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speak friend and enter
суббота, февраля 05, 2005
The Fellowship of the Mat
Excerpts from Everybody’s Normal Till You Get to Know Them, John Ortberg
One of the great stories in the Bible about community involves a paralyzed man and the friends who brought him to Jesus.
His whole life is lived out on a mat three feet wide and six feet long. Someone has to feed him, carry him, clothe him, move him to keep him from being covered with bedsores, clean him when he soils himself. He will never know the sense of independence we price so fiercely.
He has no money, no job, no influence, no family, and seemingly not much of a future. His “as-is” tag is three feet wide and six feet long.
What’s he got going for them? He has friends. He has amazing friends.
He’s in one of the killer small groups of all time.
Everybody Has a Mat
Think about what the paralyzed man goes through in order to be friends with this group of men.
He must have wrestled with his sense of independence sometimes. I suspect at times he became jealous of their independence, since after they had been together, everyone could walk home but him. Sometimes he must have wished in the secret places of his heart that he could trade places with one of them. He must have struggled with how they saw him in his neediness.
It is a very vulnerable thing to have someone carry your mat. When somebody’s carrying your mat, they see you in your weakness. They might hurt you if they drop you.
A Community of Roof-Crashers
Then one day Jesus comes to their town. These four men find out about it, and naturally they want to hear this famous rabbi.
One of them says, “We can’t just go ourselves. We’ve got to get our friend there. This could really encourage him. And maybe these things they’re saying about Jesus was true. Maybe Jesus really can heal our friend- wouldn’t that be something! We gotta get him there!”
To do that is going to make things harder logistically, but they’re not thinking about themselves. They are thinking of him. Friends do that. Friends serve each other.
They tell their friend he’s going to see Jesus. They will pick him up at nine o’clock. He doesn’t have much choice, because when his friends pick him up, they really pick him up.
They get to the home where Jesus is teaching, and it is packed. Standing room only, “There was no room left, not even outside the door,” the Bible says.
The men hadn’t counted on this. They had been so excited, and now they’re shut out. They just watch for a while.
Then one of the- the management guy, the one with an MBA- says, “How can we get him to Jesus? Let’s have a brainstorming session, and remember- when brainstorming, there’s no such thing as a dumb idea.”
One of them gets an idea- probably the youngest guy, the tattooed and pierced guy, because he’s an outside-the-box thinker.
“Dudes! What if we make a hole and lower him through the roof! Whoaaa!”
Silence.
“Okay,” asks the MBA, “any other ideas?”
There aren’t any. The hole in the roof is the only thingy they can come up with. They realize its an unorthodox way to get into a room.
But they are desperate to get to Jesus. They had decided they wouldn’t let anything get in their way, so strong is their trust in Jesus, so great their love for their friend.
So the men get some ropes for lowering the mat and head upstairs. It was common in houses to have an outside staircase leading up to the roof, which was often used as a kind of patio. The friends go up and start remodeling this guy’s house.
Imagine this:
Jesus is teaching, and because he is an excellent teacher, people are paying close attention. But suddenly the distraction level begins to rise. There is a strange noise that sounds as if it’s coming through the roof. Dirt and dust and bits of reed begin to descend from the ceiling, getting in people’s eyes and landing in their hair- just a few flakes at first, and then a hail of large chunks of first-century plaster. Eventually all the conversation ceases and Jesus himself stops talking. Everyone is looking up now, and there’s a hole in the ceiling. Four pairs of hands are rooting around, making the hole bigger.
Imagine being the guy who owns the house.
You agree to host a meeting, and suddenly you’re having a spontaneous skylight installed. The owner calls the State Farm agent to see if this is covered.
“Jesus is here- can we call it an act of God?”
These men are devoted to their friend, so they decide a little roofing is not going to stand in their way. They serve him with determination, boldness, and a certain right-brained creativity. They become roof-crashers for their friend. And I have a feeling they will remember the moment for a long time.
Community gets built by servants. Great community gets built by roof-crashers.
Community Requires Trust
Now imagine for a moment that you are the man on the mat. You are about to go through the roof. This is the biggest risk you have ever taken in your life. You wonder if you can trust your friends to keep you safe. After all, when they carry you around at ground level, a drop would be unpleasant but not irredeemable. When you’re on the roof, the stakes get raised a little higher. Has anybody tested the ropes?
You wonder if you can trust the crowd to be civil. After all, they arrived early enough to get seats. Many of them have their own list of requests. You think this may be viewed as a form of butting ahead of other people in line. If things get physical, you have no protection.
You wonder if you can trust Jesus. What if it turns out he can’t help you after all? Worse yet, what if he’s in the middle of a really important point and doesn’t like to be interrupted?
You lie there on your mat on the roof, thinking about all these dangers. You have a decision to make. If you go through the roof, you could get dropped, you could get ridiculed, you could get rejected. On the other hand, if you don’t go through the roof, it’s certain you will never be healed. This is your one shot at wholeness.
The man nods his head. He decides to roll the dice. He becomes a roof-crasher, too. And nothing will ever be the same.
Authentic Community Always Involves Spiritual Growth
The man’s friends must wonder how Jesus will respond. I know from personal experience that teachers can get a little touchy about being interrupted. You’ll notice Jesus made sure he came to earth before there were beepers and pagers and cell phones (“in the fullness of time” is the biblical phrase for it).
Jesus looks up and sees the faces of four friends staring down at him.
They have nothing to ask for themselves. Their only thought is, “If we can just get our friend close to Jesus...”
That’s what great friends do for each other.
Then the text says an amazing thing: “When Jesus saw their faith...”
Usually healing stories speak of Jesus seeing the faith of the one asking for healing for themselves or their child. Here it’s the faith, not primarily of the man, but of his friends.
Do you have any idea what the faith of one person can do for a friend?
They dug a hole through a roof and sent in their friend. There is no record of their saying anything. Its not what he heard that moved Jesus; we are told that he saw their faith. What did he see?
A big hole in the ceiling, four faces in it- sweaty, dusty, anxious, hopeful faces thinking only of their friend and trusting somehow that Jesus has the kind of heart that will respond. Jesus sees a group who posses and act on an irrational commitment to the well-being of one of its members.
Jesus sees a little of what God intended when he made human beings. He sees a little island of shalom in a sea of brokenness. He sees people who love even in the face of a giant “as-is” tag. He thinks to himself that this is humanity at its finest.
He sees their faith.
Jesus turns and looks down at this twisted, motionless body on a mat. He sees not only a broken body but- as in every one of us- a broken, fallen soul.
He speaks tenderly: “Son, your sins are forgiven.”
I wonder what the man on the mat thinks at that point. He hadn’t really signed up to have his sins talked about.
But it’s one of the things that happen when you get neck deep into community and Jesus is there in the middle of it. Being in community has a way of surfacing the sin issue.
Jesus is filling the desire of this man’s friends, perhaps even deeper than they realize. When someone is your friend, your greatest desire for them- deeper than external well-being or even physical health- is that things are right between them and God. If someone is truly my friend, their deepest concern is the well-being of my character, my soul.
This man- who has been mocked and judged by people who assumed that his damaged body indicated that he was spiritually inferior- this man is told by Jesus, “You’re clean. You’re forgiven. You are right with God.”
A key part of this story is that there are others present in the room- teachers of the law, people who were thought of (and thought of themselves) as spiritual giants. They apparently arrived on time and got good seats. But you will notice that they had no friends to bring to Jesus. They were supposed to be the spiritual ones- but apparently no one they knew was hurting or confused or needed Jesus.
The “Unity of Spiritual Orientation”
Jesus is concerned for his critics. He loves them, just as he loves the men coming through the ceiling. So he acts as if to say, “Just so you know see I have authority...” He turns to the man on the mat: “Get up, take your mat, go home.”
Silence. Everyone watches.
The man stands up. He lifts his mat off the ground. He folds it up. He has spent his whole life on that thing. And suddenly- never again.
His world has enlarged from three by six to as far as his feet can carry him.
Not just his body has been healed. His heart has also. His soul. Every sin has been forgiven.
Physically, relationally, spiritually, he is the healthiest guy in the room.
Imagine when he becomes an old man and hits eighty. The other members of his small group are using walkers and canes. His legs are still running strong. He got a nice warranty.
One by one the man’s friends begin to pass away. Ever time he looks at that mat, he remembers the little community he was part of, that crashed through a roof for him. His greatest gift, humanly speaking, wasn’t his legs. It was his friends. There’s no gift like the gift of community.
It is the place where healing and wholeness happens. It is the fellowship where Jesus shows up: “Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.”
Excerpts from Everybody’s Normal Till You Get to Know Them, John Ortberg
One of the great stories in the Bible about community involves a paralyzed man and the friends who brought him to Jesus.
His whole life is lived out on a mat three feet wide and six feet long. Someone has to feed him, carry him, clothe him, move him to keep him from being covered with bedsores, clean him when he soils himself. He will never know the sense of independence we price so fiercely.
He has no money, no job, no influence, no family, and seemingly not much of a future. His “as-is” tag is three feet wide and six feet long.
What’s he got going for them? He has friends. He has amazing friends.
He’s in one of the killer small groups of all time.
Everybody Has a Mat
Think about what the paralyzed man goes through in order to be friends with this group of men.
He must have wrestled with his sense of independence sometimes. I suspect at times he became jealous of their independence, since after they had been together, everyone could walk home but him. Sometimes he must have wished in the secret places of his heart that he could trade places with one of them. He must have struggled with how they saw him in his neediness.
It is a very vulnerable thing to have someone carry your mat. When somebody’s carrying your mat, they see you in your weakness. They might hurt you if they drop you.
A Community of Roof-Crashers
Then one day Jesus comes to their town. These four men find out about it, and naturally they want to hear this famous rabbi.
One of them says, “We can’t just go ourselves. We’ve got to get our friend there. This could really encourage him. And maybe these things they’re saying about Jesus was true. Maybe Jesus really can heal our friend- wouldn’t that be something! We gotta get him there!”
To do that is going to make things harder logistically, but they’re not thinking about themselves. They are thinking of him. Friends do that. Friends serve each other.
They tell their friend he’s going to see Jesus. They will pick him up at nine o’clock. He doesn’t have much choice, because when his friends pick him up, they really pick him up.
They get to the home where Jesus is teaching, and it is packed. Standing room only, “There was no room left, not even outside the door,” the Bible says.
The men hadn’t counted on this. They had been so excited, and now they’re shut out. They just watch for a while.
Then one of the- the management guy, the one with an MBA- says, “How can we get him to Jesus? Let’s have a brainstorming session, and remember- when brainstorming, there’s no such thing as a dumb idea.”
One of them gets an idea- probably the youngest guy, the tattooed and pierced guy, because he’s an outside-the-box thinker.
“Dudes! What if we make a hole and lower him through the roof! Whoaaa!”
Silence.
“Okay,” asks the MBA, “any other ideas?”
There aren’t any. The hole in the roof is the only thingy they can come up with. They realize its an unorthodox way to get into a room.
But they are desperate to get to Jesus. They had decided they wouldn’t let anything get in their way, so strong is their trust in Jesus, so great their love for their friend.
So the men get some ropes for lowering the mat and head upstairs. It was common in houses to have an outside staircase leading up to the roof, which was often used as a kind of patio. The friends go up and start remodeling this guy’s house.
Imagine this:
Jesus is teaching, and because he is an excellent teacher, people are paying close attention. But suddenly the distraction level begins to rise. There is a strange noise that sounds as if it’s coming through the roof. Dirt and dust and bits of reed begin to descend from the ceiling, getting in people’s eyes and landing in their hair- just a few flakes at first, and then a hail of large chunks of first-century plaster. Eventually all the conversation ceases and Jesus himself stops talking. Everyone is looking up now, and there’s a hole in the ceiling. Four pairs of hands are rooting around, making the hole bigger.
Imagine being the guy who owns the house.
You agree to host a meeting, and suddenly you’re having a spontaneous skylight installed. The owner calls the State Farm agent to see if this is covered.
“Jesus is here- can we call it an act of God?”
These men are devoted to their friend, so they decide a little roofing is not going to stand in their way. They serve him with determination, boldness, and a certain right-brained creativity. They become roof-crashers for their friend. And I have a feeling they will remember the moment for a long time.
Community gets built by servants. Great community gets built by roof-crashers.
Community Requires Trust
Now imagine for a moment that you are the man on the mat. You are about to go through the roof. This is the biggest risk you have ever taken in your life. You wonder if you can trust your friends to keep you safe. After all, when they carry you around at ground level, a drop would be unpleasant but not irredeemable. When you’re on the roof, the stakes get raised a little higher. Has anybody tested the ropes?
You wonder if you can trust the crowd to be civil. After all, they arrived early enough to get seats. Many of them have their own list of requests. You think this may be viewed as a form of butting ahead of other people in line. If things get physical, you have no protection.
You wonder if you can trust Jesus. What if it turns out he can’t help you after all? Worse yet, what if he’s in the middle of a really important point and doesn’t like to be interrupted?
You lie there on your mat on the roof, thinking about all these dangers. You have a decision to make. If you go through the roof, you could get dropped, you could get ridiculed, you could get rejected. On the other hand, if you don’t go through the roof, it’s certain you will never be healed. This is your one shot at wholeness.
The man nods his head. He decides to roll the dice. He becomes a roof-crasher, too. And nothing will ever be the same.
Authentic Community Always Involves Spiritual Growth
The man’s friends must wonder how Jesus will respond. I know from personal experience that teachers can get a little touchy about being interrupted. You’ll notice Jesus made sure he came to earth before there were beepers and pagers and cell phones (“in the fullness of time” is the biblical phrase for it).
Jesus looks up and sees the faces of four friends staring down at him.
They have nothing to ask for themselves. Their only thought is, “If we can just get our friend close to Jesus...”
That’s what great friends do for each other.
Then the text says an amazing thing: “When Jesus saw their faith...”
Usually healing stories speak of Jesus seeing the faith of the one asking for healing for themselves or their child. Here it’s the faith, not primarily of the man, but of his friends.
Do you have any idea what the faith of one person can do for a friend?
They dug a hole through a roof and sent in their friend. There is no record of their saying anything. Its not what he heard that moved Jesus; we are told that he saw their faith. What did he see?
A big hole in the ceiling, four faces in it- sweaty, dusty, anxious, hopeful faces thinking only of their friend and trusting somehow that Jesus has the kind of heart that will respond. Jesus sees a group who posses and act on an irrational commitment to the well-being of one of its members.
Jesus sees a little of what God intended when he made human beings. He sees a little island of shalom in a sea of brokenness. He sees people who love even in the face of a giant “as-is” tag. He thinks to himself that this is humanity at its finest.
He sees their faith.
Jesus turns and looks down at this twisted, motionless body on a mat. He sees not only a broken body but- as in every one of us- a broken, fallen soul.
He speaks tenderly: “Son, your sins are forgiven.”
I wonder what the man on the mat thinks at that point. He hadn’t really signed up to have his sins talked about.
But it’s one of the things that happen when you get neck deep into community and Jesus is there in the middle of it. Being in community has a way of surfacing the sin issue.
Jesus is filling the desire of this man’s friends, perhaps even deeper than they realize. When someone is your friend, your greatest desire for them- deeper than external well-being or even physical health- is that things are right between them and God. If someone is truly my friend, their deepest concern is the well-being of my character, my soul.
This man- who has been mocked and judged by people who assumed that his damaged body indicated that he was spiritually inferior- this man is told by Jesus, “You’re clean. You’re forgiven. You are right with God.”
A key part of this story is that there are others present in the room- teachers of the law, people who were thought of (and thought of themselves) as spiritual giants. They apparently arrived on time and got good seats. But you will notice that they had no friends to bring to Jesus. They were supposed to be the spiritual ones- but apparently no one they knew was hurting or confused or needed Jesus.
The “Unity of Spiritual Orientation”
Jesus is concerned for his critics. He loves them, just as he loves the men coming through the ceiling. So he acts as if to say, “Just so you know see I have authority...” He turns to the man on the mat: “Get up, take your mat, go home.”
Silence. Everyone watches.
The man stands up. He lifts his mat off the ground. He folds it up. He has spent his whole life on that thing. And suddenly- never again.
His world has enlarged from three by six to as far as his feet can carry him.
Not just his body has been healed. His heart has also. His soul. Every sin has been forgiven.
Physically, relationally, spiritually, he is the healthiest guy in the room.
Imagine when he becomes an old man and hits eighty. The other members of his small group are using walkers and canes. His legs are still running strong. He got a nice warranty.
One by one the man’s friends begin to pass away. Ever time he looks at that mat, he remembers the little community he was part of, that crashed through a roof for him. His greatest gift, humanly speaking, wasn’t his legs. It was his friends. There’s no gift like the gift of community.
It is the place where healing and wholeness happens. It is the fellowship where Jesus shows up: “Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.”
