Power in the Pulpit | Matthew 9:27–38

Intro: Thank you Leighton for leading us tonight. Thank you all for being here tonight. If you have a Bible with you tonight, we are going to be looking at Matthew 9 verses 27-38. Have you ever tried explaining something to a group of people and there’s mixed results about whether or not they get it.When this happens things are usually broken into three groups of people, there’s a group of people who do get it, there’s a group of people who do not get it, and there’s a group of people who think they get it, but don’t. Then, the people who think they get it start explaining incorrectly to the people who openly don’t get it what you said and it just keeps getting more confusing. And it becomes clear somebody is going to have to step in and rectify the situation. That’s the situation Jesus found himself in tonight’s passage. Jesus has revealed who he is, but people are led astray, therefore Jesus' followers must go. We will see this in three places tonight. We will see it in a genuine belief, intentional doubt and brokenness for the lost. As we do every Sunday night, could you please stand as we honor the reading of God’s Word.

Genuine Belief- Verses 27-31

Exposition:Leading up to this passage, Jesus has been healing people left and right. He has healed a man who couldn’t walk, while also telling people their sins are forgiven. He healed a woman who had a bleeding problem while on the way to raise a little girl back from the dead. He also found time to call a tax collector as a disciple and eat dinner with his friends and tell the religious leaders something new is here. And that’s just what we have read in chapter nine. There were other people he healed before that. So Jesus has been busy. It’s also becoming more and more obvious that he has God’s favor upon him. He’s teaching with authority, he’s telling people their sins are forgiven and backing it up with the miracles he’s performing. In verse 27 we encounter people who got word of this. Verse 27 says, Matthew 9:27 “And as Jesus passed on from there, two blind men followed him, crying aloud, “Have mercy on us, Son of David.””

Explanation: The term Son of David, was a messianic term. The Prophets in what is our OT said that the messiah would be a descendant of David. Now, there is a chance these men knew that Jesus was from David’s line, but they are making a very clear reference here based on all that Jesus is doing. And what are they crying out, just to have mercy on them.

Application: Do you see the humility in that request. They didn’t ask for the world. They just asked that Jesus would have mercy on them. That we would approach God with the same request.

Exposition: But Jesus doesn’t stop right away. Picking up with Verse 28 Matthew 9:28 “When he entered the house, the blind men came to him, and Jesus said to them, “Do you believe that I am able to do this?” They said to him, “Yes, Lord.”” At first Jesus keeps going. Why? Probably so the men could demonstrate how much they knew they needed Jesus and how strong their faith was. And how strong was it, strong enough to follow Jesus into his house to ask him to heal them. And Jesus asked them if they believed that He could heal them. and they tell Him yes. We knew the answer was yes because they just followed him down the street, with very limited or no vision at all. In verse 29 we read, Matthew 9:29–30 “Then he touched their eyes, saying, “According to your faith be it done to you.” And their eyes were opened.

Explanation: Jesus says according to their faith, he healed them. The word according to does not mean in proportion to. It doesn’t mean that the faith has to match the healing, but because of their faith, they were healed.

Application: What Jesus does here is very representative of what Jesus does in our lives. There comes a point for all of us that we need Jesus. We understand that we are sinners who are need of forgiveness of our sins. And we come to believe that Jesus is the one that can bring us that forgiveness. We believe that Jesus came into the world from heaven and lived a perfect life, but died on the cross for our sins. He took on the punishment for sin, but defeated that punishment when he rose from the grave. And all who believe in Him and make Him Lord of their life can receive the forgiveness of sins. And the making Him Lord of our life is not us saving ourselves. You see these blind men when they saw they needed Jesus and believed he could heal them, it led to them going to Jesus. And it was Jesus that heals. We cannot save ourselves, but we can go sit humbly at the feet of the one we know can. If you have never made Jesus Lord of your life, and you believe in who He is and are ready to go to Him and ask Him to have mercy on you, I pray that tonight be the night.

Exposition: Jesus had just done this incredible miracle that pointed even more to who he was. But what does he do. The second half of verse 30 tells us, Jesus said to them,“And Jesus sternly warned them, “See that no one knows about it.”” Jesus tells them to keep their mouths shut. Why? Scripture never gives us an exact reason. One reason may be the hostility Jesus would soon face. But it could also be that the people were awaiting a political or military leader that was going to drive the Romans out of Israel and allow Israel to be a great kingdom again. But that wasn’t what Jesus was interested in. He didn’t come to establish an temporary earthly kingdom, but an eternal heavenly one. So he didn’t want word to spread much. But that’s not what happened. Verse 31 reads Matthew 9:31 “But they went away and spread his fame through all that district.” I don’t think we necessarily need to assume the men just went and babbled to everyone after Jesus told them not to. Remember, these men were blind and all the sudden they could see. I think people had some questions. I don’t think Jesus expected them to start acting blind again whenever they saw somebody. I mean can you imagine. They are walking down the road and then they hear a voice they recognize, not see a familiar face because they probably didn’t know what people’s faces looked like, and then run into the side of a house so people didn’t know they had been healed. No, when they lived their regular live, it would have been obvious to people that they had changed. As it should be for us in Christ. We should not act like we did before Christ when we are around people from our past lives. No, we should resemble Christ.

Verse 27

Son of David

Verses 28-29

Followed him in

Do you believe

According to your faith

Verse 30-31

Jesus heals them

Charged them not to say anything

Transition: So they go and begin to tell people what he had done because it was incredible. Don’t you think it was that way for everybody. What we will see, is that it was not. Instead, we see that some people don’t believe because they don’t want to believe.

Intentional doubt- Verses 32-34

Verses 32-32

Exposition: Jesus walks away from healing the two blind men. And then we pick up in verse 32. Matthew 9:32–33 “As they were going away, behold, a demon-oppressed man who was mute was brought to him. And when the demon had been cast out, the mute man spoke. And the crowds marveled, saying, “Never was anything like this seen in Israel.”” This is once again a familiar scene. A man who has a demon is brought to Jesus. Now, could this have been an instance where the man didn’t have a demon, but instead something psychological they didn’t understand at this time going on? Perhaps. But it seems like it was a demon based on what we see in verse 33 about the demon being cast out. Jesus casts it out and the people are marveling at this. They are saying nothing like this has ever been done in all of Israel. It is obvious that the people are beginning to hold Jesus in high esteem. But that’s not everybody’s reaction. We see in verse 34 Matthew 9:34 “But the Pharisees said, “He casts out demons by the prince of demons.”” The pharisees, the ones that were thought of as the religious leaders and the religious experts, they were not giving God glory. They were not marveling at Jesus. Instead, they said Jesus was driving out demons by the power of the prince of demons. They were attributing the work of Jesus, God the son, to Satan. The problem wasn’t what Jesus was doing, it’s what he was doing to them. If Jesus gained influence, they would lose significance. If Jesus gained in authority, they would lose authority. The reason they didn’t believe Jesus to be from God is because they didn’t want him to be from God.

Application: There is not a lack of proof about who Jesus is. The evidence is there. But there is a cost if Jesus is Lord. If Jesus is Lord, then we can’t be. If Jesus is the one who deserves control, then we can’t be. But whether or not we want something to be true doesn’t dictate whether or not it’s’ true. Jesus is Lord because of who He is. Not because of what we do or don’t want to give up.

Verse 33

What the OT said the messiah would do and contrast that with the reactions of the pharisees

Transition:The Pharisees were the ones who were wanting to cast doubt on who Jesus was. This was a big problem that Jesus was broken for.

Brokenness for the lost-Verses 35-38

Exposition: We read in verse 35 Matthew 9:35 “And Jesus went throughout all the cities and villages, teaching in their synagogues and proclaiming the gospel of the kingdom and healing every disease and every affliction.” This may seem redundant. Of course this is what he was doing. We’ve read account after account of him doing this. But there’s a reason why this was a big deal. When we the prophet Isaiah spoke about the coming Messiah he said speaking as if he were the messiah Isaiah 61:1–2 “The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me to bring good news to the poor; he has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to those who are bound; to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor, and the day of vengeance of our God; to comfort all who mourn;” Isaiah said the messiah would restore sight to the blind, he would proclaim liberty to those that were oppressed, which sounds a lot like freeing people of demons, and all of this sounds a lot like proclaiming the gospel of the kingdom. Jesus was doing the very things the people knew the messiah would do. But what did verse 34 tell us the reaction of the religious leaders was, it was that they said he must be doing the work of the devil. The one’s that were suppose to be the experts in the law, the ones that the people trusted to know what the scriptures taught better than anybody else, were failing to recognize that Jesus was the messiah that God had promised to them. The ones the people trusted, had led them astray. And Jesus’ reaction tells us how he felt about this. Verse 36 says, “Matthew 9:36 “When he saw the crowds, he had compassion for them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.”

Explanation: Matthew tells us that Jesus had compassion when he saw the crowd. The word Matthew uses doesn’t mean Jesus saw them, felt bad, and then went about his life. No, the word describes a feeling so deep it is as deep in one’s gut as his or her bowels. Have you ever been so upset about something that you began to feel sick in your stomach. You know that feeling where your whole body feels it. That’s how Jesus felt when he saw the people. Why did he feel this way, because they were like sheep without a shepherd.

Illustrated: Sheep are pretty dumb animals. Let’s just call it what it is. In 2005 there were shepherds in Turkey that were watching a large herd of sheep in a pasture that also happened to be on a cliff. Clearly, they weren’t doing their job well because one of the sheep walked off, and a few followed, and a few more followed. All told, about 1,500 sheep walked off the cliff. About 400 of them died, but, so many of them fell that the ones on the bottom began cushioning the fall of the others, so about 1,100 of the ones that fell lived. As you see, sheep are very much in need of a shepherd. And when the shepherd fails, it can be disastrous. The leaders in Israel, the ones that should have been teaching the people what the scriptures had taught them what the OT said about the messiah had failed in that role. They had led the people away. And unless something changed, the results would be eternally disastrous. So Jesus was broken.

Application: That video we watched at the beginning. It’s funny. But isn’t it the truth. There are so many people who are living without Christ. The video used the metaphor of drowning. But there are people who do not know who Jesus is. And when you look at the people in authority in our society, who is it going to be that helps them know the truth about who Jesus is. When you look in our society, is it going to be? Is it going to be politicians, yea right. Is it going to be public school teachers, well probably not. Is it going to be preachers on social media that show up in reels. Well that stuff is only going to show up in the feeds of the people who are already watching it. And by just searching on there, they are just as likely to find something biblically inaccurate that leads them away from Christ. What about in other countries. Do you think in Muslim majority countries leadership is going to lead people to Christ? What about in communist countries such as China where governments feel threatened by the spread of the gospel? Do you think they are going to do it. What about in secular countries where the gospel destroys the moral relativism that have become engrained in society. The powers that be do not want people to know the truth often times. And if we have a heart like Jesus’ then we should be broken about all the people who have been led away from the truth. If those powers and authorities don’t want them to know Christ, they aren’t just not leading them to him, they are leading them away.

Exposition: That’s a real downer, huh. It doesn’t have to be. In verse 37 Jesus said, Matthew 9:37 “Then he said to his disciples, “The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few;” This was an agrarian society. What Jesus is saying here is that there is a lot of fruit that is ready to be picked, but there aren’t enough people to pick it, so it’s dying on the vine. What Jesus is saying is that though people have been led astray, it does not mean that they cannot be reached.

Illustration: Barna research did a study in 2022 about your generation. What it found is that 77% of teens are motivated to find out more about Jesus. Obviously people that are Christians are overall more eager to learn about him, but more than 50% of non-Christian teens still said they are motivated to learn more about Jesus. Some of you are getting old enough that for the first time, you are seeing people make really bad choices. You are seeing people do things that are not honoring to God. But you know what, even amongst those you know that are not believers, stats show that they are still eager to learn about Jesus. The heart is still there. Each week we talk about unreached people groups. Billions of people live without access to the gospel, but it does not mean that they are not unreachable. I had a campus minister in college who went on a mission trip to Malaysia once. Malaysia is a unique place. It’s a Muslim country, but it’s also pretty secular. Because it’s considered Muslim, Iran’s government allows men to fly there from Iran. A pastor there told my campus minister that they are eager to do things they can’t do in Iran. One of those is drink alcohol, non condoning that, just a fact. Another contrasts pretty greatly as they want to hear about Jesus. People throughout the world want to know who Jesus is. They were created to be in relationship with him. The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few.

Exposition: But what are you suppose to do. You all are in middle and high schoolers. How are you suppose to reach the world. That’s not even what Jesus says to do right here. He says in verse 38 Matthew 9:38 “therefore pray earnestly to the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest.”” What Jesus says to do is pray. Pray that God would send out laborers into the harvest. This isn’t a prayer that God would care about those that are lost. We know from Jesus’ reaction of compassion he does. But what it is, is to pray that the hearts of Christ followers would be softened, and that they would answer the call to go. It’s a prayer that may break your heart and lead you to go. I know some in here that has happened or is happening for. Not all of us will be called to go for years or months on missions. But we can all do is pray. We can pray that God would send people out into the harvest. There is no age minimum on praying this way. In fact, it’s a command for all believers. Maybe praying this prayer will give you a brokenness for those around you and a boldness to share with them. But maybe God hears these prayer and softens the heart of others he wants to go. What I do know is that we have a role to play in the mission of God, and that begins with praying that God would send people out into the harvest.

Conclusion: As we close tonight, I want to be very quick with what I say. Jesus Christ has revealed himself as the messiah. He has come and shown who He is. Have you believed. Have you believed that He is the Messiah. If not, we are about to have a time of prayer, come find me during this time. Let’s talk about that. But I want us to do right now is to pray together. Jesus has called us to pray that God would send laborers into the harvest. That the lost may be found. Just group up with those who are around you and pray that God would send people to go and reach the lost. Pray that hearts would be opened to respond to the call to take the gospel to those that need to hear it.