We scramble to fix what’s broken, certain we know the one restoration that matters most. But when friends lower a paralyzed man before Jesus in Matthew 9, desperate only to walk, the first words he hears are “Take heart, my son, your sins are forgiven.” Do we trust Jesus enough to receive what he says we actually need?

Study Questions

The following study questions are AI generated and may contain errors.

The paralyzed man came to Jesus hoping for physical healing, but Jesus first offered forgiveness of sins. Why do you think Jesus prioritized spiritual healing over the physical need that was so urgent and visible? What does this suggest about what we truly need?
The preacher describes being in a “foxhole”—a moment of crisis where we desperately pray and feel close to God, but then life returns to normal and we move on. How do you experience this pattern in your own life? What would it look like to hold onto God’s forgiveness the way the paralyzed man seemed to?
The scribes were offended because they understood that only God can forgive sins. What was Jesus claiming about himself by forgiving this man? How does that claim change the way you understand who Jesus is?
The sermon uses the image of “lost cat” signs and then, after finding the pet, putting up new signs announcing “Leo is home.” What spiritual parallel is the preacher drawing, and how might this apply to how we respond after God answers our prayers?
How does the paralytic’s story challenge the way you identify your deepest needs when you bring requests to God? When we come to God with urgent needs, how can we remain open to what we actually need rather than only what we think we need—and what role does genuine faith in Jesus play in that discernment?

Transcript

This transcript has been automatically generated and may contain errors.

I won’t make everyone here have to hear the whole thing again, but just to bring you up to speed, what we were talking about was that Pizza Hut sort of lost its way. And I remember how great it was, right, how great as a kid with Book It and the delicious pizza. But, yeah, we’ll clap for Book It again for those of you online. But it lost its way. And now they’re trying to find that way with the retro Pizza Huts. Does it work? I think it’s going to work. Oh, yes. Oh, hey. Yeah. Yeah, I thought Marlene was really excited about retro Pizza Hut. Yeah, but she’s right. Yeah, we’re, okay. So, yeah, it’s all working. Pizza Hut’s working. The microphone’s working. And God has everything in his hands. Yes, because God is working. Yes, amen. Yeah, okay. Yeah. Oh.

So we’re trying to find what’s broken. The paralytic. What was he trying to do? He was trying to find what was broken. Why? Because, well, he was paralyzed. We need something more.

Now, as we come to this story, it’s one of the most familiar stories. We say the healing of the paralytic. We all know what we’re referring to, right? But the other thing with that is that as one of Jesus’ greatest miracles, it was one of those things that just stood out. And if you’re going to list out everything that Jesus did, you want to come to that miracle.

And so if you look really closely, if you’re reading the different Gospels, you might say, well, why are we reading about the paralytic here? It doesn’t seem to be in the same place it is in Mark and Luke. And I’m not going to offer the complete answer to that tonight because we don’t know which Gospel writer did this. But it does seem that either Mark and Luke or Matthew decided to group this miracle with other similar parts of the story to make a point. And in ancient writing, it wasn’t always about going in perfect chronological order. We’re very into that in the West today.

I tend to think, and I’m not going to say this because I could be wrong on this, but I tend to think Matthew is the one that moves it. Why does he move it? Because he’s trying to say, Jesus has the whole world in his hands. Let me show you Jesus’ greatest miracle hits, and I’m going to give them all to you. And so what we see here in Matthew 8, lots of miracles back to back to back. But then before Matthew gets to a really personal miracle we’re going to talk about next week, he says, Well, let me tell you about one, maybe you’ve even heard of this one, but you need to hear about the healing of the paralytic.

So I say all that just because sometimes that does raise a question if you’re reading through the Bible in a year. I know I’ve talked to a number of you about chronological Bibles, especially if you’re reading that and you say, Well, wait a second here. Why is this here and here? Well, this might be a flashback, so to speak. That’s how we would call it. That’s what we’d call it in modern. Like if Matthew were a movie director, maybe this is the spot where the screen sort of fades out and everything’s a little overexposed. And he reminds you of what was. That could be it. It could be that Mark and Luke are doing that.

Ultimately, it doesn’t matter. Jesus did it. But I just know this isn’t necessarily immediately after the other one. Rather, it’s just a really, really big deal. And if we’re going to understand that Jesus has the whole world in his hands, well, let’s get to the base of it. Because, yeah, Jesus can stop storms. Yes, Jesus can heal leprosy. Yes, Jesus can raise someone from the dead. But is Jesus actually able to heal what really needs to be healed? Can he come in and restore Pete’s hut to its former glory? Well, if that were Jesus’ priority, yes, he can. He could come and restore Pete’s hut. That’s not his point in life. And I have to think there’s pizza in heaven that will be better than Pete’s hut.

Anyway, without further ado, let’s go ahead. Matthew chapter 9, verse 1. And getting into a boat, he crossed over and came to his own city. And behold, some people brought to him a paralytic lying on a bed. And when Jesus saw their faith, he said to the paralytic, “Take heart, my son, your sins are forgiven.”

Now, imagine for a moment here. You’re trying to restore Pete’s hut. And there’s a big old board meeting and they’re talking about these things, right? Should we do retro pizza? Should we do the retro logo? Should we add more of the old favorite pizzas back to the menu? Should we do all these things? And this mysterious wise man walks into the room and says, “Pete’s hut, your sins are forgiven.” Everyone look at him and say, “We’re not talking about sins here. What’s your name?” “Oh, Jesus.” “We’re not talking about sins. We’re talking about how to get the pizza business back in order.”

Paralytic, he’s not coming, it would seem, for his sins to be forgiven. Why is he coming? He’s coming because he wants to be able to walk. Well, what’s this sin forgiveness stuff? That’s an interesting thing to ponder. If you look back to the telling in Mark, Mark actually gives us more detail, because there’s one detail that Matthew really wants us to get, that we’re going to get to in a moment. But if we want to understand just how determined this man is to be healed, what happens in the Gospel of Mark, his friends take him up to the roof, because there’s too many people trying to see Jesus, and they remove part of the roof and lower the man down into the building.

And I just imagine, I mean, if we were here tonight, and all of a sudden you start to see a saw in the ceiling cutting into it, and then someone lifts up that big chunk of roofing and ceiling, and then you start to see this thing being lowered down. And then as it’s lowering down, you see a man on a stretcher being lowered down here. That would have our attention, right? I mean, everyone’s watching this. It’s definitely noticeable.

And yes, plenty of people have said about how rooftops of that time were a little easier to disassemble. It wasn’t quite the same as if you, I mean, you’re talking thousands of dollars of repairs if you did that here. Not necessarily that. But nonetheless, it wasn’t a normal way to enter a building. This was still a big deal. Still work. They really want this healing. And he’s lowered down. And Jesus looks at him and says, “I’m going to do something for you. Your sins are forgiven.” And everyone’s been watching this. They know why the man’s been lowered down. They can understand it, but sins are forgiven.

Now, would that seem completely strange? No. No, it actually wouldn’t have seemed completely strange. For example, one rabbi at the time made this comment. He said, “No sick person is cured from sickness until all his sins are forgiven.” Maybe Jesus is onto something here, right? Plenty of people over the ages have linked our infirmities with sin.

Job’s friends were experts at this. They said, “Job, let us count the ways you are sinful so we can count how that ties to every boil on your body and everything bad that’s happened to you. Maybe we can put it all together.” So, when this man’s lying there, paralyzed, on the floor, maybe some dust still trickling down, right? Beam of light shining down from outside. He hears, “Your sins are forgiven.” Was he completely shocked? No. I don’t think he was completely shocked.

But one notable thing that Jesus says here, this is really interesting in how he says it. He doesn’t say, “Take heart, my son, your sins have been forgiven.” What does he say? “Your sins are forgiven.” Why does he say that? Because this is not a man who has arrived after, at some point, having his sins forgiven, and now he’s arriving, and now the fruit of having his sins forgiven is going to occur. No, this is someone who is experiencing the act of having his sins forgiven right now. And that’s going to be the problem.

But we might say, well, is Jesus saying that if something bad happens to me then, he’s forgiving this man, he comes for healing. That means that if I have something wrong with me, if I have a health issue, if I lose my job, if something goes wrong, that it’s because I’m a sinner? Is that why? No. John 9: “And he passed by, he saw a man blind from birth, and his disciples asked him, ‘Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?’” Jesus’ answer to him was not that this man sinned or his parents, but “the works of God might be displayed in him.” He said, “You know that thing where you’re always trying to figure out, if something bad happens, what did you do wrong? What did your parents do wrong? Where can we point the finger here and say, this is the person, here’s the person who did it, who caused it, and that’s why it happened?” He said, “That’s not it.”

So when Jesus said to this man, “Your sins are forgiven,” maybe people were thinking sins and his condition together. Maybe that was part of it. But the key thing was, Jesus is not answering and saying that in the way that they might have thought. His point isn’t, “Your sins are forgiven, and that’s why you were paralyzed.” Rather, you had enough faith to come here, so let me give you what you actually really need. Not just what you think you need. You think that you need to be restored to the ability to walk. You know what you really need? You need your sins forgiven. Because all of us do. And you, unlike a lot of the people there, you and your friends actually believe enough in me to cut a hole in the roof and come in here. And you know what happens? What happens through faith? Faith is how we receive God’s grace. You actually believe in me.

The man and his friends have faith. That’s exactly what we’re told here. And when Jesus saw their faith, he said to the paralytic, “Take heart, my son, your sins are forgiven.” So twofold there. First, Jesus recognizes the whole group, the man and his friends. They all believe, right? I mean, the man had to get on board with this, presumably. He said, “Okay, yeah, lower me through the roof.” That sounds a little weird. It’s going to be a little embarrassing, but just go for it, because I just want to be in front of Jesus. His friends had to say, “Well, yeah, that sounds like a good idea,” right? “Yeah, we’re going to go up on a rooftop and cut a hole in the roof and lower you down.” They had to do that too.

He knew he had a need. He didn’t necessarily know fully what the most deep part of that need was.

I was reading about the Battle of Bataan in World War II over near Japan, that you have this battle actually in the Philippines, more properly, with the Japanese. And there were massive, massive forces going against the allies, the Filipinos and the Americans. And it seemed hopeless. In fact, in some sense you might say it was. It would become the largest American surrender since the Civil War. And many of the men fighting in that battle would die. But they fought, and they fought, and they fought before that. And as they fought, and they fought, and they fought before that, one of the notable things about how they fought is they fought so long and so hard that they actually slowed the Japanese advance. And even though the Japanese ultimately were victorious in this battle, it bought critical time. The Japanese couldn’t advance across the Pacific and advance to the cause of the Axis.

But it was brutal. And it’s thought, there’s some debate on this, but it’s thought that perhaps that now familiar phrase, “There are no atheists in foxholes,” actually originated from that battle. Because with the men in that battle was a chaplain named William Thomas Cummings. And he was ministering to these people, and he recognized as he was ministering to them that a lot of them were there in those foxholes with very little belief. They didn’t necessarily believe in God, or maybe they just abstractly, like many people did in the time, would say, “Yeah, I believe in God,” but had they been going to church before? Did they care about what the Bible said? Maybe not.

But you’re in this fierce, hopeless battle where every day you’re thinking it might be your last. And probably at some point you realize you probably aren’t getting out of this, but you’re buying critical time for others. Does that change the way that you think? Does that make you want to pray? Oh, yes, it certainly does. It’s accurate, right? There are no atheists in foxholes. However, there’s an interesting question we could ask in that, which is, if you recognize that need, I am facing insurmountable enemy attack. I am not going to probably survive. I think I might pray. Maybe I should pray. God, if you’re there, would you hear this prayer? That kind of thing.

If you live to tell about it, has it actually changed anything about you? Maybe, maybe not. Because there are plenty of people who go through a horrible, traumatic, excruciating experience, whether it’s in war or elsewhere, and are changed by it. And maybe you actually recognize, “Yeah, I do need Jesus because I can’t do this on my own.” But there are others who say, “Well, I’m going to pray. Maybe you feel like the prayer’s been answered. Great. Now I’m okay. Now I can go back to the way I was.” Or it wasn’t answered how I hoped. I think I’ll just go ahead and forget that whole prayer thing. It didn’t seem to work anyway.

Does suddenly being a non-atheist in a foxhole mean you’ve actually converted? It’s hard to say. Depends how we come to God with our need. Do we just want the one thing so badly we can’t see anything more? Here’s the thing I think that Jesus recognizes with this man and his friends. He’s in a foxhole, right? He’s paralyzed. He is in trouble, right? Here’s the situation. His best hope in life is that his friends are going to help him and that maybe, maybe he can beg. Because there’s no ADA. There’s no anything that we do in the modern world. He is at best going to live for a little while until he maybe starves to death. This is bad.

And is he in a foxhole? Yeah. If we’re talking metaphorical foxholes, I think that would feel like a foxhole. What if his friends get busy? What if they die? No. So the challenge is when God answers our prayers, but doesn’t answer how we think we need in that foxhole, can we still hear him? When Jesus looks at him and says, “My son, your sins are forgiven,” he’s still laying there, right? He’s still on that mat. I bet a lot of things would run through his head. Well, yeah, maybe I did. Maybe it was my sin. Maybe it was my parent’s sin. Maybe that’s why I’m here and I’ve had to be lowered down onto the ground here and I’m staring up at you, Jesus. Maybe that’s it. So I guess I did need forgiveness of sins. But I also need to be able to walk. It’d be easy to think that. It’d be easy to be healed and then go back to the way things were otherwise.

I didn’t really need God. I just needed to get a hand up. What are we going to do when we’re atheists in the foxhole or even Christians in the foxhole? Because a lot of times it’s kind of hard to tell the difference, right? A lot of times it really is hard to tell the difference. We still come to God with our urgent prayer needs. We pray. And then when that prayer need is over, what do we do? We go back to the way things were. But I think Jesus sees something in this man. He knows when he tells this man, “Your sins are forgiven,” this man wasn’t being lowered down that day because he thought, “I need my sins forgiven. I have to meet Jesus.” He was thinking, “I want to walk again. I need to meet Jesus.” But he has enough belief, enough faith in Jesus as he’s being lowered down, and Jesus says something that isn’t necessarily even what he was hoping for.

That what he thinks is, this is really what I need. Yeah. Whatever Jesus says I need, I don’t necessarily know what I need, but Jesus knows what I need. And if he says my sins are forgiven, that that’s what he says, then I’ll take that. Jesus sees a man who truly believes in him. Jesus gives us what we really need.

Verse three: “And behold, some of the scribes said to themselves, ‘This man is blaspheming.’ But Jesus, knowing their thoughts, said, ‘Why do you think evil in your hearts? Which is easier to say, your sins are forgiven? Or to say, rise and walk?’ But that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins, he then said to the paralytic, ‘Rise, pick up your bed, and go home.’”

When he rose, he went home. When the crowd saw it, they were afraid, and they glorified God, who had given such authority to men.

We can’t really tell when God forgives sins, can we? Sometimes that’s actually one of the challenges for us, even as we receive God’s forgiveness in our own lives. We think, does God really forgive me? Or am I still just carrying that burden? One of the important reasons we keep coming back to confession, because a lot of times, not only do we need to confess new things we’ve done, but sometimes we just need to come back and be in front of the cross and say, “God, I’m still weighed down by this. Help me to understand what you’re doing.” Jesus gives us exactly what we always need.

But those around this man, even as this man, I believe, actually does say, “Okay, Jesus, whatever you have for me, I know you’re giving it to me.” I say, “Whoa, wait a second here, Jesus. Yeah, you don’t have a medical practitioner’s license, but if you want to heal people and allow them to walk and to see and even occasionally raise up a dead person, okay, fine. That’s fine. But don’t go out forgiving sins.” I think today we’ve kind of softened that, even though those of us in Protestant churches don’t do a very strict ritual confession where you go to a priest and you confess your sins and then the priest announces that you’ve been forgiven. Although, notably, even there, it’s coming through Jesus, right? I mean, if you get into the theology of it, but it feels a little bit like a human being’s forgiving us. And so it doesn’t really shock us when a human being, of course we know Jesus so much more, but it doesn’t shock us that a human being might say your sins are forgiven.

When we do a confession, I do always try to take care to say that this is from God’s word that you’re forgiven and it’s not me doing the forgiving. But I think we’re just kind of, we’re kind of desensitized a little bit. These people are not. They understand there’s exactly one person who can forgive sins, and they’re right on that. Only God can forgive sins. So if Jesus is going around saying, “Hey, guy that just came in through the roof, your sins are forgiven,” there’s something wrong here because people don’t forgive sins, God does.

There was absolutely zero room for some person to extend God’s forgiveness. Even as many Jews were rightly anticipating the Messiah, they didn’t think the Messiah could actually forgive sins. They thought he might be a champion and a great king and do all these things, but forgiving sins? That’s God’s job. That’s what God’s going to do at the end of time.

Isaiah 33, verse 24: “And no inhabitant will say I am sick. The people who dwell there will be forgiven their iniquity.” Yes, sickness and forgiveness will be tied together, but from the Lord.

They’re not crazy to say, “Jesus, you’re blaspheming.” If you’re looking at Jesus, and Jesus is just a man standing there saying, “I am forgiving your sins,” guess what Jesus is doing? He’s blaspheming. He’s doing what God should do.

Jesus knows this. It’s why he says a phrase that I think sometimes we find kind of mysterious here. “Why do you think evil in your hearts?” Verse five, “For which is easier to say your sins are forgiven or to say rise and walk?” You say, “Okay, well, in English, let’s see. One, two, three, four, one, two, three. Maybe we should get into Greek. Is it easier to utter? Are the sounds easier to come out? Your sins are forgiven? No.”

What’s Jesus talking about? We often read this as Jesus saying, “It’s easier to say your sins are forgiven.” But I think we’re actually wrong on that. I think what Jesus is saying is, “Yeah, it’d be easier if I just said rise and walk. I know that. You think that I don’t realize that you’re going to think the things you’re thinking.” And whether Jesus is reading the actual hearts and minds of the people, of course he can. Or if it’s obvious to everyone because they’re over there grumbling and mumbling and pointing at Jesus and saying, “What? Did you hear what he said? Did you hear what he said?” It doesn’t really matter. Either way, Jesus is certainly aware that the people watching are totally aware that this is offensive. Human beings can’t say this. Jesus isn’t saying it’s easier to say your sins are forgiven. He’s saying, “Which is easier? It’d be easier if I just said rise up and walk. But I want to show you the harder thing. Because see, someday we will all be healed. Someday every ailment, every challenge, every problem that we face will be healed.

The harder thing is that our sin will be healed. Jesus says, “I want to show you the harder thing.” Now, of course, Jesus does indeed tell the man to stand up, “Rise, pick up your mat and walk.” Why does he say that? Not because he says, “Well, you know, I didn’t really mean your sins are forgiven. I’ll go ahead and say the thing I really meant because it was so much easier to say your sins are forgiven.” No, not that at all. What he’s saying is, “Okay, you don’t believe I can forgive sins. Well, if I can’t forgive sins, God surely would not allow me to raise someone up. But let me show you now. I’ve said this, and now watch me do this. And let the action I do, the thing that you can see, demonstrate to you the invisible thing that I can also do, that you can’t see.”

The reason Jesus did miracles over and over again wasn’t because he was there to heal as many people as possible of their present physical ailment. Because guess what? This man walked again, but you know this man isn’t walking on earth right now. He died. At some point, he died. We don’t have a 2,000-year-old man who was healed walking around the earth, doing jogs around the earth, YouTubing and influencing about how he can walk. At some point, he didn’t walk again. But because he had faith and because he received forgiveness, guess what? He is walking. He has a presence. Something totally different, something totally more profound, that deeper need that he didn’t necessarily know, but he was willing to hear, and the others weren’t.

When Jesus tells him to get up, what it does is it tells the other people, “Okay, now we need to actually think about the further, deeper implications and ride them out.” Because at first, we could grumble, and we could point, and we could say, “Can you imagine having the audacity to say your sins are forgiven?” But now that he’s actually had the man get up, we have to wrestle with the fact that this man actually can forgive sins. What kind of man can forgive sins? The glorified God who had given such authority to men.

Now, some people have gotten into how this is actually a preview of later in Matthew where the disciples are told they’re going to bind and loose sin, and this is the authority of the church, and human beings are going to do this. We don’t really need to go that far. The people there at that time couldn’t see that. What they could see is that one apparent just man was apparently something more than just a man because he could do this.

The question is once you see it, once God has met us in our need, do we hold on to that, and do we respond to that? If you go around your neighborhood, you probably at some point, maybe all too frequently, see the lost cat or dog signs, right? Because if someone loses a pet, and you lose that beloved pet, it’s awful, right? So you go around, and you put up the signs, and you have a picture of just how can Fluffy be gone, right? You put up the signs. And you go around and around.

One thing I’ve never seen, though, is I never know what happens to most of these stories because the signs just stay up usually until they weather away and slowly crinkle and fade. And maybe that’s because they didn’t find the animal. But also, you put the signs up. You find the animal. What do you do? Well, you celebrate you found the animal. Maybe there’s some injuries. You take your beloved cat or dog to the vet and get everything fixed up, and you move on with your life.

Well, the other week, I saw someone had taken a picture of something totally different I’d never seen before. Take a look at this. Here is Leo the cat. And Leo is home. Leo the cat because Leo isn’t home. He’s here at church. But Leo is home. And I thought about that. And you probably can’t read it all on screen there, but it talks about how grateful the family is that Leo is home and everyone who tried to help find Leo.

I’d never seen that before. It was so neat to see that someone thought, “The thing that we felt we needed has been done, but what we also realized is all these people cared. All this other stuff was going on. Maybe we even needed to know that more. Maybe we needed to know our community actually cared.” We know that too, so we don’t want to just let go of that. We want to respond to that. We’re going to go around and do all the trouble putting up the signs again, but this time to announce Leo is home.

When we’re in that foxhole, when we’re in that need that we know we have, what do we do when God meets us there? Because too often we let the old lost signs that we posted just crinkle and fade and fall down because that’s all we really thought we needed. It may have been nice. It may have been heartwarming to realize we had neighbors that cared, that people tried, and that ultimately it brought something. But you know what? We just want Leo to come home.

We realize those deeper needs that were answered there. When we come to God and we pray, I think one of the challenges, especially if we have a deep, deep need and we’re praying to God and God answers that need, are we ready? Do we have enough faith in Jesus that he’s going to meet us with what we really need? Which means sometimes he’s not going to answer exactly how we hoped, right? But then we can still see God working because we actually believe more and that God is going to answer what we really need when we’re focused on the thing that we’re praying on. That’s the first part.

But two, whether or not that very thing is the thing that is best for us, are we ready to respond when God answers and actually hold on to what he is doing, the deeper part that he’s meeting us, that he’s surrounding us not just with the community of neighbors, but with the very God of the universe surrounding us and being with us and giving us his spirit. Are we recognizing that? Because we get so focused on the initial needs that we climb out of the foxhole and we forget. We find the animal and we forget. We just move on.

What Jesus is confronting these people with is he looks at this man and says, “Okay, now pick up your mat and walk.” Are you going to go for something more than simply saying, “Ah, now I can walk. Now I have a mat and I have even a great story to tell. I met Jesus and he allowed me to walk.” Is that it? Or are you going to actually have faith in Jesus? I believe as we look at how Jesus responds to this man, that he and some of the others that saw actually said, “Whoa, we need the deeper thing. Yeah, we all probably could come and be healed in some way with Jesus, but you know what we really need? We need to actually encounter the man who’s more than a man because he can actually forgive sins.” How do we know that people did that? How do we know that people did that? Well, they glorified God here. They were afraid. Appropriate response when you’re encountering the majesty of God. And then they weren’t just afraid, they glorified God. They had done this.

Did all of them understand who Jesus was completely there at that moment? I don’t think so. But enough of them realized, yeah, it would have been amazing to see this man walk, but you know what? We saw something even more amazing because we all have those burdens. We all have those sins that we need. Whether we’re in a foxhole or in a church pew, whether we’re in our car or at home, whether we’re going on a beautiful walk or struggling in a cubicle, wherever we are, we need God’s forgiveness.

And do we recognize the most amazing words we can ever hear from God are, “Take heart, my son, my daughter, your sins are forgiven.” Jesus meets us whether we can go through a ceiling or not. Jesus meets us and he offers us healing. And it isn’t just the healing we think we need, it’s the deeper healing we actually need. We’re ready to hold on to that, remember that, and realize that is our hope today and tomorrow and forever.

Will you pray with me, please? Lord, we do pray that you would help us to be those who don’t just look for that quick, immediate need. When you come and you meet us and you say, “Your sins are forgiven,” Lord, that we’d realize that’s the deepest need, the one that we need most. Lord, would you help us to see that, to hold on to that, to be encouraged by that, we pray.

So often we do just have that checklist of things that we want. But here in this story, this incredible story of healing, we see, yes, physical healing, but more than that, we see what each of us really needs. Healing our sin. Would you help us to recognize that you are with us every step of the way, everything we’re facing, when we’re in that box hole and when we’re not. Would you help us not to just be fervent when we feel the shots being fired at us, but afterwards, as we walk through whatever we face in life, that we continue to hold on, knowing that you are the one who truly forgives.

We pray in Jesus’ name. Amen.