The modern secular world wants to kill Jesus for claiming to be God. For anyone to claim divine authority is regarded as egotistical and an affront to the desire to be one's own authority -- to be autonomous and to create one's own identity apart from any constraints. They want to kill any unique claim to be God. They want to shame anyone who claims to speak for God. They want to eliminate God from the universe. They want to delete God from conversation except as a vulgar exclamation.

In April 1999 I took my staff team to a church growth conference put on by Walt Kallestad and his leadership at Community Church of Joy, Glendale, Arizona. It was a very productive conference on creating a vision for growth and putting it into action. In a Leadership Journal article in the Fall of 2008 Walt confessed his failures with his 12,000 member church. He said that his ministry philosophy had become: "The only way to capture people's attention is entertainment.

So many of us have questions, doubts, uncertainties, and fears, that we would like to have resolved. We cannot see through the fog of life's daily challenges to satisfactory conclusions. We are confronted with declining health of ourselves or our loved ones. We are having to deal with the problems of our family members. We are troubled by the national mood and the turbulence of politics. We face divided loyalties in our relationships. We worry about the future.

Yet here in the healing of the paralytic Jesus explicitly claimed divine authority. "So that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins...." How do we know that this claim is true? It seems to be an assertion that cannot be verified. How can you know whether sins are forgiven? You are not issued a written pardon by anyone.