Making Your Own Heart Clean? - [Matthew 12:9ff]

Jesus as Lord of the Sabbath and the Need for a Better Righteousness

Matthew chapter 12. We're looking at a few cameos of Jesus before we get into our new series this fall. This is cameo number two in the book of Matthew, the gospel of Jesus Christ according to Matthew.

What I want you to do two weeks ago today and then next week is to be impressed with Jesus. I want you to see Jesus in the Bible and say things like, Wow, nobody's like him. Nobody talks like him. Nobody teaches like him.

Nobody does what he does. He's worthy of worship. There's no one like Jesus. And what a joy it is for me to preach Jesus Christ to you again today, talking about my favorite subject, the Lord of the church.

I read this week where person said you blink 25 times every minute. Each blink takes about one fifth of a second. Therefore, if you take a 10 hour car trip, averaging 40 miles an hour, you will drive 20 miles with your eyes closed.

And can you believe it? I just saw the, the new data that came out, the worst drivers, one to 200. And at the very bottom, I kid you not. I think it's Allstate who put it out. At the bottom, number 200 of the worst drivers out of all the cities in the United States, if you had to number them from one to 200 at the very bottom, you would have Worcester, Massachusetts.

At 199, you have Boston. And sometimes when we're not careful, you go through your life with your eyes closed to the magnificent Christ Jesus seen in the Bible. So I want you to see him for who he is and what he's done here in the text.

I love to preach about Jesus Christ because there's no one like him. Oh yes. He's fascinating. Yes. He's interesting, but I like to show you because he, he gives object lessons. We also see that he lives the perfect life and I need a perfect life credited to my account.

I need more than just God to look at me as if I've never sinned. I need to have God look at me as if I've always obeyed. And we see that very thing in our passage today. How Jesus Christ is the Lord of the Sabbath, Lord of humans, and Lord of lords.

So what we're going to do this morning is we're going to look at Matthew chapter 12, verses 9 through 14. Maybe we'll go a little farther if we have time. And we'll take a look at Jesus Christ in what we call the gospel of the King.

But before we do enter into our exposition found in verse nine, let me read verses one through eight so you can see the context. As you know, the big context in Matthew is Jesus out of all the Kings kinging, he's the King out of all the Lords, Lord, and he's the Lord.

And he's got the kingly, our Royal pedigree. There's a kingly battle for who the Messiah is early on with Herod, with Satan. He gives a kingly address on the Sermon of the Mount. He shows how powerful he is as King in chapters 8, 9, and 10.

This is the gospel of the King. And here he's going to show how he's King of the Sabbath, Matthew chapter 12, verses 1 through 8 for context. At that time, Jesus went through the grain fields on the Sabbath.

His disciples were hungry and they began to pluck heads of grain and to eat. But when the Pharisees saw it, they said to him, look, your disciples are doing what is not lawful to do on the Sabbath. He said to them, you'll notice he's going to say this twice to the Bible teachers, to the Bible scholars, to those that should know better and do know better.

He said to them, have you not read what David did when he was hungry and those who were with him, how he entered the house of God and ate the bread of the presence, which is, which it was not lawful for him to eat, nor for those who were with him, but only for the priests?

Or have you not read in the law how on the Sabbath, the priest and the temple profane the Sabbath and are guiltless? I tell you, something greater than the temple is here. And if you had known what this means, I desire mercy and not sacrifice, you would have not condemned the guiltless.

For the son of man, the Lord's favorite description of himself, is Lord of the Sabbath. These men are trying to put him in the examination area and we're going to expose him for who he is. We think he's a fraud, this Jesus, and now Jesus is going to turn the table on them and move them from the judge's bench, as one man said, to the prisoner's dock.

And it's going to be bad for the Pharisees, so much so the old scholar A .T. Robertson said, the poor, petty, fogging Pharisees are left in the pit. Let's watch this great illustration of the Lordship of Jesus Christ.

We have Awana Council time here, don't we, where we bring in a teacher to teach a certain lesson, to teach a truth, so the kids can understand a spiritual truth. Here is the all-time greatest Awana Council time.

Jesus Heals the Man with the Withered Hand on the Sabbath

Verse 9, just how royal is Jesus? Let's find out. I think you'll be impressed. He, Jesus, verse 9 of Matthew 12, went on from there, we don't know exactly the time, maybe it's the very next Sabbath, and entered their synagogues.

So we're going from one Sabbath incident where there's can you eat on the Sabbath to can you heal on the Sabbath, except this time Jesus is going to be pushing the envelope. He's going to cause the problem and cause the issue, and he's going to practice what he preaches, and he's going to talk about deeds of mercy are appropriate for Sabbath.

And look at the text again. Remember, one of my all-time best pieces of advice I could give you, when you read the Bible, read it slowly. Take a look, look at the words, they're important. Every single word is important.

He went on from there and entered their synagogue. The Jews would gather at a place of assembly to worship, there's lots of community stuff going on there, of course, but mainly to worship, and he goes into their synagogue.

It's their home turf, home field advantage, Pharisees. Verse 10, and a man was there with a withered hand. Now, NES does this, the Greek does it, but ESV doesn't. I wish it did. There should be the word behold there, and behold.

And behold, Matthew likes to do that. Hey, take a look, focus in. It's like you're watching a football game with 80 ,000 people, and then you've got the camera, focuses in on one person. I remember when we'll go maybe to one Celtics game a year, it happens to be the Celtics-Laker game, but we would go there, and people try to do things to get attention so they can be on the Jumbotron, right?

And they're doing all kinds of different things. And the focus of the camera zooms down in to this man with the withered hand. How unlike the Holy Spirit compared to what we would do. We wouldn't want to talk about someone who had maybe a deformity or something physically wrong with them.

We would be too polite. We wouldn't want to embarrass them. But the Holy Spirit through Scripture draws the attention. Look, at center stage, there's a man with a withered hand. Matthew doesn't even give us a verb in the original Greek.

It's just translated, and look, a man. He's got a withered hand. Luke tells us it's his right hand, and based on the Greek tense, he wasn't born like this. There's been some disease, some accident, something that has made his hand wither to have some paralysis, to have some atrophying.

The language of this is his hand used to have vitality, but now it's dry, it's shriveled. If you go to California for the summer and come back, you have certain plants that haven't been watered. They droop.

Well, they're actually brittle, but they're drooping. His hand was droopy. It's dried up, lifeless, shriveled. It's used in Matthew of a dry land. And just think, this poor guy, what do you do if you can't use your right hand?

You can't work. It's hard to work without your right hand. Tradition, not the Bible, but tradition, a traditional book, the Gospel according to Hebrews, said that the man said to Jesus, I was a stonemason seeking a livelihood with my hands.

I pray thee, Jesus, restore my health, that I may not beg meanly for my food. And so Matthew says, look, the spotlight's on this man with a withered hand, and he can't work. And I think the Pharisees have actually brought him in for a plant to defame Jesus.

This guy can't earn, he can't work, he can't provide. I probably would write something like this, and look, the Pharisees are all in the synagogue. The big shots, the guys with the PhDs. I wonder what would happen this morning if at 1055 Tom Brady walked in and sat down right over there.

I wonder if a rock star came in and sat down right over here. I wonder if President Obama came in and sat in the back. I think we would all be saying, look at them. Did you see? Did you see that person?

Have we had anybody famous ever come to our church? I don't think we have. Maybe somebody that came second place in the Heisman Trophy, I think that's as good as we got. Here, it's not look at the Pharisees, but as it is with God so often, look at the needy person.

Look at the person with this need that can't work. Verse 10 goes on to say, and they asked him. Right? It's all set up. One thing you don't want to do is ask Jesus questions, because you're usually going to get questions back.

Is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath? Why did they ask him? The text says, so that they might accuse him. They're taking the initiative. They want to discredit Jesus. They want to kill Jesus is what they want to do.

Now the rabbis had rules found in Torah, found in the Old Testament for the Sabbath. But then they, like self-righteous people like to do, like to add rules and more rules and more rules and more rules.

And one of the rules they added that wasn't in the Bible is that you couldn't try to heal somebody who was sick on the Sabbath unless they were about ready to die. So if they're about ready to die, you could help them, but anything less, got to wait till the next day.

So this guy's not going to die. He's had this problem with a deformed withered hand for a long time. These Pharisees don't want information. They're trying to shoot Jesus. The text says in Luke 6, a parallel passage, the Pharisees and scribes were watching him closely.

They were spying. They were watching with sinister intent that they might accuse him. John Wycliffe translates it, they aspied in him. They were spying on him, watching. The Greek text would tell us over and over and over, over.

We know he can heal. Will he? And if he will, we've got him. They're not thinking, will he be merciful to this poor guy who's got the withered hand and can't work, but we want to use this to kill him.

Before I go any farther, did you know that Jesus pulls out his largest guns to attack self-righteous people? Jesus launches the Patriot missiles, not at those who knew they were sinful, not at the tax collectors, not as those who are prostitutes, but those people who like these scribes and Pharisees were self-righteous religious people.

Why would Jesus go after the self-righteous? Answer, because self-righteousness is poison. It's toxic. The opponents of Jesus were the pious. The opponents of Jesus were the religious. The opponents of Jesus were the moral.

And the same thing is true today. The world war that's waged by Jesus is not against people who knew they were scumbags, who knew they were lowlifes. If you had to read the whole New Testament and say, who's the biggest disaster in all of the New Testament?

I wonder who you would pick. Here's who I would pick. Ruler asked Jesus, good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life? Jesus said to him, why do you call me good? No one is good except God alone.

You know the commandments. Do not commit adultery. Do not murder. Do not steal. Do not bear false witness. Honor your father and mother. And he said, here's the tragedy of tragedies in all the Bible. He said, all these things I have kept from my youth.

The damning doctrine of self-righteousness. I hate sin in my life. I hate all the sin in my life. But the sin in my life that I hate the most is self-righteousness. See friends, because if you are self-righteous, you don't need anybody else's righteousness.

There's no need for Christ's righteousness when you've got your own. Think of the worst people that you can imagine in the world. Are you like them? Are you better than them? Think about terrorists in Syria, ISIS people.

They behead and crucify people in front of children. Think of them. Think of abortion doctrines, cutting up babies in the womb for money. Think of heroin addicts. Think of people in Hollywood that commit suicide.

Think of anyone and then say to yourself, are you better? Are you better? And you know what my gut reaction is when I ask myself the question is, I am better. I don't do those things. I'm not like that.

And you can just hear us with the self-righteousness that invades a person. In Romans 1, they were filled with all manner of righteousness. Evil, covetous, malice. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, malice.

They are gossip, slanders, haters of God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents. They are foolish. They are faithless. They are heartless. They are ruthless. And everybody says, amen.

Look at them. And then Paul says in Romans 2, therefore, you have no excuse, oh man. Every one of you who judges. For in passing judgment on another, you condemn yourself. Because you, the judge, practice the very same.

These self-righteous scribes and Pharisees come up to Jesus. They've got their own righteousness. Thank you very much. And for those that think they have their own righteousness, they are on the receiving end of the blistering of the King of Kings.

How unlike these scribes and Pharisees are compared to Jesus. Levi made a great feast in his house and there's a large company of tax collectors and others reclining at the table with him. The Pharisees and the scribes grumbled at his disciples saying, why do you eat with tax collectors and sinners?

Jesus answered them, those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance. Think about this. Let's think about the Reformation for a second.

The Reformation's battle was not primarily fought over, do we sin? Both sides would recognize the sinfulness of sin, the holiness of God, the justice of God. But where Luther and Calvin wanted to separate from others was not over were we sinful, but how do we deal with the sin?

Can we deal with our sin alone? Can we cooperate with God and deal with sin, synergistic, S-Y-N? Or does God alone have to do it? And if there's any vestige of morality and virtue and righteousness, self-righteousness in us, in you, then you don't need to think monergistically where God alone has to do the work, so much so that you don't even need Jesus to be crucified for you.

Because if you can get to heaven on your own, what a waste of a life that was to kill Jesus. Paul even says it in Galatians 2, I do not nullify the grace of God for if justification were through the law, then Christ died for no purpose.

Inflated self-adequacy, the scribes have, the Pharisees have, self-righteousness has. I could do it on my own, I don't need Jesus. Charles Spurgeon said, the greatest enemy to human souls is, what would you say?

The greatest enemy to human souls is the self-righteous spirit which makes men look to themselves for salvation. What damns more, gross immoral sin or self-righteousness? I've told you the story many times, I remember when I was a seminary student at Master's Seminary and we had to go to evangelize door to door and I don't know if I've ever been more nervous in my life.

So you just go to the door, you take a deep breath and you knock with force. Okay, nobody's home, got to go. Knock on the door. Hi, my name is Mike Avendroth, I'm with Grace Church. We're here to tell you a little bit about a concert that we're having to talk about Jesus Christ and how you can be forgiven of sins and, you know, are you interested?

And the first guy that I remember, we visited several, but I remember a big guy, a Harley Davidson guy, a brood of a guy. And I thought, man, I'm so dead. I mean, he's just got like a 12-gauge pump in his hip or something.

I'm just blotto, I'm gone. And with another guy, I thought I'll use him as a human shield. Hey, come on in, no problem, you want a beer? Ezekiel 4, 9 beer maybe, I don't know. I thought, you know what, this is so easy.

God has ordained my steps that I might walk in them. House number two, screen door was there. It was a grandma coming. I go, she looks like my grandma. I love like my grandma's sugar cookies. She's going to just invite us not for beer, but cookies.

I love my grandma. Only she could take margarine and put them in cookies and make the cookies good. Margarine is awful. Oleo is awful. She came to the door and said, hi, my name is Mike Ebendroth with Grace Church.

Here to talk to you about forgiveness found in Christ Jesus and invite you to one of our concerts. And the door slammed and the anger came and she said, I'm a Catholic. Now, whether Catholic, whether Lutheran, whether Episcopalian or Baptist, the door slammed was, I've got my own righteousness.

Thank you. I've got my own righteousness. If you don't know you're sick, you don't go to the doctor. But if you know you're sick, you know, you need to get help. I'm not getting better on my own. I have no righteousness.

I need righteousness. If I'm going to stand before God blameless, if I'm going to stand before God with no sin, I can't even stand before the holiness of God with one sin, not one sin. I need them all covered.

Everyone washed and cleansed. I need someone else's righteousness because my own righteousness is a bad fig leaf of religion and virtue. I'm clean cut. Therefore, I go to heaven. I don't look like you.

Therefore, I go to heaven. Something wicked this way comes. No wonder God hates free will. No wonder God despises this idea where I am not touched by the fall in my will, and I will, by my own free will, allow God to work in my life.

I'll take the first step. And if I do that, then God can do the rest. No wonder that is an awful way to think about salvation and not in a sovereign grace way. If I were to give you a million dollars today and one year off, and you were to go around the world, and I will give you one more million when you complete the task, I want you to go around the world and find 100 worst, deceptive, deceitful things in the world.

Get a little taxonomy chart, a little classification. One through 100 and find out the worst deceivers, the worst deceptions, the worst lies. Go all around the world. You get a million dollars. Be very careful.

Work hard for your money. There's another million once you give me the list. 100 deceitful things. What would you find? Here's what you should do. You should leave at the top, number one, blank, because we already know the answer.

The heart is desperately wicked, deceitful above, say it, all else, over number two, three, four, all the way down to 100. And it's the deceitfulness of our hearts that say, yeah, yeah, my faith saved me.

Yeah, my will saved me. I did this. I took the first step and then God does the rest. That's self-righteousness. I've got a righteousness in me that makes God acceptable and move towards me. When the righteousness we need is a righteousness from another, a different, an alien righteousness, a righteousness that Christ earns Himself and it is so valuable because He's also God.

It's so infinite that it can be bestowed on all those who would believe. His righteousness cloaked on us is for those who say, I have no righteousness. I agree that the law tells me that I'm sinful. And if God doesn't intervene, I'm going straight to hell.

Self-righteousness says, God, your way isn't my way. Your way is Christ alone. Christ plus nothing. 100 Christ. God opens Lydia's heart and then she believes. That's your way, God. Your way, God, is Acts 13, 48.

As many as were appointed to eternal life believe. Your way, God, is you cause salvation. The result is my faith. But my way, God, is I believe and I let you save me. Spurgeon says, the Lord is very wroth against self-righteousness.

I do not know of anything against which His fury burneth more than against this, because this touches Him at a very tender point. It insults the glory and honor of His Son, Jesus Christ. Don't you hate self-righteousness?

Don't you hate it in yourself? Hate it in yourself before you hate it in others. I read this passage and I go, those scoundrels, the scribes, those scallywags, those Pharisees. They're awful. They're wicked.

And you know what? It's true. And I'm worse. I'm worse. If it wasn't for the grace of God, we'd still be doing what we were doing before, trying to get to heaven on a rope made of the sand of our own self-righteousness, as Whitefield would say.

Matthew 12, 10, they ask Him, is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath so that they might accuse Him? They've got all these traditions that they've added to real Mosaic Sabbath law. They don't care about the healing of the man.

Some of these traditions are so embedded in Judaism that the enemies of the Jews would attack on the Sabbath because, by tradition, not by the Bible, the Jews would think if we offer any resistance to some opposing horde of armies, then that would be work on the Sabbath.

And so the Jews would just get slain. False teachers didn't care about the man, but the Lord does. And Jesus knows what they're thinking. Listen to Luke, a parallel account. Jesus knew what they were thinking.

And He said to the man with the withered hand, this is in Luke, rise and come forward. And he rose and came forward. Come right here to the center. You Pharisees want to spy? I'm going to have you come right to the very front.

And then it says, after looking around at them all, you can just imagine Jesus looking at every person in the eyes, establishing eye contact with them. Come forward. You guys want to spy? Center stage of the center ring of the Pharisaical circus.

And of course, you know, when you remember the Old Testament, what was the Messiah going to be like? How would you recognize Him? What would He do? Oh, yes, eventually He was going to have a great triumph, and we know about His second coming.

But when He was going to come the first time, Isaiah would say things like this about Him. Spirit of the Lord is upon me, Jesus quoting Isaiah, but making it for Himself in Luke 4, because He's anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor.

He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor. How are you going to know the Messiah is here?

Because He's going to do what you're going to see in just a moment, and that is heal the man, to be kind and compassionate. Jesus says to them in verse 11, quite a probing question, which one of you, just making it personal, which one of you, scribes and Pharisees, self-righteous, who has a sheep, falls in the pit on a Sabbath, will not take hold of it and lift it out?

Of how much more value is a man than a sheep? So it is lawful to do good on the Sabbath. But Pharisees, if you follow what you've been teaching, you wouldn't get your own sheep out of the ditch. You'd just leave it.

But I'm telling you, you would. If you got a sheep in the ditch, you would not just go over on the Sabbath and say, here's a little hay, here's a little clover, here's a little thing of water, and we'll see you tomorrow morning.

You wouldn't do that. You'd go over and help that sheep. But you're basically saying by what you're teaching, you wouldn't do that. You don't want to help people on the Sabbath. You want to murder them and you want to murder me.

Mark says, is it lawful on the Sabbath to do good or to do harm, to save life or to kill? Is it right to save a life or to kill? I'm going to save this life and you want to kill me. Aren't people more valuable than sheep?

Verse 12, of how much more value is a man than a sheep? Sheep's in trouble on the Sabbath, help it. Men are more valuable than sheep and they're in trouble on the Sabbath, help him. So, you want me to wait till tomorrow to cure this guy.

When I can cure him today, why would I have him suffer for one second longer? I'm trying to do good. You're trying to kill me. Mark says, they kept silent. It's an ongoing silence. It's the sound of silence.

Verse 13, look at this glance of Jesus. He says to the man, stretch out your hand. Now, the original in Matthew, the Greek is, he says to the man. Why? Because oftentimes you'll use present tense to make it vivid, to make it graphic.

It doesn't read well for history to say, he says to the man, but that's the text. He says to the man. The reader wants you to understand for you to be there as it were. The man stretched it out and it was restored healthy.

Hygienic is the Greek word, like the other. Mark says, before the man stretched out his hand, Jesus looked around them with anger and then he was grieved at the hardness of their heart. Righteous indignation, a holy flash and then an ongoing grief.

He's not called the man of sorrows for no reason. Now, don't you love this? Verse 12, verse 13. He said to the man, stretch out your hand. He said to the man, here's some Latin phrases for you. He got out some incense, put on some robes, some funny hats.

He made an incantation. He slew them in the spirit, knocked them over with his coat. Now, think about it. He says. Now, what are the Pharisees going to say? How can this be work on the Sabbath if you say?

He's only saying. They're talking. Jesus talks. He talks with authority. And he says, stretch out your hand. This is the God who creates the universe. This is the Genesis 1 -1 God. This is the God who speaks things into existence.

Don't you love it in Genesis chapter 1 where it's talking about the stars that God made? It's almost like a throwaway line. I know it's not a throwaway line, but what else did God make? And he made the stars also.

Psalm 29 speaks about the voice of the Lord, who is Jesus. The voice of the Lord is powerful. The voice of the Lord is majestic. The voice of the Lord breaks the cedars. The voice of the Lord makes Lebanon skip like a calf.

The voice of the Lord hues out flames of fire. And the voice of the Creator, the eternal Son of God says, stretch out your hand. And through his words, nothing but talking, not accused of doing a work now, his hand is restored.

By the way, when people are on Daystar and TBN and every other heretical kind of TV show, and they're doing all kinds of miracles, you ought to ask yourself this question. The miracles that I see, are they like the miracles that Jesus does, that the apostles do?

And the answer is no. Jesus heals immediately, completely, with authority. Spectacularly. Undeniably. Did you know in John 3 and in John 11 and Acts 4, they bring in people who have seen the healings.

These scribes and Pharisees in Matthew chapter 12 could not deny the healing power of Jesus. It's undeniable. Until false teachers and false miracle workers go to children's hospital and heal everybody, with CNN there, you know they're charlatans and fakes.

They're not healing like Jesus did. Spectacular. Undeniable. Spurgeon had a story about a dentist in the 1800s and he had a little cure, a momentary cure for a toothache. Couldn't get the thing off the ground.

Couldn't sell it. Nobody wanted to buy it. And he thought, you know what? I've been selling this as a momentary cure for a toothache. I'm going to change it to an instantaneous cure for toothaches. And one man said, business became a lot better.

Jesus heals with a word. He must be the Messiah. This is a valid confirmation. And he's authentic. Now think about this for a second. He's commanding the impossible. What's the text say? Stretch out your hand.

What a great picture of salvation. Don't you think of salvation when you think of this? Well, you ought to. Stretch out your hand. I can't stretch out my hand. I'm in the flesh. I'm an unbeliever. I can't do any good thing.

Romans chapter 8 says, those who are in the flesh cannot please God. I have no ability to stretch out my hand of faith. I'm depraved. I'm fallen. I have original sin. I have my own sin. I can't do anything.

And yet Jesus says to this man, stretch out your hand. And he said to us when we got saved, stretch out your hand of faith. We couldn't do it. How did we get saved? What a great picture of the inability of an unbeliever.

Vance Havner said, what the unbeliever needs is not a boost from below, but to be born from above. Stretch out your hand. Friends, did you know when you tell unbelievers to repent, to believe, to trust, to follow, to forsake, they can't do it because they're depraved.

They're fallen. Adam's fall was real. I wonder if we could bring up the man with the withered hand here and ask him a couple questions. Let's ask him some questions. Did you stretch out your hand? Well, the Pharisees didn't stretch out their hand.

That was me. I stretched out my hand. Of course I stretched out my hand. I'm the one that Jesus healed. I'm the one that Jesus brought to the center. Did you stretch out your hand? Yes, I did. Question two.

Did you stretch out your hand all by yourself? I remember talking to my kids that way. All by yourself? Did you stretch out your hand all by yourself? That's the rub. You ask a Christian. Did you believe?

Did you repent? Did you trust in the finished work of Jesus, the risen Savior, who is a representative and substitute for sinners? Well, yeah, of course I did. God didn't believe for me. You didn't believe for me.

My parents by proxy didn't believe for me. But I have another question for you, believer. Did you stretch out your hand of faith by yourself? And any thinking believer ought to say, God is the one who caused my salvation.

I didn't make any decision for Jesus until I was healed. Until God worked in me. That's the real issue. Is salvation from the Lord? B .B. Warfield said, We point out that the doctrine of inability does not affirm that we cannot believe.

Listen, before you throw summer squash at me. But only that we cannot believe in our own strength. We do not say when a man is unable to do the will of God, when we say that he is guilty of inability, or that when he is afflicted with inability, we do not say that he cannot believe.

We say that he cannot believe in his own strength. Did you stretch out your hand? Of course. Did you do it by yourself? No. Who worked first? Who's the cause of your salvation? Do I believe in the responsibility of man?

Yes. Stretch out your arm. Do I believe in God's sovereignty and salvation? Yes. God through His Word works powerfully. Which one do I believe more? I believe the sovereignty of God first before man's responsibility, of course.

Can you imagine when you evangelize your friends or your kids or you're praying for people to get saved, you actually believe this very thing. Because you pray, God save them, God rescue them, God deliver them, God shake away their self-righteousness, and God make them cast themselves on you and your grace for eternal life.

Don't you pray that way? Of course. Man left to himself can't do anything. The man would still have a shriveled hand unless Jesus came up. And through the Word, remember, faith comes by hearing a message about Christ and this foolishness of preaching.

It seems like a foolish message. There's this God-man who dies on the cross in Palestine 2 ,000 years ago. And it's also foolish to preach because we're preaching to dead people and dead men's bones.

Do they ever come alive? And the answer is yes, at the sovereign will of God. Unbelievers are spiritually dead and blind and deaf and hardened and polluted and unable to change their spots and unable to change their spiritual skin color and unable to come to Christ until God regenerates their hearts.

And then they'll freely come. They will freely come. Well, let's finish with our text here. We're moving on. Verse 14, "...but the Pharisees went out and conspired against Him.". How to destroy? Filled with rage.

Because when you are self-righteous and you realize it's only through sovereign grace, they are filled with rage. Luke 6 uses the word rage. They're out of their minds. They blew a gasket. Enough is enough.

You mean to tell me that my baptism, my good works, my holiness, my virtue, my confirmation, my being a good citizen, my going to church, my being a member isn't good enough for you to find favor in me?

Then I'm blowing the gasket. God saves people through His Word. Physically, stretch out your hand. Spiritually, stretch out your hand of faith. Now, I love John Flavel. He's a Puritan preacher. And he was preaching in England.

He came to the benediction. And here's what he said. He's supposed to bless the congregation. This morning, I'm sorry that I cannot pronounce a blessing upon you. I cannot pronounce a blessing upon you for not all of you love our Lord Jesus Christ.

And if any man love not the Lord Jesus Christ, Paul says in 1 Corinthians 16, let him be accursed. How can I bless you all when you're not all saved? By the way, side note, you think I'm tough. Man was 17 years old in the congregation in England.

86 years later, that 17-year-old, you heard it right, that 17-year-old 86 years later is in New England. He's 103 years old. And he couldn't get that out of his mind. If you don't love the Lord Jesus Christ, you're accursed.