Dr Joel Gregory A Second Touch

0:00 I want you to open the Word of God with me to Mark chapter 8, right in the middle of Mark's Gospel. If I were to write a title over this sermon, it's almost unavoidable to say sometimes you need a second touch. There's an account of a miracle that's only in Mark's Gospel, and it's the only one just like it. Let's see if you can catch that in Mark 8, 22. Jesus said the 12 had been on a retreat that may have been as long as six months, skirting the north of the Holy Land. They were in what is today Lebanon. They come back down to Bethsaida on the border of Jewish territory and Gentile territory.

1:00 And here they are in verse 22. They came to Bethsaida, and some people, the translations say they, brought a blind man to him and begged him to touch him. He took the blind man by the hand and led him out of the village.

1:27 And when he had put saliva on his eyes and laid his hands on him, he asked him, Can you see anything? And the man looked up and said, I can see people, but they look like trees walking.

1:48 Then Jesus laid his hands on his eyes again, and he looked intently, and his sight was restored, and he saw everything clearly. Then he sent him away to his home, saying, do not even go into the village. Sometimes you need a second touch. Would you pray with me? Lord. I pray in these minutes, these ancient words might come off this page and be living words to this needy preacher and to these gathered here and beyond here. Lord, I pray for the present power of this past event that by your spirit, through your word, it might be operative in our lives that ere we leave here today, we'll know the power of a second touch.

3:05 In Jesus' name we pray, and all God's people said, amen. In nature, there's something striking about vision. The vision of different creations. A horse. A horse's eye is on either side of its head. Really, for a horse to get a perspective, it has to move its head from side to side in order to see. That's the vision of a horse. Down at the microcosm, a dragonfly has a compound eye. And that compound eye enables the dragonfly, an insect, to see in slow motion. You wonder how does a dragonfly zap another bug for dinner? It's because that dragonfly sees in slow motion.

4:03 A common pigeon is able to see a range of colors that human beings can't see. It sees off the scale. Now, a snake doesn't see with vision at all. A snake, in a sense, sees because it has heat receptors in its head. And when that snake strikes, its vision is aided by this receptivity, creative act of God. A cat, a house cat, I don't know how they can tell this, I guess they interviewed the cat, can only see shades of gray.

4:44 And yet a cat can leap because of its vision and land on a rodent immediately. Or a hummingbird. A hummingbird has the ability to see off the scale of ultraviolet light. God's done strange things. in creatures' visions. One of my favorites is a bird, I know it's off the coast of Texas, I don't know where else, the kingfisher that has two kinds of vision. It has one kind of vision as it hovers over the waters of the sea, but then it dives underwater and a whole other lens covers its eye as it has a fish. It's almost as if the kingfisher gets a second touch. In our passage... In these few short verses, Jesus and the 12 are ending a long retreat.

5:45 It's interesting because 5,000 had wanted to follow him, but Jesus had rather have a dozen followers than 5,000 fans. 12 committed and a whole lot of curious, and he spent months with them. Now they come back down to Bethsaida, and this miracle happens. This group of people called they bring a blind friend to Jesus. Jesus takes this individual by the hand, leads him out of town, away from the crowd, and spits in his eyes. Now this is the only one other time in Mark chapter 7, and a man who could not speak and could not hear, did Jesus do that?

6:37 This story is only in Mark, and it's the only time that a miracle didn't work the first time. Now, even if you're a casual Bible reader, that must strike you. Did Jesus have a bad day at the office? What happened? And then it's the only time that Jesus asks someone, how's this working for you? And he says in so many words, well, not very well. I see men, but they look like walking trees. This is an unusual story. And I think Mark put it here as we'll see for a very specific reason. And if I could hand it to you in one single simple sentence, what Jesus wants you to know is that sometimes even if you are following him, you really need a second touch. Now, I'd like to lean into this first way, as it were, on the front steps of this passage to say you never know what's going to happen when you bring someone to Jesus.

7:53 There's a group of people here. The New Revised Standard calls it some people. The rest of the translations say they. They bring this man to Jesus. Have you ever noticed the nameless, unidentified, incognito people in the New Testament? Some people get a name. You know, you've got blind Bartimaeus. You've got Mary Martha, Lazarus, Nicodemus. But here they are just they. It's like those earlier in Mark, those four men who bring their friend to Jesus, who's a paralytic. They're not given a name. It just simply says, they bring him. Remember when they tore the roof off, and there's Jesus standing with thatch in his hair and dirt on him, and they lured that man? They're called they. We live in a world that's consumed with fame.

8:48 Andy Warhol, the pop artist, made a prediction decades ago that in the future everybody will be famous for 15 minutes, and it looks like social media is going to fulfill that prophecy. Consumed with fame. It makes me think about these people called they. Do you recognize that these people called they are more famous than people who think they're famous? Can I say that again?

9:16 Now, I've never been a big watcher of the Kardashians. I understand they're about to go off TV. But I can assure you, for 19 centuries before anybody thought of them, and when they're gone, they are still going to be in the Word of God because they brought someone to Jesus. Strange, there's a special exhibit in the British Museum on Nero. Nero's name is in the New Testament. I went to that yesterday, Colin, and an interesting thing, in that exhibition there is a biblical name. When Nero committed suicide at 30, his servant was named Epaphroditus. and Epaphroditus was loyal to him all the way to the end of his suicide and burial and there Epaphroditus has his name on a stone in the British Museum for the public to see but there's another Epaphroditus and that's in the book of Philippians.

10:23 He's the one who took Paul's gift from Rome to the Philippian church and brought the letter And I ask myself, where would I rather be? Would I rather be on the wall, on a stone, or would I rather be in the Word of God? I can assure you I'd rather be Epaphroditus in the book of Philippians. They.

10:47 You want to be famous with God? Get somebody to Jesus. I like to say to congregations, You don't have to bring a stadium full of people like a stadium evangelist, a late Billy Graham or somebody. In your lifetime, make it your mission to bring somebody to Jesus.

11:14 Do you understand if that were to happen in his church, the entire church would be replaced in a generation. Why don't you be one of they? I'd rather be famed in God's book. That's just on the front porch of this. Let's enter this another way. Only you may know the intimate thing that Jesus does for you. This is one of two times, the other in the previous chapter, that Jesus takes someone and leads them aside, takes them away. Now, there was an obvious reason for this. This man was blind everywhere Jesus was. There was an uproar. There was a crowd. There was a throng. There was a press. There was a parade. And this poor blind man's friend had taken him by the arm. Jesus needed to get him away in order to do what he wanted to do.

12:14 Could I note this? The Quaker, Stephen Foster said in his book years ago, there are three enemies of the spiritual life. He says noise, hurry, and crowds. And he said these three enemies are what keep us from hearing the voice of Jesus. He says that's the reason Christianity now is a mile wide and a half inch deep because we're addicted to noise, we're always in a hurry, and we're obsessed with being around a crowd. Jesus pulled this man aside, and in pulling him aside, He was isolating so he could hear that still, small voice.

13:01 You know, sometimes Jesus needs to do things so intimate for you that only you and he will know what he did. Out here on the extremity of the human frame, is this thumb. It's the opposing thumb. Now, you could live without it. You wouldn't want to, but you could live without it. But it's not an essential thing, and yet out here on this part of you that isn't essential, every single one of you is different.

13:41 And so also in the way that Jesus deals with you. You see, he doesn't deal with people according to precedent. And you say, well, has he ever dealt with anybody just like he's dealing with me? The answer may well be no. There are things in your life that need the touch of the Lord Jesus Christ that are just as intimate and personal and individual as the print on this opposing thumb. And he takes you aside to do it. Because if he did it any other way, it might stain it with the publicity of it. It might corrupt it with the revelation of it. I can tell you this. I can testify that the Lord Jesus Christ has taken me aside and done things in my life that were only in my life and only for me to know. And he'll do that for you too.

14:39 The same Lord that never duplicates any two sunrises or any two sunsets can individualize, customize, tailor-make in a bespoken way what he does for you. The same Lord who never makes any seascape or mountainscape exactly the same is the same. And he took this man aside to do something intimate for him. I want to ask you this question, simple question, straightforward question. And I pray that the Spirit might put it in your heart. Do you have a time, a way, a place where without fail, obsessively, you get away from noise, hurry, and crowds so that he might do what only he can do in your life? Let's lean into this another way.

15:37 You need to let him do what he wants to do the way he wants to do it. Now, they brought this man. Now, did you notice they told Jesus how to do it? They said they brought him to him in order that he might touch him. The word had gotten around. He heals by touching. But they didn't know the whole story. Earlier in Mark's gospel, when there was a man with a withered hand in the synagogue, Jesus spoke the word across that synagogue. Stretch out your hand. Never touched him. When dead Lazarus walked out of his tomb,

16:17 Jesus spoke a word. He didn't always touch. Or Mark 5, the woman with a hemorrhage famously reached out and what? Grabbed him. And here he does it in a way unprecedented. He spits in the man's eye. Can you imagine that? There's a word here to me. Hope it's to you. And that is you need to let him do what he wants to do the way he wants to do it. Many of us have put the risen Lord Jesus Christ, the cosmic Christ, the ascended great high priest in a box, and we think we know how he's going to do what he's going to do. There's a funny little story I ran into somewhere. was after the resurrection and they were waiting to start the church. And four crowds showed up. The woman who reached out and grabbed the tassel of his garment showed up and says, I want to tell you, the only way he does it is if you reach out and grab him. And the man with the withered hand said, oh, no, no, no, you don't understand. He says the word. Lazarus is standing behind him saying amen.

17:31 And then this man shows up and says, oh no. When he does it, he spits in your eye. Well, what happened was before the church even started, they had four denominations, the first church of the spitters, the first church of the tassel grabbers. You got the idea.

17:55 You can't fence in or hem in how he does what he does in your life. And let me say this, a good deal of the Christian world has divided up over how does he do what he does. A friend of mine is Theodor Aparinov. He's a Bulgarian Baptist preacher in Bulgaria.

18:20 He told the story that a man was walking across a bridge in Bulgaria and he saw a man about to jump off and commit suicide and he cried out and said, stop, stop, don't do it. And the man said, there's nothing to live for. And he said, well, are you a believer? Do you have faith? And the man said, well, yes. And he said, well, are you Muslim or are you Christian? He said, well, I'm Christian. He said, well, so am I. This is an appointment of God. Are you Orthodox or Protestant? Protestant, well, I'm Protestant. Oh, friend, don't jump. Are you Pentecostal or Baptist? The man said, Baptist. He said, well, I'm Baptist. Don't jump. God put this together. He said, now, are you original Baptist or Reformed Baptist? He said, well, no, I'm Reformed Baptist. Well, I'm Reformed Baptist. Now, are you Reformed Baptist Church of God or Reformed Baptist Church of the Lord?

19:17 And the man said, Church of the Lord. He said, I am. And he said, well, is it Church of the Lord Reformation of 1909 or Reformation of 1931? And the man said, 1931. And the helper said, jump, you heretic. Thank you. Let him do what he wants to do, how and when he wants to do it.

19:50 Somebody, marriage is falling apart on the rocks. I know what you're saying. Lord, fix my wife, fix my husband right now like this. And he says, no. He says, I'm in the business of teaching you forbearance and patience.

20:15 You don't know what I'm doing. And I'll fix it, but it'll be in my time and my way. Lord, I have a habit. This habit has manacled me and shackled me. I'm obsessed with this habit. Break it right now. And it might be. And he says, no. No, I'm not going to break it right now. I'm going to teach you that every day of your life, you're going to have to live in dependence on me. Sometimes you have to let him do what he wants to do, how he wants to do it. But I need to get into the real pith and marrow of this text, what it's about, and that is sometimes you need a second touch. That's what this is about. It's the only two-stage miracle. and it's only in Mark, and it's here for a reason. Why did it not work the first time?

21:13 Well, as I already said, it's certainly not because Jesus had a bad day at the office. I mean, he could make it work any way he wanted. Then why? I think it had to do, first of all, something with this man owning where he was so he could disown where he was. You see, that thing we called repentance, repentance means I have to own who I am in order to disown who I am. Now, this man could have said, just in order to please the crowd and please Jesus and fool himself, oh, I've never seen this clearly in my life, and that would have been a lie.

21:52 He said, no, no, I'm owning it. I see men, but they look like walking trees. It's parenthetically, it's evidently that this man had at one time seen because he knew what a tree looked like. Now he sees again. For the Lord to do it in your life, you have to own who you are in order to disown who you are.

22:20 You have a problem, you fill in the blank. Whether it's lust or dishonesty or fraud or a temper, that is a firestorm when other people don't deserve it. We like to mitigate that, like minimize it, trivialize it, marginalize it. You've got to own who you are in order to disown who you are. But I think there's another reason here too. And that is this man had a condition where he was going to have to cling to Jesus to touch him again. You know, there's some of us, when the Lord does it for us, we immediately take credit or we become so self-confident we're like that person I heard about who hugged himself to death. That's a terrible way to go.

23:16 Self-hugulation. This man was going to have to live in dependence on Jesus. It wasn't that he made himself see. Sometimes the Lord does it a way that keeps us clinging to him. But more than anything else, and this is the pith, the marrow, the heart of this passage, this miracle that really happened happened for the sake of the twelve. this is what some people call a Markan sandwich that is this is in between two events Jesus is fed the 4,000 and he and the disciples get in the boat to go across the sea of Galilee and you find out the disciples started looking around and saw that there were 13 men in the boat and only one loaf of bread 13 hungry men a trip across a big lake and one loaf of bread.

24:19 So they completely misunderstand Jesus. He tells them, watch out for the yeast of the Pharisees. Yeast, they said to one another, is that because we don't have any bread? He was on a completely different plane from then. And they start counting one another and this loaf of bread. Well, you never talk about Jesus behind his back, incidentally. He knows what they're saying. He says, your word being in the boat with me with one loaf of bread, how many loaves of bread did it take me to feed 5,000? Can you do the math? You're in a boat with me with a loaf of bread. How many loaves did it take for me to feed 4,000? Can you do simple math? You see, they knew enough to get in the boat with him, but they didn't know enough to believe that when you're in the boat with him, he can take care of you.

25:13 they were like men who saw trees walking. They had to learn that if you get in the boat with him, he's the storm stiller. If you get in the boat with him, you can catch so many fish it'll sink two boats. If you get in the boat with him with one loaf of bread, the Lord who got you in the boat can take care of you. Now, I know some of you may be so saved, sanctified, and glorified that you don't need that lesson, but let this preacher say, I do.

25:53 Every day, I need to have a touch that the Lord who rescued me when I first came to him is the Lord who can care for me, even if there's only one loaf in the boat. if the storm hits the sea. Now, you say, well, that's invented, but look at the other side of this. The other side of this is what we call the great confession. Who do you say that I am? And Pete, who's always willing to speak up, Peter says, you're the son of God, you're the Christ. He saw that much, but you remember what happened next? Maybe the biggest rebuke in the Gospels. Jesus said, I've got to go up to Jerusalem and die, and what does Pete say? Be it far from you.

26:45 None of them is going to see what Jesus is about. until they get a second touch after the resurrection and the ascension and Pentecost. So this is sandwiched, sandwiched between two events when those who were closest to him needed another touch. Christian life is not something automatic. You don't get a one-time vaccination. This is a reminder that even those closest to him needed another touch, and they saw it right here in this man.

27:32 I'm glad he's a hands-on Savior. He's a hands-on savior. It's interesting when you think about this image of touch. Do you know the artist who sold more pictures than any other artist in human history? It wasn't one of the great classical art. It wasn't Rembrandt. It wasn't the Cubist Picasso. Oh, no. The artist that sold more pictures than anyone in history just left us recently. He's an American named Thomas Kincaid. He sold pictures of little villages on television. He sold thousands, tens of thousands. He had a factory that turned out his paintings. And you could buy them for a reasonable amount. In the states, you see them in homes all over the country.

28:27 But what he would do, it was a very shrewd business scheme. he would announce that he was coming to town, and if you had bought one of his factory paintings, he would meet you at the shopping mall, and if you gave him some more money with his own hand, he would touch the painting and highlight it. Those paintings became worth $50,000 because they had a second touch.

28:56 Philadelphia, there's a beautiful organ, a Wurlitzer Theater organ that's in a department store there. It has what's called second-touch keys. If you press the key down one-eighth of an inch, you get that note. And this huge pipe organ, if you touch it again and press it all the way down, it brings in all of the registers of the organ and roars in that department store. You hear more.

29:29 Because it's a second touch. He's a second touch kind of God. If you believe in a creating God, and I do, these days of exploration of Mars, it's interesting to think about this. How many ever planets there are, nine, ten, I think they demoted Pluto.

29:51 Mercury is closest to the sun. It freezes you on the dark side and fries you on the sunny side. No life there. Venus, Venus, if you could get there, has an atmosphere of 800 degrees Fahrenheit and ammonia for an atmosphere. You couldn't stay there.

30:15 Mars, we don't know. There they are crawling around, trying to find some ice to see if anything lived. Jupiter, a gravitational field so strong it would flatten you if you tried to stand there, so forth. But in this third planet from the sun. The creating God gave a second touch. See, I don't believe that's an accident. I'm not that kind of rationalist. I believe the sun comes up in the morning because God says, get up, son. G.K. Chesterton used to say that. I get up in the morning because he says, get up, Joel. and this planet that's tilted just the right amount, 23 degrees, with just the right temperature, it got a second touch, because I believe in a creating God.

31:18 Well, let me say this. If he can do that in the macrocosm with planets, he can do it in the macrocosm with your life. And somebody right now. needs that second touch.

31:38 You say, well, we all need it. Yes, but there are intersections of life. There are by-paths. There's detours. We're in a remarkable way. a standout way. You need to say, I'm seeing men like trees walking. I need... a second touch. It's been almost half century ago that Bill Gaither wrote that little song, Hate and Gloria, He touched me. Oh, He touched me, and oh, the joy that floods my soul.

32:22 Some touch me. And I wonder right now, here or beyond here, who would be willing to own where you are in order to disown where you are? Who would say, Lord, take me aside and do it the way you want to do it, just as individual as I am? Would you bow with me in prayer right now? I just like to ask. Don't worry about the person around you, really. Let this be just your own little private prayer closet and chapel.

33:03 Here's where I wish I knew you and I could sit at your kitchen table, of course, some tea and just talk with you. in the presence and the quietness and the stillness of this moment. May his spirit speak.

33:24 And he will. The promise in Luke 11 is, if you ask,