By His Faith, Bartimaeus Is Brought Out of the Anonymity of the Crowd

I want to begin a series of meditations on figures who stand out in the Word for being persistent people, committed people, people who are forceful in the Spirit; determined people, resolute people, clear-minded people, radical people. And we are going to see how these individuals’ characteristics wrested grace from the Lord. And to speak of wresting grace from the Lord sounds like a violation of the Lord’s dignity, but it is not; every now and then, the Lord likes us to put Him in a tight spot, so to speak.

And He likes it because when we show the Lord that we are sufficiently committed to Him and that we believe enough to be aggressive, that pleases the Lord; far from offending Him, it pleases Him. This figure, Bartimaeus, is like that; he is forceful in the good sense of the word, courageous. Do you remember that verse which says that the Kingdom of Heaven advances forcefully and the courageous seize it?

The courageous—that word translated into Spanish can be translated as: the diligent, the battle-hardened, the dynamic, the enterprising, the militant, the radical—they seize the Kingdom of God. The Kingdom of God is tough, did you know that? The concept of the Kingdom of God—and this already gets me into the sermon, because you are quite familiar with this text, but I am going to develop it as I go—the concept of the "Kingdom of God" in the New Testament has a connotation of warfare and militancy.

The Kingdom of God is set in opposition to what? To the kingdom of darkness. And when the Bible speaks of the Kingdom of God, it refers to an entity, almost, in a sense, a government that enters the Earth to repossess something that has been taken away—not from God in an ultimate sense, but perhaps from us—by the forces of the devil, of hell. This world is occupied by an illegitimate power, which is the power of hell, and Christ comes into the world to wrest that illegitimate dominion from Satan. That is why, paradoxically, the Bible calls Satan the Prince of this world, because Satan has made himself lord over this world, but he is an occupier; he is an illegitimate force that has taken this world through violence and deceit, because humanity, to whom God entrusted this world, has handed it over through its sin and rebellion.

So Christ comes into the world to wrest that power from Satan, amen? And we, His Church, are the instrument He has left here so that we may wage war in His Name. That is why a neutral understanding of the Gospel, an administrative kind of understanding of the Gospel, does not do justice to what the Gospel is. By nature, the Gospel is war; by nature, the Gospel is conflict. The Church is an institution of war that God has left here to evangelize, to defeat demons, to inform principalities and powers that Christ is Lord, to undo the glories of the devil.

What does the Bible say? It says: "For this purpose the Son of God was manifested." For what purpose? "To destroy the works of the devil." Every time you see Christ, you see Him in conflict with something: in conflict with the Pharisees, in conflict with the Roman Empire, in conflict with demons, in conflict with sickness. He always is, because the Gospel is opposed to everything the world represents.

So when the Bible says that the Kingdom of God advances forcefully, the idea in the original Greek is as though it said—excuse me—the Kingdom of God proceeds with violence; that is the idea. It proceeds with force, it proceeds against something; it proceeds forcibly, it proceeds roughly—that is the idea. Because the Gospel—an image comes to mind right now of an icebreaker, one of those ships that have a V-shaped steel bow and are used in the Arctic to cut through ice in the sea when it is frozen. And that ship has that forward part, which is called the bow, very sharp and made of solid steel, and it moves with force. You can see how the ice breaks and flies; wherever that ship goes, the ice splits apart in front of it and is thrown to the sides. That is the idea of the Kingdom of God here on Earth: it proceeds in that manner.

Or, if you want to see it another way, also less—I think, in fact, more precisely—it is like those great sheets of ice, those icebergs, those great masses of ice that geologists tell us move one inch every 10 years or 100 years, but which are absolutely irresistible. And where do the mountains and canyons come from—the Grand Canyon, for example, there in Colorado—and all those geological formations?

We were just recently, for example, at Arcadia National Park, a very large national park about five hours north of here, and there are large mountains all around. That entire park was created by immense sheets of ice, gigantic masses of ice that, as they moved, pushed the earth, scraping the earth, as it were, and thrusting it forward like a gigantic shovel. And that is what creates the hills and the formations in the earth’s surface: powerful movements of masses that displace everything in front of them and around them. As they expand, everything has to give way, and that is how cavities and hollows and mountains and all these things are created.

The Kingdom of God is something like that in history. The Kingdom of God has taken 2,000 years since Christ came, and it is advancing little by little, but it pushes against everything that resists: the devil, hell, the nations, man’s rebellion. And we are part of that invasive, warring force, do you understand? That is why the Gospel celebrates desperate people like Bartimaeus. Let me read to you here for a moment. I am going to continue with this idea, because if I leave just one idea in your heart—the idea of being radical for the Lord, knowing what you want, and pursuing it with the focus of an icebreaker—then I have already accomplished my goal for today.

Verse 46 of Mark 10 says: "Then they came to Jericho, and as He and His disciples and a great multitude were leaving Jericho, blind Bartimaeus, the son of Timaeus, was sitting beside the road begging." Look for a moment at something interesting, right? It says: "And as He and His disciples and a great multitude were leaving Jericho, blind Bartimaeus." I think there is something interesting here, and it is that there is a crowd, there are many people, disciples; there is a great mass of people. But in the midst of that great multitude, a person suddenly stands out: Bartimaeus.

Suddenly, Bartimaeus is brought out of the anonymity of the crowd, and the text brings him into relief. The panoramic camera moves like this and focuses on the face of a single man who suddenly takes on full dimension and solidity and stands out from the masses. And that is something I often see in Scripture: the Lord was always surrounded by crowds, but many times there was something—a quality in someone—that suddenly set that person apart from the masses and drew the Lord’s attention to them.

Just as right now: there is a fairly large group of people here, and one could say, well, sometimes we adopt a herd mentality and lose ourselves in the crowd. Look: through your faith, you yourself can reach the Lord directly with your need, depending on the condition of your heart. There may be a thousand people praising the Lord, but if there is a quality of desperate praise in your heart, the Lord hears and sees your worship as though you were the only one worshiping Him at that moment. And the Lord is capable of doing that with the thousand people who may be in this place, or with the billions of people on Earth.

What distinguishes us is that quality of faith Bartimaeus had. The Lord’s Grace can reach everyone in a general way, but many times the Lord’s Grace reaches a person in a specific way through the faith within that person. When we come to the House of the Lord, ultimately, coming to the House of God in itself brings blessing. We receive the Word of God, we rejoice in the company of our brothers and sisters, and we are inspired by hearing noble, good, and eternal principles, amen? But do you know what? There are people who leave the Church with a gift in their hands that comes directly from the mouth of God.

A healing, a Word of deliverance, a revelation that came to their mind, a solution to a problem, a declaration from the mouth of God: I have a part in your business, in your important situation, and I am going to act. There are people who leave the Church with spoils in their hands because they waged war as necessary; others leave blessed—amen!—because they were in the House of the Lord. But when I come to the House of the Lord, when I come to the Kingdom of God, I do not come to receive a generic blessing; I want to possess the land, I want to receive what God has for me. I need provision for my need. It is not that I am selfish; that is how God likes things to be. According to your faith, it will be done unto you, says the Word of the Lord.

I always say: look, salvation is free, but the blessings within the blessing depend on you and on your heart and on your effort and on your faith and on what you give to the Lord and on what you invest in the Lord. We will all be saved in Christ Jesus, but some of us will arrive smelling of smoke, almost burned; others will arrive strong in the Spirit, joyful, with a hearty welcome from the Lord: Come, good and faithful servant; you have been faithful over a little, I will set you over much. And others will be told: Ah, well, what else can we do? Get in here, come in! I want to be among those who already have a welcoming committee receiving me, with trumpets and everything.

Bartimaeus is like that, right? There is a crowd around him. There are other people—look at the woman with the flow of blood, whom we have discussed. There was a whole crowd around Him, and this woman furtively, secretly, illegitimately in a sense, touches the edge of the Lord’s garment, and the Lord feels a jolt and says: Who touched Me? And the disciples, clumsy and crude as they are in their spiritual understanding, say: But Lord, what do You mean, who touched You, when there are hundreds of people around You? No, someone touched Me.

A woman with faith, a desperate woman. A woman who had nothing to lose; she did not care about anything, she did not care what people thought or what they said about her, or whether she would be arrested because she was going against Jewish law. She had a need, and she approached Jesus and said: Today is the day of my healing; today I am not leaving without receiving what I came to seek. And the Lord recognizes that.

The fact is that sometimes we do not understand the nature of the Kingdom of God. Sometimes we think: well, the Lord is sitting up there and He listens; He is merciful and has Grace. Look, the Kingdom of God is very specific, brother. You are going to receive according to what you give; you are going to experience the Glory of God according to your commitment to God. That is why the apostle James says, right? When he says, for example: "If any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask God, who gives abundantly and without reproach." That is the general word, right? God’s nature is to give, but it says: ask in faith, without doubting.

But that is where the conditions come in. It is what I say, right? Salvation is for everyone by grace, free—and even that is not free; it cost Jesus dearly—but James says: "But let him ask in faith, without doubting, because the one who doubts is like the"—how does it say it?—like the waters of the sea, like the waves driven from one side to the other? It says: "The double-minded man"—say, "Ouch," and you, sister, are included too, do not think you are not (laughter)—"the double-minded man is unstable in all his ways." It says, "Let him not expect to receive anything from the Lord," essentially, the one who has that kind of attitude.

The Gospel is like that; you have to. There are many people in the Church, and this is one of the things I want to get into your mind again through these messages: these are not times for you to be a double-minded person. If you eat only once a week, you are going to have problems at work and everywhere else; the same is true of the Kingdom of God. If you only—excuse me, I hope you still love me at the end—but if you only come to Church and eat only on Sunday morning, you are going to be weak.

These are dangerous times, brothers and sisters. I believe these are the times to which the Word of the Lord referred when Christ said that those days would be shortened because otherwise even the elect would not be saved. I do not believe that the level of deception currently unleashed upon this world has ever existed in all of history. The dangers that beset the children of God today as they seek to maintain a sound, biblical life in these times are of unprecedented proportions, and I believe that only people with a very robust spiritual mindset, nourished by the Word of the Lord and with a clear commitment to remain faithful to the Lord come rain, thunder, or wind, will survive these times.

I think that is why those mysterious words of the Lord always haunt me: "When the Son of Man returns to the earth, will He find faith?" Because I see how the structure of the Church is crumbling in these times. Even those of us evangelicals who pride ourselves on being faithful to the Word are playing games with the Word. That is why my desire and my commitment as a Pastor is to produce in us the faith of Bartimaeus: a militant faith, a radical faith. People who do not say: No, why do I need to go to Church so often? That is for fanatics; once a week is more than enough, especially since the Pastor preaches far too long anyway.

Some people come halfway through worship because: oh well, 15 minutes is enough. How about spending 35 minutes here? But just look at the movies that take three hours—and how many times a week, right? Yet when it comes to giving God three hours, wow, we are stingy with God. But I believe we need robust people who can take on three dimensions before the Presence of the Lord, people who know how to seize their miracles, people who know how to go before the Throne of God, present their needs, and leave there with their package under their arm because they received there what they needed.

Brothers and sisters, if you depend on the Pastor to receive your blessing, I am afraid you are leaning on a very fragile reed, you know? I barely have enough strength for what I myself need; imagine if you lean on me. Learn how to climb the tree and find your own food, brother, how to eat your own fruit from the Kingdom of God. Sit down with your Bible at home, open it, plunge into that bottomless sea and dive, and pull out a few fish every time you enter the Word of the Lord, and eat directly from the Word. If you eat from here, you are honestly eating canned food, because it has already gone through—look—first the Bible, then a few commentaries, then the Pastor, then I preach it, and by the time it reaches you, very few nutrients remain. Go directly to the Word of the Lord; kill your own meat and eat it directly, brother.

Eat directly. Take time to be before the Lord. Fight your battles and earn your own medals. Do not put on little plastic medals bought there at Walgreens—no, real medals that you earned by fighting, with the scars from your own battles, when you were wounded and you fell and kept moving forward and saw the Glory of God. Those are the children of God who deserve to inspire this world and be used by God.

Bartimaeus exemplifies that; he is a warrior. So it says that the Lord, His disciples, and the crowd were there, but there was a man: blind Bartimaeus. Another interesting thing—perhaps I am going to have to stay with that verse alone. You know what? There is another passage; it was the first time I saw this, and that is why it is important to delve deeply into the Bible. Matthew 20:29–34—I am not going to ask you to look it up right now, but write it down if you want—it seems that there were two blind men, not just one, because if you read Matthew 20:29–34, it is an almost exactly identical account, but with two blind men rather than one, and that happens sometimes.

I am not going to get into all the complexities of textual interpretation and how the accounts came into the Bible; there are people who take care of that, and I am going to leave it to them. But Matthew presents us with an account, a more comprehensive version of the event, which seems to include two blind men—and it was not another, separate situation that resembled this one. No, I believe there are so many similarities between the two texts that it seems impossible to me that there were not two. But interestingly, Mark chooses just one and tells us the nature of the event. In fact, there is no contradiction; everything the other text in Matthew says is the same as what Mark says in terms of the biblical principles involved, what Christ does, and the relationship.

But it seems that Bartimaeus distinguished himself even within that select group of two blind men amid a crowd. There was something in Bartimaeus that set him apart even from the other man who was there, and that is why Mark chooses to focus on one—on Bartimaeus—because even within the innermost circle there are sometimes distinctions in how the Grace of God manifests itself in a life. Sometimes we simply paint with red, white, black, and yellow, and that is it. Look: the Kingdom of God has nuance upon nuance, and there are spiritualities that are subtler and more powerful. It depends on your effort; it depends on your heart; it depends on the degree to which your life, the makeup of your character, and your love for the Lord draw the Grace of God to you.

God is an incredible wine taster, and He can distinguish between one soul and another the subtle little things of purity, surrender, clarity, decisiveness, willingness to sacrifice, to give, and to go beyond. The Lord distinguishes the tiniest movements of the human soul. I always live my life believing that God knows every nuance, every shade of my thoughts, and that the Lord distinguishes my subtlest feelings.

The Word says that there is nothing the Lord cannot distinguish. It says of the living and effective Word that it discerns and divides the intentions of the heart and mind. It says: there is nothing that is not revealed before His Word and before Him. So live your life that way.

So even here we see that Bartimaeus stands apart from the other blind man. It says that he was sitting by the road begging. In his poverty and misery, Bartimaeus is a representation of every one of us—our helplessness, our problems, situations, difficulties, and struggles. We are helpless; we are beggars like that. All of us need a miracle from the Lord. There is something that binds us; there is a struggle. There is a battle we have to win; there is something that drains our blood every day, if you think about it—is that true or not? And like Bartimaeus, you need something that only Christ can provide.

And that is why you need prayer, fasting, sanctification, service, giving to the Lord, reading the Word, perfecting yourself in spiritual warfare, and knowing the mysteries of the Kingdom of God, because those are the weapons you can use to escape your human misery. Ultimately, we are all beggars; like Bartimaeus, we are all sitting by the road waiting for a miracle and an intervention from God. And what is going to make that intervention from God possible?

Verse 27 says: "And hearing that it was Jesus of Nazareth, he began to cry out." No, it was not just any Pharisee passing by; it was not the fashionable rabbi of the day who had a radio or television program. It says: "Hearing that it was Jesus." The solutions to the world’s problems are in Christ; I am convinced of that. They are not in the Virgin Mary, with all the respect I have for her; they are not in the new Pope we have; they are not in Pastor Miranda; they are not in Lion of Judah; they are in Christ Jesus. That is why we have to let people know that there is a sheriff here in Boston named Jesus, and He is able to solve the problems of drugs, gangs, misery, ignorance, injustice, and poverty.

Jesus—the Church has to proclaim Him to the Church so that they will know: oh, ah, Jesus! Okay, I am going to go to Him. Many people do not know that in Jesus there is power to transform lives. This community needs a warrior Christ, not that Christ over there with the little lamb in His arms, all languid like a pop music singer. No, He is a Christ who is a warrior. I like to see Christ with a rod of authority in His Hand, with eyes of fire and a body of burnished bronze, and a Voice like the roar of waves and seas. That is the Christ I serve, the One who captures my attention, because that Christ is the One who has the power to shatter all the enemy’s wickedness, destroy the hosts of the devil, change your life, transform communities, change nations, and change history. That Christ is seated upon His Throne, and He reigns, and He wants people to draw near to Him.

When Bartimaeus realizes, ah, there is Jesus, he begins to shout; he begins to cry out—a nice way of saying that he started shouting like a man possessed. He began to cry out. I see that again and again in the Gospel: we have to cry out to the Lord, not because He is deaf, but because He likes us to be intense. A hurried prayer while we eat a bowl of Corn Flakes does nothing, I think. Perhaps God in His mercy will hear it, but God wants a person who will sit down, gird up his loins, and cry out before Him.

Desperate people. People who say: give me this or I will die; I need a miracle, Lord—people who cry out to the Lord. And you know what? The Lord is not going to be offended; He is not going to say: oh, you are bothering Me. The Lord likes it when we ask Him with an aching and bleeding heart. We have to learn to cultivate that place of desperation. When I weep before the Lord, I know that does not come from me; it comes from God, and He hears my prayer. That is why I ask the Lord: Lord, may I be able to weep before You, may I be able to cry out before You, may I be able to feel the urgency of my need before You, because I know that when I pour out my soul before You, You hear my prayer—the heart that pours itself out before Your Presence.

Like Samuel’s mother, who poured out her soul there in the temple, while Eli, a man who had lost the anointing, thought she was drunk. When you are drunk with sorrow and need and crying out and anguish, if you pour that prayer out before your Heavenly Father, He will hear it. Let us learn to be intense; let us learn to be desperate before the Lord. God is honored by the prayer of His People.

"And hearing that it was Jesus, he began to cry out, saying: Jesus, Son of God, have mercy on me." You know what? We have a table to celebrate this morning. There are many things we could say; we are only just entering the passage. Perhaps next Sunday we will continue with this passage, but this morning I believe you already have good material to take home and think about. Let it be a substantial thought that remains in your heart like a cannonball entering your life; carry it away in your hands.

God wants desperate and radical men and women through whom He can do His work on Earth. People who say, like Esther: if I perish, I perish; tell my people to pray for me, because I do not know whether I will come out of this alive, but I have no other recourse—I am going to move forward. Those are the people God hears.

You have a choice this morning: you can live your life as just another evangelical with your evangelical membership card, or you can live your life with a sword in your hand, cutting your way through the undergrowth of this fallen world, clothed every day with the armor of the Spirit over your life.

My brother, my sister, in the Name of Jesus, receive right now—if you want to bow your head so you can concentrate better—God’s challenge for your life: I want to bless you. I want to perform miracles in your life. I want to make you a man, a woman, who brings joy to My heart when I look at you. I want to turn you into a resource for My Kingdom, and I want you, while you serve Me, also to eat from the table with which you serve others. I am not merely going to use you; I am going to provide for you and bless you while I use you, because I want a well-fed servant. I do not use My children like slaves from whom I squeeze every last drop and then kick them and throw them into the gutter. I bless My children, and while I use them, I bless them, and while I bless them, I use them. But I will have no dealings with mediocre people, the Lord tells you.

The lukewarm make Me nauseous, says the Lord; look it up—it is in the Word. Why don’t you settle this once and for all? says the Lord. If you are going to serve Baal, serve him; but if you are going to serve Me, serve Me. Do not keep wavering between two waters or two opinions—one thing or the other. Take a stand and live your life completely committed to one thing or the other, says the Lord. If you serve Me, I will bless you. If you surrender yourself to Me, I will make sure that no demon of hell prevails over your life. I will take part in all your affairs, and I will hear your prayers, and I will bless your offspring. But take a stand, wage war, and be like My Kingdom, which is violent, fierce, and rugged. That is how I want My people to be in the things of the Spirit.

So I declare that spirit over you. If you want to receive it, receive it; if not, do not receive it, because this is not a matter of inertia. If you want to enter this covenant with me, then say: yes, Lord, I open my heart to that endowment of Your Power and Your Grace; I commit myself to You. If you dare to believe this and receive this, raise your hand where you are, whether you belong to the Church or not—raise your hand. If you cannot do it, please do not do it, okay? But it is a commitment that I am asking you to make right now to the Kingdom of God and to the purposes of the Kingdom of God. Do not be too proper to raise your hands if you know that you need to raise them; do not be too elegant to raise them either.

If you believe that you understand what I am asking, raise your hand. That is part of being a man or a woman who thinks in supernatural terms; these actions have meaning. I raise both my hands and even one foot as well, in the Name of the Lord.

Father: Oh Lord, may the cloud of Your Spirit spread over this Church at this moment, Father. Make us a Church that is crazy about You, Lord, a Church that is reckless in the things of the Kingdom of God, a Church extravagantly committed to You, Lord. Oh God, in the Name of Jesus, thank You. We receive from You, Lord; we receive Your Grace; we receive Your Grace, hallelujah. I commit myself to You, Lord. Radical men and women, a radical Church, Lord, for Your Glory and Your honor. Forgive us for being so fainthearted, Father, and kill us and make us anew according to Your image and likeness, according to Your specifications, Lord. Thank You; we worship You and bless You.