Four of a kind, beats a full house!
Text: Mark 2:1-12

1. Jesus and His preaching
Preaching was central to the life and ministry of the Lord Jesus. And, the same should be true for the church! I love good singing; I love testimony meetings; I love special services; but nothing can take the place of preaching!

Preaching is God’s chosen method for reaching into the hearts of the lost with the Gospel of grace, Rom. 10:13-15; 1 Cor. 1:21. Nothing should ever be allowed to crowd out the message!

We should support it!!! We should strive to love it!!

We should pray that our church will stay focused on the message. It would be easy to slack up and back off so that we could entice people to come to our church. The primary business of this church is not to fill our pews or our bank accounts. Our business is the proclamation of our Lord’s message. That is what we are to be about! That is our business and it is to be our only business! Thank God for an old-fashioned, Bible-believing church where preaching is still the centerpiece of every service!

2. Jesus and His presence
Churches have to deal with all kinds of rumors. Most of the rumors started on churches are negative. The greatest rumor that can get out on a church is for people to start hearing the rumor that Jesus is in a church. When that word gets out, people will start coming! Jesus has drawing power, John 12:32. When He is lifted up and the word gets out, the people will come!

3. Jesus and His power
A ten legged man met the Master!!
Let me say a word about these four men who brought their friend to Jesus. These men were willing to do whatever it took to get their friend to the Lord.

Someone has said that these four had four necessary traits needed to bring people to the Lord:
a. Sympathy
b. Co-operation
c. Originality
They dared to do what was difficult. It was not easy to carry that man up on the roof. It was a difficult task. The Bible says that “Jesus saw their faith”. Faith is something that works in the heart and then it works its way to the outside, James 2:18; Eph. 2:10. A faith that won’t put you to work for Jesus probably won’t take you to Heaven either!

They dared to do the unusual. They were will to think outside the box! For them, it was not business as usual, it took ingenuity to think of breaking up the roof to get that man to Jesus!

They dared to do the costly. They might have had to pay for the cost of the repairs to Peter’s roof. These men were willing to do whatever it took to bring that man to the Lord. That same heart needs to beat within us!

d. Persistence

They got him there, that’s all we can do!
Speaks to him as a father does to a SON – Speaks of the Family of God
Speaks to him as one who is involved in SIN – Speaks of the Failure of Man
Speaks to him words of SAVED! – Speaks of the Fellowship of the Redeemed!

4. A personal lesson from this story:
If you want to understand the preaching, if you want to feel the presence, and if you want to experience the power, you gotta get the clay out of the way!
Houses in that day usually had one of two types of roofs. The first consisted of beams, covered with criss-crossing sticks. This wooden foundation was then covered by clay tiles, which was in turn covered with more clay and finally grass was placed on the top. The other type of roof was covered with overlapping clay tiles. These roofs were accessible via a stairway on the side of the house. Either way, to get this man to Jesus, they had to dig through the layers of the roof to get the clay out of the way! When they did this, their friend experienced the grace of God that resulted in the forgiveness of his sins and the healing of his body! But, no new of this happened until they got the clay out of the way!