A Sign of Faith: Desperate and Persistent

QUOTES FOR REFLECTION

“What does not satisfy when we find it, was not the thing we were desiring.”

~C.S. Lewis (1898-1963) in Pilgrim’s Regress

“Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life.”

~Steve Jobs (1955-2011) at Stanford commencement address

“In faith there is enough light for those who want to believe and enough shadows to blind those who don’t.”

~Blaise Pascal (1623-1662), French mathematician

“I freed thousands of slaves, but I would have freed hundreds more had they known they were slaves.”

~Harriet Tubman (1822-1913), key leader of the Underground Railroad

“When we submit our lives to what we read in scripture, we find that we are not being led to see God in our stories, but our stories in God’s. God is the larger context and plot in which our stories find themselves.”

~Eugene Peterson (1932-2018), pastor, scholar and author

“It is the identity that we ascribe to God out of doubt or faith in his Scriptures that will determine the identity we will give ourselves and ultimately the life that we inevitably live. If he is the Creator, then we are created. If he is Master, then we are servants. If he is love, then we are loved. If he is omnipotent, then we are not as powerful as we think. If he is omniscient, then there is nowhere to hide. If he cannot lie, then his promises are all true. It is faith in the truths of God’s character that has the power to completely revolutionize how our lives are lived out.”

~Jackie Hill-Perry, writer and hip-hop artist

“The first link between my soul and Christ is not my goodness but my badness; not my merit but my misery; not my riches but my need.”

~Charles Spurgeon (1834-1892), British preacher

SERMON PASSAGE

John 4:43-54

John 4 (NIV)
43 After the two days he left for Galilee. 44 (Now Jesus himself had pointed out that a prophet has no honor in his own country.) 45 When he arrived in Galilee, the Galileans welcomed him. They had seen all that he had done in Jerusalem at the Passover Festival, for they also had been there.

46 Once more he visited Cana in Galilee, where he had turned the water into wine. And there was a certain royal official whose son lay sick at Capernaum. 47 When this man heard that Jesus had arrived in Galilee from Judea, he went to him and begged him to come [down] and heal his son, who was close to death.

48 “Unless you people see signs and wonders,” Jesus told him, “you will never believe.”

49 The royal official said, “Sir, come down before my child dies.”

50 “Go,” Jesus replied, “your son will live.”

The man took Jesus at his word and departed. 51 While he was still on the way, his servants met him with the news that his boy was living. 52 When he inquired as to the time when his son got better, they said to him, “Yesterday, at one in the afternoon, the fever left him.”

53 Then the father realized that this was the exact time at which Jesus had said to him, “Your son will live.” So he and his whole household believed.

54 This was the second sign Jesus performed after coming from Judea to Galilee.

John 1 (ESV)
11 He came to his own, and his own people did not receive him. 12 But to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God, 13 who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God.

John 2 (ESV)
23 Now when he was in Jerusalem at the Passover Feast, many believed in his name when they saw the signs that he was doing. 24 But Jesus on his part did not entrust himself to them, because he knew all people 25 and needed no one to bear witness about man, for he himself knew what was in man.