February 8, 2015 · John 4:48–50

Healing The Royal Official's Son

"Unless you people see signs and wonders," Jesus told him, "you will never believe." The royal official said, "Sir, come down before my child dies." "Go," Jesus replied. "Your son will live." And the man took Jesus at his word and departed.

“Basically we need to just get on board with what the Spirit's doing. Finally, in terms of discipling, I want to talk about a mature, obedient faith. The mission of this church is to create mature disciples. That's one of the lines in our mission statement. People are kind of asking about this — "mature". What does this maturity mean? It means to trust in God fully, to not be washed around. Let's begin accepting Jesus at his word. Do we need God to serve us? Do we need God to do things for us so that we obey? That's the sign of immature faith. If we're always focused on what we're getting from our faith, on what God is doing for us, then we start to forget who we are, and more importantly we start to forget who Jesus is. We don't follow Jesus as a self-help strategy. We follow Jesus because he's the king of the universe, and he deserves our loyalty. Now, Jesus does love and care for his disciples. He blesses his disciples. But that's not guaranteed materially. He will bless us spiritually — but some of those blessings are things like perseverance, endurance. Which means you're persevering through some bad stuff and you're enduring some pain. There is a cost to discipleship. There's a loss that comes. We're gonna explore this as we enter into Lent season. Now, Jesus is asking us to move past our faith based on what he did for us. He knows, he understands, that we come to him and sometimes that's how we begin things, because we're immature, we're children in the faith.”