In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.
Today’s Bible story tells of a well-known but seldom spoken about Miracle of Jesus. This Miracle includes Jesus, a paralyzed man and his four friends and a large crowd of people. These friends carry the paralyzed man up to the roof of a home where Jesus is preaching one day hoping to lower him through an opening.
According to this story, the crowd was so large that day that the paralyzed man could not reach Jesus so his four friends cut a hole in the roof of the house and lowered him through it and seeing the faith of these men, Jesus heals the paralyzed man. He uses the faith of a few good friends to teach about a very special type of prayer.
It is the type of prayer where we pray for others. The four friends wanted healing for their paralyzed friend, which the medical world of the day could not provide so they brought him to the feet of Christ. This is the special prayer of intercession. It is a way of showing love through prayer. It is when we move from prayers for ourselves to prayers for others. It is when we shift our focus from our own needs to the needs of others. The man in the Gospel was known to be paralyzed in body and soul. He was going to give up on hope. He was going to give up on life, but his friends loved him and would not let him give up and changed his life forever.
There are many people we know who are paralyzed in this way—paralyzed spiritually. There are people who fell victim to temptation and people who fell victim to wrongful behaviors over time and gradually surrendered to temptation. Temptation has always been around, but today, temptation has become an industry in our world. Temptation has risen to the corporate level. Temptation has gone “hi-tech” and fills the Internet and fills our world every moment of every day.
Today, temptation is a huge multi-billion dollar business that targets people of every age. When we give in to these temptations, we can seriously damage our lives, our marriages, our families, our careers and our faith. By falling to temptation, we can become “spiritually paralyzed.”
Our Church Fathers knew that, when people fall to temptation time after time after time, they begin to justify their reasons to cheat or lie or break relations that were never meant to be broken. The story of Christianity is the story of forgiveness. The entire Crucifixion and Resurrection is centered around forgiveness and a second choice.
Today’s Bible story shows us that by praying for others we can bring people to God who have distanced themselves from Him. We bring them in through our prayers and through our love and through our concern and place them at the feet of Christ. So, whatever life throws at us or people we know, we are not helpless. We have our prayers and through our prayers, we stand directly in the presence of God. It is a great honor and responsibility to present our loved ones and our friends and those who don’t want to be our friends to the mercy of God and by doing that, we become like the four friends who lowered the paralyzed man through the roof and placed him at the feet of Jesus Christ.
Who in your life needs your prayers? Through our prayers, we become like the four men who lowered their friend through the roof and placed him at the feet of God.
Amen.