The Healing Touch of ChristНамуна

Day 4 Devotional:

The Salvation of Christ

The difference between Jesus and the Jewish rabbis of His day was that the Jewish rabbis could not be easily approached by ordinary people because they considered themselves to be too holy.

But Jesus Christ was the exact opposite. He drew to Himself the people whom the rabbis considered sinners. Jesus was easily the most approachable human being who ever lived.

After the leper had said to Christ in verse 40, “If you are willing, you can make me clean,” verse 41 tells us that, “Jesus was indignant. He reached out his hand and touched the man. “I am willing,” he said. “Be made clean!”

Notice that verse 41 tells us that Jesus was indignant when He heard the leper’s request. This is because Jesus couldn’t believe the leper would doubt that He would want to heal him, so Jesus stamped His foot down hard on the ground in indignation, and said something like, “If I am willing? Of course, I am willing! Be made clean immediately!”

In verse 42, as soon as Jesus touched the leper, the leprosy left the man.

Christ touched the leper because He knew that this isolated and ostracized man needed to feel His healing touch to heal his soul of the stigma of aloneness, isolation, and separation from society.

This is the good news of the gospel; Jesus took on our sin so that we could take on His life. No one would touch this leper because everybody knew that touching a leper meant being infected with leprosy.

The leper did not infect Jesus with his sickness. Instead, Jesus infected the leper with His healing life! The life of Christ that flowed into the life and body of the leper was so powerful that the man’s leprosy simply could not coexist with it.

In verse 44, Christ instructed the healed leper to say nothing to anyone, but to go, show himself to the priest, and offer for his cleansing what Moses commanded in the Law. But, in verse 45, the healed leper went out and began to spread the good news about his healing.

The former leper had now become so healed with the life of Christ that he now became contagious, no longer with leprosy, but with the life of Christ. Even though Christ had asked him to be silent, he just could not be silent.

His faith became so infectious that the good news “spread” like the coronavirus, but, of course, this was the good infection with the very life of Christ; everybody caught it from this healed leper, and people came to Christ from everywhere.

So, we can summarise our third S by saying that the good news of the gospel is that Christ came to heal us of our spiritual sickness of sin with His salvation and to remove the barrier of sin that quarantines, isolates, and separates us from God, and from other human beings.