If you have a Bible with you, turn over to Matthew chapter 8, starting in verse 14 tonight.
On the last Wednesday night of the month we’ve been looking through the Gospels to see instances of Jesus interacting with people and changing their lives in some way.
Tonight, Jesus is invited to come hang out at Peter’s home and before they know it, the house becomes a base of operations for Jesus’ ministry of healing the sick.
If we put ourselves in the place of Peter and his family, hopefully we’ll be very encouraged to see how much the Lord cares for us and how much He wants to help us and invest into our lives.
So, let’s look at our text and see what we see.
Matthew 8.14-17 – Now when Jesus had come into Peter’s house, He saw his wife’s mother lying sick with a fever. So He touched her hand, and the fever left her. And she arose and served them.
When evening had come, they brought to Him many who were demon-possessed. And He cast out the spirits with a word, and healed all who were sick, that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by Isaiah the prophet, saying:
“He Himself took our infirmities and bore our sicknesses.”
When you step back, these 4 verses are a great, concentrated example of the Christian life as a whole. Peter’s mother-in-law sort of represents each of us in that Jesus came into her life, He put His hands onto her life and saved her, her response was to serve Him and then she had opportunity to minster to others and introduce them to the Lord.
The story is small, but what happened here is huge. As Peter and his family went along with the Lord and trusted Him, the Lord was then able to do remarkable things in their lives and in their household.
And it all started with Peter just bringing Jesus home one day. There was no plan. No strategy for how they were going to become the number 1 exorcism outfit in town. Peter just wanted to be with the Lord and asked Him to come and hang out at His house.
The disciples take a lot of flak because they didn’t always understand what Jesus was doing, but texts like this show that they understood that discipleship is all about being in the presence of the Person you are following and pursuing Him, no matter what.
Peter’s view was to abandon all other pursuits in favor of being with Jesus wherever He went. Everything else was secondary. There were day to day things that he, no doubt, had to take care of, but there really wasn’t any other goal or career or quest that was apart from his desire to be in the presence of Jesus Christ.
As we think about how the disciples interacted with the Lord, it’s important to notice that it was relational, not programatic. Jesus did give them assignments and send them out to do certain things from time to time, but being a disciple, at it’s core, is about presence and relationship, not a program of achievements, where we level up after performing acts of piety.
It’s easy for us as individual Christians or whole churches to programize discipleship, but the real goal we should set our minds toward is communion with God that is ongoing. Not compartmentalized or works-oriented, but simple and personal communion with the Lord.
Part of that communion means we should do what Peter did here: Bring the Lord home with us!
When we get together in church, sometimes we refer to it as ‘coming to the Lord’s house’ and that’s a great thing, a commanded thing. But we should also be sure that we’re bringing Jesus with us to our house and our workplace and into our leisure times. Because, remember, discipleship is pursuing the Lord above any other thing. So, toward that end, we should be bringing God wherever we go and inviting Him in to hang out and take a look around.
Why? Because the Lord wants to spend time with us. He wants to fill our days with Himself. He wants to come home with us, because as we’re going to see, there’s a bunch of stuff He’d like to do in our lives. And to me, Peter inviting the Lord to his house was a great encouragement to remember that the Lord doesn’t look at my walk with Him with clipboard in hand, tapping His foot saying, “Geno better finish 10 assignments today.” Much the opposite, the Lord just wants to be with me and wants me to be in His presence, so that He can do for me, not so that I can do for Him. He doesn’t need me to do anything for Him.
Look at verse 14 again:
Matthew 8.14 – Now when Jesus had come into Peter’s house, He saw his wife’s mother lying sick with a fever.
Once Jesus was inside the house, He started looking around and checking out the scene. Because when the Lord comes into your life, He’s not a passive observer. He’s not like Alexis de Tocqueville who toured around America in the 1830’s and didn’t really do anything and wrote a book about what he saw.
Jesus comes into your life and into your home as a Friend and a Fixer and a Remodeler. He came in here and Peter’s mother-in-law was sick with a high fever and the Lord did something about it.
Each of us here tonight has different sins and struggles and hurts in our lives. Jesus knows about them, because He is all-knowing. And because He is all-powerful, He comes into our lives as Christians and says, “Yeah, I can fix that.” That hurt, that failure, that struggle. The Lord is able and powerful to do something about your something, whatever it may be.
When we read the parallel accounts of this story in Mark 1 and Luke 4 we see that the disciples had faith and they asked Jesus to intervene in Peter’s mother-in-law’s sickness.
Here’s what happened:
Matthew 8.15a – So He touched her hand, and the fever left her.
I’ve been learning the importance of allowing the Lord to get His hands onto the situations of my life. Many of you know a few weeks ago the well at our house failed. And since then the Lord has been very graciously getting my attention and saying, “Let me get My hands onto this situation and show you My solution to your problem.” And I’ve been finding that my natural bent is to try to solve the circumstances of my life on my own without really asking the Lord to take care if it with His solution. But God keeps nudging me and inviting me to invite Him to put His hands on my life.
And that’s really the 2nd phase of a relationship with the Lord. The first is to invite Him into your life, the second is to relinquish control to God and give Him the room to operate in these struggles you find yourself in.
And what I’ve been finding in my own life is exactly what the Scriptures have said for thousands of years – that God’s remedies are much, much better than my remedies. To their credit, the disciples turned to their Rabbi for help with this fever.
I’ve had a high fever before. Last year I got pneumonia and at one point early on I was running a fever of 105 degrees. I had been sick for a couple of days, but we figured it was the flu or whatever, but I can remember getting to that level of fever and just not being able to really think or gather thoughts. My vision and hearing started to fuzz out and nothing was making it better. We were trying all the things you try to reduce a fever but nothing helped, so eventually we went to the Emergency Room and found out what was going on.
But, I can remember that when that happened we really didn’t know what to do. We tried a bunch of things and none of it worked, so eventually we went to find someone else who might know what to do.
Luckily for me, they don’t treat fevers like they used to. Today I was looking up the historical treatments of fever. For a while they thought you needed to gorge on food to make a fever go away. Then they switched to fasting. You needed to starve the fever. Then of course there was the practice of blood-letting to get the fever out, then some people thought you had to induce vomiting to cool your body down. All in all, I’m glad I live in this modern age where I wasn’t subjected to all of those poor remedies.
Peter’s mother-in-law had this fever, Dr. Luke called it a ‘high fever’ in his Gospel, and who knows what the conventional wisdom was for people who were sick like that at that time. But, as disciples, Peter and the others had the faith and the wherewithal to go to the Lord first and see what His idea was in that struggle and that circumstance.
And the idea we should take away from that is not that God heals every time we ask Him to, He doesn’t, but when we find ourselves in situations where we don’t know what to do, or times of difficulty or struggle, the Lord is on record as saying, “I know what to do! Come and ask Me and I will give you direction.”
It’s a mistake when we act hastily in our distress. That’s what King Saul did. He’d get into these rough situations and he would make rash, foolish decisions. All the while the Lord wanted to help Saul and give him direction, but instead of going to God, Saul would just try all sorts of different things to solve his problem, but in the end it would always drive him further from the Lord and further from the blessing of the Lord.
When we find ourselves in struggle or difficulty or hurt of some kind, it’s important to pause and step back and remember that God’s whole mission is to lift us up and help us and redeem our lives. He has bought us with a high price because He loves us and wants to get us up out of our hurt and into a life that is filled with joy instead of frustration. Purpose instead of futility. Hope instead of hopelessness.
So, as disciples, we can bring Jesus into our homes and into our lives and then surrender control of ourselves to Him, allowing Him to put His hands onto us in every situation to see how He will redeem and restore us according to His wonderful plan for our lives.
Because, as we read in verse 17:
Matthew 8.17 – that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by Isaiah the prophet, saying:
“He Himself took our infirmities and bore our sicknesses.”
That’s who our God is. He came to bear our burdens and our lives so that He could give us new life, new hope and new purpose.
So, Peter’s mother-in-law was healed.
Her response was to serve the Lord. She got up and served Him a meal and ministered to Him.
God loves when we minister to Him. It’s easy to think of serving the Lord as a duty or an obligation, and we do have a duty to serve our Master, but we should never forget that God loves it when we minister to Him. It brings Him pleasure. When we sing or pray or bring an offering or meditate on His splendor, He loves it. And as we serve the Lord, He is then able to reveal more of Himself to us and do more work in our lives. We see that in Acts 13 verse 2.
Rather than think that we have to work to make ourselves fit for communion or do a certain number of things in order to get the Lord to look upon us, we need to see our God for who He is in Scripture. And here we see that the Lord is ready for communion with us. He’s ready to be with us. And then, once He’s in our lives, once He’s in control, once we’re pursuing Him, then He can start filling up our lives and setting us apart to minister to others.
Matthew 8.16 – When evening had come, they brought to Him many who were demon-possessed. And He cast out the spirits with a word, and healed all who were sick.
The people brought the sick and possessed to the Lord so that He would do for them what He had done for Peter’s mother-in-law and so many others. As people heard the testimony of what God had done, they thought, “If God could do that for you, maybe He would help me! Maybe He can save me from my trouble. Maybe He can change my life too.”
One of the great things we see in this little text is that a very simple time of hanging out with the Lord turned into not only a lifelong testimony of God’s power and grace, but it turned very quickly into a life-changing outreach for the people of the city. Many lives were changed and saved because of Peter’s faith and communion with the Lord.
What we see is a great example of the harmony of God’s power and our surrender. As disciples devote themselves toward the Lord, not in works, but in relationship, just pursuing God, as we spend time with the Lord, He then works in us and for us and ultimately through us so that others can be helped and effected by God.
And, whether it was the fever or these other illnesses or demon possession, no matter the situation, Jesus could handle it and He wanted to handle it. He never sent people away. He was ready to be with them and help them and redeem them if they were ready to receive what He was offering.
The more time we spend with the Lord in our hearts, the more we will want to surrender ourselves to Him and then the more His work and power can be shown and demonstrated through our lives and circumstances so that we can be blessed and the people around us can see a testimony of what our God loves to do.
So tonight, do what Peter and his family did. Let God into your heart. Bring Him home with you. Allow Him to get His hands all over your life, surrendering control of your pursuits and struggles and circumstances so that He can bring the transformation and redemption that He loves to bring. And then, in response, worship Him and minister to Him. And when we do that, then we’ll have more opportunities to minister to others than we could ever imagine.
It all starts with communion. Drawing near to God and understanding what He has done for us and what He still wants to do for us. And then we go with that and see where the Lord takes us.