Text: Luke 17:11-19
11 Now on his way to Jerusalem, Jesus traveled along the border between Samaria and Galilee. 12 As he was going into a village, ten men who had leprosy met him. They stood at a distance 13 and called out in a loud voice, “Jesus, Master, have pity on us!” 14 When he saw them, he said, “Go, show yourselves to the priests.” And as they went, they were cleansed. 15 One of them, when he saw he was healed, came back, praising God in a loud voice. 16 He threw himself at Jesus’ feet and thanked him—and he was a Samaritan. 17 Jesus asked, “Were not all ten cleansed? Where are the other nine? 18 Was no one found to return and give praise to God except this foreigner?” 19 Then he said to him, “Rise and go; your faith has made you well.”
Why Thank We All Our God?
- For His mercy
- For His healing
Dear fellow redeemed in Christ,
Introduction: I’m guessing that most, if not all of us here today are familiar with the hymn Now Thank We All Our God. It’s one of the most popular Thanksgiving hymns in our hymnal, and possibly in America. It was written in the early 1600s by the Lutheran pastor and hymn writer Martin Rinkart who served in the German town of Eilenburg during the horrors of the Thirty Years War. Eilenburg became an overcrowded refuge for the surrounding area. This led to epidemic and famine and, in 1637, the Great Pestilence. At the beginning of that year, there were four ministers in Eilenburg. But one abandoned his post for healthier areas and could not be persuaded to return. Pastor Rinkart officiated at the funerals of the other two. As the only pastor left, he often conducted services for as many as 40 to 50 people per day. In May of that year, his own wife died. By the end of the year, the refugees had to be buried in trenches without services. Yet living in a world dominated by death, Pastor Rinkart wrote the following prayer for his children to offer to the Lord: “Now thank we all our God With hearts and hands and voices; Who wondrous things hath done, In whom this world rejoices. Who, from our mother’s arms, Hath led us on our way, With countless gifts of love, And still is ours today.” And so today we consider the question, “Why thank we all our God?” We see that we have every reason to thank Him, first, for His mercy, and second, for His healing.
I. [For His mercy] Everyone here today… in fact everyone in the world… we’re all beggars. And we’re all like the 10 lepers in our account. Not just the nine who didn’t return and give thanks, and not just the one who did return to thank his Lord. (We’ve all had times of thankFULness… and thankLESSness.) But we’re all like the lepers in that none of the lepers had anything good to offer Jesus for His mercy. They had the skin disease called leprosy. Now in the Bible, when a person has leprosy, it can refer to a number of different skin diseases, not just modern-day leprosy, which is known as Hansen’s Disease. But I want to tell you about Hansen’s Disease because I think it illustrates well how bad this disease was for people.
The myth is that if someone has leprosy, like Hansen’s Disease, their fingers and toes just start falling off. That’s just a myth; that’s not exactly how it works. What does happen is that their nerves, especially towards the edge of the skin are severely impaired. So their toes or fingers might shrivel up. They can also contract very serious infections on these areas. And so they do, in a sense, lose their toes and fingers and other extremities.
Leprosy, in Jesus’ day, was considered highly contagious. The lepers were forced to live outside of the city limits, away from other people, in “leper colonies.” They were complete outcasts from the community. A leper was a person who was regarded as already dead, and that’s why they were considered unclean. In Leviticus, Moses gives instruction regarding the man or woman who is diagnosed with leprosy. He writes, “The person with such an infectious disease must wear torn clothes, let his hair be unkempt, cover the lower part of his face and cry out, ‘Unclean! Unclean!’ As long as he has the infection he remains unclean. He must live alone; he must live outside the camp.”[1]
Not only were these 10 men physically diseased and considered dead… but they were spiritually diseased and dead. All 10 of these men were sinners. No worse than anyone else, but certainly no better either. The thanklessness of the nine shows their sinful nature. Does that mean that the one thankful leper, the Samaritan, was not a sinner? No, he was every bit as sinful as the rest. And so, physically and spiritually diseased and dead, what could these 10 men ever hope to offer our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ? Nothing. They had nothing. And that’s why when they called out to Jesus for mercy, they called Him their Master. They recognized they were completely at His mercy.
As I mentioned, we’re in no better shape. Like the lepers, we have nothing to offer; we’re all sinners. The prophet Isaiah writes that all our “righteous acts are like filthy rags.”[2] On our own, we’ve done no good thing for which God should show us love or mercy. And like the lepers, we’re outcasts. But it’s not just from the local community, we’re outcasts from God. We don’t deserve to even be in His presence. And our “disease of sin,” if you want to call it that, makes it so that we are dead, too. We’re dead in our trespasses.[3]
And like, at least the nine lepers, our thanklessness shows our undeserving character. It’s so easy to take our earthly blessings for granted. It’s so easy to forget that, despite how hard we may have worked for all of the earthly goods that we have, they are nothing more than gifts from the Lord. And more significant than the fact that we aren’t always as appreciative of our earthly gifts as we should be… is the fact that we often fail to consider the significance of our spiritual blessings. Isn’t this what happens when we worry? We think, “I know I have eternal glories beyond the grave, but that’s not important right now. What’s important is my earthly needs right now.” And when we say that, we trivialize all that Christ has done for us. Clearly we have nothing to offer our Lord and Savior either. And so, like the lepers, we cry out “Lord, have mercy upon us!”
Like the ten lepers in our account, we’re all in the same boat. For them, the Jew had no advantage over the Samaritan, who was considered to be of lower standing and a second-class citizen. But as lepers and sinners, they were all beggars. And the same is true for us. No matter our church attendance, no matter our financial state, we’re all equally in need of a Savior. And we’re all equally in need of His mercy.
Transition: But Jesus sees us, as He saw the lepers. That’s a significant word in our text because the natural human reaction would have been to just pass the lepers by. But Jesus saw them and He recognized their need. And in the same way, He recognizes our need.
We, too, come to our Lord and Savior as beggars, with nothing to offer. And when He has blessed us, we have often failed to be as grateful as we should have been. But thank God for His mercy. It’s a mercy we can count on. As the words of the old hymn Rock of Ages say, “Nothing in my hand I bring, Simply to Thy cross I cling.” He has been merciful; it’s mercy we can count on. And He has brought us healing, a healing we can count on.
II. [For His healing] In our account today, Jesus physically healed all of the lepers. It didn’t matter if they were Jews or Samaritans, He healed them. And He knew that the one would turn back and thank Him, but that the other nine would not. And yet He healed all of them.
In the same way, our God blesses all of us materially. Believers and non-believers alike are blessed with far more than they or we could ever need. Martin Luther offers us a short listing of some of the earthly blessings for which we can be grateful in his explanation of the Fourth Petition, “Give us this day our daily bread.” In defining what we mean by daily bread, he writes the following. I’m not going to even mention everything in his list. But think about each item I say, and think about whether we don’t have far more of this item than we could ever really need. He writes, “Daily bread includes everything needed for this life, such as food… drink… clothing… shoes… house… money… goods… good weather… health… true friends and the like.” And especially here in the United States we really have nothing to complain about. We talk about being in a recession, but look at all these good things we still have. What an amazing God we have to shower all of this upon us!
But in the end, these material blessings are temporary and will all crumble away. Paul writes in his first letter to the Corinthians, “If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are to be pitied more than all men.”[4] But it isn’t. Far more importantly than the fact that God blesses us materially, is the fact that Christ has healed us from sin and its effects. And this healing isn’t just for this life; it has eternal value.
So what is this healing that is of such greater significance? The greatest gifts are often the ones that came at the greatest cost, right? And that’s the case with our greatest gift as well. It’s not these earthly goods. If God wants us to have them, we have them; it doesn’t cost Him a thing. But the greatest gift that He’s given us came at the cost of His own Son’s life. And Jesus died, not just for those who show Him love, but He died for sins of whole world.[5]
By our Lord’s death on the cross, He has cured our sin. He died for all of our sins, including the times when we have been ungrateful for the amazing blessings that surround us. So we have no reason to feel guilty anymore for ungratefulness or any other sin. Our broken relationship with God our Father has been restored. And we have hope for a better future, both in this life and the next.
But even though these blessings are won for everyone in the world, they only come to us through faith. It’s not the cause of these eternal blessings, but it is the pipeline by that carries them to us. Jesus ends the account by instructing the Samaritan to “Rise and go; your faith has made you well.” Did the man’s faith heal him of his leprosy? We don’t want to fall into the trap of thinking that this grateful Samaritan leper was the only one of the ten who had faith. All of the men cried out to Jesus as their master. And they all left to go show themselves to the priest, while they still had leprosy. So they actually all showed themselves to have faith, at least that Jesus had power to heal them as He did.
But the Greek word that Jesus uses here for “made you well,” could also be translated, “has saved you.” Clearly this has greater implications than just the man’s physical health. Because of the man’s faith in Jesus as His Savior, He was saved, eternally. And so it is for us. Faith in our Savior makes it possible that we receive these gifts of salvation. And this faith, too, is a great blessing for which we give thanks. Because through this faith, we receive the blessings of salvation.
And so, like the 10 lepers in our account today, we’ve been greatly blessed. We’ve been blessed with earthly blessings, spiritual blessings, and a faith by which we receive the spiritual blessings. And the heart that has been so blessed naturally shows its gratitude by praising and thanking God. Through faith in our Savior, we turn around, turn back to Christ and say, “Thank you, Lord! You are an amazing God! We know that we can’t ever thank You enough, but we will always try.”
Conclusion: One of the family devotion books that my dad read to us growing up was A Few Minutes With Jesus. All of the devotions center around the fictional Whitney family. There is one devotion that, for whatever reason, has always been remembered by all of us kids. It’s the Thanksgiving one. In the Thanksgiving one, the oldest son, Jeff, is eating his Thanksgiving dinner. But all of a sudden, all of his food starts disappearing. When it does, he realizes he has forgotten to thank the Lord for his food. Jeff wakes up and realizes it was just a dream. Of course it’s just a dream. That’s not the way God operates and we see it here in the account of the 10 Lepers. But Now Thank We All Our God. He is a God of great mercy, and of great healing… both physically and spiritually. And He is a God who has given us every reason to praise His name. Praise God from whom all blessings flow! Amen.
[1] Leviticus 13:45-46.
[2] Isaiah 64:6.
[3] Ephesians 2:5.
[4] 1 Corinthians 15:15
[5] John 2:2.
