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Let us continue in worship by giving attention to the reading of God's Word as it is recorded. In the Gospel of Luke, the seventh chapter, I begin the reading at the verse numbered 11. Soon afterward he went to a city called Nain, and his disciples and a great crowd went with

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him. As he drew near to the gate of the city, behold, a man who had died was being carried out, the only son of his mother, and she was a widow. And a large crowd from the city was with her.

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And when the Lord saw her, he had compassion on her and said to her, "Do not weep." And he came and touched the beer, and the bearers stood still. And he said, "Young man, I say to you, arise." And the dead man sat up and began to speak.

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And he gave him to his mother. And may God bless to us and to our understanding this reading from his Word. Pray with me. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, amen.

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It was a pretty town then. You'd hardly notice it today. I'm referring to Nain, of course, a place that would be forgotten except for one incident that occurred there.

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Jesus and his disciples, followed by a crowd, were approaching the city of Nain. And when they came to the gate, they found coming out of the gate, moving toward the town cemetery, a funeral procession. Now a funeral procession is always a sad thing to see, but Luke is anxious that we understand

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the special poignancy of this procession. And so he makes three observations about it. First of all, he says that the one who has died is a young man. Now death is always an intrusion into life, but that intrusion never seems as profound

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as it does when it takes the life of someone who is still young. The saddest death of all is the death of the one who has never had the opportunity to live. I remember in the decade that I served on a campus that occasionally one of the students would be killed in an accident or die in some other way.

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And almost invariably, the reaction of the other students was one of disbelief and of hurt and then of anger. It simply was not right that death should break into the ranks of the young. So there is a special sadness here.

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The one being mourned is young. Then Luke points out another detail. This young man is the only son of his mother. Now I do not have the mind to understand and I do not have the tongue to explain the relationship

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between a mother and her son. H.L. Hubbard, the noted English poet, has a bit of verse in which he talks about love being a chain forged through all of the earth by God. He says there are bronze links, which are loving friendships.

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There are silver links, which are the loving ties of a husband and wife. And then he says, "But every here and there in God's bright change, I see a link of gold, of metal rare, surpassing all the rest. Here, polished, shown the purest and best of mortal love, transforming all creation.

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The finest link in all this heavenly chain is that which binds with ever strengthening bonds of love, a mother and her son." I cannot tell you why this is so, but I have lived long enough to know that it certainly is true.

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And then Luke points out one other thing. This young man, the only son of this woman, he leaves behind a mother who is a widow. Her husband has already died. In other words, her son was all that she had in life.

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What Luke is telling us here is not only of the emotional pain of this moment, but of the economic trauma experienced as well. For you see, in that day and time, your son was your social security program. Your son or sons was your pension program.

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When this woman lost her only son, when this lonely widow woman lost her only boy, she lost her means of support. So in this single sentence, "Behold, a young man who had died was being carried out, the only son of his mother, and she was a widow," Luke is telling us that there was great grief

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at the gate of name. Now when Jesus sees this, he is immediately touched. It's interesting to notice the impulses which lead people to act. I sometimes think you can tell more from the impulsive actions of a person than from any

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other actions that might be theirs. There is a story of an evangelist who was doing a series of meetings in Detroit, Michigan. One night he was taking the trolley car from one part of the city to another. He got on to the trolley and he had only paper money.

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So he asked the motorman for change and he was given the change and he dropped the appropriate amount in the box. He went back and sat down and looked at the chain remaining in his hand and discovered that there was more change than he should have had.

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So immediately he got up and went to the front of the car and said to the motorman, "I think you have given me more change than I am entitled to." And the motorman said, "I know. I've been coming to your meetings all week and I wanted to see whether you were an honest

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man." He had set up, you see, a kind of subtle, unrecognized test to see what the impulsive response of this man would be to temptation, knowing that by that impulsive response he would learn much more than through the formal presentations he had been hearing throughout

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the week. Impetus reveals our intellect and our will, but impulse reveals the heart. Christ impulsively responds and we are told that he responds with compassion. And the word for compassion used here means literally the contractions of a mother's womb

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as she is giving birth to her child. In other words, this compassion is something which is deep and hurtful to him. This one who has made every mother's heart has himself a mother's heart. Her agony is felt by Jesus.

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And there's a kind of test in this for us. How do we react when we see distress and hardship? What is our impulsive response to hunger, disease, drunkenness, dirtiness, the ugly things we see in life?

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Do we turn away from them or are we moved with compassion with regard to them? If we are going to be like Jesus, we must be people of pity. But Jesus' reaction is not only sympathetic. He immediately adds to his sympathy action.

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He does a rather amazing thing. He reaches out and puts his hand on the beer, the casket in which the young man is being carried. It does not seem like much.

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But in the first century, this immediately made Jesus ritually unclean. The law said that anyone who touched a dead person or touched anything that a dead person had touched was immediately unclean for at least seven days. And it was a costly and very complicated procedure to gain cleanliness again.

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And this was an especially grievous thing to happen to a rabbi. And Jesus was a rabbi. But Jesus understands, you see, that sympathy means nothing until it's joined with sacrifice. Quite truly, you cannot call yourself a Christian if you're never willing to touch the beer.

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Or to put it in another way, there are no miracles without risk. To good intentions must be added significant actions. I think this morning of Dr. William Harrington, who is a physician who lives and teaches and practices still in the state of Florida.

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Dr. Harrington was involved in research on a medical problem commonly called ITP, idiopathic thrombocytopenia purpura. This is a problem of the autoimmune system, which destroys the platelets in the blood system.

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And it can lead to uncontrolled bleeding and death. It quite commonly occurs in young adults. In order to pursue his research, Dr. Harrington, very sympathetic to the problems of those who suffered from ITP, adds to his sympathy sacrifice.

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He injected plasma from the blood of those with this problem into his own veins, thus causing himself to develop the problem, the medical difficulty, with a rapid decline of his own platelets. But by doing this, Dr. Harrington confirmed his theory that there was something in the

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plasma which caused the problem. He shed a great deal of light on this medical mystery. But it took more than thought, you see. It took action.

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My friends, the reason that most people show so little progress in their spiritual lives is simply this. They are unwilling to take any risks. They make no sacrifices.

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They make no choices because they are unwilling to take chances. They live in the dimness of indecision. And indecision, of course, is a negative decision. If there is any one factor which cripples more people and more companies and more churches

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than any other, it is the inclination to live in a kind of easy monotony rather than to launch out into the adventurous. But it's only in the adventurous that miracle is discovered. I think of Sam Jones, who was a well-known preacher in the early part of this century.

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He concluded a sermon one night to his people with these words. "Suppose we think of the kingdom of God as a great locomotive. What part of the locomotive would you like to be?" Well, one person immediately said, "I'd like to be the whistle and sing the praises of

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God." And a second said, "I'd like to be the track and keep the train running always on the way of the truth." But a third person then commented, "I would like to be the coal and burn myself out in

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the service of Christ." And Sam Jones responded, "We have too many whistles, too many people who are willing to talk about their faith and nothing more. We have too many tracks, too many people who are determined to keep the church running

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ahead exactly as it has run in the past. What we really need are people who are willing to be the coal, to pour themselves out in sacrifice." That's what we see Jesus do here.

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At the gate of Nain, look at him. He reaches out and touches the beer. To sympathy must be added sacrifice if there is going to be miracle. The procession stops and Jesus addresses the corpse.

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"Young man," he says, "I say to you, arise." And immediately the young man sits up and begins to talk. Now I know there are those who doubt this miracle. They say that this young man was not truly dead, that he probably was caught up in a

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coma or some type of catalepsy, and that the imperious voice of Christ called him back to consciousness again. There are only two things wrong with that idea. In the first place, it makes our Lord Jesus Christ into a liar.

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There is no doubt that Jesus let his disciples believe here that he had called a man from death to life. If Jesus knew that this young man was only in a coma or some type of cataleptic state, but pretended that he had called him back from death to life, then this brands the Savior

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with phoniness, a rather difficult thing to imagine of one who preached the Sermon on the Mount. But some say, "Well, you see, Jesus didn't know that the young man was in a coma. Jesus thought that he had died when in fact he had not died.

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Jesus was not experienced in these things." But the testimony of Scripture is quite to the contrary of that. Do you remember, for example, when Jesus was called to the house of Jairus because Jairus' daughter had died?

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Jesus' immediate response to that was, "She has not died. She is asleep." And the word he uses for sleep here is the word for rest. The word means precisely the same thing that we mean by that word today.

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Jesus understood, you see, that this little girl was not in fact dead, but quite to the contrary was caught in some state that appeared, that seemed to be death, some type of coma, some type of trance, something of this kind. But here in the experience at Nain and later in his ministry when he goes to the tomb of

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Lazarus, his friend in Bethany, Jesus describes both of these two as being dead. And the word for dead that he uses here is the very word from which we derive our word "cemetery." In other words, Jesus knew the difference between someone who was caught up in some

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strange sleep that appeared to be death and something that in fact was death. Jesus said what he meant, and he meant what he said. The fact is that Jesus is able to bring life where death is. And that is not only true of people, but that's also true of plans and purposes.

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I think this morning of George Getty. George Getty was a Canadian, and he heard that the Kimberly-Clark paper mill in Kimberly, Wisconsin was going to have to close for lack of business. 1,100 people were going to lose their jobs in this small town which had only 7,000 citizens.

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And George Getty thought this was a very sad thing. And so he prayed that God would give him some guidance, that there might be something he could do to stop the death of this company. Well out of this prayer, he came to the conclusion that the only way in which this paper mill

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could be saved was if it had machinery that produced paper at a much faster rate, computer-controlled machinery. And a little research showed him that that machinery was going to cost nothing less than $80 million.

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And so George prayed for that money. The first thing that happened was the union changed its contract, giving a much bigger portion to the company and demanding less for itself. The second thing that happened was the bank was willing to give a second mortgage on the

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property. The third thing that happened was a great sale of stock in and around Kimberly, Wisconsin. And the last thing that happened was George Getty was successful in convincing a number of major magazines to buy all of their paper from this mill and to say that they would

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continue to do this for a minimum of 10 years. In 14 months, he had raised the $80 million. The machinery was put into the mill. It is some of the fastest paper-producing machinery in the world even today.

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It produces a sheet of paper 18 and a half feet wide at the rate of 3,000 feet per minute. 1,100 jobs were saved, 150 jobs have been added since. Where there was going to be death, there is instead life because the problem was approached with prayer.

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The problem was approached with Jesus. Life is stronger than death, so get into the God mode. He is sovereign over all, including the dead. I think it very interesting to observe in this story and in the other stories in which

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Jesus encounters dead people in the Scriptures or those who appear to be dead that there is a growing demonstration of Christ's power. When he meets his first contact, the daughter of Jairus, this little girl, she is still in her home.

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When he meets this young man from Nain, he is being carried in the funeral procession. When he encounters Lazarus and Bethany, Lazarus has already died and is in the tomb. First you see Jesus confronts Coma, then he confronts the dead, then he confronts the dead and the buried.

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Each gives, you see, a greater expression of the power of Christ. And notice this also. When Jesus went into the house of Jairus and said that the little girl was only asleep, they laughed at him, they sneered at him, they said that he was completely and utterly

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wrong. They created such a commotion that he had to order them out of the house before he could call the little girl to consciousness again. And when Jesus went to the tomb of Lazarus, again, unbelief was all about.

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They said, "You're too late. Had you come earlier, you might have saved him, but now the time has passed." And Jesus was so wounded by this unbelief that the scriptures say that his spirit groaned within him.

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You see, in both of these cases, Jairus' house and the cemetery at Bethany, Jesus is encountering unbelief. And unbelief impedes Christ. But at Nain, at the gate of Nain where we are this morning, there is none of that.

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He sees the procession, he raises his hand and stops it, he reaches out and touches the beer, he utters the word of command, "Young man, I say to you, arise and the miracle is done." There is no unbelief, and so his power flows forth immediately and with special magnificence.

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The secret here is simply this. If you trust Christ and believe Christ and depend on Christ and yield to Christ, you know life. But if you doubt Christ and you are faithless before Christ and you turn away from Christ

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or you fight against the things of Christ, you are caught in death. It says in the scriptures that Jesus could do no miracles in his hometown of Nazareth. Why? Read Matthew 13.

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He could do no mighty works there because of their unbelief. The greatest power in the universe is the power of the one who made the universe, but the key to that power and access to it is in believing, is in risking, is in trusting Christ.

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And so the story comes to its end, except for one last sentence, which I personally think is one of the most beautiful and tender sentences in all of the New Testament. Luke concludes the narrative by saying, "And Jesus gave the young man back to his mother." You see in him there is not only power, there is also love.

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There is not only the miraculous, there is also the infinitely tender. All of this is in Christ. So choose power. Choose the miraculous.

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Choose tenderness. Choose love. Choose Christ. For what more can you possibly be seeking?

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Let us pray. O Father, we're like little children running along the beach of life, allowing the waves to touch our toes, but running for the dry sand before the waves catch us, before we know the thrill of being lifted by the power of the sea.

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And so we play about the fringes of faith, wetting the tips of our toes, grant that we might be called into the wonder of the waves. May thy spirit flood any unbelieving heart that hears these words. And in that special buoyancy which thy spirit alone can give, let these people, by their

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repentance and their acceptance of the sovereignty of the Savior, find power, find love, find Jesus. For we pray it in his name. Amen.

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