On this edition of Victorious Faith, Cherri Campbell begins the next message in her series “The God of Miracles” with “Lessons From Jesus’ Healing Miracles, Part Two.” Building on previous teachings about faith, authority, and healing, Cherri examines the story of the paralytic lowered through the roof in Luke 5 and highlights the powerful truth that faith is visible through action.
Teaching verse by verse through the Gospel account, Cherri explains that Jesus “saw” the faith of the men carrying the paralytic because faith always acts. Their determination to bring the man before Jesus — even tearing through a roof
SPEAKER 01 :
Good morning. Welcome to Victorious Faith. I’m Cherri Campbell. This morning, I’m going to begin sharing with you the third message in a six-message series that I preached in our Victorious Faith services called The God of Miracles. And this message is called Lessons from Jesus Healing Miracles Part 2. And if you’d like to download the notes, you can go to my YouTube channel, which is under my name, Cherri Campbell. C-H-E-R-R-I Campbell, C-A-M-P-B-E-L-L. And there in the top category called radio broadcasts, you will see this series called the God of miracles. And each message has its own notes. And this message is called lessons from Jesus healing miracles part two. So join me now in our live service for part one of this message. Lessons from Jesus healing miracles part two. So we are going this evening to pick up where we left off in our last service. We are now in a series called The God of Miracles. The God of Miracles. And we are in part three tonight. As you will see it on your screen, it is part three, the third message in this series. It’s part two of lessons from Jesus healing miracles. So in our last service, we actually started with this outline. And so as you can see on the outline, we did already talk about the miracle of healing the leper in Mark 1. And we talked at length actually about receiving by faith. That is an important message. And I encourage you to listen to that because laid some very important foundational truths about healing and And there’s a lot of Christians who have wrong thinking about healing and wrong believing about healing, about who God will heal. Will God heal everybody? We talked about that in detail. And so if you miss that, that will answer a lot of your questions in that message, that foundational message part one. So I encourage you, you don’t want to miss it. Go back and listen to the last message. And then we also talked about the centurion’s servant. And we saw how the centurion understood authority, working together with faith. And Jesus said, I have not seen any greater faith in all Israel. And it was simply because of The centurion understood authority, the use and the exercise of authority over sickness, disease, demons, the curse, anything from the devil. And then we did also look at this next miracle, Peter’s mother-in-law in Luke 4. We saw that and Jesus rebuked the fever. The fever responded. We talked about that. And then we also did look at the fourth miracle, the man with the withered hand. And Jesus said, stretch forth your hand. And we talked about that. So we’ve already talked about the first four miracles, lessons that we can learn because there were only so many healing miracles in the ministry of Jesus that were written and recorded in the gospels descriptively. There were hundreds and thousands of mass miracles where we even read the scriptures in our last service about crowds followed him, the multitudes followed him. And actually, that word refers to thousands and thousands of people. And some historians say that there were tens of thousands of people at certain gatherings. For example, the Mount of Beatitudes or When Jesus gave the Beatitudes in that sermon, and then at the end there, he healed them that there were tens of thousands gathered there on that mountain. It says Jesus healed them all. Jesus healed them all. And so we’ve already taken a look at that. And even though there were many mass miracles where Jesus would lay hands on the multitudes and they were healed, there were only a certain number, and I think it’s about 18 miracles in the ministry of Jesus recorded in the four gospels that are descriptive of telling us who the person was, what the person’s problem or illness or deformity or whatever it was, what they had, what their problem was, what Jesus did and said, and what they did and said. So there are only a few of those that are descriptive. Those 18, therefore, are important. They’re significant. That when you see a miracle in the four gospels that describes the person, who it was, what their problem was, what they said and did, and what Jesus said and did. Those are recorded out of hundreds and thousands of miracles. Why were those selected? Why did God select those? Because there’s something for us to learn. There’s something for us to learn from those miracles, from either and or what Jesus said and did and what they said and did. And in some cases, in many cases, actually most of the cases, there’s a few cases where they didn’t do much and Jesus was the predominant one involved. But in most of the 18 individual descriptive incidents, The person receiving the miracle said and did something that was significant to them receiving their healing and their miracle. They did or said or both did and said something. And that is something that we should learn to do and say. in most of these cases. And so let’s pick it up then in the outline with the paralytic. And we read about this case in Luke 5, verses 17 to 25. And it says, one day as he, that’s Jesus, was teaching, Pharisees and teachers of the law who had come from every village of Galilee and from Judea and Jerusalem were sitting there. And notice this. The power of the Lord was present for him to heal the sick. The power… That is also the anointing of the Lord was present for him to heal the sick. Some men came carrying a paralytic on a mat. and tried to take him into the house to lay him before Jesus. When they could not find a way to do this because of the crowd, they went up on the roof and lowered him on his mat through the tiles into the middle of the crowd, right in front of Jesus. When Jesus saw Jesus, their faith. You should underline that. I put that in bold. Notice faith is a spiritual thing, but he saw it. Why? He saw the action of it. Faith acts. Jesus saw faith. Faith is a spiritual force. So the spiritual force you cannot see, but you can see the action of faith. And Jesus saw their faith. What did he see? He saw them acting. He saw them lowering the man through the roof on a mat. That was their faith in action. And he said, Friend, your sins are forgiven. The Pharisees and the teachers of the law began thinking to themselves, who is this fellow who speaks blasphemy? Who can forgive sins but God alone? Jesus knew what they were thinking and asked, why are you thinking these things in your hearts? Which is easier to say? Your sins are forgiven or to say, get up and walk. So notice to Jesus, they were the same people. It took the same faith to say your sins are forgiven as it was to say get up and walk. The same faith to forgive sins as it is to heal. Well, on the opposite side, it’s the same faith that receives forgiveness as that also receives healing, the same faith. So which is easier to say? So he’s putting them on the same level, the same plane. Your sins are forgiven or to say, get up and walk, but that you may know that the son of man has authority on earth to forgive sins. Then he said to the paralyzed man, I tell you, get up, take your mat and go home. Immediately, he stood up in front of them, took what he had been lying on and went home, praising God. Hallelujah. And then the next verse, I didn’t include it here, says that the people were all amazed, said, we’ve seen amazing things today. Well, all the crowd could do. was say, we have seen amazing things today. But I wanted to point out, first of all, going back to verse 17, the power of the Lord was present for him to heal the sick. Now, they were in a building that was packed like sardines, packed wall to wall. That’s why the men carrying the paralytic couldn’t even get in the door. They couldn’t even get in the door. They couldn’t find a narrow path to squeeze between people and to say, step aside, step aside. Let us bring this man to Jesus. There was no room to even ask people to step aside six inches. That means they were packed like sardines in that building so that these men had to go up on the roof. That means there were a lot of people there. Now, in any crowd, let’s say even if it was a small building, it would have probably held at least 30 people. Even if it was a house and they moved out all the tables and chairs. it would probably seat at least 30 people packed like sardines. And very likely it was even a larger house than that. Could have seated 50 or 100 people. All right. Well, let’s even be conservative. In a group of 30 people, do you think more than one person would have an illness? Absolutely. When I have asked people, and I’m not going to do it now, in a congregation, in a service, raise your hand if you have anything that you would like to be healed from. It’s usually more than 50% of the people have something healed. whether it’s an allergy or hard of hearing or blood pressure, blood sugar. Usually it’s at least 50% of the people say, yeah, I’ve got something I can use healing in my body. What you just heard was part one of message three in a six message series that I preached in our victorious faith services called the God of miracles. And this message is called lessons from Jesus healing miracles. Part two. We will continue this message again tomorrow. So join me again tomorrow and remember God loves you. You are blessed and highly favored by the Lord.