Teaching, Proclaiming, Healing (Mt 9:35)

Short teachings from Hillcrest Church further exploring Sunday's teachings.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hey, hope your day is going well. Hope you had a good Mother's Day weekend. And it's Tim here, and we are diving deep into our Living Scent series. So I wanted to just kind of do a little deeper dive into the first text that James had us look about look at on Sunday. It was Matthew 9. We looked at 35 and 36. And so I was just going to spend some time in that with you this week. So Matthew 9, 35 through 36 is part of this little larger section, 9 through 38. But it's really there's kind of a uh well, I'll say it this way. Um like 35 uh is really a summary statement. If you remember when we went through the book of Mark, we saw a couple of these summary statements. And then uh 36 through 38 moves on to make this statement about the need to pray for more um God to send more workers into the harvest. Um pretty well-known text there. Uh but let's look at the summary statement and see what what it might tell us about uh Jesus and about um even just kind of reading the Bible well. So um we read uh in verse Matthew 9.35, Jesus went through all the towns and villages teaching in their synagogues, proclaiming the good news of the kingdom, and healing every disease and sickness. And uh when you learn to uh kind of do more um kind of in-depth biblical exegesis, exegesis is another term for um like you know uh academic study of biblical texts. Um so when you do it, one of the things you might learn to do is what they call sentence diagramming, but you basically see how the sentence works together. And I think this is a nice little example of that. So in this uh sentence we have the main verb, uh, and the main verb is uh Jesus went. Um and then um there are three participles. If you remember, participles are ing words, three participles that all hang off of that main verb. And the three participles are teaching, proclaiming, or preaching, proclaiming, uh so teaching, proclaiming, and uh healing. So teaching, proclaiming, healing. So um uh Jesus went teaching and proclaiming and healing, and then each one of those uh has further little clauses hanging off it. So um off Jesus went, Jesus went through all the towns and villages, uh Jesus went teaching in the synagogues, Jesus went proclaiming, proclaiming the good news of the kingdom, Jesus went healing, healing every disease and sickness. But the the main the sentence structure as a whole is Jesus went, and as Jesus went, he went teaching, he went proclaiming, and he went healing. Um and these three, you know, teaching, Jesus' teaching ministry, his proclaiming ministry, and his healing ministry, there are three different kinds of ministry. The the teaching ministry um is uh, you know, well, maybe for me it's probably easiest to start with the proclaiming. The proclaiming um is first and more this this declaration. Um it's an announcement of what God is doing uh to um bring about the kingdom of God through the ministry of Jesus. And so it's an announcement. Um, and it's uh an announcement of the kingdom of God. You this shows up, we saw this a lot in the Gospel of Mark. Um it's the you know uh the good news, and when we've talked about this before, like the announcement of a new king on the throne or a military victory, he's announcing something. So that's one of the things he's doing. Number two, he's teaching. Um, and teaching, uh, this is more about instruction. Now, the teaching is in light of the um in-breaking reign of God, uh, but the teaching is you know, things like how to live in light of that. And so when I think about teaching, I think about like in Matthew, um, the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew 5 through 7, like what does it look like to live as the people of God? Um, or the parables. And sometimes the parables are about how does the kingdom of God work? What is it like? How do we deal with the already and not yet tension, the fact that the kingdom of God is breaking in, but just sin and injustice are still in the world, and so it's teaching, it's explaining, helping people live in light of the reality of the kingdom of God, to understand what God's will is for life. So proclaiming, announcement, teaching, it's this instruction, uh, and then healing, which is obviously um Jesus' minister, ministry to restoring human bodies. Um, and I I somewhere I've got written down in one of my notebooks, I don't, I couldn't find it, some you know, rough guesstimates at the level of sickness and injury in the ancient world, but let me just put it this way. Um, you know, you imagine uh rural galilee in Jesus' day. You got no antibiotics, you got no painkillers, you know, Tylenol, like nothing, right? Um no emergency rooms, no regular medical doctors, no understanding of germs, like the level of like constant sickness and injury, uh, you know, it must have been overwhelming. You know, a third of the people at any time, uh, sick or injured, right? I I think it's hard for us to imagine what that uh might have been like, and um and Jesus' ability to minister to human bodies in that context. Um and of course, James's big point uh that is well taken is that it's not uh Jesus does all these. He has he his teaching and his proclaiming and his healing ministries um all go together. And sometimes in the other gospels, the other thing that'll get added to this will be his um exorcism ministry, his driving out of evil spirits. Sometimes we'll get added into this kind of ministry summary. But this is but in in Matthew, we get these three teaching, proclaiming, um, and healing. Uh, and that as he went, he was doing all these things, uh ministering to the whole person in all the contexts that he found himself in. And so um, yeah, I mean, be encouraged. The same Jesus who cared about every aspect of uh people's lives um 2,000 years ago still um cares about every aspect of your life and every aspect of the lives of the people you're involved in. Um He cares about uh He cares about that they would know his in-breaking uh kingship. He cares that they would um understand what it means to walk uh rightly with God, and he cares about their their physical uh well-being. There's not a part that uh that Jesus' care does not extend to. And so be encouraged by that for your own life and for those that you uh minister to yourself on grace and face.