Introducing the Kingdom of God
Well, this morning I want you to turn in your Bibles to Luke chapter 13. And here we're going to see Jesus introducing the reality of his kingdom.
In this section, Jesus is moving from not only the polemic of going after those who were trying to trap him, which he certainly gets at religious leaders that he still calls hypocrites. But Jesus is moving from simply polemics to now he's going to move into apologetics and show that his kingdom is coming.
His kingdom is an unstoppable force, and he is going to initiate it through the weakness of frail humans, like a crippled woman and like us.
The Authority of Jesus' Kingdom
And this kingdom authority and power is expansive. So let's read, beginning in verse number 10 through verse 21.
On a Sabbath, Jesus was teaching in one of the synagogues. And a woman was there who had been crippled by a spirit for 18 years. She was bent over and could not straighten up at all. When Jesus saw her, he called her forward and said to her, "Woman, you are set free from your infirmity." Then he put his hands on her, and immediately she straightened up and praised God.
Indignant because Jesus had healed on the Sabbath, the synagogue leader said to the people, "There are six days for work, so come and be healed on those days, not on the Sabbath." And the Lord answered him, "You hypocrites! Doesn't each of you on the Sabbath untie your ox or donkey from the stall and lead it out to give it water? Then should not this woman, a daughter of Abraham, whom Satan has kept bound for 18 long years, be set free on the Sabbath day from what has bound her?" When he said this, all his opponents were humiliated. But the people were delighted with all the wonderful things that he was doing.
Then Jesus asked, "What is the kingdom of God like? What shall I compare it to?" It is like a mustard seed which a man took and planted in his garden. It grew and became a tree, and the birds perched in its branches. Again he asked, "What shall I compare the kingdom of God to?" It is like yeast that a woman took and mixed into about 60 pounds of flour until it worked its way all through the dough.
In this passage, we will see unmistakably that Jesus has started his eternal kingdom through human weakness and frailty. In the summer of 2024, it became very clear how dependent businesses are on their IT departments. Airlines, banks, hospitals, and other risk-averse businesses and organizations around the world woke up to the blue screen of death when the CrowdStrike software running their systems introduced a flaw. This software flaw had been an automatic update that was intended to be a security patch to protect them against disruptions. But suddenly, these large businesses and small ones too went offline.
CrowdStrike issued an apology and they released a software update as soon as they could. The fix was actually fairly simple in terms of code. But the problem was delivering it to all the machines that had been updated and impacted. It took multiple days for some companies to restore their systems. They needed to have administrative privileges on every machine that was affected. Some companies could do that at once and issue that update by force, but many had to issue it one computer at a time. And it was painstaking. This prompted the CEO of Delta Airlines to say that they lost, by his estimate, over $500 million of revenue because of this flaw.
It's fascinating that one small, seemingly insignificant software update can take down entire computer systems. And in a similar way, the kingdom of God is like a single line of computer code that has infiltrated our broken world. This code is constantly running in the background, and it is steadily making its presence known. And eventually, the kingdom of God will overtake everything.
Luke, in his gospel account of Jesus, is recording the beginnings of God's kingdom on earth. In chapters 12 and 13, in particular, Luke has presented Jesus interacting with religious hypocrites who opposed him, people who were set in trying to trap him and silence him. But we also see Jesus interacting with people like this crippled woman and crowds who are curious about what he's doing. Everywhere Jesus goes, he is interrupting people's lives, calling them to believe, and installing that line of code that introduces the kingdom of God.
Jesus Intervenes at Our Need
Jesus, we see in this passage, intervenes at our point of need. And that is the first point of my sermon this morning: that Jesus intervenes at our point of need. Jesus recognizes where we have vulnerabilities, where there is a need for a patch, and he provides the balm of the gospel.
On this particular Sabbath day, beginning in verse number 10, Jesus was working his way to Jerusalem. This is where he would face the cross and be crucified for the sins of people like us. But so far, he's not made it to Jerusalem. As he's working his way through first Galilee, then Judea, he is teaching about the gospel and kingdom, inviting people to believe in him.
And in this particular Sabbath, he noticed there was a crippled woman who was crippled, he says in verse 11, by a spirit. At this point, there were crowds who were surrounding Jesus to hear his teaching. They were waiting to see if he would conduct another miracle. They hung on every word that he said. They watched with every body gesture that he made, and they wondered if they might see something incredible.
But at the same time, there were Pharisees and there were lawyers who were shadowing Jesus. They were there to try to silence him, to stop his message and influence from spreading. They were desperate to find an angle that they could use against Jesus. But here Jesus is teaching with authority. He's come into the synagogue and taken over because of his ability to teach and his desire to interact with people.
And this woman who had been crippled by a spirit lingered in the background. Perhaps she was there quietly hoping for relief. Maybe she had heard of Jesus, but certainly she was there as a devout Jewish person who wanted God to intervene in her life. For 18 years, an evil spirit had disabled her body, keeping her bent over so that she could not straighten up at all, it says in verse number 11. No doubt, she had asked for people's prayers. She had pursued healing, tried medicine. She was desperate for intervention, anything that might relieve her suffering.
But her physical deformity was not merely osteoporosis or some degenerative bone disease. It involved demonic oppression. So when Jesus appeared in her particular synagogue on this exact Sabbath, the woman must have listened intently to him. Here was a rabbi that she had not yet met, one that she had not yet been able to approach about her malady. But yet the text does not record her approaching Jesus for help. Instead, it presents her as one who is there, but probably on the margins.
So Jesus takes the initiative to pursue her. Notice in verse 12, it says, when Jesus saw her, he called her forward. He called the woman from the background to the center of attention. And in her crippled state, she must have slowly, methodically, even humbly approached the Messiah. And all eyes were on her. The one thing she probably didn't want was attention, but the process of making her way to Jesus exposed her in front of everyone.
And when Jesus asked her to come forward, he was demonstrating his human compassion. He was also going to show his divine authority. There was no doubt that this woman was probably ashamed of her appearance, and she did not want everyone to be looking at her. But Jesus looked past her bent over, broken body, and he saw her as a human being. He recognized her dignity and her worth. And Jesus invited this woman to come into his presence so that he could restore her identity and restore her health.
Over these 18 years of suffering, before she ever met Jesus, she had probably sought numerous rabbis. She had probably listened to their teaching, wondering if she had missed something, if there was more to learn that would have impacted her health. There's no doubt she listened to synagogue rulers as they came and went and wondered if one ruler or another would be able to help her. And she probably also sought medical practitioners to the best of her ability. Whatever it was, she put herself in a place to receive help.
But this woman had likely been embarrassed in the past because no other teachers or religious leaders had been able to pray for her with the effect of relieving her suffering. So by the time Jesus appears, she may have been reluctant to ask for more help. But Jesus takes that away. He invites her forward and steps into her life.
But this woman's physical malady required more than medicine. Her condition was linked to an evil spirit. There was some kind of demonic influence that was literally pressed against her body to the point that it folded her in half. Contrary to the Pharisees and the lawyers who had already accused Jesus of working for Beelzebub, this evil spirit, like other evil spirits, would tremble in God's presence and others had begged Jesus to leave them alone. So when Jesus summoned this particular evil spirit, the woman came.
Compassion for the Broken Woman
Forward. And what's noteworthy is that the emphasis is not on the response of the evil spirit; it's on Jesus' compassion for the broken woman. And when she finally made her way to the front of the synagogue alongside Jesus, he simply uttered one sentence. He said, "Woman, you are set free from your infirmity." He did not give a pious lecture or a theological treatise on physical maladies or evil spirits or this woman's sinfulness. He simply spoke the words and he healed her body.
And after he spoke, it says in verse 13, he put his hands on her and immediately she straightened up and praised God. The woman went from literally slowly, tortuously making her way from the back of the synagogue to be near Jesus to now standing straight, able to move freely. Yet there was nothing in this episode that Jesus did that involved work. He was simply teaching in the synagogue and people were listening when he called the woman to come forward. Then he spoke words and healed her by his command.
When he touched her body, he wasn't doing work as if a doctor was performing surgery or a chiropractor was making some kind of adjustment. He was simply placing his hands gently upon her deformed back and she immediately stood straight. Then this woman, whom Luke does not even bother to name, immediately praised God, verse number 13. She recognized that something miraculous happened. For the first time in 18 years, she was able to stand straight. Instead of being folded over, she was upright and she felt the glory of God in her body. This woman was instantaneously and completely healed and her dignity was restored.
And her response was not about herself. It was to give glory to God for healing her. She didn't call attention to her and to her need and to what had happened or to how hard it had been for those 18 years. She simply directed everyone's attention to the source of her cure, which was God himself. Throughout his ministry, Jesus pursued sinners like this woman and called them to become his followers. He doesn't say here that her malady or the spirit that was impacting her were there because of sin. He simply shows that this woman needed the power of God that he had on offer.
Jesus demonstrates the initiative in reaching out to this woman just as he had throughout the gospel so far and will continue to. He had started his ministry by calling the disciples and saying, "Come, follow me." Then he initiated healings and other miracles to reveal his deity, picking some, not picking others. And Jesus always intervenes at our point of need, and he saves us from our sin. Later, Luke says in chapter 19 that the Son of Man comes to seek and to save the lost.
Neither Luke nor Jesus said that this crippled woman was suffering because of a particular sin in her life or because of some specific sin in her family. No, this woman was suffering because she lived under the curse of sin in our world and the presence of evil spirits. Jesus noticed this woman when no one else was paying attention to her. After all, she had probably been around this synagogue for these 18 years and everybody just dismissed her or ignored her. They thought, "Oh, here she comes again, that poor woman, that poor lady." And they may have been patronizing or they may have simply ignored her. But whatever the case, Jesus noticed.
Jesus drew attention to her so he could bring glory to his Father, and he took the initiative to heal her broken body, displaying his divinity. In the same way, God uses our pain, our suffering, and our shame as an invitation for us to depend on his divine power. When we lose a rewarding job and wonder, "How did this happen? Why did I get laid off?" Or maybe we receive a medical diagnosis, such as the word cancer or heart failure. We wonder what God is doing. Has he abandoned us? Or maybe we encounter problems with our children and not just of the toddler variety of toddlers who are defiant, but perhaps teenagers and young adults who are questioning their relationship with us and pulling away. Or maybe we face a bitter divorce, a broken marriage, and a relationship that has gone awry. Maybe it's parents who are in poor health, who need elder care, and we don't know what to do.
Whatever it is, God intervenes at our point of need. He doesn't take away our problems. He doesn't say, "I'm giving that to you because you're an awful sinner," but he's entrusting us with that suffering and that difficulty so that we will call upon him, that we'll respond to his gracious invitation to come forward and to receive the healing power of the gospel. God the Father invites us to cast all of our anxieties on Jesus because he cares for us, Peter says in his letter. And this starts with our salvation. The only right response to Jesus is repentance. We saw that in the first part of this chapter, that Jesus called the religious hypocrites to repent of their sin and to trust his righteousness, but they wouldn't do it.
For those of us who do accept Jesus as our savior, this invitation to cast our cares on Jesus continues with our lives. He invites us to depend on him over and over and over again because he never stops loving us. The crippled woman came to Jesus and cast her cares
The Blindness of Religious Leaders
On him. She responded to his invitation and he blessed her. But notice the religious leader of the synagogue. It says in verse 14, he became indignant because Jesus had healed on the Sabbath. In complete contrast to this woman offering praise to God, this leader is now condemning the Son of God.
He could not appreciate Jesus' miracle because he only saw a violation of the Sabbath rules. He responded to Jesus' teaching and this woman's joy with a harsh rebuke to everyone that was listening. Notice what he says in verse 14: "There are six days for work. So come and be healed on those days, not on the Sabbath."
Notice he's not directing his attack directly at Jesus. He's saying this to the whole crowd to highlight the rule that has been broken, to show that Jesus is in violation of the law. And he's also calling out this woman for her listening to Jesus because he says here, "So come and be healed on the other days, on those days, not the Sabbath." In other words, he's saying, you should have stayed in the background or maybe you should have even stayed home that day, but you had no business coming forward to the presence of Jesus.
This synagogue ruler could not have been more blind and deaf to what God was doing. Rather than rejoice over her healing, he rebuked Jesus and the woman for violating the rules of Sabbath keeping. He classified his miraculous healing as labor because it involved the work of caring for a sick person. He ignored the fact that Jesus had set her free from her infirmities, verse 14. And he had done this with his words, not with his works.
The synagogue leader was accusing Jesus of sinning. In other words, he was saying, "You broke the Sabbath. You cannot be the Son of God." But he didn't take into account that Jesus had restored a broken body with an evil spirit. He must be the Son of God.
So notice what Luke says. Jesus' response is in verse 15: "Then the Lord answered him." Here, Luke identified Jesus by his divine title, Lord. Already in chapter 6, Luke had called Jesus the Lord of the Sabbath. Jesus was not a sinner like the synagogue ruler or the Pharisees or the lawyers who were in wait trying to trap him. But Jesus was none other than the Son of God, the master and ruler, exercising his divine authority over this woman's body and over the day that he chose to heal her.
And the Lord called this synagogue ruler and his allies hypocrites. He said, "You hypocrites," because Jesus knew their wicked hearts. He knew their evil intention. They were not trying to protect the Sabbath or the synagogue. They were instead trying to condemn the Son of God. So Jesus called his accusers hypocrites. We've seen this throughout chapter 12 and verse 13. And he calls them hypocrites because they are routinely asking others to do more than they do themselves.
In this particular instance, this religious leader was routinely untying his animals and leading them outside on the Sabbath. He cared for animals like oxen and donkeys more than he cared for a child of God. And he was willing to do some work and excuse himself because it impacted his family and his life.
But Jesus asks a rhetorical question. He said, if these religious leaders can untie their animals on the Sabbath, why can't Jesus unbind a daughter of Abraham as well? Jesus was opposing and calling out their ridiculous double standard. Ironically, these religious hypocrites cared far more about the well-being of their animals than the human being made in the image of God. They would rather this woman suffer one more day than rejoice when Jesus miraculously healed her from 18 years of suffering.
Jesus' response to the hypocrites humiliated them and exposed their evil motives because Jesus showed that they were not pure, but they were instead polluted. They were trying to scheme and to work against Jesus, and it backfired on them because everyone in the crowd could notice that this woman was truly healed, that she was encouraged, excited, and glorifying God. And how could you argue with the evidence of the kingdom in this lady's life?
We should not be surprised when people reject Jesus Christ. They can listen to the gospel message, read the Bible, study theology, attend church, hear conversion stories, and they can still find excuses not to believe. Perhaps they think the church is filled with hypocrites, and it is. Maybe they believe that science mutes the Bible because science has displaced the Bible, but it doesn't. Or maybe they feel hurt from a church or some Christians in their past, and that can certainly happen.
Sometimes the most strident opponents of the gospel are people raised in the church. They turn their former religious experience into an evangelistic crusade against the church. I was speaking to a divorce attorney a couple years ago about different things and seeking his advice and trying to help with some counseling that I was doing. And this led to some other conversations. And what was interesting in that conversation is we were talking about how passionate people can be against the gospel.
It's as if these former Christians take their evangelism training and use it to try to convince others not to believe. I can think of a former pastor and former believers who use online platforms that are very large to help Christians deconstruct their faith and abandon the gospel.
This Jewish synagogue leader, though his ambitions were not that large, was certainly trying to undo this woman's faith. He was trying to steal glory from God by highlighting a secondary rule. Fortunately, not everyone puts their faith in outspoken skeptics and rulemakers.
Notice verse 17: "But the people were delighted with all the wonderful things that Jesus was doing." When the crowds heard Jesus' teaching in the synagogue and observed this miracle, they joined the woman in praising God. Rather than accuse Jesus of sin on the Sabbath and undermining his claims of deity, the people were delighted to see his display of divine power and goodness, and they appreciated what their leaders were rejecting.
Jesus healed this crippled woman as a display of his divine power. He exercised his authority in a Jewish synagogue with teaching and healing. And he healed on the Sabbath to show his lordship over religious rules. And he used his power to rebuke the hypocritical religious leaders enforcing those rules.
Jesus demonstrated his authority through an unnamed woman in an unknown synagogue to show the unstoppable power of his kingdom. Jesus initiates his kingdom through human weakness. Here, through this woman, he is showing that his kingdom is going to overcome all and that everyone will one day submit to his lordship.
Yet not everyone believed it. So Jesus shows a second aspect of this. First, he intervenes at our point of need. And second, Jesus initiates his unstoppable rule in unlikely ways with us. Jesus initiates his unstoppable rule with us in unlikely ways.
Parables of Growth and Influence
Notice Luke included two parables about the kingdom to illustrate the significance of healing a nameless crippled woman in a Jewish synagogue. We sometimes read parables like this and we extract them from their context and we think, "I know what that means." And we come up with all kinds of ideas, but we forget that this happened and is recorded in the gospel to amplify another point.
In this particular case, Jesus is amplifying, and Luke has recorded it in this way, to show us that what he's done for this woman is as significant as a seed of mustard or in a speck of yeast. Jesus is using his ministry to show that what seems like something small, unnoticeable, and marginal is actually the most important thing of all.
The synagogue rulers' opposition, along with the Pharisees and the lawyers, looked more powerful than Jesus and his 12 disciples. And although the crowds delighted with all the wonderful things he was doing, his influence looked meager at best and ignorable at worst. The Jewish leaders thought they could outlast Jesus. There had been other up-and-comers. There were others that had threatened their tight grip. So they planned to end Jesus' influence. They were going to take him down in Jerusalem just as other prophets had been silenced in Israel's past.
But this woman's healing showed that Jesus had initiated his unstoppable rule with ordinary people. The kingdom of God was already present in Israel and it was starting to make an impact. So by using the parables of the mustard seed and the yeast, Jesus was confronting the religious leaders who held positions of authority. And he was exposing their inevitable failure, that what currently seemed like power and strength would soon become weakness, and they would break.
According to R.C. Sproul, when we read about the kingdom in the Gospel of Luke, Jesus is speaking about a place where God reigns absolutely. It is that absolute rule that is carried out according to his justice, his mercy, and his righteousness. And we see the kingdom breaking in here where Jesus is ministering to an unlikely woman. And he's caring for her in a way that not only changed her life, but brought glory to God and impacted a large crowd that observed it all.
The parables of the mustard seed and the yeast both illustrate this principle, and they show it in a different way. This kingdom of God begins almost invisibly, but it eventually and inevitably takes over the whole earth. So Jesus asked them a question: "What is the kingdom of God like? What shall I compare it to?" Verse 18. And he compared it to a mustard seed planted in a person's garden. It was among the tiniest of seeds. And it appeared minuscule, powerless, almost as if it was worthless. Yet a single mustard seed, Jesus said, grew and became a tree, large enough to support birds perched in its branches.
There are many Bible scholars, preachers, and students who have over-interpreted this parable. They give long explanations about the size of the mustard seed, which will barely, it's tiny to sit on the tip of your thumb. The large scale of the mustard tree, some exaggerating how quickly it grows and how large it becomes. They talk about the number and kind of birds that are nesting in its branches and wax on and on about the kingdom of God. But all of those analogies miss the point Jesus is making.
Jesus is simply using this parable to paint a word picture of heavenly truth. And that word picture is that the mustard seed illustrates the slow, steady growth of God's kingdom. Many first-century Jews were expecting the Messiah to come as a triumphant king who would liberate Israel from oppression. But Jesus was teaching just the opposite: that rather than come with power and authority to crush Rome, he was coming in weakness and in frailty to build up his people. And as he was doing this, it was starting like a tiny seed and it was gradually growing until it would become an unstoppable kingdom of God that overtook everything.
We cannot accurately measure the gospel's impact by what we see now. The disciples could not measure it in the first century and we struggle to measure it in the 21st century. Christians and Christianity seem to be in decline in the United States and the local churches seem to be small. But what seems to be may not actually be. I'm not saying that our church or other churches are somehow mysteriously large, but where Christianity is in decline, it's also growing by leaps and bounds in other parts of the world. Local churches here that may seem to be small are balanced by churches in other parts of the world that are growing so quickly they are planting and starting church planting movements.
It is impossible for us to measure the gospel's impact with our bare eyes. Instead, what we know is that the gospel is growing and the kingdom is advancing over all nations and all people. We are not a fully grown tree now. That's not the point of Jesus' analogy, but we are the seedling that God is growing into a mature tree, and God's tree will dominate the garden.
So Jesus used a second parable to illustrate this point further.
The Unstoppable Influence of Yeast
Again, he asked in verse 20, "What shall I compare the kingdom of God to?" Now Jesus introduced a second parable, and this one gives a similar idea to the first. If the mustard seed pictured the growth of God's kingdom, then the yeast that was mixed into about 60 pounds of flour illustrates the influence of the kingdom. It's like a single ounce of yeast that permeates many pounds of flour. Once the yeast gets mixed into the flour, all of the flour becomes affected. It's irreversible. You cannot pick the pieces of yeast back out and eliminate its influence completely.
Likewise, when Jesus initiated the kingdom of God, it could not be stopped. The kingdom touched the sick and the scribes, the poor and the Pharisees, the evil spirits and the synagogue rulers, the Jews and the Gentiles. And the kingdom of God cannot be stopped just like yeast cannot be removed from a loaf of bread.
Jesus initiates his unstoppable rule with weak and lowly people like this crippled woman. And he uses weak and lowly people like you and like me. He chooses those who are physically sick, oppressed by evil spirits, ignored by leaders, and forgotten by society. He doesn't need the cool kids or the power brokers or the influencers. Paul says it this way in 1 Corinthians 1: "The foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom. And the weakness of God is stronger than human strength."
Too many times, I'm afraid we judge the church on what we see rather than on what God is doing. As a pastor, I have a front-row seat into people's lives, and I take that privilege and responsibility very seriously. But it's incredibly encouraging to hear stories and testimonies of God's work in your lives that not everybody has the opportunity to hear about. A struggle I've had over the years as a pastor is: how do we get some of those testimonies in front of the church? But be assured, God is working in the lives of people in our church that demonstrate the power of his glory.
Sometimes we and other Christians count attendance on Sunday morning and we wonder why so few people attend. We look around and wonder, "Where are more young people?" We compare Bible lessons and sermons with TED Talks and well-produced TV shows and wonder how God could ever spread the gospel through such a dysfunctional group as the church. But this passage reminds us that God uses weak, lowly Christians and small, ordinary churches to advance his kingdom. The kingdom of God is growing in every generation and its influence on earth is unstoppable. It's not something that can be removed, and we must believe that.
God is using our church and our lives like lines of a computer code that is broken into a secure network, and God is going to take over the mainframe because he owns it all. And when God takes over, it will be irreversible. There will be no patch to return to the curse of sin. There will be no way to go back to the doom that the devil has brought. But his power and authority will rule over all.
This Tuesday is an election day, and I wrote about voting in my practical pastoring this week. It's tempting for us to look at politics the wrong ways. We can wrongly assume that the future of civilization depends on what happens at a polling place on Tuesday. There are some believers who think political parties and politicians will save us, and there are constant arguments about these things. Other believers think that Christian nationalism with Christian laws and penalties for non-believers will restore God's righteous order, and a few believers think that it's all hopeless and they don't even bother to vote.
But the kingdom of God does not look like political parties, politicians, Christian nationalism, or pessimism. The kingdom of God is like a minute seed or a tiny microorganism like yeast. God is slowly, almost imperceptibly, changing the world until one day it will suddenly become his everlasting kingdom. We need ears to hear the gospel and eyes to see Jesus, and then we will recognize the kingdom of God and where the gospel is spreading.
So rather than be pessimists, let's be optimists that God is working. We may not be able to measure it all. We may not be able to quantify it or have a spreadsheet or some database that keeps track of it, but know that God is on the move, one life at a time. The call of this passage is to respond to Jesus' offer of the gospel.
Responding to the Gospel Offer
So, if you're not a Christian, I would beg of you to consider repenting of your sin and taking the righteousness of Christ in place of your own evil. And if you are a Christian, I would encourage you to abide in Christ, to trust that He's working even when your life feels like a mess, even when it seems like everything around you is faltering or failing, that God demonstrates Himself through your weakness.
Earlier this year, Danny, who's been doing our elements of worship this morning, introduced our church to Chap Bettis. Chap served as a pastor in New England for over 20 years. He has written multiple books about parenting and discipleship, and God is using his ministry to impact Christians and churches around our country and even beyond. When Chap was here, I had the privilege to introduce him to a handful of pastors and my brothers in the Greater Atlanta Baptist Network.
Then just a few weeks ago—so this is many months removed from Chap being here—I was listening to a Christian podcast and he mentioned that he met Chap through one of the pastors in Gabon. And he was so intrigued that he wanted to interview him and he invited him to his church. Human networks like this are fascinating. It's almost impossible for us to trace how one relationship connects to another and then later comes back full circle. Yet I believe the way that these interpersonal relationships spread illustrates the power of the gospel and the influence of the kingdom of God.
The kingdom of God spreads almost imperceptibly until all of a sudden it appears everywhere. As we consider the kingdom of God, let's be challenged and give glory to God that He is working, that He has brought conversion to you to show you your sin and His forgiveness as your Savior. But let's also be faithful to work for the gospel and kingdom. Let's not be pessimists. Let's not be triumphalists. Let's be realists. And let's live out the gospel and invite others to join us in following Jesus.
Let's pray. Heavenly Father, as we consider this passage, we're encouraged. We're encouraged because we see the evidence of your kingdom that has already started. And we know that it's working because it's come from that first-century healing to our lives today. And we are here today because we have expressed faith in the gospel of Jesus Christ.
But God, there could be some here today, children or teenagers, that don't yet know Jesus as Savior. And I pray that you would bring the gospel to them, that their eyes would be open and that their ears would hear that there are sinners who need a Savior. And Father, for those of us who are following Jesus, help us to trust that your kingdom is doing its incredible work even when we can't figure it out. Forgive us for those times where we either give up or where we think we're going to strong-arm everyone into becoming a Christian. And God, help us instead to trust you, to see that you're working in ways that will blow our minds in eternity.
So, God, I pray that you would bless us as believers and as a church to be faithful and to give glory to God, just as this crippled woman did, because you alone are worthy of our praise. We ask these things in Jesus' name. Amen.