“And Jesus answered them. Go and tell John what you hear and see. The blind receive their sight and the lame walk. Lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear and the dead are raised up and the poor have good news preached to them.”
– Matthew 11:4–5
I love Matthew 11:4–5. This is Jesus’s response when John the Baptist was in prison and he sent word by his followers to Jesus saying, “Are you the one who is to come?” Because there were a lot of questions. Jesus was not the Messiah that most people were looking for. And even John was wondering about his identity and Jesus answered them. Go tell John what you hear and see, and just listen to the beauty in these words that are describing the fruit of Jesus’s life, flows from his identity, the blind receive their sight. The lame walk, lepers are cleansed. The deaf hear, the dead are raised up and the poor have good news preached to them.
Matthew 11:4–5 Reminds Us to Share the Gospel
We look forward to Christ coming again. May we live to make the good news of Jesus known till He returns or calls us home.
Don’t you long for all those things? I just look around me, us in the world, and there’s so much that is not right. There’s so much tension and hurt. There’s so much pain, injustice, sickness, disease, there’s blind and lame and deaf, and people die. I don’t mean to paint a bleak picture, but it’s just the world, the fallen world we live in. And Jesus came to turn it totally upside down. He came to give sight to the blind, to help the lame walk, to cleanse lepers, to help the deaf hear, to raise the dead to life, to preach good news to the poor.
And obviously, obviously these are still realities in the world today. These were realities in the first century when Jesus was there, but we are seeing, as we read through Matthew, these things happened because Jesus has power to bring about these things.
Matthew 11:4–5 Reminds Us Everything Will Be Made New
And I was just meditating recently on Revelation 21 when Jesus returns and he will make all things new, and everything will be right and everything will be good. And the blind will have sight, and the lame will be walking, and lepers will be totally cleansed. Everyone who’s suffered from sickness and disease will have no more sickness, no more disease. And you will raise us to life never to die again. Jesus, we pray, come quickly. Lord, we are tired of sin in the world, sin in our own hearts, the effects of sin all around us. Jesus, we praise you for coming, for paying the price for our sin, for dying on a cross, for rising from the dead, for conquering the grave, for defeating sin and Satan. And we just say together today, we look forward to your return.
This Verse Leads Us to Pray For Jesus to Come Quickly
We look so forward to your return and we pray you’d come quickly. Help us to live, to make the good news of your grace and your love and your power and your mercy and eternal life in you known from now until the day either you come back or you bring us home to yourself.
Lord help us to proclaim this good news about who you are and how you are making all things new. God, please, please, please spend our lives toward that end. As long as we’re here, help us to live and Philippians 1:20-21, to live is Christ and to die is gain. We praise you Jesus. We pray these things with longing for you’re coming with our lives surrendered to you in your name. Amen.
David Platt serves as a pastor in metro Washington, D.C. He is the founder of Radical.
David received his Ph.D. from New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary and is the author of Don’t Hold Back, Radical, Follow Me, Counter Culture, Something Needs to Change, Before You Vote, as well as the multiple volumes of the Christ-Centered Exposition Commentary series.
Along with his wife and children, he lives in the Washington, D.C. metro area.
