What Happens After the Revival?
Matthew 17:14-27
I want you to connect these verses with the opening verses of the 17th chapter. In the opening verses we have the tremendous, exciting account of the transfiguration experience of the Lord Jesus. Jesus took three of His disciples - Peter, James and John - and carried them, the Bible says, to a high mountain apart and there before them the Lord Jesus was transfigured.
And the Bible says that His face began to radiate above the brightness of the sun. It’s what we call the transfiguration experience of the Lord Jesus. It is one of those great mountaintop experiences of the Lord.
The verses we are studying tonight are the verses that take place or circumstances that take place after that transfiguration experience. Jesus goes all the way from the mountain of transfiguration down into this valley. He goes from the mountain of glory down to the valley of misery. There was glory on the mountain.
Moses and Elijah from the Old Testament appear there. The voice of the heavenly Father is heard there. The Lord Jesus Christ in all His splendor is seen there. There is glory on the mountain. Now there is misery in the valley. There is a violent boy. There is a distraught father. There are powerless disciples. There inquisitive crowds. There are ridiculing Scribes and Pharisees.
So, we go all the way from the glory to the agony. We go all the way from the heights of inspiration down to the depths of human need. I don't know about you but I really prefer the mountain experiences of life. I enjoy it when I'm up on the mountain. Life does have its mountaintop experiences.
God gives us along the way some wonderful mountaintop experiences of life and personally I enjoy that. I enjoy it when things are good and life is on the mountaintop, when the glory comes down and when the blessings of God are real and the presence of the Lord is there in all His splendor and all of His glory.
I personally don't get real excited when I have to go down in the valley experiences of life. I don't enjoy it when you get down there where the problems are. I'm not real thrilled when you get down there and things don't work out the way you want them to work out.
You need the mountaintop experiences. You have to have those times when you are alone with the Lord on the glory mountains. You need those times for inspiration. You need those times to draw special strength from the Lord. You need those times when you have some solitude and you get alone with the Lord.
But our solitude should not cause us to be solitary. Our experiences on the mountains ought not to cause us to neglect those in the valley who have needs that only the Lord Jesus Christ can meet. So, we go now down into a valley experience because there is a man who has a problem with a boy. The disciples of the Lord Jesus aren't able to do anything about it and the Lord Himself has to come down and He has to do something about it.
It's really quite a chaotic scene. We have this boy and the father and we have these disciples and the scribes are picking at them and causing them problems.
Then, of course, we have the Lord Himself. Keep in mind that the miracles of our Lord, in the physical realm, are illustrations of what the Lord can do in the spiritual realm. I want you to see also the scene which we are going to study in these verses give us a composite picture of the world in which we live - a world that is desperately in need, a powerless church too many times and a loving Savior who wants to help people right where they are.
I want to call you attention, first of all, in these verses to -
I. The PLEA of the Father.
The Lord Jesus comes down and the father sees Him. The father comes to the Savior and he makes requests.
We are told several things about this father and his son. In verse 15 we know that his son is epileptic.
When you look at Mark and Luke you will discover some other details that are given. We know that he was an only son. We also know that this is a problem that had began to trouble the boy since He was just a little boy and had been going on all these years since he was just a little fellow.
Now as you study the miracles of the Lord, particularly, the healing miracles, we discover that generally speaking a physical problem is a symbol or sign of a spiritual problem. And usually, the physical healing is incidental to the spiritual healing. It is often simply the vehicle that gets a person to Jesus for so the spiritual need can be addressed.
In fact, with this boy we discover he has a physical ailment that is demonic in nature.
Notice verse 18
The Bible teaches that there is a real personality in the spiritual realm known as the devil. If you doubt that, I would suggest that you do this: GO to a revival, and get your life right with God, and then just try to live for the Lord. You will discover very quickly there is a devil and he is interested in you and your behavior.
Now as far as the little boy and his family are concerned, this all started when he was just a little boy. But for the disciples who had been with Jesus it all started after they had been on the mountaintop.
And when they come down they are confronted with this desperate father with a desperate situation and he had come to the disciples and the Bible says that the disciples hadn't been able to do anything about it. They were absolutely helpless, powerless to do anything about it. In fact the man says in verse 16 specifically that he came to the disciples and they could not cure him. Isn't that a sad statement?
That's tragic. He brought him to the ones he thought would be able to help him. He brought his son to people he thought would be able to help and they were totally powerless to do anything about it.
Isn't that a picture of the church in the world today? Isn't that a picture of a powerless, prayerless church today? Isn't that the picture of too many churches today that have the saving Gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ, the answer to the basic needs of the human heart, the church of the Lord Jesus Christ that has a message that can change people's lives?
Yet people come to the churches and they don't find any help whatsoever. God have mercy on us. The plea of the father.
II. The POWER of the Lord.
It's wonderful to notice that Jesus showed up just at the right time. He always does. There those disciples were - absolutely powerless. Mark, in his parallel account, says that the scribes were questioning them. That means they were really giving them a hard time. They were ridiculing them and taunting them and making fun of them.
The world takes great pleasure in a powerless church. The world likes to make fun of the church of the Lord Jesus Christ when it doesn't have the power that God said it could have.
So, they were sticking the blade of ridicule into those disciples and making fun of them. Here comes the Lord Jesus Christ. Notice what He does.
verse 17
Do you detect just a little disappointment there? Do you sense a little frustration in those words of the Lord there? Can you almost see the Lord as He takes a deep breath and sighs? Here is the Lord who has power. Here is the Lord who had given His disciples power. You will read the earlier accounts of these disciples and Jesus specifically gave them power to solve situations just like this. The power was available. Yet, Jesus said, "O, faithful and perverse generation."
Notice the order of the words there. See what Jesus said. The word "perverse" means to twist or bend like a piece of twisted pottery. It means to twist something out of shape - to pervert it. It is the picture of the moral condition of a generation of people. It is a graphic picture of what we are experiencing in the moral decline and the moral perversion of American society. We are living in a perverse society. We are living in a day that is about as perverted as you can possibly get.
But how did it get that way? You have to look at the first word - faithless. He says, "faithless and perverse generation." A loss of faith always precedes a rise of immorality. When a people lose their confidence and their trust and their faith in the absolutes of the Word of God that's when the moral decline sets in.
It's the book of Romans, the first chapter. Read very carefully that first chapter and read about the moral decay that the Scriptures declare there and you will see that it all started when they turned their back against the revelation of God. A loss of faith always brings perversion in society. That's what has happened in America. There was a time when we could pray and read the Bible in the schools, but we don't want that in America now.
We want morals. We don't want them to burn our schools down. We don't want them shooting up in the halls. We don't want that to happen, but we don't want God. Well you can't have it both ways. You are either going to have to have the Lord and faith or you can't have morals.
Jesus said, “Bring him to me”. Did you see that? Education says, "bring him to me." Big government says, "bring him to me." And they can do a certain amount of good. Other people say, "bring them to me." But if you really want to get people helped, ultimately you have to bring them to Jesus.
The real solutions to the problems that people face basically is to bring people to Jesus Christ. That's what we are all about here. We have to bring people to Jesus. Don't you think this lost world is knocking down the doors of the church trying to find Jesus.
I read about these seeker services. Seeker-friendly
services. Make the service so that seekers will come. You’ve got to have a certain kind of music and you can’t preach loud or long because it’s not what the seekers are looking for. Only problem with that is that the book of Romans says "there is none that seeks after God..." People aren't seeking after God. If you think this world is clamoring for the Lord Jesus Christ you don't know much about the world in which we live in or the Bible you hold in your hand.
This world isn't interested in Jesus. This world crucified the Lord Jesus Christ. So, we have a job. We have to go out there and bring them to Jesus. We’ve got to come down from the mountain and go to them.
And notice verse 18
Jesus rebuked the demon, the demon departed out of him and the child was cured from that very hour. I mean, right on the spot.
I have good news for you. You can come to this wonderful Jesus Christ tonight and give your heart and your life to Him and you can walk out of here set free, forgiven by the power and the mercy of the Lord Jesus Christ.
III. The PROBLEM of the Disciples.
When the scene is all over and the man has gratefully had his son given back to him again, verse 19 says that the disciples get Jesus apart. That means they get Him over the side by themselves. I don't blame them. I'd be kind of like them. A little embarrassed and red-faced, too.
So, they do it in private. "Excuse us, Lord, why couldn't we cast him out?"
There's some hope in that question because the disciples at least are concerned about the fact that they couldn't do anything about it. Some people don't even seem to care. Some people area like Samson. God's been gone from them so long they don't even know that the Lord has left them.
But there is hope for a church and there is hope for a Christian and there is hope for a Sunday School class when they get concerned about their powerlessness.
Is your Sunday School class growing? Does it disturb you that it is not, if it is not? Are you having anybody saved in your Sunday School class? When is the last time you had anybody saved" Have you had anybody saved lately.
What about the lifestyle of the members of our Sunday school class? Are they living a Christian lifestyle? Are they living a life that is consistent with their testimony. If they're not does that ever bother you? It ought to bother us. There's hope when people get concerned about their powerlessness.
So, these disciples come to Jesus and they say, "why couldn't we cast him out?" Then Jesus talks about their problem and He gives them the solution to the problem and the reason for their lack of power.
Jesus, in verses 20 and 21, basically gives the reasons why they didn't have the power to do anything about this poor, demon-possessed boy and couldn't relieve the anxiety of this broken-hearted father. There are some problems that are of such severity and of such degree that it takes an unusual accumulation of spiritual power to do anything about them.
What Jesus is going to say in these two verses basically is that the power was there all the time.
The disciples had just failed to appropriate the power. We are living in abnormal days. Normal church work is not going to get it. Normal church life is not going to cut it.
We are facing the powers of Satan like we have never faced it in America and it is going to take out-of-the-ordinary means if we are going to do anything about the problems we are encountering in our day.
Verse 20
He says the first reason for your problem is your lack of faith - your unbelief. Then he goes into a little discussion about faith. He said if you have faith as a grain of mustard seed. A grain of mustard seed was a tiny seed. He said you could say to this mountain - be moved - and it would be remove and nothing would be impossible unto you.
What is He talking about? That's a figure of speech. Mountains are figures of difficulties. We all use it that way. We talk about a mountainous problem - a mountain in front of me. Jesus is saying if you have a mountain in your life - a mountain of difficulty in front of you it is faith in the Lord just the size of a mustard seed that can remove the difficulty.
He is saying it's not the size of the mustard seed - that's not the point. But the fact that faith can grow. Faith can get bigger. Faith can have an object. If we aren't careful we get so used to the ordinary and the average that we just let things go on like they are and we content ourselves with what's God is doing now when God wants to do so much more.
God blesses us here. We praise God for ecery thing that happens, and those who rededicated their lives to the Lord and all that.
But if you aren't very careful you say we are going to have some good singing and some preaching and there will be a sweet fellowship there and God will save some and it was all good and just go right on powerless.
But I would daresay everthing that needed to happen didn’t happen, and some who could have been saved didn’t get saved, and some who needed to make a fresh commitment are still mad and bitter and hateful and backslidden.
And we need to respond to that by exercising our faith in the Lord and believing God for the impossible.
He says, "Nothing shall be impossible to you." It means nothing God wants you to do shall be impossible to you. Don't be absurd about it. So, the first ingredient that solves the problem of our powerlessness is faith in God.
The second ingredient is in verse 21. "
You have to pray. Pray is what links us to heaven. Faith is the foundation that creates the possibility of God work in our midst. Prayer is what gets us in contact.
Prayer is the connecting link that connects us to the power of God. We literally can pray the power of God down in a situation. Prayer links us to heaven.
What is fasting? From the looks of most of us, most of us don't know a whole lot about fasting. Prayer
links us to heaven. Fasting disconnects us from this earth. There's nothing more basic than eating. Fasting is depriving ourselves of something that is an earthly necessity in order to accomplish a spiritual purpose.
Jesus didn't say a whole lot about fasting but what He did say was very significant. One thing Jesus said was if you are going to fast - don't go around bragging about it. It's not something you brag about. It's not something you publicize.
Then Jesus talked about fasting in terms of getting so concerned about spiritual matters that physical matters lose their importance.
Let me illustrate it this way. Think about this man in scripture. He has a sick child and he wants to get him to Jesus. He’s already been to the disciples and they couldn’t help. You can sense the urgency and fervor in his voice. He’s not concerned about his own well-being and feeding his stomack; only one thing is on his mind and that is to get some relief for this boy, whatever it takes. He is totally occupied with the physical sickness of that child.
He has been so concerned about the needs around him in the life of his child that his own physical appetites and hungers are unnoticed.
Jesus is saying there are some cases that are going to take out-of-the-ordinary means in order to get the victory. Some of you have some young people who are giving you a real problem. The devil is trying to get his clutches on that boy, that girl. Things aren't going the way you want them to go. It's not going to be business as usual if you are going to get the victory in that situation.
You are going to have to have faith in the Lord and trust in the Lord like you never have. You are going to have to pray like you have never prayed before. You’re going to have to get to the point that you are willing to devote yourself totally to the spiritual to the exclusion of some other things in your life in order to get the victory.
I like the mountains, but I have found in life that the God who is the God of the mountains is also the God of the valleys. The God who is real on the mountain is just as real in the valleys. Do you know this God? Have you received Him as your personal Savior? You can be saved tonight.
