We started a new series at Gateway Church in Austin called “Unstoppable.”
In this passage, we witness the unstoppable power of Jesus’ forgiveness. Jesus isn’t just offering a one-time fix—His forgiveness shakes the earth, changes hearts, and heals lives. This isn’t just “good news”—this is life-altering, jaw-dropping, can’t-stop-it-now forgiveness.
Digging Deeper:
Work through the following questions and scriptures on your own or get together with your group, spiritual running partners, or family to talk through what you are learning.
Message Video:
Message Audio:
Message Notes by Ross Sagehorn:
Quick story to get us started this morning, and I share this both because I have a point, I promise, but also because, as the parent of a toddler, I’ve got to get a couple things off my chest, and this is cheaper than counseling. So, welcome to my therapy session.
Here’s the thing. I feel like plenty of people warned me about the unique challenges of toddlerhood, but I honestly was not prepared. For example, let’s talk about snack time. Zander loves snacks. He calls them “Nacks.” So cute, I know. But I learned recently that snack time has gone from, like, normal to legendary difficulty depending on the phase of the moon or something.
I went to get Zander a banana the other day, which is like his third favorite food behind applesauce and Chick-fil-a, and he got so excited, which was my clue that I was on the right track. Awesome. But as I was peeling the banana, and cutting chunks of the banana onto his little plate, he lost his mind. Full tantrum. We’re talking shouting, stomping, tears, from him and me probably. And over the next several minutes I tried serving this banana every single way I knew how. Slices. Chunks. Spears. Arranged artistically like I imagine they’d do it in The Bear or something. None of it worked.
So finally I just handed Zander like the third banana, still in its peel (I had just opened it). And I don’t know how toddlers do this, but on cue he stopped crying, smiled, and walked away eating this banana straight from the peel. That’s all he wanted. A banana straight from the peel.
This is the new level of snacking in our house: It’s no longer just about what we want to eat, it’s also how we want to eat it. Pray for us.
Now, what does that have to do with anything? I promised I had a point, and it’s kind of a rhetorical question: Have you ever tried to solve a problem, only to realize that there was something bigger going on? I’m sure we all have, right?
I did some research, and it turns out that as humans we’re actually not so great at solving the right problems. One business article I found is titled, “Problem-solving Is Wasting Your Employees’ Time.” Talk about click-bait. And they got me. Turns out, this group surveyed over 30 large organizations to discover how much time is spent on what they call, “unnecessary problem-solving.” On average, they found that employees across this organization spent 3 hours per work week trying to solve problems that could have been easily avoided with the proper support. Which means the problems weren’t really the problems; asking for help was the problem.
An older LinkedIn article actually talks about how, at least in a pre-Covid world, organizations seem to have a cultural bias for simply finding solutions to problems and implementing them, rather than taking the time to take a step back and identify the underlying issue and why it’s an issue. They reference a global survey of C-suite executives, 85% of whom agreed that their organizations were bad at problem diagnosis, and 87% of whom agreed that this flaw carried significant costs.
Over and over, the more I read stuff like this (and honestly just considered how this can play out in my own life) I kept coming back to a similar version of the same question: Do I live my life simply trying to solve the next problem, or do I see the bigger thing going on?
Think about how you would answer that question, because in a lot of ways it frames the passage we’re looking at today. We’ll be in Mark chapter 2 if you have a Bible and want to go there. We’ve been in this teaching series we’re calling Unstoppable where we’ve been studying through the book of Mark (one of the four gospels, or biographies, of Jesus—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John), and in this series we’ve been learning how Jesus is more than just teacher, more than just miracle worker. He’s the unstoppable force of God, ushering in a new Kingdom. In other words, amidst everything we see Jesus doing and saying, there’s something bigger happening. And that’s what we’re going after discovering. We pick things up today in Mark chapter 2, starting in verse 1:
A few days later, when Jesus again entered Capernaum, the people heard that he had come home. 2 They gathered in such large numbers that there was no room left, not even outside the door, and he preached the word to them. – Mark 2:1-2 (NIV)
Real quick, we learn that Jesus has come to a city called Capernaum—Capernaum sat on the northern edge of the Sea of Galilee, which was about 60-ish miles north of Jerusalem, and became kind of like Jesus’ base of operations for his Galilean ministry (hence why it says Jesus “came home” in verse 1). That makes sense, then, when we read that Jesus again entered Capernaum, which is to say he’s been here before. That’s an important detail for a couple reasons.
The first reason is because it speaks to what happens next. People hear that Jesus is back in town, and they rally. In fact, if you go back and reread parts of Mark chapter 1, specifically starting in verse 21, you get the story of the first time Jesus was in Capernaum. And what’s crazy is, if you were to compare the two stories, the exact same thing happens to Jesus both times he’s in Capernaum. The first time (in chapter 1), while Jesus is healing Peter’s mother-in-law, the people of the city hear about it and they swarm the house. The story goes that Jesus was healing people and casting out demons well into the evening. So naturally what happens when Jesus comes back to Capernaum, this time (in chapter 2) with a growing reputation and level of fame? It’s a sold-out show. Standing room only.
And here’s the thing: This wouldn’t have caught Jesus off guard. In fact, we get another interesting detail at the end of Mark chapter 1 (v. 45) that suggests Jesus’ ministry and fame had become so visible that he no longer even entered towns to teach—he’d camp out in the wilderness and people would come to him. That’s the second reason why Jesus entering a city like Capernaum to teach is so fascinating. Yes, it was his home base, but he knew it would be crazy. That’s why he opted to teach outside the cities—why make an exception here? (I have thoughts, but we’ll come back to those later)
Here’s what we know at this point: It’s a sold-out show, and we’ve got five guys who arrive late. Look at this, verse 3:
3 Some men came, bringing to him a paralyzed man, carried by four of them. 4 Since they could not get him to Jesus because of the crowd, they made an opening in the roof above Jesus by digging through it and then lowered the mat the man was lying on. – Mark 2:1-4 (NIV)
This is just wild. And probably really illegal. It also speaks to the power of community—who you surround yourself with matters. This guy couldn’t do for himself what his friends were able to do for him. They got him to Jesus. Who do you have in your corner like that? Because sometimes it’s the bold faith of others that gets us to Jesus.
And we don’t really know a lot about these guys except what’s immediately obvious, right? Four friends carrying their fifth friend, who happens to be paralyzed, to go see the Jesus show. Which makes sense! You have to imagine the backstory. Again, we don’t get a lot from the passage itself, so this is purely me wondering a little bit about these guys’ stories. Feel free to disagree with me—if you don’t like it, throw it out—but I wonder if these guys grew up together. I wonder if they attended synagogue together, or if they worked together. I wonder if they knew each other’s families. And I wonder what it was like that day they heard the news, the news of their friend—let’s call him Chris. Sounds like Chris was in an accident, or got sick—we get no indication he was born paralyzed.
And we have to understand, that word paralyzed probably isn’t the best translation of the word from the original Greek. In the New Testament, the word paralutikos is only ever used as a noun, not an adjective. So a better English translation would be paralytic. Chris was a paralytic. Why is that important? Well, go back to your elementary grammar lessons. Adjectives describe something about you; nouns are who or what you are. Again, it makes me wonder: What if Chris’ very identity had become wrapped up in his disability? You get called a name for long enough, and you start to believe that’s all you are. Ever felt defined by your worst mistake, or your worst season?
Paralytic, liar, cheater, fool, coward, moron—the list goes on, and you’ve got your word, right? I know I have mine.
Whatever the case, it’s probably safe to say Chris’ life didn’t look the way, or turn out the way he hoped it would. And here are his four friends, maybe a little shocked, maybe a little stunned, maybe a little angry, but ultimately powerless to do anything to help him. But then they hear about this Jesus guy. He came to their town once before, and man, he did the impossible. He healed people, he cast out demons. And if you’re Chris’ friends, you’re thinking, “If Jesus did those things for other people, maybe he can do it for Chris, too.”
So, they put Chris on a mat—maybe he’s already been there for a while at this point—and they take him down the road. But they’re too late. The only reason they know Jesus is even there is because they see the crowd. No way they’re getting Chris through the door. But…what about the roof? Seriously, talk about tenacity! These are good friends. They climb to the roof. They start digging through it. Don’t ask me where they got the shovels. They lower Chris through a literal hole. Don’t ask me where they got rope. And imagine the people in the house. Jesus has got like dust falling on him while he teaches, the people have to be getting excited, like, “Oooh this is it! What’s about to happen?!”
And here’s Chris, now right in front of Jesus! The anticipation is building. What is Jesus going to do? Check it out, verse 5:
5 When Jesus saw their faith, he said to the paralyzed man, “Son, your sins are forgiven.” – Mark 2:5 (NIV)
And you have to imagine the collective breath leaving the room. Chris, his friends, and everybody within earshot going, “Huh?! What did he say?” “He said, ‘your sins are forgiven.’” “What does that even mean??” This isn’t what the four guys expected or even wanted for their friend! “Excuse me, Jesus. Um, thank you, but I don’t know if you noticed. Chris can’t walk. We were kind of hoping you’d do something about his legs.” Fascinatingly enough, there was a common belief in the day that one’s personal sins led to disease, so maybe people thought Jesus was speaking to that (although Jesus himself didn’t believe this is always the case). Either way, Jesus is speaking to the root cause of disease and death—our sinful rebellion against God—but I’m not sure that’s what the crowds really wanted.
Have you ever been in a situation where you thought God would show up one way, but he didn’t? You thought, or hoped, or maybe even believed, he would do one thing, but then he didn’t? You thought he would do one thing, but actually something totally unexpected happened instead?
Like, you prayed God would send you a husband or a wife, but you’ve been single (or single again) for way longer than you thought you’d be. You prayed that your marriage would make it. It didn’t. You prayed your son or daughter would come home. They didn’t. You asked God to take the cancer away. But the test came back positive. Again. You’ve been praying for a long time that God would bring you a job. And so far, he hasn’t. Or at least that’s how it feels. Maybe you’ve been doing this whole 21 days of prayer thing, but it doesn’t feel like God is there at all. It’s been radio silence.
These guys are feeling what many of us have felt. The energy in the room that day had to include shock, confusion, and disappointment. But Jesus is so smart. And he’s so kind. He’s making a much bigger point, and he’s going to use another group of people who were present that day to do it. Their response wasn’t necessarily shock, confusion, or disappointment—they just got mad. Let’s keep going, verse 6:
6 Now some teachers of the law were sitting there, thinking to themselves, 7 “Why does this fellow talk like that? He’s blaspheming! Who can forgive sins but God alone?” 8 Immediately Jesus knew in his spirit that this was what they were thinking in their hearts, and he said to them, “Why are you thinking these things? 9 Which is easier: to say to this paralyzed man, ‘Your sins are forgiven,’ or to say, ‘Get up, take your mat and walk’? – Mark 2:6-9 (NIV)
Side note: It’s never a good idea to think critical thoughts about Jesus when Jesus is in the room because he can read your mind! Jesus is fully man and fully God. Perplexing, yes, but the fact remains. These religious leaders are basically asking him, “Jesus, who do you think you are, God?!” The irony obviously being, yes, he’s God. And in his divinity, Jesus hears these guys’ thoughts. So, as he so often does in situations like this—where there’s doubt, or disdain, or disapproval, especially from the religious people—Jesus responds with a question.
What’s easier to say? “Your sins are forgiven?” or “Get up and walk?” Here’s the answer: It’s easier to say your sins are forgiven. Why? Because there’s no way to back it up! How would you know it worked? You can’t. The much more audacious thing to say, then, is, “Hey man, on the count of three I want you to stand up. One, two, three…” See, to say that with confidence, Jesus is about to reveal one of two things: Either he’s the real deal, or he’s a total fraud. And if he’s the real deal, we might want to pay attention to everything else he has to say here. This is the point Jesus is making, and he says it like this in verse 10:
10 But I want you to know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins.” So he said to the man, 11 “I tell you, get up, take your mat and go home.” 12 He got up, took his mat and walked out in full view of them all. This amazed everyone and they praised God, saying, “We have never seen anything like this!” – Mark 2:10-12 (NIV)
The crowd goes wild! But pay attention to why they’re cheering. It isn’t because Jesus offers forgiveness of sins; it’s because the paralytic can walk now. Scholars have noted that Mark often does this throughout his gospel. He calls into contrast peoples’ tendency to focus on what Jesus can do—the miracles, the healings, the teaching—rather than who Jesus is. So I imagine as the entire crowd like, conga-lines out of the house—Chris leading the way—Jesus is in the back, like, “Um, guys, you missed the point…”
See, Jesus is ushering in a new Kingdom, where he’s the King, and his Father, God, has sent him with the authority to forgive sins, to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim freedom for the captives. That word “forgive” is used four times in this passage. It is the message Jesus is trying to communicate: A restored relationship with God is made possible through me, Jesus says, and that is being made available to you.
It’s like he’s saying, “Please don’t miss the real headline here, which is not that a guy could start walking again, but that God is so crazy about you that he sent me, his son, to do whatever it takes (short of sinning) in order to make a way for you to come back to the Father from whatever sin and shame has been keeping you locked-up.” Jesus says, “It’s forgiven. I paid for it.”
So why does Jesus use a man on a mat to proclaim this message of unstoppable forgiveness? I think it’s because he wants to drive a point home for us that goes like this: Jesus is more interested in saving you than simply fixing you.
And the million-dollar question becomes: What is our response to that?
What is our response to the reality that Jesus offers so much more than just quick, temporary fixes to the things that we sometimes convince ourselves matter more than they actually do?
And I’m not saying that your problems don’t matter to Jesus. Go back to the story—Jesus still healed this guy’s legs! But Jesus also knew that eventually, regardless of whether he healed Chris’ legs or not, that wouldn’t be Chris’ biggest problem. What does that mean? Well, where is Chris now? He’s dead. And Jesus loves Chris, and he loves you, way too much to settle for simply going after temporary solutions to temporary problems when he knows there is so much more at stake: our place in God’s family, our eternity with or without God.
Jesus is more interested in saving you than simply fixing you.
So be honest. What’s your response to that? It might look different for everyone, but there were at least three responses from the people who were present that day that I think we can learn from. See if you resonate with any of these.
One response is:
You can get MAD.
Just like the religious leaders. “Jesus, who do you think you are…?” See, they have such a fundamental misunderstanding of who Jesus actually is that they get mad at, they get offended by, the very gift of grace that Jesus is offering them too because they can’t see past their own expectations of who they thought Jesus should be.
And we can look at these guys 2,000 years later and say, “Well I’d never do that.” But how often have you experienced this, whether you’ve been walking with Jesus for a long time or you’re on the front end of exploring what that even means. A day comes when Jesus confronts you on something that doesn’t align with his best version of your life—maybe he does this through his Word, maybe through your time in prayer, maybe through a friend of yours who’s another Christ follower. By the way, the only reason Jesus would even care to confront these things in our lives is because he loves us too much to let those things take us out. But when Jesus gets too close to that thing, whatever it is, our response can be, “Stay in your lane, Jesus! You want to get me a job? Fine. You want to heal my parents? Great. But don’t touch that part of my life.”
And our anger, our irritation, our frustration actually betrays a misunderstanding of who Jesus really is. If we’re not careful, we can put Jesus in this comfortable little box based on our understanding or expectation of who he is, or what we think he wants for our lives, then get mad at him for breaking out of the box we put him in! Jesus says, “I can do so much more in your life if you’d let me have it. All of it.”
Jesus is more interested in saving you than simply fixing you.
Another response you can have is:
You can get DISTRACTED.
And man, this one is subtle. But again, go back to how the story ends. You have crowds of people who watched Jesus do two things. Number one, he looks at this man and says, “Son, your sins are forgiven,” and number two, he looks at the same man and says, “Get up, take your mat and go home.” And I believe without a doubt that before Chris even had the thought to stand up on legs that hadn’t worked in who knows how long, Jesus was 100% telling the truth and his sins had, in fact, been forgiven. Jesus just changed the trajectory of his entire eternity, but that’s not when the crowds started cheering, was it? No, the crowds didn’t start praising God until after Chris walked out the door.
And you have to imagine, there was someone in the crowd that day who was probably more excited about what Jesus just did in someone else’s life than he or she was excited about what Jesus could do in their life. They got distracted by the temporary miracle, the temporary breakthrough, and I think we can do the same thing, can’t we?
See if any of this sounds familiar. We come to church and worship is just on fire. Like, the band is killing it, the energy in the room is awesome, and our conclusion is, “Man, church was awesome today!” But did we miss what Jesus was trying to teach us through the worship, through the song?
Maybe we took on the challenge from this last 21 days of prayer to be more intentional at carving out time during our days to be in prayer, to be in scripture, but over time if we’re not careful these rhythms can start to look like another pair of items on our to-do lists, so we approach them with the same just-get-it-done mentality as we would packing a lunch or picking up groceries. On the other hand, we might swing the other way and become hyper-fixated on what we’re learning about prayer and scripture. Either way, we can start to lose the sense of curiosity that comes with actually getting to know Jesus through prayer and scripture.
What about this one? You came to church for the first time, or the first time in a long time. Maybe you’re in a season of genuine searching. Like, you just have to know if this whole Jesus thing is real, and if it is, can it make any real difference in your life? Or maybe you’re skeptical about the whole thing. Your friend has been inviting you for a long time, and you finally said yes to get them off your back. You came, you’re here, but you have plenty of doubts and questions. That’s not a bad thing by the way—Jesus is so patient to sit with us in our questions—but I wonder if sometimes we hold up the questions as this sort of smoke screen. “Well Jesus, what about this, and this, and this, and this…” And we never slow down long enough to simply get to know him.
Jesus is more interested in saving you than simply fixing you.
You can get mad, you can get distracted, or, response number three:
You can get UP.
You can get off the mat. As in, you can stand in the reality of what Jesus says is true about you the moment you put your faith in him to forgive your sins, cancel your debt, restore you to right-standing (right relationship) with the Father, and bring you back into God’s family where you belong.
Listen, when Jesus looked at the man and said, “Your sins are forgiven—get up!” the only person in the room at that point who could have kept him pinned to the floor was himself. At that moment, Jesus was making it clear that by his authority to bring unstoppable forgiveness and grace, there was now nothing standing in the way of this man and the life and freedom Jesus was offering. The only person who could turn it down was himself! And you might think, “Why would he turn it down?! That’s nuts!” But how often do we do the same thing?
See, whether you’re a Christ follower or not, I think we can all be guilty of this. I know I can be, so I’ll speak for myself. I can look at everything Jesus has done in my life, or wants to do in my life, or could do in my life—like, the things I’m even a little scared to hope for because it seems like they’re just too good to be true; the levels of hope and freedom that I used to think were impossible—I can imagine those things from Jesus, and my first response can be, “Okay Jesus, I see where you want to take me, but let me just get a few things organized over here first. Let me just clean up this part of my life first.” That’d be like the guy on the mat saying to Jesus, after Jesus just told him to get up, “Jesus, I hear you, but why don’t I just go ahead and operate anyway, just to be safe.”
I say this with so much love, probably because I need to be reminded of it more than anyone else right now: We can’t save ourselves. If we could, we would have done it by now! Jesus says, “I have done everything necessary to wipe away your sin and your shame—just receive it, and get up off the mat you’ve been pinned to for so long.”
All we do is receive. That’s it. So we’re going to remind ourselves of that this morning by taking communion.
The apostle Paul, in writing to the church at Corinth, describes the night Jesus was arrested, which would set in motion events leading ultimately to his being crucified, and buried in a tomb, and his rising from the grave three days later, just like he said he would. Before that, though, we see this final gathering between Jesus and his disciples, his closest friends. Look at this in 1 Corinthians chapter 11, starting in verse 23:
23 The Lord Jesus, on the night he was betrayed, took bread, 24 and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, “This is my body, which is for you; do this in remembrance of me.”
25 In the same way, after supper he took the cup, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood; do this, whenever you drink it, in remembrance of me.” 26 For whenever you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.
1 Corinthians 11:23-26 (NIV)
To proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes is to remind our hearts and our minds, as well as to remind each other since we do this together as a community of Christ followers, that Jesus’ death paid the price for the wages of my sin and your sin—choices we made to actively choose our will be done in the universe, not God’s. Proclaiming the Lord’s death is the shout of humility that says Jesus’ death, and his rising from the grave, achieved for us the means by which we can experience his life, and love, and freedom right now—life, love, and freedom that we could never earn for ourselves. This little cracker and this cup of juice remind us that we don’t have to stay pinned to the mat anymore. Why? Because Jesus paid that debt, once and for all. Grace and forgiveness were bought for you and for me with the precious blood of Jesus Christ. What’s left for us is just to receive.
Around here at Gateway we have what’s called an open table, which means if you’ve made the decision to surrender your life to Jesus, then you go ahead and take the elements for yourself. If you’ve not made that decision yet, don’t take them (there’s no pressure)—instead, let this be a moment where someone like me reminds you one more time: God loves you, he’s never stopped pursuing you, and the life and freedom Jesus offers is for you too. It’s what saved my life. And you just have to receive it.
Let me pray for us, and then the band is going to play this beautiful song over us. There’s a line in it that talks about an altar—in Jesus’ time this was where sacrifices were made for the forgiveness of sins. That is, until Jesus became the perfect sacrifice on our behalf. See, the altar is a place of surrender. It’s where we come to the end of ourselves. Open hands. You might be there right now. Communion reminds us, in that place of total surrender, I’m not enough, but you are Jesus.
So when you’re ready, take the bread, and take the juice. Then stand and sing with us.
