those were the fingers that formed
the first hearing ears. That was the finger that had
the power to write the 10 commandments on the tables of stones. Those
powerful fingers were put in this man's ear, and that's what
enabled him to hear. And there's something about the
Lord's spit being put on this man's tongue that enabled him
to speak plainly. You know, this man was healed. He was healed from something
that came from inside the Lord's body. From inside the Lord, by
his power. Now that's some story. You know,
that really happened to a poor man who couldn't hear or speak. And every time I read this story,
it always makes me thankful, you know, that the Lord healed
this man. I mean, that would be such a miserable way to live. Many years ago, I had a relative,
I think he was dad's cousin, Becky would remember him, Lloyd.
You remember Lloyd? Now Lloyd, he couldn't, he was
blind and he was deaf and he also couldn't speak. But it just
made me sad to see Lloyd have to suffer through this life,
not being able to see, not being able to speak, not being able
to hear. And so I'm so thankful that the
Lord healed this man so he didn't have to suffer that, you know,
his whole life long. I mean, that's a story. That's
a miracle. But if all we get from this story
is that the Lord is able to heal our physical diseases, we missed
out on a great spiritual blessing. And that's true of all the Lord's
miracles, but in this one, I wanna give you a few points, a few
pictures from this miracle that show us the miracle of salvation. Now, number one is this, all
of us are born spiritually deaf. Now, we can hear the words of
the gospel, and we understand the words, but we can't love
them. We can't believe them. We can
hear Christ preach, but we don't have the ability to believe on
Christ. You know, the words of the gospel
are easy to understand. If it's preached right now, the
words of the gospel are easy to understand. Understanding
is not our problem. Our problem is we can't believe.
Microsoft Word has a feature that you can click on and tell
you the reading level of your paper, my notes. And Microsoft
Word tells me that my notes today are on a third grade reading
level. Now that ought to mean everybody in this room can understand
every word that I'm saying. Our problem is not lack of understanding. Our problem is that by nature
we cannot believe the gospel when we hear it preached. We can hear the preacher speak
to our ears, but we can't hear Christ speak to the heart because
we're spiritually deaf. We understand the words of the
gospel. If somebody says God, you have some understanding of
who that is, what that word means. We hear the word sinner. We at
least to some degree know what that means. We hear about grace
and forgiveness and salvation. And at least to some degree,
we know what those words mean. But our problem is that when
we hear them, we can't believe God. When we hear those words,
those words do not make us trust Christ because we don't believe
what God says. Somebody reads scripture to us
and we understand the words. You know, the King James version
with thee and thou is not what makes us not believe the word
of God. Our problem is we're spiritually deaf. So we can't
hear and we cannot believe. We can't, you know, the preacher
tells us that we're sinners and the Word of God tells us we're
sinners, but we really can't believe that we're a sinner.
I mean, not completely. I mean, you know, I do stuff
wrong, but everything I do, oh, everything I do, you know, is
not sin. We can't really believe that
we're sinners who, if we're going to be saved, has got to be by
God's grace alone. We really can't believe that
our sin is so bad, that the only way our sin could be forgiven
is by the blood of the sacrifice of the Son of God who come into
flesh. Now we really can't believe that. And since we can't hear,
We can't speak either. You know, when you hear somebody
talk about salvation and talk about Christ and talk about God,
and you think, well, this is utter foolishness. None of this
makes sense. Well, of course it doesn't. They
can't hear. And since they've never heard,
they can't tell the truth. We can't tell the gospel because
we've never heard it with the ears of faith. Since we're spiritually
deaf, we've got a speech impediment. Now, I wish I was smart enough
to come up with this on my own, but I was not. But this is so
good, I'm gonna give credit to where credit's due. This is what
Brother Todd Niver says about our speech impediment. If we're
spiritually deaf, here's our speech impediment. I, I, I. That's our speech impediment.
We think it's all about us. When we hear the, we can't hear
the gospel, so we think I, I, I. We can say the name Jesus,
but we don't know who he is. We don't know what he's done.
We can say the word grace, but we don't know what grace really
is. We think grace is something that we kind of deserve, you
know? And here's why we say things like that. You can't tell what
you never heard. You can't tell what you've never
experienced in the heart. Because by nature, we're spiritually
deaf. All right, number two. Before
I go on, how's the volume? Can you hear? Barb, you can hear
back there? Okay. Here's number two. Now,
we're spiritually deaf, so somebody's got to take us to the Lord. You
know, if you know someone who's spiritually deaf, tell you what
to do. Take them to the Lord. Take them
to the Lord in prayer. Keep lifting up their name to
God in prayer, asking God to be merciful to them, because
he's the only one doing things for them. Take them to God in
prayer. Do you know that's what the Lord did? In verse 34, it
says, And looking up to heaven, he sighed, and saith unto him,
Ephatha. Looking up to heaven indicates
to me, This was a prayer. The Lord prayed, looked up to
heaven, depending on the power of his Father, you know, he prayed. So if you've got a loved one
that you know, and you know they can't hear, you know they can't,
take them to the Lord in prayer. And if you can, Take them where
the gospel is preached. If you've got children who are
under your roof, don't give them the option if they're going to
go with you or they're going to stay home. Force them to go.
You're going. Force them to go hear the gospel.
If you love them, that's what you'll do for them. If you've
got others, you can't force them. You sure can invite them, can't
you? You can invite them to come with you. Give them a bulletin. You can give them a link to a
sermon audio message or something. You can do something to expose
them to the gospel, because if the Lord's going to save them,
that's how he's going to do it. It's through the preaching of
the gospel. And they're going to have to be alone with the
Lord. You can be in a crowd like what
we've got here today, and if the Lord's speaking to you, you're
completely alone with the Lord. Well, if we're going to be alone
with the Lord, I mean, you know, it's pretty obvious to me, I'm
going to have to be where he is. Don't you reckon? But one
place I know where he is, is where his word is preached. Where
two or three are gathered together in my name, there I am in the
midst of them. You know, if you've got someone
who's spiritually deaf and you love them and you care about
them, do everything you can to get them to Christ. Get them
to the place where he's preached. All right, number three, now
we're spiritually deaf. So the Lord has to touch our hearts
so that we hear with ears of faith. Now this man, the Lord
touched his ears and made it so that he could hear and so
he could speak. That's what we need the Lord to do for us spiritually,
spiritually so that we hear the gospel. We hear it plainly and
we believe it and love it. We don't really need the Lord
to touch our bodies physically. I mean, If we've got some physical
ailment, I mean, we do pray that the Lord would touch us and heal
us, but tell you what, we need a whole lot more than our physical
bodies working right. We need the Lord to touch us
and create something brand new in us. Something that was not
there before. We need the Lord to touch us
in his power and give us new ears. Give us ears of faith. We need the Lord to touch us
and give us a new heart, a spiritual heart. We need the Lord to give
us a new nature, because the nature of Adam that we're born
with is dead. We need a new heart. We need
God to touch us and put something in us that was not there before. We need the Lord to come to us
and say, be opened. And boy, if he does that, be
opened, we're going to hear and believe. We need the Lord to
come to us and tell us, be new, be new. I'm going to make you
new. If he does that, we'll be new. We'll be new. Now, you know, nobody can explain
exactly how does that happen? You know, spiritually, the Lord
comes and he touches you. So you're able to hear. So you're
able to believe. So that you're able to love Christ.
So that you're now able to tell other people about Christ. Nobody
can exactly explain how that happens. Usually we can't explain
when it happened exactly. I remember when I went to Brother
Henry and asked him to be baptized, I told him, I said, I don't know
when this happened. He said, that's okay. I don't
either. I don't know when it happened for me either. What's
important is, do you trust Christ now? I don't know when it first
happened, but here's what I love what the songwriter says about
that. Something happened. Something happened. And now I
know he touched me and he made me whole. Now here's something that's so
beautiful about our Savior. He's got to touch our hearts
now. He's got to do something for us that we cannot do for
ourselves. And He does that in compassion
for sinners. If the Lord hasn't touched you,
and someone who has not been given spiritual ears to hear
the gospel, here's what they tend to think. They tend to think,
okay, well, you're preaching this powerful God who's so mean,
he won't touch everybody. He's a mean God, you know, he
won't save everybody. What they hear, they don't have
ears to hear, they don't have spiritual ears. So what they
hear is that there's a God who can save but won't. That's what
they hear. They hear that because they don't
have ears to hear. But if God has touched you, and he's given
you ears to hear, what you hear in the gospel is there's a God
who can damn, but won't. There's a God who can condemn,
but won't. There's a God who can judge,
but won't. There's a God who can be gracious
and he is. There's a God who can be merciful
and he is. If God's given you ears to hear,
when you hear the gospel, you hear of a Savior who has mercy
and grace on sinners in compassion for them, in compassion. That's what the Savior does in
our text. Mark says that the Lord looked up to heaven and
he sighed. When I first read that, I had
a definition of the word sigh in my mind. I had it like me.
I sigh because I'm exasperated. I sigh because I'm tired of this.
I sigh because I'm tired, you know. But this is not the way
the Lord sighed. He didn't sigh in frustration.
He didn't sigh because he was tired. It was a sigh of compassion. I looked this word psi up in
the concordance, and here's what it means. A groan with grief. When the Savior sighed, he healed
this man, feeling his agony. Feeling the agony of his condition. And that's what God does for
his people spiritually. He feels the agony that his people
are going through. So you don't ever need to be
afraid to beg God for mercy. Don't think, oh, you know, God,
this mean God who can't have mercy but won't. You don't ever
have to be afraid of that. You don't ever have to be afraid
to ask God to forgive your sin. You'll never be afraid to cry
to the Lord, Lord, save me. Lord, you save your people, Lord,
save me. Lord says you chose a people
to save, Lord, choose me. Lord, call me. Lord, save me.
You don't ever need to be afraid of crying in that because you
think, well, God's tired of hearing people cry for mercy. You don't
ever need to worry that Almighty God is worn out because He just
is so tired of hearing the problems of sinners. Our Lord feels the
sorrow and the weight of sin of His people. So not only does
He heal them spiritually, not only does He save them from their
sin, He heals them with compassion for their sorry states. We have
not, the writer to the Hebrews said, a high priest which cannot
be touched with the feeling of our infirmities. Our high priest,
Christ, our great high priest, feels the infirmity of his people. He felt the weight of the sin
of his people when he took it away from them and suffered it
on Calvary Street, didn't he? Oh, he has compassion for his
people. He's touched with the feeling of our infirmity. So he has compassion for helpless
sinners. So my advice to you is, if you're
a helpless sinner, cry out to the Lord and beg him for mercy,
because that's the God that he is. All right, number four. If the Lord's gonna save us,
he's gonna have to humble us. Now, like I said earlier, I don't
know whether the Lord spit directly onto the tongue of this man or
if he spit on his finger and then put his finger on the tongue
of this man, but either way, Either way, whatever the Lord
did, however it was, he got spit from his mouth onto the tongue
of this man to the natural man. I mean, that sounds pretty gross,
doesn't it? It sounds pretty gross. You're
gonna have to be very humble before you let somebody put their
spit on your tongue. I mean, I venture to say there's
not one of us here that let somebody do that to us. But this man was
so needy, he was humbled. All the pride was taken out of
him. All the starch was taken out of him. Whatever the Lord
wanted to do with him was fine with him. He was humbled before
the Lord. Now, if the Lord's gonna save
you and me, he's gonna have to humble us enough so that we will
submit to salvation on God's terms. You know, most of us are
very willing to have salvation on our terms, aren't we? But
if God's going to save us, He's going to humble us till we're
going to submit to salvation on His terms. Submit to the righteousness
of God. That's what we'll do. Now I can
understand. It's hard for a human being to
humble themselves. I can understand not wanting to humble yourselves
before other men. Because you don't know what they're
going to do. It's hard telling what they're going to do if you
give them complete control over you. But you don't have to be
afraid to ever humble yourself before God and let Him do with
you what He will. You don't ever have to be afraid
to humble yourself before God and beg Him for mercy, and then
wait on Him to give it to you. You don't ever have to be afraid
of that. Let me read to you a few scriptures. James 4, verse 10. Humble yourselves in the sight
of the Lord, and He shall lift you up. 1 Peter 5, verse 5. Likewise, ye younger, submit
yourselves unto the elder. Yea, all of you, be subject one
to another, and be clothed with humility. Be covered with it.
Four, God resisteth the proud, and he gives grace to the humble.
1 Peter 5, verse 6. Humble yourselves, therefore,
under the mighty hand of God, that he may exalt you in due
time. You see the pattern there? God
humbles his people and then he lifts them up. He always lifts
the humble up. But first he's got to humble
us, doesn't he? He's got to put us in the dust. He's got to make
it so that we see we're helpless and we're totally dependent on
him. And whatever he does with me is just fine with me. We've
got to be humbled. Right, here's the fifth thing.
The only thing that can give you and me spiritual life is
something that comes from Christ to us. Now, the only way that
this man could be healed and able to speak is from the spit
of the Savior's body entering his body. That's the only way
he could be healed. I know that because that's what
the Lord did. That's the way the Lord's gonna heal this man.
Nothing inside this man could heal him. No amount of speech
therapy was gonna enable this man to speak. No amount of hearing
aids and those kinds of things would enable this man to hear.
Nothing from inside this man could heal him. The only thing
that could heal him was something that came from inside the Lord
and was put into him. You see what I'm saying? Now
if you and I would be saved, that's what we need. There's
nothing in us that will save us. There's no amount of threats
of the law that will reform us and get us acting right so that
God will save us. There's no amount of trying to
obey the law that will make us righteous. There's nothing that
comes from in us that will save us. We need something from inside
the Lord to be put inside of us. That's what salvation is. We need his life to be put in
us before we can live. Before we can be made righteous,
we have to have His righteousness put in us. In us. I read an article this week about
imputed righteousness and imparted righteousness. You imputed righteousness
as God legally reckons his people to be righteous, because that's
what Christ made them. He took their sin away and made
them righteous. He was made sin for us, he who
knew no sin, that we might be made the righteousness of God
in him. That's imputed, it's a legal thing. God imputes his
people to be righteous because they are. But there also has
to be imparted righteousness. If God's gonna accept us, righteousness
has to be put in us That's the righteousness of Christ that
comes from Him, has to be put into us. We have to have His
nature put into us, the nature of Christ, the mind of Christ,
the heart of Christ. Those things have to be put in
us. That's what salvation is. It's a work done for us and a
work done in us, in us. Well, here's the sixth thing.
Oh, when the Savior says, be opened, we can hear and speak. I mean, that is just our constant
prayer for ourselves and for those that do not know the Lord,
that he would come to them and say, be open. Oh, if the Savior
ever tells you be open, you're going to suddenly start hearing
clearly. You're going to suddenly start hearing the gospel like
you've never heard it before. And you're going to say, preacher,
how come you didn't say that before? Well, I did. You just couldn't
hear. That was my experience. I would
think sometimes, you know, Henry's been preaching for 50 years.
Hockeyman said this before. Well, he did. I was deaf. That
was a problem. But now I hear. Now I hear. If the Savior ever tells you,
be open, suddenly you're going to start speaking correctly.
Now we can speak in faith. We're speaking in faith in Christ.
We're speaking in love for Christ. Now we know Christ, so now we
can tell others about him. I mean, the Lord's not going
to instantly make you a preacher, but there are things that you
can say clearly now. Now, if the Savior ever tells
you to be open, you're not going to say, I, I, I, I anymore. It's
going to be him, him, him, him, him. That's what you're going
to say. You know, I might not be the greatest theologian around,
but I know this, since God's revealed himself to me, since
he told me, be open, now I know how God saves sinners. I know
that. I do know that. I know what God did for me. I
don't know everything, how he did it, but I know what he did
for me. I was blind, and now I see. I
was deaf, and now I hear. I know this. I know how dependent
I am on Christ. I used to be pretty full of myself.
Now I know how dependent I am on Christ, and I know how dependable
He is. I know this in all things. Christ
gets all the glory. He gets all of the glory because
He did it all. I know that salvation is by God-given
faith. I can't earn it by my works.
It's got to be by God-given faith. He's got to give me something
that I don't have. I know this. If God didn't save
me, I'd go to hell because that's exactly what I deserve. If Christ
didn't pay the debt for me, I'd go to hell because that's exactly
what I deserve. I know this. You can hate on
election all you want, but this is what I know. If God didn't
choose me first, I never would have chosen him. If God didn't
love me first, I never would have loved Him. If Christ does
not make me righteous by His obedience, I'll not be righteous
because I don't have any obedience in my home. Now I know this,
God saved me. But if God the Holy Spirit doesn't
keep me all the way to the end by His power, I will surely fall
away. Now I know that. I know that. And if you want, if you want,
I can tell you the reason for the hope that is in me. I can
tell you that if the Lord has come to me and said, be open.
That's what these folks did in our text, Mark 7, verse 36. And he charged them that they
should tell no man. But the more he charged them,
so much more than a great deal, they published it. Now the man
who had his ears open and his tongue loosed, tell you what
he's gonna do, he's gonna use that tongue to tell everybody
he knows about the Savior. Let me tell you what Christ did
for me. But the Lord told them, tell
no one. And you read that quite a few
times in the four gospels, the Lord does something, heals somebody,
performs a miracle, and then tells them, tell no one. Now
why would he do that? Now, over the years, I've heard
a lot of explanations for that question, and I'm sure they're
all, you know, at least partly true, but, you know, I've just
never really been completely satisfied with them. You know,
people say, well, the Lord says don't tell anybody because the
people would come and make him an earthly king. Or don't tell
anybody, because if this news spreads too much to the scribes
and Pharisees, they hear it, they're going to hate the Lord
even more, and it's going to make them want to try to put
the Lord to death before it was time. And it could be that's
the way the Lord brought His will to pass, so He died at the
exact moment, the appointed time. I don't really know, but none
of that, at least it's not a complete explanation. I felt sure of that.
I saw an explanation this week, and this is the one I like the
best. The Lord said, tell no one, because his miracles are
secondary to his word. To his word. The Lord never used
his miracles, the miracles that he could perform, to get a following
for himself. He used his miracles to demonstrate
the power of his word. And what we need is the Lord's
Word. A whole lot more than we need
fleshly miracles. We need God's Word. It's God's
Word applied to our hearts that says, be open. It's God's Word
that gives faith in Christ. Faith cometh by hearing, and
hearing by the Word of God. It's the Word of God that reveals
Christ the incarnate Word. It's the Word, that's what we
need. So this is something else that you see. Whenever the Lord
says tell no one, it seems like nobody ever listened to him.
They all just went and just spread it abroad even more. That's what
these people did. In verse 37, this is what they
could sum up. They were beyond measure astonished,
saying, he hath done all things well. He maketh both the deaf
to hear and the dumb to speak. Now here's what I know for sure.
I don't know how God did everything he did. I don't know why he's
done everything that he's done. But I do know this, he's done
all things well. He's done all things well in
salvation. He's done all things well in
providence. He's done all things well in my life. Whether they're things that were
painful or things that were pleasant. He's done all things well. Well,
he hadn't made a mistake. He's done all things well. And
that's what you and I'll say. If the Lord ever opens our ears
and loosens our tongues, he'd done all things well, hadn't
he? And we're thankful. All right, I hope that'll be
a blessing to you. Let's bow together in prayer. Our Father, how we thank you
for this story of your power and your compassion in healing
deaf, dumb sinners. Father, I pray you take your
word as it's been preached and that you would apply it to the
hearts of your people, that you enable us to see the glory of
Christ our Savior, that you enable us to see our need of him and
cause us to run to him. And that you might say to our
deaf ears and our blind eyes and our dead heart, be opened,
enable us to have faith, to trust in and rest in Christ our Savior.
Father, we'll give you all the praise and all the thanks and
all the glory for it. Surely you would enable us to
say, He hath done all things well. Father, it's in Christ's
name, for His sake and His glory, we pray. Amen. All right.