Ain't Too Proud to Beg
After Pentecost • Sermon • Submitted
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1000 Illustrations for Preaching & Teaching A Fellowship of Beggars
The year 1983 marked the five-hundredth anniversary of the great reformer, Martin Luther, whose stature increases with time. Found by his deathbed, scrawled in German and Latin, was this declaration: “We are beggars: That is true.”
This statement may have inspired D. T. Niles to say, “Evangelism is one beggar telling another beggar where he can find a piece of bread.” Not a sweet roll and a cup of coffee, but a bite of the staff of life—bread!
The church is a fellowship of beggars, receiving and offering love, support, and hope. Committed Christians acknowledge their dependence upon God and their interdependence on one another. They are always in the bread line, if not receiving, then giving.
Blessed Lord, You have caused all Holy Scriptures to be written for our learning. Grant that we may so hear them, read, mark, learn, and take them to heart that, by the patience and comfort of Your holy Word, we may embrace and ever hold fast the blessed hope of everlasting life. … through Jesus Christ, Your Son, our Lord, who lives and reigns with You and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.
The Bible does not contain many stories about people who are simultaneously powerful, and handicapped. You have Naaman the Syrian military commander who suffered from leprosy, you have King Uzziah of Judah. It has been theorized that St. Paul the Apostle suffered from some sort of visual affliction (his “thorn in the flesh”), but that is not a universally held opinion and it is not based upon anything that Paul clearly said about himself.
Generally, the wealthy live well, so much so that it was generally understood that wealth was a sign of God’s favor until Jesus said:
25 It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God.”
By contrast, poverty was seen as evidence of God’s displeasure. After all, God had promised to Israel that one of the fruits of God’s favor would be a lack of poverty.
4 But there will be no poor among you; for the Lord will bless you in the land that the Lord your God is giving you for an inheritance to possess— 5 if only you will strictly obey the voice of the Lord your God, being careful to do all this commandment that I command you today. 6 For the Lord your God will bless you, as he promised you, and you shall lend to many nations, but you shall not borrow, and you shall rule over many nations, but they shall not rule over you.
In addition, poverty is presented in the book of Proverbs as the result of a lack of wisdom or laziness, not the result of any institutional barriers that trapped people into its clutches:
10 A little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to rest, 11 and poverty will come upon you like a robber, and want like an armed man.
Jesus changed all that, both by his words and his actions. He declared and showed that God loves those who lack material goods or who are dependent upon the kindness of others for survival. Today’s text introduces us to Bartimaeus. His name, the conjoining of the Aramaic “Bar” - “son,” and the Greek “Timios,” - “precious,” stands in contrast to his situation, a poor, blind beggar. Perhaps his last name, Bar-Timaeus, indicates his father’s name.
We do know this much - Bartimaeus needed mercy. We know it because that is what he asked for, and even if he hadn’t, we know because we are in the same boat as he. God has given us life, and we didn’t deserve that, but we have it. Since our conception, God has given us those things that are needful for our survival and growth as His image-bearers - material, emotional, social, and spiritual. beyond all the things that we recognize as necessary, there is the need for God to have mercy upon us.
Jeremiah penned these words of comfort in the midst of his lament over the fall of Jerusalem:
21 This I recall to my mind, Therefore I have hope. 22 Through the Lord’s mercies we are not consumed, Because His compassions fail not. 23 They are new every morning; Great is Your faithfulness.
And so, Bartimaeus sits on the edge of Jericho, a city that once experienced the wrath of God when Joshua visited before, but has been rebuilt, and now is in the presence of the mercy of God when a greater Joshua now comes, and bringing with him “new mercies.”
47 And when he heard that it was Jesus of Nazareth, he began to cry out and say, “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!” 48 And many rebuked him, telling him to be silent. But he cried out all the more, “Son of David, have mercy on me!” 49 And Jesus stopped and said, “Call him.” And they called the blind man, saying to him, “Take heart. Get up; he is calling you.” 50 And throwing off his cloak, he sprang up and came to Jesus.
Think about this, just for a moment - a blind man, as in “I cannot see where I am going” - gets up and runs to the place where the Word is found, because that is where he will find mercy! He doesn’t argue with the people around him, he doesn’t try to negotiate - he comes.
People today seem to have a problem with doing that. They know what the Church is, and Who we represent. We say to them, in essence, the same thing that those people said to Bartimaeus - “Take heart, get up - the Lord is calling you!” Perhaps you told someone just this week, someone who needed a word of encouragement, someone who needed a word of wisdom. Someone who needed to hear the pure Gospel, have his or her sins revealed and released. Instead of trusting in the offer of divine mercy, that person makes excuses, clings to unbelief, and resists the Spirit of grace.
This is why we are called to be Christ’s witnesses. We can testify to the goodness of Christ, to His faithfulness to us. We can, because we are also beggars, we are also spiritually poor without Christ Jesus. Although, with time and an unhealthy dose of pietism, we can sometimes forget this, God left a record through the Apostle Paul:
1 And you were dead in the trespasses and sins 2 in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience— 3 among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind.
That’s who every human being is, no matter how we cover it in our good manners, fitness and beauty regimes, and intellectually stimulating conversations,
4 But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, 5 even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved— 6 and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, 7 so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. 8 For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, 9 not a result of works, so that no one may boast. 10 For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.
When it comes to good works, the only difference between the saved and the lost is not in the works we produce, but the Source from whom we do them, “for whatever does not proceed from faith is sin.” Thus, even our regret which does not come from the recognition that we have sinned against God, is no better than the pride by which we boast of getting away with wrongdoing against our neighbor.
Without Christ to heal us, we are blinded by the veil that is our flesh, and until His Word draws us to Himself, we are unable to do anything to change the ultimate situation.
51 And Jesus said to him, “What do you want me to do for you?” And the blind man said to him, “Rabbi, let me recover my sight.” 52 And Jesus said to him, “Go your way; your faith has made you well.” And immediately he recovered his sight and followed him on the way.
Notice that Bartimaeus, in obedience to the Word of the Lord, went, not away from the presence of the Lord, but “followed Him on the way.” Faith in Christ never leads us away from Him, away from His Body, the Church, but always to Him, always to joining Christ and following Him in His Mission, the missio Dei. It will be this way until He comes to take us Home at His return. For those who are His are followers of the Way, the Truth, and the Life, which is Christ.
The Word of faith, which we preach - that is how Paul writes about Him. The Gospel of Jesus Christ that reveals God’s love for us and desire to save us, a desire that embraced death, and that on a cross, for you, to deliver you from those things which the Law was powerless to do, but could only declare your guilt before God. Christ took our sin, our identity as sinners, and stood naked before our Father, bound to the cross as we had been bound by our sin, “enduring the cross, despising the shame,” who rose with all power in heaven and on earth, so that He could forgive all our sins as we trust in him for forgiveness and deliverance.
And He bids us to “go your way, go in peace, to love and serve the Lord.”
So let the peace of God, that passes all understanding, guard your hearts and minds through Jesus Christ our Lord, Amen.