Imagine your son or daughter comes home from school, completely distraught. What’s wrong, my child? I received an impossible exam today. I don’t even know how to do the first problem. Let’s look together, you say.
And sure enough, as you flip through the exam, you see that the packet filled with many pages of difficult questions. But you notice that the last page in the packet has a large header at the top, “THIS IS THE ONLY PROBLEM THAT WILL BE GRADED.”
And further, the answer is already provided.
Imagine your shock when your child’s excitement wanes after just a moment, “But you don’t understand. I don’t know how to do all the rest of the problems!”
This is a picture how many of us treat God’s mercy. God, in His great kindness, has solved our greatest problem — the only thing that keeps us from Him — and yet, day by day, instead of waking up rejoicing that “God’s mercies are new again today,” we wake up concerned that we don’t have answers to the many problems we will face. Problems which ultimately don’t matter at all!
Instead of greeting each day with an “ah!” we grunt out an “ugh.” This should not be! God has been reminding me regularly, in the midst of all sorts of unexpected problems that I don’t have the answers to: Don’t forget, I’ve already solved your biggest problem. You have the solution to the only problem that matters.
What a world of difference it makes when I truly take this word to heart!
Our Amazement Reveals Our Values
There’s a familiar story in Matthew’s gospel:
“…He *said to the paralytic, ‘Get up, pick up your bed and go home.’ And he got up and went home. But when the crowds saw this, they were awestruck, and glorified God, who had given such authority to men” (Matthew 9:6-7 NASB).
This was surely a great miracle, but it also reveals something concerning about the crowd. It was the second miracle Jesus had performed for the man, but it was the first one that made them excited.
The first miracle was when Jesus said, “Take courage son; your sins are forgiven” (Matthew 9:2b). But that didn’t seem to impress the crowd at all. Their amazement at the second miracle revealed which they truly valued.
But they were clearly amazed by the wrong thing. Jesus Himself tells them why He bothered with the healing (the second miracle) at all:
(Matthew 9:6 NASB) “so that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins”—then He *said to the paralytic, “Get up, pick up your bed and go home.”
Jesus only healed the paralytic to prove that He had authority to forgive sin. The forgiveness of the man’s sins was the truly great miracle — the one that Jesus valued and hoped to emphasize — but no one was amazed by that.
No wonder that just three years later, the same crowds who saw Jesus perform miracles rejected Him: they were fixated on outward, temporal circumstances rather than heavenly, eternal realities. They saw the man’s paralysis as a bigger problem than his sin.
I can be the same: my sins are already forgiven — and continue to be, day after day, as I live a lifestyle of continuous repentance — and yet the thing that amazes me (or the thing that I hold out for, to be amazed by) is God’s deliverance and help in temporal situations.
In such cases, I’m no different than the child who is fixated on the problems he can’t solve, rather than truly relishing the fact that the only problem that counts has already been solved. “It’s all well and good that the only problem that matters has already been solved, but I really need to the solution to this one, too.”
Let me not be like a foolish child. And let me not be like the crowds who marvel the minor miracles. Let me begin today with a sober reckoning of God’s great mercy over my life: He has already performed the great miracle! Beware fixating upon some temporal deliverance, to the neglect of God’s eternal cleansing!!!
“For he who lacks these qualities is blind or short-sighted, having forgotten his purification from his former sins.”
2 Peter 1:9 NASB
“Therefore, since we receive a kingdom which cannot be shaken, let us show gratitude, by which we may offer to God an acceptable service with reverence and awe;”
Hebrews 12:28 NASB1995
“Help me Lord, on earth to show, by my love, how much I owe.”