Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 889
Delivered on Sunday Morning, SEPTEMBER 5, 1869, by, the Metropolitan Tabernacle, Newington.
“He healed them that had need of healing.”- Luke 9:11.
“HE healed them that had need of healing,” that is to say, on this gracious occasion no single case came before Him which baffled Him. However rampant might be the disease, however extreme the condition of the patient’s malady, Jesus worked an instantaneous cure. And truly to this very hour no spiritual sickness has defeated the great Physician. No sick souls have ever been carried away from His feet to perish hopelessly because their need outreached His power. Satan’s worst is soon undone by Jesus’ best. The Son of God, in no solitary instance, has been foiled. Still in the goings forth of His mercy He has “healed them that had need of healing.”
The text also indicates that our Lord continued unweariedly to heal all the multitudes that came. From morning till night, as fast as the various patients presented themselves, He worked their care. There was an eye to be opened here— hearing to be given there, a lame man to be made to leap—a withered limb to be outstretched. There was leprosy to be cleansed, dropsy to be dried, fever, epilepsy, madness and all manner of maladies to be subdued, and Jesus paused not, virtue continued still to flow to heal “them that had need of healing.” Though they had been countless as the sands, His love, like the sea, would have touched them all. His restoring power was by no means exhausted—the oil only ceased to flow when there was not another vessel to fill!
Had the needy continued still to come even to this day, our Master would still have multiplied His miracles of mercy. In spiritual sicknesses, the great Healer of our sin-sick nature has by no means declined in power. He is far from being exhausted by the number of applicants who have come to Him. We do well to sing—
“Your precious blood Shall never lose its power, Till all the ransomed Church of God Is saved to sin no more.”
If this present world should continue through a century of thousands of years, yet no sinner shall apply to Jesus for pardon and find that His cleansing efficacy has ceased! So long as sin shall pollute this earth, the Savior shall remain to purify those who believe in Him.
But the text seemed particularly, to me, as it flashed upon my mind, to indicate this further Truth of God—that as the Redeemer was neither baffled by any one disease, nor drained of His healing virtue by the multitude—as the diseases which He healed were intense, the cures which He worked were memorable. They were not feigned sicknesses which were brought before Him, nor counterfeit miseries, else His cures also had been shams and He Himself had been a mock Savior. Those whom He healed had deep, true, undoubted, urgent need of healing! They were not pretended patients, with sores which they had manufactured for the occasion. They were not sentimental sufferers with griefs imagined but not existent.
Our Master worked health for persons who were well known to be cruelly diseased—in whom the mischief was no dream, the misery no fiction—and consequently the cures which He worked were no fictions. either. They were evident, permanent and true. Fancied ills He left to others. He healed those that had need of healing. Sentimental grievances may be left to jangling philosophers and hair-splitting rabbis—Jesus deals with actual evils whose cure is urgent. Of all men who ever lived, the Prophet of Nazareth was the most practical. He did nothing for show, nothing for mere custom, but everything to work solid good and erase real evil.
Not a motion of His finger has He for feigned or fancied grievance, but all His power goes forth to those who have true need of healing. We shall take this thought, this morning, and dwell upon it. It seems to us to be full of comfort. May God grant it may bring into light and liberty some who have long been bound.
I. Our first head, this morning, shall be that THOSE WHOM CHRIST HAS SAVED WILL ALL CONFESS THAT THEY HAD NEED OF SAVING. Out of the whole multitude who have believed in Jesus, there is not one to whom His salvation has been a superfluity. I will be spokesman for them, this morning, according to my ability—they will all confess that what they have received was what they greatly needed—that the salvation which Jesus has given them was a salvation without which they would have perished everlastingly.
For first, Beloved, all the saved saints confess that they had need of healing through their natural depravity. There is a sad bias in us all towards sin. Whoever may dispute concerning original sin as a universal fact, all the saints confess it as a particular evil in their own case. We are compelled to own that David’s confession must be ours, “Behold, I was shaped in iniquity; and in sin did my mother conceive me.” Our nature was corrupted at its fountainhead. When at any time we were put upon right courses by the stress of moral persuasion, or by the urgency of fear, yet still our heart labored to follow its own devices against wind and tide.