According to our passage for tonight, John says that this healing of the nobleman's son was the second sign of Jesus. It was further testimony to the fact that Jesus was the Son of God. It is quite obvious that Jesus is the star of the story. But, I want you to look with me tonight... not at the star of the story but at the man who played the supporting role, the nobleman himself. When we focus our attention on Jesus, we are reminded of His power. But when we focus our attention on the officer of the court, we are given a beautiful picture of faith.
"Faith" is one of our most common religious words. It appears over 550 times in the New Testament in one for or another. In primitive Christianity, faith became the leading term to describe the relation of man to God. Even today, we refer to ourselves as "believers" or we say that we are "men and women of faith." What does the word mean? What is faith?
Critics of the church would define faith as "belief without evidence in something said by one without knowledge of things without parallel."
Martin Luther said, "Faith is a living, deliberate confidence in the grace of God, so certain that for it, one could die a thousand deaths."
F. B. Meyer, one of the finest biblical expositors of the past, said that, "Faith is the open hand receiving Christ ... the golden pipe through which His fullness comes to us."
More recently faith has been defined as "facing the unknown future and the uncharted journey with an unfailing friend."
What is faith?
Sometimes it is easier to demonstrate a word that it is to define it.
This is what we have in our text.
We have a living demonstration, a portrait in flesh and blood, of what faith is.
Our Lord continued His journey to Cana of Galilee and came again to Cana.
It is not apparent from Scripture why Jesus returned to Cana.
Maybe He wanted to cultivate the "seed" He had planted there when He attended the wedding feast.
Nathanael came from Cana, so perhaps there was a personal reason for this visit.
Jesus was met at Cana by a nobleman from Capernaum, some twenty miles away.
The man had heard about His miracles and came all that distance to intercede for his son who was dying.
The first miracle came at Cana at the request of His mother, and the second miracle at Cana at the request of a father.
Was this man a Jew or a Gentile?
We do not know.
Nor do we know his exact position in the government.
He may have been a member of Herod's court;
but whatever his national or social standing,
he was clearly at his wit's end and
desperately needed the help of the Savior.
He begged Jesus to travel to Capernaum to heal his son.
John 4:48 was not a rebuke of this nobleman.
Rather, it was our Lord's lament at the spiritual condition of the people in general, both in Judea and Galilee.
"Seeing is believing" has always been the "pragmatic" philosophy of the lost world, and even the religious world.
The nobleman believed that Jesus could heal his son, but he made two mistakes in his thinking:
1. He believed that Jesus had to go to Capernaum
to save the boy.
2. He also believed that if the boy died before they
could get there, there was nothing left that
Jesus could do.
We must admire this man's faith.
Jesus simply said,
"Go your way; your son lives."
And the man believed Jesus and started to return home!
The need!
The action. What you do next after Jesus speaks determines what you actually believe.
Both this anonymous nobleman and the Samaritan woman that is mentioned earlier in this chapter must have rejoiced the heart of Jesus as they believed the word and acted on it.
The boy was healed the instant Jesus spoke those words; so the man's servants started out to find him so they could share the good news.
The boy had been healed at the seventh hour, which, in Roman time, would be 7 o'clock in the evening.
The father certainly would not have traveled at night, for that would have been dangerous; nor would the servants have taken that risk.
The father's faith was so strong that he was willing to delay going home, even though his heart yearned to see his beloved son.
When the father and the servants met the next day, their report confirmed his faith.
Note that the father thought the healing would be gradual (when did he begin to get better?);
but the servants reported a complete, instant recovery.
This man began with crisis faith.
He was about to lose his son and he had no other recourse but the Lord Jesus Christ.
Many people came to Jesus with their crises, and He did not turn them away.
And thats something that we need to understand about faith.
If there is the remote possibility that we can figure out a solution to the problem, that we can determine a way for something to work out, it does not require faith and God will not be a part of it.
It is only as we come to the point of desperation where we understand that we cannot do it in our own power, that we don't have the resources,
that we don't have the money,
we can't raise the money and that if we don't get the resources from somewhere we are doomed for failure ... that is the place where our Lord steps in and performs miracles.
Today, there are too many people in the church who are worried about the resources.
They are worried when the see the "holy bank account" diminishing.
Let me tell you this, it may be that the holy bank account is going to have get to ground -0- before God is going to bless with His miracle.
If God wants to keep the doors of this church open,
we don't need $5 in the bank...
and if God wants to close these doors,
$5 million is not going to be enough to prevent that from happening.
And until we stop worshipping the holy bank account and start worshipping the Holy of Holies,
the King of Kings, the Lord of Lords,
it is impossible to expect His blessing.
Hebrews 11:1 says,
"...faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen."
It goes on to say,
"By faith Enoch was taken up so that he should not see death; and h was not found because God took him up; for he obtained the witness that before his being taken up he was pleasing to God."
How did he do that?
Verse 6 says,
"And without faith it is impossible to please Him, for he who comes to God must believe that He is, and that He is a rewarder of those who seek Him."
The answer to every problem in the universe is that we seek Him first, that we seek Him with all of our being, and then He will reward... then He will bless....
then He will perform the miracle.
Turn in your Bibles to Joshua 3:7-13 pg. 153.
READ
Do you know who these people are?
They are the descendants of the people that God delivered out of bondage in Egypt.
Remember those people.
They were the ones who said, we can't see how this thing can work out.
Moses brought us out here to die, and they complained. And God said, because of your bellyaching and because of your lack of faith in me,
you will not enter into the promised land....
you will not be part of the blessing....
you will not be part of the victory.
After you die, I will allow your descendants to go into the promised land, but it will still require faith.
Moses has died off with the rest of the generation of unbelief... and here we have the descendants of the people of blessing.
God told them to pack up everything and go down to the river and begin to cross.
The people were not to wait in their camps until the way was opened, they were to walk by faith.
They were to break camp, pack up their goods,
form in line to march, and move down to the very banks before the river would be opened.
If they had come down to the edge of the river and then had stopped for the stream to divide before they stepped into it, they would have waited in vain.
They must take one step into the water....
they must make the commitment....
they must act....before the river would be cut off.
We must learn to take God at His Word and go forward with the task that He has laid on our heart.....even though we see no way in which we can go forward.
The reason we are so often stopped by the obstacles to faith is that we expect to see them removed before we try to pass through them.
If we would move straight on in faith, the path would be opened for us.
We stand still, waiting for the obstacle to be removed, when we ought to go forward as if there were no obstacles at all.
Don't buy into the lie that in order to accomplish some great task for the Lord that we must have all the resources in place before we start.
If that is the mind set of this church, God is never! never! never! going to bless us.
God says that He will provide.
He doesn't say that it is going to be easy.
Look at verse 10. READ
These people were going into an inhabited land.
There were people there who claimed that land as their homeland.
God told them to go in and He would fight with them.
Listen, if God is on your side,
then the fight is guaranteed.
And how do we get God on our side?
Go back to Hebrews 11:6.
Without faith it is impossible to please God.
Ladies and Gentlemen, unless and until we take our eyes off the holy bank account and begin to set out,
this generation is going to wander in the wilderness and die out and it will be up to the next generation to accomplish God's will for this church.
The church where we had our Valentine banquet last night started a project to repair some of the church.
There was no money.
There was no surplus.
There was no CD.
There was no slush fund of designated accounts.
There was the receipts of that week, most of which were paid out on bills and salaries that week.
But the people stepped out on faith and God worked a miracle.
That entire project was accomplished with a measly $8,000.
And that was almost three times what the church originally set out to do.
But today, the church is disbanded.
Why? Because they took their eyes off God and eventually tried to do things in their own strength.
Don't be misled by believing that money in the bank is what accomplishes God's will.
What accomplishes God's Will is people who are simply audacious enough to believe that God will provide.
The nobleman's faith went from crisis faith to confirmed faith and ultimately to contagious faith, because after the healing, he shared his experience with others.
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The same God that healed a nobleman's son from a distance of twenty miles, is the same God who parted the Jordan River and allowed the people of faith to walk into the promised land on dry solid ground.
My hope is built on nothing less
Than Jesus blood and righteousness;
I dare not trust the sweetest frame,
But wholly lean on Jesus' name.
On Christ, the solid Rock, I stand;
All other ground is sinking sand,
All other ground is sinking sand.
So will you put your trust in the money in the bank account or will you put your trust in the God who's storehouse of blessing is open to those who believe that He is and that He is a rewarder of them that diligently seek Him?
