If you would turn with me to
the book of Acts chapter 14. Acts chapter 14. Let's start
our reading in verse 6. The they here is spoken of as
Paul and Barnabas. And it says, they were aware
of it and fled into Lystra and Derbe, cities of Lycaonia, and
into the region that lieth round about. And there they preach
the gospel. And there sat a certain man at
Lystra, impotent in his feet, being a cripple from his mother's
womb, who never, never had walked. And the same heard Paul speak,
who steadfastly beholding him and perceiving that he had faith
to be healed. And said with a loud voice, stand
upright on thy feet. And he leaped and walked." Now
here we have a story of, as I said, Paul and Barnabas preaching in
the town of Lystra. And it seems from my studies,
in Christ's name, was completely unknown in this place. This was
a rural and agricultural area. Not many people were familiar
with it. I remember one time, Teresa and I lived in a little
town in Kentucky called Nebo. And I know that's a biblical
name, but anytime someone would say, where are you from? And
I'd say, Nebo, they would immediately go, where is that? And that's
kind of like Lystra here. And of course, me always being
the smart aleck I am, they'd say, where is Nebo? And I'd say,
it's just down from your elbow. But we see here that they seem
to have been sunken in superstition, as we'll read. At the gates of
their city, there stood a great temple dedicated to God, Jupiter,
and they served this false god. As Paul and Barnabas came down
from the mountain to enter the town, God providentially gave
them a time fitting to preach. And why wouldn't he? He providentially
had caused them trouble in order to send them there. Look at verse
1. And it came to pass in Iconium
that they went both together into the synagogue of the Jews.
And so spake that a great multitude, both of the Jews and also of
the Greeks, believed. But the unbelieving Jews stirred
up the Gentiles and made their minds evil, affected against
the brethren. A long time, therefore, abode
they, speaking boldly in the Lord, which gave testimony unto
the word of His grace." That's what preaching the gospel is.
It's giving testimony to the word of God's sovereign grace
and granted signs and wonders to be done by their hands. But the multitude of the city
was divided and part held with the Jews and part with the apostles. And when there was an assault
made both of the Gentiles and also of the Jews with their rulers
to use them despitefully and to stone them. Barnabas and Paul
preaching the gospel here in Iconium. stirred up a great division
as the gospel usually does. It separates family members. We see in verse 6, and they were
aware of it. They knew what was going on.
And they fled to this little town of Lister. So God had providentially
not only had them leave where they were, come to where they
now were, but providentially gave them a time fitting to preach. Now you keep that in mind the
next time that God sends you trouble. He may be preparing
you for a blessing. God does things that are much
higher than our way of thinking, doesn't he? Oh my, he can providentially
cause trouble to become a blessing. And he often does. So here are
Paul and Barnabas and they stood up in a marketplace or somewhere
where the majority of the people gathered together and began to
preach the gospel. We see that plainly in verse
7. And there they preached the gospel. Of course they did. That's what they always did.
They preached the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ. They begin
to tell these folks that Jesus Christ, the Son of God, who was
God, had come down from heaven, that He had taken on flesh, that
He became a man, and He had suffered, and He had died, and He had cleared
the guilty sinners by being made sin for them. Oh, I can just
hear them, can't you? I'm sure as they began to tell
more and more of the wonderful things of Christ, more and more
people gathered around. You know, people do that out
of curiosity. As they heard the wonderful things
that Christ has done, I'm sure the crowd became bigger and bigger. And they told those that listened
that Christ, the Son of God, had given sight to blind eyes.
that he had given hearing to deaf ears, and that he had caused
the lame, the crippled, to walk. I'm sure they even told him how
that he had raised a dear friend of his by the name of Lazarus
from the dead, who had been in the grave four days. Oh, they were telling them about
their Lord and their Savior. That's what preaching the gospel
is, friends. It's not trying to tell people
how to live, how to straighten up and fly a ride. It's to proclaim
the one and only Savior who lived and died in the place of chosen
sinners. They proclaimed to the people
Jesus Christ, the God-man, who paid the sin debt of all who
believe in and on Him. And there in the crowd, can you
see Him? Nobody's paying much attention
to Him. He's not standing. So you may not even see him.
You see he's laying on his feet. And he lay there, I'm sure, on
the little cot or whatever it was that the lame was laid on. I've drawn much attention from
anyone. But as Paul was preaching, it
seems as though, from what we read, that Paul seems to be drawn
to this man. And he fixes his attention on
this crippled man and he looks intently into his face. And I'm
sure that he was moved with compassion. But there was something more.
than just that going on here. Whether it was God-given insight,
whether it was a prompting of divine revelation, Paul perceived,
according to verse 9, that this man had faith to be healed. Right in the middle of his preaching.
right in the middle of his message. He did something that I am sure
grabbed the attention of all those that heard him. You see,
God was about to shine forth His amazing glory, and He stops
right in the middle of His message, and He looks directly at the
crippled man, and He cries with a loud voice, Stand upright on
thy feet. Oh my. You know what happened? It's right there before you.
The crippled man leaps up and walks. And I'm sure that's not
all he did. I bet he was praising God, don't
you? Why, he'd been lame since his
mother's womb. Never walked a day in his life.
So before I go further, I want to bring your attention to a
few things about this man that you and I should easily be able
to relate to. Look at verse 8 again. He was a certain man. We've talked
about that many times in different messages. Just like all the certain
men and women that God shows mercy. He was a certain man. A certain man or woman will certainly
be saved. healed, whatever God's intention
towards them are. In Mark 5, 25, we're told about
a certain woman which had an issue of blood for 12 years and
she worked her way through the crowd and touched the hem of
his garment and was made whole. She was a certain woman. There
was also a certain woman in Mark chapter 7 whose young daughter
had an unclean spirit and she heard of Christ and she came
to Him and she fell at His feet and Christ healed her daughter.
She was a certain woman. In Mark 12 we're told that there
was a certain poor widow Oh, and I pictured this in my mind
so many times. As she came to the synagogue,
she threw in two mites which make a farthing, and the Lord
Himself greatly commended her, for she had put in all that she
had. It would be like us taking a
dime or a quarter and throwing it in the offering plate. But
to this woman, it was all she had. She was a certain woman. A certain woman. Remember our
Lord crossed the sea and went into Gadara and when he went
forth to the land there met him out of the city a certain man
which had devils for a long time and he didn't wear any clothes.
He ran around naked. He cut himself with rocks. He
broke the chains. He wailed at night like an animal,
a wild animal and a bull not in any house but in the tombs
and later You see him sitting at the Lord's feet in his right
mind, fully clothed. He was a certain man. When our
Lord told the story of the Good Samaritan, the man that fell
among thieves and was beat half to death, he's called a certain
man. It was a certain man that laid
impotent for 38 years next to the pool of Bethesda. And when
our Lord said, would you be healed? And he said, I don't have any
man to put me into the water. He couldn't move, my friends.
Because it was a superstition that an angel came down and stirred
the water. And the first one that got in
the water was healed. He said, I don't have a man to
put me in the water. The Lord said, take up your bed
and you walk. And immediately he was made whole. He was a certain man. There was
a certain beggar named Lazarus which laid at the gate full of
sores. And later on in that story you
see the rich man that ignored him daily finds himself in hell,
but Lazarus in the bosom of Abraham. He was a certain man. Another
man named Lazarus who was the brother of Mary and Martha whom
I mentioned earlier that Christ raised from the dead. Been in
the tomb four days. His sister said, you're too late. By now he stinks. Lazarus, come
forth. And he came forth. He was a certain
man. The Scriptures are full of certain
men and women whom Christ saved and healed by sovereign grace.
There were certain towns in which our Lord said, I must go through
for he had an elect child of God there. This man in Acts 14
in verse 8, and there sat a certain man. a certain man. The second thing I would have
you notice is this man was impotent. He was an impotent man. Now that
word impotent simply means helpless, useless, worthless, incapable. That would be a good word to
describe you and I, wouldn't it? Impotent, useless, worthless,
incapable. And verse 8 goes even further. It tells us that he was impotent
in his feet. He couldn't stand. He couldn't
walk. He couldn't work. He was totally,
totally dependent on others to do for him. Is that not a picture
of you and I? Naturally. God commended His
love toward us in that while we were yet impotent, helpless,
worthless, incapable sinners, Christ died for us. That's the best news I ever heard
in my life. That's why it's called the Gospel.
It's good news. It's good news. Third thing,
He had been this way from His mother's womb when the day was
born. lame on his feet, impotent. Job said, naked came I out of
my mother's womb, and naked shall I return. The Lord gave, the
Lord hath taken away. Blessed be the name of the Lord. I can tell you this, if this
man was to ever stand, it'd be the Lord giving. It'd be the
Lord giving. Solomon echoed Job's words in
Ecclesiastes 5, and he said, as he came forth of his mother's
womb, naked shall he return to go as he came. And then he says
these words, and shall take nothing of his labor. Oh, when I read
that, I just jumped out. He said, which he may carry away
in his hands. Friends, if you leave this world
in Christ, it won't be because of your labor. It won't be because
of any works of righteousness that you've done, but according
to His mercy that He saved you. How can one walk that's been
lame from his mother's womb? Well, here's the answer. It's
found in Galatians 1.15. You don't have to turn there,
but here's the answer. But when it pleased God. who separated me from my mother's
womb and called me by His grace." Friends, it's God that makes
the difference. Who makes thee the different
from another? What do you have that you hadn't received? And
if you received it, why do you glory in it as if you hadn't
received it? I tell you what, a believer will
never brag about what he's done, and he'll continually brag on
his Savior who has done all things for him. God chose, God called,
God saved this man before he was ever in his mother's womb.
He may have been lame from his mother's womb, but friends, he
was a chosen vessel of mercy before that. Did you hear that? God under
no obligation but by and for His own sovereign pleasure chose
a people and determined to be merciful and gracious to them. The irony is that those people
He chose and loved hated Him without a cause. Fallen in Adam. Sinners by birth. Sinners by
practice. There was nothing in them that
would cause God to love them and everything in them that would
cause God not to love them. Unconditional love. That's right. The minute you
think you've done something to deserve God's grace and mercy,
you've missed the boat. You've missed the boat. The fourth
thing about this man that I can so well identify with is that
he had never walked. This one says, verse 8, There
sat a certain man at Lystra, impotent in his feet, being a
cripple from his mother's womb, who never had walked. This man had never stood upright. He had never been able to stand
or walk. Again, what a picture of a dead
dog sinner like me. God loved His perfectly righteous
Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, and He loves all His people in Him,
dear friends. And listen, we've never, never
stood upright. We've never stood upright on
our own until Christ gave us a perfect righteousness. Perfect righteousness. Psalm
11 says, So the righteous Lord loveth righteousness and his
countenance, but behold, the upright. That's Christ. And God loves me and him. Good
and upright is the Lord, therefore will he teach sinners in the
way. Psalm 25, 8. The Lord knoweth
the days of the upright, and their inheritance shall be forever. Psalm 37, 18. Psalm 37, 37. Mark the perfect man and behold
the upright, for the end of that man is peace. Peace. In Christ, in Christ alone, we
stand upright. That word upright comes from
an original word called orthos. Now, I'm not a Greek scholar,
and it's what God makes us. Upright. It means to be straight,
not crooked. It means to rise. And that can
only be accomplished, my dear friends, in the divine healing
and divine intervention by the Lord Jesus Christ and Him only. No one else can do that for you.
No one. No one. Now that we've seen how
we easily picture this man by nature, let's observe a couple
of things that I pray will be profitable to your souls this
morning. Number one, Romans 10, 17 says,
Faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the Word of God. This poor crippled man heard
the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ. If you and I are ever
to stand upright, we must hear the only good news that God has
for sinners. That's found in the gospel. The
gospel is in a person. The gospel is in Christ. After
this man was healed, these superstitious people who believed that these
false ancient Greek gods named Jupiter and Mercury, who had
supposedly once been there in Lystra, that's why they built
this big temple at the gate. They believed that at one time
in this mythology of the Greek and Roman Empire that these two
so-called gods had been right there in Lystra. Look at verse
11. They believed they'd come again.
And when the people saw what Paul had done, they lifted up
their voices saying in the speech of Lycaonia, the gods have come
down to us in the likeness of men. And they called Barnabas,
Jupiter, and Paul, Mercury, because he was the chief speaker. And
the first thing they do, as fast as they can, is they run to the
priest of that temple, the priest of Jupiter, if you want to say
that, and they started to bring sacrifices to be offered unto
Paul and Barnabas. Their religion ran rampant once
again. Now here's a scriptural example,
dear friends, of what religion is. Religion endeavors to make
the things of God to fit into its little box. Most religious
practices since the beginning of time have been no more than
man-made. A lot of the things that goes
on in religion today can't be found in this Bible. I'll give
you a quick example right off the top of my head, altar call.
Nowhere in the Scriptures can I find where men had to get up
and walk down front in order to be saved. Can't find it in
Scripture. And religion does the same thing
today. It makes man to be God. And God
to be nothing. Now you listen to me. I'm going
to get up on my soapbox for just a few minutes. And you can forgive
me afterwards because you got to. Men have made themselves
the object of worship. That's what they did to Paul
and Barnabas. They bragged. They said, look
what we've done. Look how holy and righteous we
are. We've done this. We've done that. We have a ministry
for this. We have a program for that. We,
we, we, we, we, all the way home. And they never speak of all of
the things that God has done for sinners. It's what we've
done for God. Never what God has done for sinners.
Now there's a church not far from here, and I just, being
nosy sometimes, I got on the internet and looked at their
bulletin, and they've got 41 ministries. 41, I counted them. They've got a nursery and toddler
ministry. They've got a children's ministry.
They've got a student's ministry. They've got a men's ministry.
They've got a woman's ministry. They have a young married ministry.
They got a baptism ministry. They got a membership ministry.
They got a mercy slash widow ministry. They got a finance
ministry, an outreach ministry, a prison ministry, a media ministry,
an internet ministry, a senior ministry, a wedding and funeral
ministry, a communion ministry, a military ministry, and a college
ministry. And that's just to name a few.
And I take this directly from their bulletin. They call them
ministry. Right here, one size fits all. One size fits all. We preach
Christ and Him crucified. And you can have all the ministries
in the world, and you can name them, and you can call them,
and you can define them, and they don't mean nothing if you
don't preach Christ. And they don't. And I say this
because I've heard, I've listened to several of the messages. They
have meant the one thing needful, which is Christ. Oh, I tell you
friends, in this rampant religious world in which we live, religion
doesn't have anything to do with Christ anymore. It has to do
with we, what we've done, what we've got. Men and women are
too busy making themselves to be God. Sorry God, we don't need
you. We've got a ministry for that.
Okay, I'm off my soapbox. In Lystra, friends, it was no
different. Here God had done a miraculous
thing in healing this impotent man, and then here comes religion. Look at verses 14 and 15, in
which when the apostles Barnabas and Paul heard of it, they rent
their clothes. And that's a symbol in the Scriptures
of sorrow and mourning. And they ran in among the people
crying out and saying, Sirs, why do you do these things? Here
they come running, they're wanting to sacrifice unto Paul and Barnabas
and to make them and worship them as gods. And this is what
I want to do sometimes. I'm trying to be honest with
you. I want to run right in the middle of this religious world
and cry out, why do you do these things? Why do you do these things? And they say in verse 15, we
also are men of like passions with you. We're not gods. We're men of like passions. And here's what we do. We preach. Look at verse 15. It's right
there. And preach unto you that you
should turn from these vanities unto the living God. Oh, that
religion would turn from their vanities to the living God. Which might happen. Not talking
about a little g-god here, we're talking about the God, the only
God, the God that made heaven and earth and the sea and all
things that are there. But there was a certain, hopeless,
crippled man that had by the preaching of the gospel been
made whole. There's no account in this passage
of Scripture where anyone else was saved or healed. One man. Faith comes by hearing. And hearing by the Word of God,
the Gospel. These are the words of life. What did Paul preach to this
superstitious group of people? He preached what He always preached.
He preached Christ the sinner's substitute. He didn't preach
about Him. He preached Him. He didn't tell
them some little facts about Him. He preached Him as God's
salvation. He preached who He was, what
we are, and what He did for us. Men preach messages about a Christ-centered
life. I heard a message by a man not
long ago, and it was titled, A Christ-Centered Life, and never
preach Christ in whom our life must be centered. Paul didn't
change his message for this mythology believing men and women. He didn't
try to reason with them according to man's wisdom and man's knowledge. He proclaimed Christ, who is
God. and who is man, the only one
who could be just and justify the ungodly. Christ is our message. Christ is our message. Christ
is our salvation. Christ is our everything. One size fits all. Those Sunday
school rooms, we teach Christ. We don't need a special ministry
for that. Jake, if you were in the military, we don't have to
have a special military ministry to tell you about Christ. If
Christ means nothing to you, dear friends, then you might
as well worship Jupiter. You might as well worship Mercury.
For none other than Christ can give life. And here's my second
thing, and I'm almost done. Where does faith come from? If
faith comes by hearing and hearing by the Word of God, where does
it come from? Where did this man's faith come
from? It came from God. You see friends, I was once that
poor crippled, lost man. Then I can only speak to you
now from my personal experience of where my faith came from.
But I'm sure that it was the same with this man and every
man and woman whom God gives faith and sovereign mercy and
grace. This account tells us this poor
man had faith to be healed. Paul perceived that he had faith
to be healed. Isn't that what we read? And
as he listened to Paul's preaching, and he did, He hung on every word. It was
the first day I heard the gospel. I'm sure something like this
went through his mind. Well, what this man is saying
sounds true. The true God must be a God who
is sovereign and in control and not dependent upon me for anything. That makes perfect good sense. That sounds like that's true.
That He's in control of everything. That must be true. And if that's
true, and Jesus Christ, His Son, is so great a Savior, perhaps,
perhaps I may be healed. Just maybe these lame legs of
mine, which never would carry me anywhere, may have come straight. I think they may. I hope they
may. I believe they may. I know it
can be done if Christ wills it. I believe that. And from what
this man tells me of Christ's character, I think, no, no, I
believe He must be willing to do it. I'll ask the Apostle when
he finishes and I'll lift up my cry for I believe it can be
done. And I think there's a perfect
willingness both in the mind of the Apostle and of the Master
that it should be done. I believe it will be done and
that I shall one day stand upright. And then Paul stops and says,
Stand upright on thy feet. And he did so in a moment. He
had faith to be healed. Who gave him that faith? The
same one that gave you yours. God did. Has God given you that
precious faith? Have you come to see your desperate
need? Has God shown you that you're crippled? That you can't
walk upright? Has God shown you that you're
crooked in every sense of the word? Has God shown you that
He only can make you straight? Then stand up right on my feet. Stand up right on my feet. Walk
in His ways. Leap, praising His name.