The following sermon was given by the Reverend John W. Howe, Rector of Truro Episcopal Church in Fairfax, Virginia, on September 5, 1982. The title is, Therefore the Redeemed, and the scripture reference is Mark, chapter 7, verses 31 through 37. 

The Holy Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ according to St. Mark. I'm reading from the 7th chapter beginning at the 31st verse. Jesus returned from the region of Tyre and went through Sidon to the Sea of Galilee, through the region of the Decapolis.

And they brought to him a man who was deaf and had an impediment in his speech, and they besought him to lay his hand upon him. And taking him aside from the multitude privately, he put his fingers into the man's ears, and he spat and touched his tongue. And looking up to heaven, he sighed and said to him, Ephrathah, that is, be opened.

And his ears were opened, and his tongue was released, and he spoke plainly. And he charged them to tell no one, but the more he charged them, the more zealously they proclaimed it. And they were astonished beyond measure, saying, He has done all things well.

He even makes the deaf hear and the dumb speak. The Gospel of the Lord. The words that we just sang together as our gradual come directly out of the prophecy of Isaiah.

What's interesting to me is that they occur there not once, but twice, where we heard them read in the 35th chapter, and then again, almost exactly word for word, the same thing in Isaiah 51. And I'm always intrigued when you find God taking the trouble to repeat himself. This is his word, whoever else spoke it.

God inspired its speaking and its writing. He was moving in the mind and heart and through the lips of Isaiah. and so I attribute this to God Himself.

This is God's promise to His people and when God takes the time to repeat Himself, it's as if He's underlining something. He's saying, this is doubly important. Pay attention to it.

That really is the reason that Jesus so often says, verily, verily. It's not just a figure of speech. Truly, truly, I say to you, this is doubly important.

Take notice of it. And so we have a tremendous promise that God has given us twice through the prophecy of Isaiah. And interestingly, if you look at that promise, that prophecy in context, you find that the two passages are pointing in exactly the opposite directions.

In Isaiah 51, the prophet is looking backward. God is calling him to look backward at the whole holy history. the way in which God has moved among his people to deliver them time and again specifically and especially the way he brought deliverance in the days of Moses it says in Isaiah 51 awake as in the days of old the generations of long ago was it not thou that didst dry up the sea the waters of the great deep that didst make the depths of the sea a way for the redeemed to pass over therefore the redeemed of the Lord shall return and come to Zion you Lord are the one who opened the pathway in the sea your people came right up against it the army was behind them there was no escape and you opened the sea and caused a highway to be there and your people went through the midst of the Red Sea dry shod that's the kind of God you are that's the kind of deliverance you gave us in the past and we expect that as you acted on your people's behalf in the past so we can be confident that you will act for your people today and in the future that you are the same God that there's a consistency in the way that you behave the prophet is reminding himself and God is reminding him and through Isaiah he's reminding the people that God is the same yesterday, today, forevermore.

That's what the book of Hebrews says about the Lord Jesus. Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever. What we read about in the New Testament is normative Christianity.

It wasn't just for the first century. It's the same yesterday, today, and forevermore. What we see Jesus doing in the pages of the New Testament, we should also see Him doing in the pages of our lives.

The book of James, chapter 1, which happens, by the way, to be the epistle assigned for today. We didn't trouble to read it, but you could go and read it for yourself. There's this rather interesting comment.

It says, God is the Father of lights. And then it goes on to say, with whom there is no shadow of turning. It's a rather interesting phrase, isn't it?

The Father of lights with whom there is no shadow of turning. It's as if God were being pictured as a solid object. And whichever way you turn Him, the shadow was the same.

Or even better than that, He's so bright a light that whichever way you turn Him, there isn't even a shadow. He's consistent. There's no variation.

There's no change. As He was in the past, He is today, and He will be forevermore. Now that's the essence of Isaiah 51.

Lord, you acted on your people's behalf. You opened a highway for them to pass over. And we believe that whatever the difficult circumstances might be today, you're going to open a pathway for your people.

And they're going to return to Zion. Now, obviously that applies in a remarkably specific way to what's happening in the Middle East right in our own generation. But Zion also means into the household, into the community of God's people.

That highway is being opened by the Lord to bring His people into salvation. Because He's the same God as He always has been. So Isaiah 51 looks backward toward the past.

And it says the future will be like the past. Isaiah 35 talks about the future. It gets very specific.

It looks in the other direction about that future which is coming. Now mind you, this is written somewhere around 700 years prior to Jesus. And Isaiah now is looking forward to the coming of Messiah.

And he says, the day is coming when your God will himself step onto the stage of human history. Behold, your God will come. He will come and save you.

And when he comes, these are some of the things that will happen. The eyes of the blind will be opened. The ears of the deaf will be unstopped.

The lame will leap and run and dance for joy. The tongue of the dumb man will be loosed that he might sing God's praises. It's a remarkable description of the ministry of Jesus, isn't it?

You get the point. The prophet says God himself will come. And 700 years later, along comes a man named Jesus, and His ministry entails exactly those things which the prophet said would occur when God Himself arrived among us.

So we see Jesus moving among people and healing them, and reaching out His hand in ministry. He steps onto the stage of human history and the things that were promised about God are true of him. Jesus sticks his fingers into the ears of a deaf man and suddenly that man can hear again.

He makes spittle and touches the man's tongue and suddenly that tongue is loosed and he can speak. Now I need to tell you, I get just about that far in the story and my five-year-old says, Oh, gross! That has become Jessica's absolutely favorite word this summer.

Oh, gross! I'm not sure why Jesus did that. Obviously, He didn't have to.

Lots of times He healed without so much as going to visit the person. Sometimes He went. Sometimes He prayed.

Sometimes he touched. In a couple of occasions he made spittle. I'm not sure why.

It's interesting to notice that when he entrusted the ministry of healing to his church, he instructed the elders not just to pray for people and not just to lay their hands on the sick, but also to anoint them with oil. And I think that there's a parallel here. Oil, of course, is always, Old Testament and New Testament, is always the symbol of the Holy Spirit.

It's as if to say, this healing is not our work, it's God's work, it's the ministry of the Holy Spirit operating through the elders, through the prayer of faith. But also, oil is a medicinal element. Right?

Before they had wonder drugs, somebody gets a wound, they clean out the wound, and they pour oil into it. And I think that's absolutely fascinating. It's as if to suggest We don't need to choose between faith healing and medical healing.

What does it matter? So long as we understand that God is the healer, however, He chooses to work. You don't need to make that dichotomy.

If He chooses to heal instantly with a prayer, that's His work. If He chooses to use a doctor, that's His work. Jesus making spittle and touching the man suggests to me something very similar to that.

There wasn't any oil right there, perhaps. And Jesus uses the next best thing. It may strike you as gross.

It may strike Jessica as gross. But think about it. That's why an animal licks its wounds.

You get a cut on your finger and you're not in front of the medicine cabinet and you suck it, right? And Jesus is making a point of contact with this person for his own purposes, for whatever reason. I don't want to dwell on it, but I think the implications are absolutely fascinating.

On the one hand, it suggests that nothing can come out of the mouth of Jesus, but that it accomplishes God's will. Did you ever think about that? I mean, He can't even spit without it healing somebody.

What comes out of your mouth? Does that bring healing? had a man come up for prayer at the rail on Friday evening.

I never saw him before. But he asked that God's Spirit would fill him in a new way and take control of his life. And as we were praying, I was moved to ask him, I said, by any chance, do you have trouble with a filthy mouth?

And he looked at me. and he said yes as a matter of fact that is one of my problems and I said have you ever given your tongue to the Lord and again he looked at me and I said no I'm quite serious you know David says our tongue is our glory it's one of the glorious things about being created human the animals don't have a tongue that can sing God's praises with any kind of understanding and yet God has given us that and we can use our tongue to bless him and to bless others? Have you ever given your tongue to the Lord?

He said, no. I said, you realize that when Isaiah found, the same Isaiah that we're reading about, when he found himself in the presence of God, when God gave him that wonderful vision of himself in the throne room of heaven and the angels were singing, holy, holy, holy, just as we began our service, Isaiah's response was, woe is me, for I'm a man with filthy lips. And then God sent one of the angels to touch his lips with a burning coal and purge them. And then Isaiah was able to become the mighty prophet of God.

So I said to this fellow, let's pray that God would cleanse your lips and your mouth this day. And we prayed that and we believed that, that God really was going to do exactly that. And then I asked that the Lord would fill that man's mouth with a new language to praise him.

And that's exactly what happened. Nothing came out of Jesus' mouth but that it blessed people. It brought healing.

And I believe that's what he'd want to come out of our mouths as well. Well, for whatever reason, that's how he dealt with this particular man. Stories told about two fellows who met each other in the city of Jerusalem and they began chatting and they realized that both of them had been healed by the Lord Jesus.

They had both been blind and they had both encountered the Lord Jesus and they had both received their sight. And one of them said to the other, well, tell me about it. How did he do it?

And the fellow says, well, he just spoke to me. He said, receive your sight. And I could see.

And the other man says, no, no, no, no. He's got to spit on the ground and make clay and rub it on your eyes. no Jesus isn't limited to it being one way or another Jesus can use any way that he chooses and he usually surprises us and it's always better than we dared to imagine that's what he did in this particular instance for whatever reason but I'm interested in another thing he told the crowd not to say anything about it and we read that the more he charged them the more zealously they proclaimed it. Again, I'm not sure, but I suspect that Jesus felt the timing wasn't right.

Their level of understanding of what was going on wasn't high enough. And perhaps that as important as the ministry of healing was, He had come for still a more important mission than that. And He didn't want to be diverted from the mission of dealing with people's sins to simply ministering to their bodies.

Of course, as soon as the news is out that people's bodies are being healed, tremendous crowds gather and Jesus can hardly get on with the rest of His work. And so He says, don't tell anybody. But it's interesting, isn't it?

Those who have known the touch of Jesus can't shut up about it. The more He charged them, the more zealously they proclaimed it. It raises a very interesting question for me about all those folks who are faithful churchgoers week after week, month after month, year after year.

There they are for an hour, an hour and a half. And then the rest of the week, you hardly know the difference between them and anybody else. I don't mean to condemn, I just raise a question.

How many of those folks have ever really known the touch of Jesus? If you've known the touch of Jesus, how in the world can you keep silent about it? Many of you were at Shrine Month this year, and you heard Pat Robertson dealing with all sorts of fascinating statistics.

You can do all sorts of things with statistics, but I was intrigued with some of the things that he said, and I began to play with numbers myself, and I came up with an absolutely amazing conclusion. Do you know what would happen if every member of this parish, just take Truro, just Truro Church, and if every member of this parish were to tell one other person in the next year, you've got a whole year, 12 months to do it, going to tell one other person about the Lord Jesus. In the next 12 months, each one of us is going to win one other person to Christ.

And then in the year after that, that double group, that combination of the original group and those newcomers turns around and each one of them wins one person to Christ. And the year after that, it doubles again. Do you know what would happen?

Double and double and double and 16 more years a total of 20 years from today and every man, woman, and child on the face of the earth would have heard the gospel. Just out of this congregation. And yet two-thirds of the world's population have yet to hear it nearly 2,000 years later.

What happened? What happened? Either an awful lot of folks haven't really felt the touch of Jesus.

Or there's been an awful lot of slippage somewhere. Jesus told this crowd not to say anything and they couldn't shut up. And He told this crowd, go out into the highways and the byways and compel them to come in.

Go into all the world and proclaim the Gospel to every creature. Make disciples of all nations. and for so many folks it's business as usual.

I've come back from holiday greatly refreshed, obviously much younger, and deeply convicted that the time is upon us to move out in ways we've never done for the Lord Jesus Christ. I believe that he's telling us he's telling folks everywhere that the time is short and he's not saying that in order to scare anybody at all that's joy look up for your redemption draws near but the time is short and it's our privilege to make the most of it it's thrilling to see the the amount of work that's been done in the last month the walls rising around us It's the expansion that becomes possible. At 9 o'clock we had an overflow congregation.

On Labor Day weekend we had an overflow congregation of nearly 80 people in the Undercroft by closed circuit TV. That's thrilling. And yet, you realize that in Fairfax County, 50% of the residents don't go to any church anywhere.

what would happen if every one of us here this morning agreed together that we're going to bring one new person next week Mimi would go crazy right I mean we'd be into really overflow wouldn't we wouldn't that be exciting wouldn't it be exciting if before we even get the new building finished we're bursting it seems wouldn't that be terrific You say, what would we do with all those folks? Obviously, we'd have to go into additional services. You do your part.

We'll do our part. I'm not interested in numbers for their own sake. I'm absolutely not.

The principle that I'm operating on is this. Maximize the usefulness of the physical plant. Have maximum capacity, okay?

That's what dictates the size of the building. How much can the land itself tolerate at one given time? Parking plus facilities for kids.

Maximize the usefulness and then maximize the use. Maximize the usefulness and then maximize the use. So we fill it up eight times a day.

What's wrong with that? No value in numbers for their own sake. I'm not into that.

But I'm interested in reaching out to every man, woman, and child that Jesus Christ loved enough to go to the cross to die for. He loved them enough to die for them. Do you and I love them enough to tell them about it?

To invite them to come along and join in the celebration? it raises a question to me. How many of us have had our ears opened to hear the Word of God, to hear what He's saying to us?

There's hearing and there's hearing, isn't there? How many of us have had our ears opened to hear what God would say to us? And how many of us have had our tongues loosed to declare His glory?

I guarantee you that when the ears of the deaf are unstopped and when the tongues of the dumb are loosed, then the redeemed of the Lord shall return and come to Zion with singing and everlasting joy will be upon their heads. Amen.