“Jesus said: ‘Bring him to Me’”
Mark 9:19
Grace to you and peace from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus.
This past July, about twenty after nine in the evening, a fire started in a high-rise apartment building in downtown Philadelphia, sending thick smoke billowing up to the nineteenth floor. That’s when a 35-year-old man named Jermaine, got a frantic call from his sister that their bedridden mother was trapped on the fifteenth floor. Immediately, he rushed over, and tried to get inside.
There was just one problem--the police wouldn’t let him in. They said the elevators weren’t working.
“No problem,” he said. “I’ll just take the stairs.” They told him, “We can’t let you in.”
So what would you do if your bedridden mother was trapped in a burning building on the fifteenth floor? Most of us would likely stand there, and break down in tears.
But not Jermaine. He was not about to let her die while he stood outside, helpless.
Instead, he did the only thing he could think to do. With nothing but a pair of wire cutters in his hands, he started to climb the building on the outside, making his way from one fenced-in balcony to another, until finally he was able to reach his mother inside.
He said, “It was all for my mom’s safety, period. I wasn’t worried about mine at all. She can’t get out of bed or walk around, so if there’s a fire, she needs help out.” And he said, “I’m not just going to sit there and let my mom die. I’d rather risk my life falling, than let her sit in there and die.”
What would you do for someone you loved?
So it was in our text for today. Please turn in your Bible to page 1074. I’ll start where it says: “Jesus heals a boy with an unclean spirit.” Matthew chapter 9, verse 14: “And when they came to the disciples, they saw a great crowd around them, and scribes arguing with them. And immediately all the crowd, when they saw Him, were greatly amazed and ran up to Him and greeted Him. And He asked them, ‘What are you arguing about with them?’ And someone from the crowd answered Him, ‘Teacher, I brought my son to You, for he has a spirit that makes him mute. And whenever it seizes him, it throws him down, and he foams and grinds his teeth and becomes rigid. So I asked Your disciples to cast it out, and they were not able.’”
Let’s stop there for a moment to see what’s going on.
If you’d glance back a few verses in chapter 9, you’d see that Jesus and three of His disciples, Peter, James, and John, had just come down from the Mount of Transfiguration. As it says in verse 3, it was there that Jesus’ “clothes became radiant, intensely white, as no one on earth could bleach them.” And it was there that He spoke with Moses and Elijah, where a cloud overshadowed them, and where the Father called out from heaven to say: “This is My beloved Son; listen to Him.”
And just as soon as they came down from that mountain, what did they find? They found the rest of the disciples, all nine of them, standing with a “great crowd,” in the middle of an argument.
So what was the problem? Look again at verse 17: “And someone from the crowd answered Him, ‘Teacher, I brought my son to You, for He has a spirit that makes him mute. And whenever it seizes him, it throws him down, and he foams and grinds his teeth and becomes rigid. So I asked Your disciples to cast it out, and they were not able.’”
Do you get the picture? If you think about it, it must have been quite a sorry sight!
First of all, think of the father, the poor, distressed, absolutely helpless father, who for years had struggled to care for his sick, sick boy. And notice--this wasn’t some genetic disorder, and neither was it some kind of childhood disease. Instead, he was possessed by a demon!
And not only did it grab him and throw him down to the ground, verse 22 says it cast him into fire and into water to destroy him.
Time after time after time, the demon grabbed him and slammed him into the ground--bruise after bruise, burn after burn, wound after wound, concussion after concussion. The demon was literally killing the boy, doing everything it could to destroy him. And the father was doing absolutely everything he could to save him.
But hope against hope, he heard that there was Someone, a worker of miracles, who could help. Supposedly, He had healed so many others. Just maybe He could help him too. So off he went, in search of Jesus, dragging his son along with him.
But he couldn’t find Him. So he did the next best thing--he found His disciples. And since they were Jesus’ disciples, surely they could do something to save his demon-possessed son!
But it didn’t go as well as anyone planned. For no matter what the disciples said or did, they couldn’t do anything to save him.
Which is strange! They had cast out so many other demons before.
Meanwhile, (try to picture it), a crowd began to gather. Verse 14 says, “a great crowd gathered around them, and scribes were arguing with them.”
Can you hear them shouting? “We told you so! We told you so! You think your Master, Jesus, is so great? So where’s His power now? Where’s His healing now? Come on, Andrew, have a go! Go ahead, Philip, save the boy! Look at his scars, his wide-eyes, his fear. Isn’t there something you can do to help him? Absolutely not, and neither can your Savior Jesus.”
And turning to the crowd, they said even more. “Just look at this sorry excuse for disciples! They’re just a bunch of impostors--fools, fakes, frauds. Can’t you see there’s nothing to this Jesus business after all!”
And see the disciples, sad lot that they were--heads hanging down, confused, beaten, embarrassed, afraid. Why couldn’t they do it? They had cast out so many before!
And if you would, step back a little further from the crowd, the scribes, the disciples, the father, and the poor, demon-possed boy, and you’ll see there was one more there that day--Satan himself, strutting around, and laughing to himself. “Go ahead, do you what you want,” he said. “Preach to the boy, shout at me to leave him alone. Do your best. Do your worst. There’s no way I’ll ever be afraid of you!”
It must have been an incredibly sorry sight!
Then what? Wonder of wonders, who should come, but Jesus. Verse 15: “And immediately all the crowd, when they saw Him, were greatly amazed and ran up to Him and greeted Him.”
And what did He say as soon as He saw what was happening? Verse 19: “O faithless generation, how long am I to be with you? How long am I to bear with you? Bring him to me.”
And when they brought him to Him, verse 20: “Immediately it convulsed the boy, and he fell on the ground and rolled about, foaming at the mouth.” Jesus asked, “How long has this been happening to him?” And he said, “From childhood. And it has often cast him into fire and into water, to destroy him. But if You can do anything, have compassion on us and help us.” And Jesus said to him, “If you can! All things are possible for one who believes.” Immediately the father of the child cried out and said, “I believe; help my unbelief!”
Then verse 25. Just as soon as Jesus saw the crowd come running together, He rebuked that unclean spirit. He said: “‘You mute and deaf spirit, I command you, come out of him and never enter him again.’ And after crying out and convulsing him terribly, it came out, and the boy was like a corpse, so that most of them said, ‘He is dead.’ But Jesus took him by the hand and lifted him up, and he arose.”
There’s a lot this text can teach us. I’ll leave you with two things.
The first is this. Do you know why the disciples couldn’t cast out the demon? It’s not because they didn’t believe in Jesus, or because they doubted He was the Son of God. It’s simply because they thought they could handle it on their own, and didn’t need Jesus to do His work in His name.
To put it another way, they were trying to bear fruit without abiding in the vine.
Sound familiar? It should, because that’s what Jesus said in the book of John: “I am the vine; you are the branches. Whoever abides in Me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from Me you can do nothing.”
There’s a lesson for us there as well. Sometimes we think we can handle our trials and our troubles, whatever they might be, on our own. But just like the disciples, we end up worse off than before, embarrassed, confused, and afraid.
Think instead of the words of Paul to the Philippians: “I can do all things through Christ who gives me strength.”
And one more thing. Did you hear what Jesus in verse 19? They’re truly the four most beautiful, and most important words of all. “Bring him to Me.”
And it’s those four words that tell us no matter how hard our challenges might be, no matter how deep or how dark, we can bring them all to Jesus.
Back in the early 1800s, John Paton was born in a small country farm cottage, the eldest of eleven children. And though he was born and raised in Scotland, he felt called by God to serve as a missionary in the New Hebrides Islands, just off the coast of Australia.
But life there wasn’t easy. Soon after he arrived, his wife died of tropical fever, and so did their newborn son. Later, he said he slept on their graves to protect them from the local cannibals.
But he kept going, kept working. And before he died at the age of eighty-two, he translated the entire New Testament into the Aniwa language, brought all of the island to Christ, and sent Christian missionaries to twenty-five of the other thirty islands.
And one day, as he was translating the Gospel of John into the Aniwa language, he realized that there was no word which meant, “believe.” It simply didn’t exist in their language.
And in the Gospel of John, the word “believe” appears more than ninety times. And you just can’t translate the Gospel of John if you don’t have a word for “believe.” So not knowing what else to do, he put his manuscript away--a lost cause.
Until a fellow worker came into his office. He was an aboriginal pastor who had been out in the hills preaching, and he was tired. And as he plopped down in one chair, and rested his feet on another, he sighed, and said an aboriginal word that means, “I rest my whole weight on these two chairs.”
And when Paton heard him, he said, “That’s it! That’s the word for ‘believe!’ I rest my whole weight right here.
Complete trust. Complete abandon. I rest my whole weight on Jesus.
We thank You, dear Father, for the grace You supply every day of our lives. Help us to bring all our trials and troubles, our worries and concerns, and to give them all to You, for Jesus’ sake. Amen