I hope
everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving.
I hope you were able to relax. I
hope you were able to spend some time with family and friends. I hope, too, that you took a little time,
among the food, the fun, the football, the hunting, and whatever else you did,
to give thanks to God.
We’re wrapping up our sermon series
on thankfulness today. We’ve talked
about why we should be thankful to God, and we’ve talked about how to be
thankful to God in all circumstances.
Here’s the question for today:
What difference does it make?
It’s an important question. I mean, we’ve said that being thankful can
help us feel peace in our lives, and that’s good. Even so, it seems like we still have the same problems, whether
we’re thankful or not. If that’s true,
will we be able to keep feeling peace in our lives by being thankful? Or are we more likely to think, well, I
tried being thankful, and nothing happened.
If nothing actually changes as a result of us being thankful, then what
good does being thankful do me?
In our reading from Luke, we heard
a story that involved thankfulness.
Jesus was walking down the road and was about to go into a village. At the edge of the village he meets ten men
who have leprosy.
Now, leprosy was kind of a
catch-all term for a variety of skin diseases, so we don’t know exactly what
was wrong with these people. It
was something that people considered pretty serious, though. It was considered pretty contagious,
too. That’s why these guys were all
gathered at the edge of town. They’d
been kicked out of town by people who were scared that if they came in contact
with these men, these lepers, they’d get the same disease. These guys see Jesus coming, and they say,
“Jesus, Master, have pity on us!”
Now, that’s probably not the exact
words they said. It’s not like they
were saying these words in unison, like a chorus. They were begging, pleading with Jesus. They’d heard about Jesus.
They may not have known exactly who Jesus was, but they’d heard the
stories about Jesus healing people.
They were desperately hoping those stories were true, and that Jesus
would heal them, too, just like he’d healed those other people they’d heard
about.
Jesus tells them, “Go, show
yourselves to the priests.” That’s all
we’re told Jesus said. He did not say
what was going to happen when they showed themselves to the priests. In fact, he did not say anything was going
to happen. He just told them to do
it. And they did. Maybe they did it because they had faith,
maybe they did it because they figured it could not hurt anything, maybe they
did it because they had nothing better to do.
Whatever the reason was, they did it.
And on the way to go see the priests, they were healed.
Ten men were healed, and one of
them came back. One of them, the one
Luke goes out of his way to specify was a Samaritan, someone who was of a
different and disliked race from the Jews, came back, praised God in a loud
voice, threw himself at Jesus’ feet, and thanked him.
We wonder, what happened to the
other nine? Why did they not come back
to thank Jesus? Jesus wondered the same
thing. He said, “Were there not ten
cleansed? Where are the other
nine? Was no one found to return and
give praise to God except this foreigner?”
Then he said to him, “Rise and go; your faith has made you well.”
“Your faith has made you
well.” What does that mean? Does that mean the leprosy returned to the
other nine, because they did not have as much faith? Well, maybe, but I don’t think so, though. I think Jesus meant something else by that
phrase.
Notice the different words used in
this story. First, we’re told that as
they went to the priests, the ten were “cleansed”. When the one comes back, Jesus says, too, that ten were “cleansed.” At the end, though, Jesus uses a different
word. Jesus does not say, “Your faith
has made you cleansed.” He says, “Your
faith has made you well.”
I think that’s important. I think Jesus was making a purposeful and
important distinction. I think there’s
a difference between having your body cleansed, being cured of a physical
disease, and being made well.
Now, don’t get me wrong. Physical health is very important. Those of you who are struggling with
physical problems right now, or have loves ones who are, know exactly how
important it is. I’m not trying to
minimize anything here.
The thing is, though, that we’ve
all known people who are physically healthy, but still are not really
well. What I mean is that we can be
physically healthy but still be unhappy with our lives. We can be physically healthy but still feel
that our lives lack meaning and lack purpose.
We can be physically healthy but still know that something is missing in
our lives, even if we don’t know what it is.
I’d guess some of us have experienced that at some point in our
lives. Maybe some of us are
experiencing it now.
I wonder sometimes what happened to
the other nine people who were cleansed.
Did they go on to live happy lives?
I don’t know. I mean, I’m sure
they were happy to not have leprosy any more.
They’d probably dreamed of being cleansed for years. But then what? Did they go get jobs? Did
they even have any marketable skills they could use to get a job?
And were they accepted back into
society? Remember, lepers were
outcasts. Again, these guys were out on
the edge of town because the people in town had kicked them out. Did people welcome them back? Or were they kind of leery of them? Did the people of the town still give them a
wide berth, thinking that they still might be contagious, that their disease
might come back some day?
How did they explain their
cleansing to people? How did they even
explain it to themselves? What did they
think happened? Did they think they’d
been cured by the power of God? Or did
they just think they’d gotten lucky?
And if they did think they’d been cured by the power of God, why did
they not come back and thank Jesus? Did
they think they deserved to be cured, and so no thanks were necessary?
We don’t know the answers to any of
those questions. What I suspect,
though, is that being cleansed did not solve all their problems the way they
thought it would. I suspect that, after
a while, they found out that they still had plenty of problems. In fact, I suspect that they may have even
wound up back on the edge of town, leading the same life they’d led before,
because that was the only way of life they knew. See, they’d been cleansed on the outside, but on the inside they
were still the same. They may have been
outwardly different, but inside they were still the same people they’d been
before.
We don’t know what happened to the
one who came back, either, of course.
What we do know, though, is that he was not simply cleansed of his
disease. He was made well. He was not only different on the outside, he
was also different on the inside. He
knew that he had been cured by the power of God, and he knew that that power of
God had come to him through Jesus. That
knowledge gave him faith: faith in God,
and faith in Jesus Christ as his Savior
He still had problems too, of
course. He may not have been welcomed
back into society, either. He may have
had trouble adjusting, too. Just as
with the nine, he may have had no marketable job skills. Objectively, he may have seemed to be in the
same boat as they were.
But he was not. Because he was not only cleansed, he was
made well. As important as the change
on the outside was, the change on the inside was even more important. That inner change meant that he was no
longer who he had been. He knew that
now he was a saved child of God. He
knew that he was important, that he was valuable. He knew God would help him find meaning and purpose to his life,
no matter what the rest of his life might hold.
That’s why being thankful to God is
important. That’s the difference it
makes. Being thankful does not
guarantee that we won’t have any more problems. On the outside, it may seem like being thankful changes
nothing. On the inside, though, it
changes everything. When we give thanks
to God, we are reminded that we saved children of God. We are reminded that we are important, that
we are valuable. We are reminded that
our lives have meaning and purpose. We
are reminded that God will help us find that meaning and that purpose, no matter
what the rest of our lives might hold.
There is no person on earth who is
here without a reason. Each person on
earth has some purpose for being here.
That means that you have a purpose for being here. When we give thanks to God, we open our
hearts to God’s leading and to God’s guidance in finding that purpose.
So, if you did not give thanks to
God this past week, please do so now.
On the outside, nothing may change, but on the inside, everything
will. We may or may not be cleansed. But we will be made well.
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