Luke 13 10 to 17 and it says this Now Jesus was teaching in one of the synagogues on The Sabbath and behold there was a woman who had a spirit of infirmity 18 years and was bent over and could in no way raise herself up but when Jesus saw her he called her to him and and said to her, woman, you are loose from your infirmity. And he laid his hands on her and immediately she was made straight and glorified God. But the ruler of the synagogue answered with indignation because Jesus had healed on the Sabbath. And he said to the crowd, there are six days on which men ought to work. Therefore come and be healed on them and not on the sabbath day The lord then answered him and said hypocrite Does not each one of you on the sabbath loose his ox? Or donkey from the stall and lead it away to water it So ought not this woman being a daughter of abraham Whom satan has bound think of it for 18 years be loosed from this bond on the Sabbath. And when he said these things, all his adversaries were put to shame and all the multitude rejoiced for all the glorious things that were done by him. So the Lord Jesus was teaching in one of the synagogues on the Sabbath day. And one of the persons that was there was a woman who it says had a spirit of infirmity, and by this is meant bodily infirmity. The word infirmity here in the Greek is ascenias, and it refers to a great weakness of body or mind by implication, something which had greatly hindered this woman's being able to move at all or to stand up straight. She no doubt had great difficulty walking. And perhaps there was much pain when she did walk. It was a great bodily weakness, which it says she had had for 18 years. She was bent over and she could in no way raise herself up, it says here. Now, it should bring great encouragement, I think, to any of us here who have great bodily weaknesses. And perhaps you have had them for a long time. This woman had had this 18 years. I can't imagine not being able to move or straighten yourself up for 18 years. The Lord Jesus had come there to the synagogue to teach the people and it says he took notice of her. I like the way that this is worded. He thought particularly about what he could do for her to help her and that which would glorify God. He knew what he was called to do, and he knew what he was able to do, and he knew that his helping this poor woman would bring glory to God on this particular Sabbath day. It would show forth his power to save people from their sins. Sin is something, by the way, that paralyzes you in terms of your doing good. If you hold to it, it will paralyze you from doing good. and helping other people and glorifying God with your life. Well, if Jesus did this miracle, he knew it would show forth his power to save people from their sins, and it would show them also where the power to live a God-glorifying life comes from. It comes from him. It comes from Jesus. And so I want to ask three questions of this text, which will lead us to better understand the power and the glory of the Lord Jesus Christ to save, to heal, to empower for service to our great God and King. First of all, whence came this infirmity that this woman had? Well, verse 16 tells us. Jesus explains her problem publicly because of the objections of the ruler of the synagogue. He tells us, so ought not this woman, being a daughter of Abraham, whom Satan has bound, think of it, for 18 years, be loosed from this bond on the Sabbath. So we see that it was Satan who had somehow gained permission from God to bind this woman for this inordinately long period of time. Now it's true, and we need to understand this, that because of one man's sin, Adam's sin, that all of us are affected by bodily infirmities and by the corruption that sin brings to us. We're going to eventually die. And there are many bodily weaknesses and infirmities that we experience all the way to our eventual death. But not all of us are bound with this radical kind of infirmity as this woman was. Jesus calls her here a daughter of Abraham. And what he means by this title is that she was a woman who believed in him. She believed in the promises of the coming seed, the coming Messiah in those Old Testament times. She believed in Jesus and she had heard about Jesus and she very much wanted to be there that day. So she's called by Jesus, a daughter of Abraham, one who had true and saving faith. Faith is based upon a promise. When you believe in Jesus, you're believing in the promise concerning Christ, that if you believe in him, you will come to have eternal and everlasting life. And when you do, you will come to know God personally through the Lord Jesus Christ. So the promise concerns God sending his only begotten son into the world to be our savior. And this woman believed in the promise and she was saved, but she was immediately attacked by Satan because she believed in Jesus. This is what I want you to see. Satan somehow gained permission from God to afflict this woman with this paralysis of her limbs. For 18 years she had experienced this. She was bent up like a pretzel by Satan and could hardly move. And I want you to see that sometimes Satan is given permission to afflict believers who are fully trusting in all the promises of God. That's what happened to godly Job. You remember Job in the Bible? Well, God had said to Satan, have you considered my servant Job? There's none like him on the earth. A righteous man who's, he fears me and he's turning away from evil. And Satan says, yes, but if you take away his possessions, then he'll curse you to your face. So he got permission from God to take away all of Job's possessions. And all of his children too were killed in a storm. And in one fell swoop on one day, he lost all of this. And this was something that God had permitted, but it was permitted for a good reason. And I want you to understand this afternoon that when God permits afflictions, bodily afflictions in your life of one sort or another, He has good reasons for permitting them. Now it's true we're all going to die someday and so we're all going to experience various afflictions of our body as we go through this life. It's just certain that that's going to happen. But it certainly does not always happen like it happened to this woman or to Job for instance. But that none of us, what I'm trying to show you is that none of us will escape having to deal with Satan at some point or another in our experience as a believer who will come to try to prove our faith is really not of any value or any worth or any significance or there's no reality to it. And what we need to do in that case is what this woman did, in that she trusted the Lord for 18 years of bent over pain. You see that? That's what happened here. And when she heard that Jesus was coming to teach that day, she knew that she had to absolutely be there. And by the way, this is a good reason for you to come out to a service like this or to church on a regular basis to hear the word of God, because the Lord Jesus is here in the preaching of the word. He's here to help. Whoever I'm teaching this afternoon or sharing the word with you teach you about himself, about God himself. Now you'll remember that it was Satan who disguised as a serpent at the beginning of the world came into the Garden of Eden and he was originally created by God as a very beautiful and powerful angel. And his responsibility was to guard the garden of God. In a good sense, he had this responsibility to watch over it. And his responsibility actually was to prevent our first parents, Adam and Eve, from coming to any harm. But Satan didn't like God's long-term plan for mankind that eventually was going to make men and women to be the highest of creation, even eventually higher than the angels. Satan didn't like that. And he knew himself to be very strong and beautiful, and he was very proud at that time when he heard these things, that pride was engendered in his heart and he fell from his original righteousness and he took a third of the angels with him. And they are the demons that are around today doing terrible things in the world when they can. Well, from that point until now, until the end of the world, Satan is the arch enemy of God and all believers in Christ. On that day so long ago, he came into the garden And he tempted Eve to believe that God's instructions not to eat of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil were not good instructions. That she could become wise if she would eat this fruit. Eve would eat the fruit he said to her and she would become like God. knowing the difference between good and evil. She would become wise in every way, he was telling her. So Eve believed this lie and she ate of the fruit and gave some to her husband. They both died. They didn't die physically immediately, but they died spiritually immediately. upon eating this fruit. And the seeds of sin were there. Sin was entering their hearts and the seeds of death were sown in them. So eventually they would die after 900 years or so. They both died. But sin corrupted every faculty of their being and affected every aspect of their thoughts and their life, both spiritually and physically. Well, they would have died eternally as well if they hadn't believed the promise of Genesis 3, 14 and 15. Let me read it for you because And this is God addressing Satan. Because you have done this, he says to Satan, you are cursed more than all cattle and more than every beast of the field. On your belly you shall go and you shall eat dust all the days of your life. And I will put enmity or hostility between you and the woman. and between your seed and her seed, he shall bruise your head and you shall bruise his heel." So Adam and Eve believed in this promise concerning Christ, the promised seed, capital S, and they were saved from their sins. I want you to see that because a lot of times people think about the fall of Adam and Eve and they think that somehow there was a long time between that and their being saved by God. There was not. They were saved immediately upon believing this promise of God to them. And so too, every person believing in the promise of God concerning Christ, that He is the righteous one, the perfect one, the holy one, and that He is the one who has died for your sins on the cross. You believe that promise that you'll have eternal life and it is yours when you believe it. That's what I'm trying to show you. So at the cross, the Lord Jesus bruised or crushed Satan's head so that everyone believing in him would be delivered from Satan's power. So all throughout human history, you've seen this story being played out that Satan tries to afflict and bind up in various ways those who are believing in Jesus. So this woman's case was a very radical one. and a very significant one because what Jesus did for her is that he loosed her from her infirmity, her great weakness, her great inability to move and raise herself up. He simply spoke the words, woman, you are loosed. from your infirmity and he laid his hands on her and immediately she was able to raise herself up and to give glory to God that Jesus had done this for her. She was made upright, straight in her back so she could stand up straight once again and look people in the face. You see Jesus, had this power in himself because he is the son of God and God the son. And because he said this and because he did this, she was able to rise up to her full height and move all of her limbs in this most wonderful and exhilarating way for the first time in 18 years. Jesus had freed her from Satan's malicious grasp upon her body. Her spirit was already free because of her faith. I want you to see that too. In other words, if you come into affliction like this woman, or perhaps Satan gains permission to afflict you in some way bodily, I want you to see and understand that this woman, because of her faith, she was freed already in her spirit. It was only her body that was bound up. And Jesus, when he came and healed her of that, he loosed her from that infirmity. But I'm trying to tell you that even if you come into a situation where you cannot move in the way that you want to, the way you used to so freely, realize that Christ is still with you and Christ will still help you to keep trusting in him. as I was telling one man over lunch who said that he sometimes gets depressed, I said, well, you know, Jesus says that men ought always to pray and not to faint. In other words, not to become discouraged. I know that we do become discouraged at times because things seem too overwhelming to us. Sometimes physically they seem that way to us. But all I'm trying to say is that when you're in such straits, such difficulties, simply remember that God is for you. If you're believing in the promise, God is for you and God is with you, and He has freed your spirit to serve Him. It says in 2 Thessalonians 3, this is concerning Satan himself, I'm trying to show you that Satan cannot dominate your faith in Jesus Christ. And Christ himself is faithful. This is what it says in 2 Thessalonians 3 and verse 3, the Lord is faithful who will establish you and guard you from the evil one. And in Psalm 34, verse 19, it says, many are the afflictions of the righteous, but the Lord delivers him out of them all. You say, well, what about death? Well, in death, the Lord is delivering you through death to himself. Do you see that? Maybe you don't think about it that way. You think, oh, I just, I can't think about losing my body. Well, that's what death is, is the separation of our body from our soul, but for the Christian, not for all eternity. When you die, you'll lose your body for a time, but you'll go to the mansions in glory, which Christ is preparing for you now when you believe in him. Do you see that? Your spirit will be in glory with the Lord Jesus until the day of the resurrection. And when Jesus comes back again the second time, he will raise all the dead and those believing in him will be caught up together with him into the air and they will be with him forever with this glorified body that we will someday have. So someday, dear ones, you will be, having believed in Jesus, more beautiful and more strong than you ever were at your most beautiful and strong point earlier in your life. That's what I'm trying to share with you. What a great thing. Many are the afflictions of the righteous, but the Lord delivers them from them all. And listen to Hebrews chapter 2 and verses 14 to 16. It says, Inasmuch then as the children have partaken of flesh and blood, He himself likewise shared in the same that through death he might destroy him who had the power of death, that is the devil, and release those who through fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage. For indeed, he does not give aid to angels, but he does give aid to the seed of Abraham. So this is why you should trust in the Lord Jesus for spiritual salvation, because the soul is more important than the body. This is something that I think a lot of people either forget or they don't realize. What will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses his soul? And what will a man give in exchange for his soul? Jesus says. Well, if a person only knew, they would give everything to be able to have their soul saved by the Lord Jesus. What a wonderful thing it is to think about that Jesus does this glorious work of salvation. You know, if you believe in Jesus, you have all things. You have all things, beloved. It's an amazing thing. It says in the Bible, if you have him, neither death nor life, nor principalities, nor powers, nor any affliction or infirmity that you have can separate you from the love of God in Christ Jesus. This woman did not come to the synagogue that day expecting to be healed even. She was just gonna go there to see Jesus. Now, maybe she would have thought about it. Maybe she had thought about it. Maybe she wanted that. but it wasn't mentioned. She had borne with her affliction so long that she knew that she could be well content with it. Just like Paul, the apostle, when he had his thorn in the flesh, you remember that? I don't know what it was with Paul, but he had this thorn in the flesh. It was probably his eyes, I'm thinking, that his eyes were very weak and he couldn't see too well and he thought it was gonna be a great hindrance. to his ministry, and so he pleaded with the Lord three times to take it away from him. And the Lord came back and said to him, no, Paul, my grace is sufficient for you, for my power is perfected in your weakness. And so Paul says, therefore, he says, I'm well content with infirmities. and with weaknesses and distresses and persecutions, because when I am weak, I am strong. Will you say to me, well, when I am weak, I am weak. And that's true. That's how you feel. But when you realize that you have the Lord Jesus in your heart and in your life, it is he the one that is the one who gives you the strength to be able to carry on, even though you're not healed bodily right away, you will be someday Someday you'll be free from this body of death and pain and await the resurrection, like I said. So there's much good that is coming. But in the interim, you need to trust that the Lord Jesus will be your helper in everything. Keep praying to Him. Keep seeking Him. Keep walking with Him. Keep talking with Him about all your difficulties. Jesus took notice of this woman and gave her this great blessing of being loosed. So I want you to see that each of us should rest our faith upon what the Lord Jesus has done for us in his great redemption and know that his grace will be sufficient for us. Well, then I wanna ask this question. Why the objections of the ruler of the synagogue? When Jesus healed this dear woman of her infirmity, immediately the ruler of the synagogue answered Jesus He answered his act with words of indignation. He was objecting because Jesus had healed on the Sabbath. He said, there are six days on which men ought to work, therefore come and be healed on them and not on the Sabbath day. Why did he say this? It was because he had wrongly been taught by others, and he had come to believe it himself, that since six-day work was to be abstained from on the Sabbath day, that Jesus' working and doing this healing on the Sabbath day was wrong. This man's reaction was totally wrong, in reaction to Jesus' doing this healing. His words to Jesus were absolutely not true. And so Jesus, the Lord of glory, the one who was and is God the Son, the one who originally gave the Sabbath commandment, I try to imagine this, that Jesus, here's Jesus, and this man in the synagogue standing before the very one who gave Moses the Decalogue on Mount Sinai. And so this man's effectively trying to reprove his own creator. his own giver of the law to him when he says these things to him, which is so strange a thing to observe in Jesus, the son of God, having to face this kind of hypocrisy in this man who claimed to know him. He said, hypocrite. Does not each one of you on the Sabbath day loose his ox or his donkey from the stall and lead it away to water it? So ought not this woman, being a daughter of Abraham, whom Satan has bound, think of it, for 18 years, be loosed from this bond on the Sabbath? So the Lord Jesus is so very wise, so very good, so very practical when He says these things. This man was a hypocrite. because he would have loosed his donkey or his ox from the stall and led it away to water it on the Sabbath. So it was sheer hypocrisy to say that Jesus should not heal this woman. from her infirmity. He released this dear woman from this great physical affliction which Satan had her in for so many years, and this man is objecting to it. That is her release, if you can imagine. So we need to see that God gave us his 10 commandments for our good, all of them. Even remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy. But when God said that, it doesn't mean that Jesus couldn't heal on the Sabbath day or make this woman's heart glad by releasing her from this infirmity. It's a good thing that our God and our Christ are not like this legalistic ruler of the synagogue. It is possible to lay burdens on people that they cannot bear, but Christ would make our obedience to be a joyful one and helpful to people in the right way. every time. And then third, how can we glorify our God and our Christ when they do great things for us or others? Well, we can do what this woman did. Verse 13. And Jesus laid his hands on her and immediately she was made straight. And what did she do? She glorified God. What does that mean? It means that she praised aloud with her voice God in front of all of these people that she was able to rise up, which she hadn't been able to do for 18 years. And verse 17 also, when Jesus said these things, all his adversaries, those who were against him, were put to shame and all the multitude rejoiced for all the glorious things that were done by him. So when God brings healing to your body, you want to glorify God by praising him. Dear ones, let me ask you, do you praise God when he heals you? of your infirmities, when he helps you in the midst of all of your afflictions, oh, you should praise him. Praise is becoming to the upright, it says in the Psalms. And God is pleased when we praise him, when we thank him for the great things that he does for us. Now you'll recall that one time Jesus came into a certain village and he met 10 men who were lepers, and they were standing afar off, and they lifted up their voices, and they said, Jesus, have mercy on us. And so when Jesus saw them, he said to them, go show yourself to the priests. And so it was, it says, as they went that they were cleansed. And as one of them then, when he saw that he was healed, he returned and with a loud voice glorified God. In other words, he praised God for what Jesus had done in healing him with this loud voice. And he fell down on his face. and gave Jesus thanks. And Jesus said, were there not ten lepers cleansed? But where are the nine? He says, were there not any found who returned to give glory to God, accept this for, in other words, to come back and praise me for what I did for you ten people? Healing you of your leprosy? No, the other nine just went right away. They didn't come back and say, thank you. And I know we need to see this. It's something that we need to do. When God heals us and he keeps us in health and he keeps us in life, we ought to praise and thank him for every day that he gives us. It's another day to glorify him. It's another day to praise him. We should praise God each and every day of the week. because praise is a beautiful thing. Praising God is a beautiful thing in the sight of God. If you know the Lord, my friend, you will praise the Lord. You will glorify the Lord Jesus for all that he has done for you. And Jesus, when he reproved the ruler of the synagogue, it says that when he said these things, that all of his adversaries were put to shame and all the multitude rejoiced for all the glorious things that were done by him. And that's the way that it ought to be for every and with every Christian. You should always be rejoicing. for all the glorious things that Jesus does. Will you not glorify him now? Praise glorifies God. Well, let's pray together. We thank you, Lord, for this time together around your word, and we pray that we would learn many good things here together today. We thank you for the way that you teach us through the Bible, and we pray that we would think about these things and make application to our lives, that when we go through afflictions, that you will be with us if we are trusting in you, and you will help us to go through them in every way if we will just simply look to you in faith You will help us and help us also to be obedient to your commandments and not to neglect them But at the same time rejoice that you lord jesus have fulfilled them fulfilled them all perfectly And that your righteousness is imputed to us so that we might joyfully live to you and for you by faith Help us to see these good things this afternoon in jesus name. We ask it father amen