Luke 5: 12 In one of the villages, Jesus met a man with an advanced case of leprosy. When the man saw Jesus, he bowed with his face to the ground, begging to be healed. “Lord,” he said, “if you are willing, you can heal me and make me clean.” 13 Jesus reached out and touched him. “I am willing,” he said. “Be healed!”And instantly the leprosy disappeared. 14 Then Jesus instructed him not to tell anyone what had happened. He said, “Go to the priest and let him examine you. Take along the offering required in the law of Moses for those who have been healed of leprosy. This will be a public testimony that you have been cleansed.” 15 But despite Jesus’ instructions, the report of his power spread even faster, and vast crowds came to hear him preach and to be healed of their diseases.16 But Jesus often withdrew to the wilderness for prayer.
When Jesus loves you and forgives you “it is the real thing!” He touches the untouchables, heals the unhealables, forgives the unforgiven, and loves the unlovables. Why? Jesus is God and God is love. Nuff said!! We only see a facimile of this love from Christians of today and what should be a norm is unusual. The pride of man has taken over so many believers lives and their desire for power has clouded their vision when it comes to looking at those who are needing a touch from Jesus. This causes us to look at a person’s sin more than the grace offered to them through Jesus. We might as well take the hymn Just As I Am out of our hymn books if we are going to try to live this kind of evil belief.
Jesus went against the norms of their society and touched this man with leprosy and healed him. How many people do you know with leprosy? I can’t think of any I know right now, but I do know of people who have sin in their lives and need a healing touch from our Savior. In our world’s view I would go to them and tell them to clean up their act and then come to Jesus for eternal life. But, that would not match up with the Bible, God’s Word. Remember the Bible? We want to write our own Bibles from the “wisdom” we think we have and the first thing we see, to write out is forgiveness. Thomas Jefferson read the Bible and loved the moral principles of Jesus, but Jefferson didn’t agree with all Jesus taught, so he cut and pasted his own Bible together out of what he agreed with and left out the scripture that he didn’t agree with. In a Christian world that worships relativity it seems we are writing our own Bibles where forgiveness is conditional and service is optional. We shun sinners as though we have never sinned and thus limit the work of Jesus because of our own judgment. Jesus never did that and His Word still holds true today, no matter how we mess it up.
To be like Jesus in our modern world will take us fighting the worldly norms established by modern Pharisees and once again loving those the world has shunned, the lepers of our society, sinners. And isn’t it strange that we all fall into this sinner category, but try to stay aloof of the condition, as though we never sin. Once again, satan, the father of lies, has made another lie look like the truth. To dispel this lie means we must believe “all” of the Bible and then the pure truth of His Word will show us the way. There are lost souls just waiting to be loved in our world, and we must never turn our back on those Jesus would embrace and heal. Can’t Touch This doesn’t apply to our loving Lord, so it shouldn’t apply to us either.
The Pilgrimage Continues,
David Warren