Grace Emmanuel Church

Pastor Sam Chess

(Do you ache for the touch of Jesus?)

John 7:37 On the last and greatest day of the Feast, Jesus stood and said in a loud voice, "If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me and drink. 38 Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, streams of living water will flow from within him." (NIV)

Matthew 11:28-31 Then Jesus said, “Come to me, all of you who are weary and carry heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. 29 Take my yoke upon you. Let me teach you, because I am humble and gentle at heart, and you will find rest for your souls. 30 For my yoke is easy to bear, and the burden I give you is light.” (NLT)

Which of these Webster definitions do you think I'm heading toward today?

a) to handle…lay hands on

b) to come near and come in contact with…

All of the New Testament and part of the Old… is about God coming near and coming into contact with humanity. Jesus…taking on Human form and coming to this earth… is a ratcheting up of God TOUCH into the lives of his children… but…

The Gospels go out of their way to tell us that Jesus, sometimes, physically, went out of his way to put his ten fingers on people. Why? He didn't have to….In some other places he heals people from a distance…. and sometimes his very presence brings physical healing to whole villages.

We see Jesus grabbing the apostle Peter's sick mother in law by the hand and raising her up…

He takes Jairus dead daughter by the hand and raises her back to life…

He puts his finger in a deaf and dumb man's ears and then touches his hand to his speechless tongue.

He repeatedly holds children on his lap…

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Always, touching people… everything Jesus did had a divine purpose….so what was the purpose of all this touching… was Jesus trying to convey a deeper meaning?

When we touch we are saying something. If someone says "hi" after the service… that's nice. If they shake your hand, enthusiastically, that's nicer. If they put their arms around your shoulder and squeeze… they are probably saying something more than, "I feel like stretching" or "your top is made of such nice material".

Touch communicates!... sometimes more than words ever can.

It makes sense that the greatest communicator of all time would use the sense of touch in bringing the Gospel of salvation to mankind.

No-where is it quite as potent as in "mother-of-all" touch stories that I want to tell you about today…

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Let me set the stage:

Let's call out character Levi… One day Levi began to get a weird pain in his joints…. Then starting on his back, there began to appear oddly-discolored blotches, almost in a symmetrical pattern of some kind. The blotches finally erupt into open green oozing sores, with a strange, spreading, numbness setting in. The tendons on the hands and feet contract making claws, and the skin around the face bunches and furrows like a lions skin…

Eventually the deadened extremities begin to rot and fall off leaving stubs where fingers once were…. Sometimes the whole hand or foot would just rot and drop off. The voice would grow raspy and the rotting flesh would send up a horrific never-ending smell. It generally took 9-20 years before the organs inside would rot enough to send the sufferer into coma and then death.

There was no known cure for leprosy!

Because Leprosy was incurable and contaminating… there were strict Jewish laws controlling the lives of lepers, The Old Testament, itself, sets up strict laws for diagnosing and regulating leprosy. As soon as the rash started you were to instantly go to the priest and if you had just gotten into the poison ivy your live would go on… If you had leprosy… your life, for all practical purposes…ended.

You would, from a distance, look at you family for the last time, with eyeballs that would eventually fall out… and blow kisses to them with lips that would one day fall off..

None of them would ever touch you again! You would forever be banished from the cities and even out in the countryside you would drone the words… unclean…unclean!

You probably didn't really need to because anyone within 1000' of you could smell your rotting body long before they could hear your voice.

David's 38^th Psalm sound like it was written about this disease:

 Psalm 38:1 O LORD, do not rebuke me in your anger or discipline me in your wrath… 3 Because of your wrath there is no health in my body; my bones have no soundness because of my sin. 5 My wounds fester and are loathsome because of my sinful folly. 6 I am bowed down and brought very low; all day long I go about mourning. 7 My back is filled with searing pain; there is no health in my body.  8 I am feeble and utterly crushed; I groan in anguish of heart. 9 All my longings lie open before you, O Lord; my sighing is not hidden from you. 10 My heart pounds, my strength fails me; even the light has gone from my eyes. 11 My friends and companions avoid me because of my wounds; my neighbors stay far away. 14 I have become like a man who does not hear, whose mouth can offer no reply… 15 I wait for you, O LORD; you will answer, O Lord my God. (NLT)

You know how sometimes we get angry at God because there is not quite enough money at the end of the week, when we are not treated quite like we deserve, at work…

Imagine….

Enter…Jesus… (Mark 1:40-42) (five sentences)

a) A man with leprosy came to him and begged him on his knees,

b) "If you are willing, you can make me clean."

c) Filled with compassion, Jesus reached out his hand and touched the man.

d) "I am willing," he said. "Be clean!"

e) Immediately, the leprosy left him and he was cured. (NIV)

Let's break this down…. Jesus is on his tour of Galilee… At some point the leper starts in his direction…His smell preceding him. I'm sure when he didn't divert his course…whoever was with Jesus probably scattered…. Not Jesus… he stuck his ground and probably even made some motion to let the leper know it was OK to walk right up to him…

a) A man with leprosy came to him and begged him on his knees,

This is a bold move from a man who has shunned all human contact for years. There was more here than just physical desperation. There was real faith here. The phrase translated "begged him on his knees" is the Greek word for bow down/worship!

b) "If you are willing, you can make me clean."

The Matthew account of this phrase includes the word LORD. He doesn't use the word for Sir… he calls Jesus Lord acknowledging his deity. There is something here I want you to notice…most of us can probably relate to this.

The Leper had full faith in Jesus ability to touch him… He lacked faith in Jesus willingness to touch him.

Most everyone in this room has faith to believe God is capable of dealing with any problem that has arisen in your lives. You fully believe that God can and does bring healing to people's souls, bodies, minds, and emotions… You just don't believe he will do it for you!

You can read this book of Vern Bourne's about God's deliverance from a vile, sinful life and his cocaine addiction…. and even read in the new material about a later addiction to pornography that God delivered him from…. And you can strongly believe in the power of God to wrestle sinners away from their sin… and yet when you apply the same logic/theology to your own life… it comes out like:

"If you were willing, you could make me clean."

Jesus: "OK…let's do it…

Don't tease me Jesus…I know you could if you wanted to…

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c) Filled with compassion, Jesus reached out his hand and touched the man.

This is huge…. First of all the compassion statement: Jesus is incarnate God…God is infinite in compassion. Jesus would have always have had more compassion than all of us, here, put together.

When the Bible takes something Jesus already had… and says he was overwhelmed with it…that is very powerful. Something about the helplessness of the leper, that day, something about his pure faith that Jesus could do what no one else could ever do.

What came next was unprecedented: Jesus reached out his hand and touched the man.

By Old Testament Jewish law…which Jesus himself inspired and wrote… as soon as he touched the leper; He, himself, became defiled with the disease. He was now unclean by Jewish law…and he didn't care. As the defilement… and perhaps even the bacteria that we now know caused the disease passed to Jesus… out of him, and into the leper, passed the awesome, healing power of God!

And talk about communication by touch… Jesus touch didn't stop on some rotting part of Levi's body…. It reached right into his soul!

You can actually hear the excitement in Jesus voice…

d) "I am willing," he said. "Be clean!"

I am willing: Greek present tense: present action going on into the future without an ending point!

Be clean: Greek aorist tense: decisive and immediate action

e) Immediately, the leprosy left him and he was cured. (NIV)

I don't have to tell you that it wasn't just his leprosy that was cured. The touch of God made its way deep into all the years of cruel abandonment, and misjudgment and began to heal layer after layer of pain and heal from the inside out, perhaps, decades of abuse at the hands of others. Jesus love began to fill up Levi's empty emotional tanks…

Perhaps some here long for that kind of inner touch deep into your soul!

Maybe you're crying out: "If you are willing, you can make me clean."

Out the front of shortened sandals popped the rest of a foot and then toes stretched far out into the dirt. New seeing eyes watched a nose stretch out over newly forming lips. The leper walked toward the temple to present his new body to the priests. Truth is; he could have lived the rest of his life as a leper… that wasn't the most important healing that day. What made him really joyous were the effects of Jesus touch deep into his soul.

Jesus walked away that day carrying the defilement of Levi's leprosy. The symbolism of what happened wasn't new to him. It was just a tiny part of what he would one day bear as he hung on the cross. Then he would carry ever sin, every abuse, every cruel act of every human being… and understand…he wasn't just going to bear our sin… oh no…it was more than that:

2 Corinthians 5:21 God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. (NIV)

You think the exchange he made with the leper, that day was big… what he has promised to each of us is even bigger!