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Day 2 Devotional

Our Sin Sickness

Mark 1:40 says, “A man with leprosy came to Jesus and begged Jesus on his knees, saying “If you are willing, you can make me clean.”

In the days of Jesus Christ, if a leper came into someone's house, the house was seen to be defiled and should therefore be destroyed. If a leper was seen on a public street, people were allowed to throw eggs and stones at him. Leprosy was assumed to be a curse from God.

This is why the leper came begging and kneeling before Jesus. This is also why the leper said to Jesus, "If you are willing, you can make me clean."

The leper had no doubt that Jesus could heal him, but he doubted if Jesus would want to heal him because he carried in himself this deep sense of being unclean, of being defiled, and of being unworthy, and he was overcome with shame; he was deeply ashamed of his condition.

People who were infected with the coronavirus lost their sense of taste and smell. With the disease of leprosy, one of the most distressing symptoms was the victim’s loss of sensation and sensitivity in his body, so that the infected person stopped feeling pain.

For example, lepers often lose their fingers and toes, and people think this is caused by the disease, but what happens is, that sometimes, at night, as the leper is asleep, rats would come and chew at the lepers' infected fingers and toes, but because they do not feel any pain, they would sleep right through it and they would wake up in the morning to find that those parts of their body were gone.

So, in this passage, this man’s sickness of leprosy is a picture of our own spiritual sickness of sin that spiritually defiles us before God and makes us insensitive to God and to the needs of other people. Our spiritual sickness of sin makes us more concerned about ourselves than the will of God and the needs of others.

So, we can summarise our first S from this passage by saying that it reminds us about our own spiritual sickness and defilement by sin that makes us insensitive to God and insensitive to the needs of other people around us.