Jesus Pronounced

What Did Jesus Do?

According to your faith be it done to you.
Matthew 9.29

An announcer tells it like it is. We expect announcers to accurately state the facts, report truthfully what is happening. An announcer who kept shouting “Home run!” after every inning ending strike out by the home team wouldn’t last long. But in the end, even the best announcers have no real authority, they just watch and report. But one who pronounces is altogether different from one who merely announces. Pronouncers definitely have authority. The authority of the Son was given Him by the Father, and the power of His pronouncements was the power of the Holy Spirit.

To pronounce is to make a declaration, to state officially, with authority. It is certainly not predicting. Jesus was most decidedly a pronouncer. The Lord spoke and taught unlike anyone the people had ever heard in a synagogue, for He taught them “as one who had authority.” (Matthew 7.29) When Jesus spoke, well, pretty much everyone and everything obeyed. From its beginning to its end the ministry of Jesus was about pronouncing the kingdom of heaven. (Matthew 4.17)

When Jesus said to Simon and Andrew, who were beside the Sea of Galilee casting their nets, “Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men” He made an official declaration of their new, and totally unexpected, vocation, which commenced immediately. (Matthew 4.18-19)

A humble centurion, and humble centurions were hard to find, came to Jesus with a compassionate request that the Lord might heal his servant who was paralyzed and suffering greatly. The centurion understood that Jesus was a pronouncer, for he did not presume to ask the Lord to trouble himself to come to his house, but rather believed that Jesus, with His authority, needed only to make a pronouncement. And the Lord made the kind of pronouncement He like to make most of all, a pronouncement of faith, “Go; let it be done for you as you have believed.” (See Matthew 8.5-13)

Similarly, when some people brought a paralytic lying on a bed to Jesus, He pronounced the paralytic both forgiven and healed by virtue of the faith demonstrated by his friends. The crowd who witnessed what happened could not help but glorify God when they saw that such authority to pronounce had been given to men. (Matthew 9.1-8)

Meteorologists, armed with weather satellites and radar, make predictions of varying accuracy about whether it will rain, and how much might be expected to fall. Jesus made pronouncements which the wind and rain obeyed. (Mark 4.39)

Typically medical examiners come and make pronouncements of death. But Jesus wasn’t a medical examiner, He was the Great Physician, His business was pronouncing life, not death. And so it was that the Lord dismissed a house full of mourners making a commotion over what they thought was the death of the daughter of a ruler; for Jesus pronounced, “the girl is not dead but sleeping” and the girl arose. (Matthew 9.23-25)

Perhaps Christ’s greatest pronouncement was the one He made with His last breath upon the cross, “it is finished,” declaring that the work of saving men’s souls had been accomplished. (John 19.30) Yet, the Lord was not done pronouncing. Some forty days after the Crucifixion Jesus made one final pronouncement before He was lifted up into heaven, “You will be my witnesses.” (Acts 1.8) And so it was that Jesus, who possessed all authority in heaven and on earth to pronounce, declared His followers to be pronouncers.

Fishers of men, laborers who gather the harvest, salt and light to the world, pronouncers, that is what Jesus calls His followers to be. The world has always had plenty of announcers, and today it has perhaps more announcers than ever. But amidst all the announcing in our world, the sick and the lost need to hear someone kingdom pronouncing. That’s what Jesus did.

S.D.G.

Jim
www.jimwilkenministries.org
Marion, NC
PS 37.4