Jesus Gives That Healing Touch

For those who hide from Jesus, for those who wish Jesus would see only beauty when He looks at them, I've got some bad news. It just isn't gonna happen. Jesus went out of His way to touch those things which tradition had declared ugly and disgusting: dead bodies, oozing sores, women, children, leprosy, bloody discharges and sinful people.

To follow Peter's first instinct at the Last Supper, and tell Jesus to not cleanse us denies Jesus a place in our lives. If you insist on making yourself acceptable, if you think that you can't release your life to Jesus until the porn and masturbation, the lying and hating and withholding forgiveness and lusting are in control, you disqualify yourself from receiving anything from Jesus. He came to earth to save sinners, not those who think they are good.

It is Jesus who will release you from sin's power.

You have no ability to achieve that freedom on your own.

Powerful changes that happen in the life of someone who follows Jesus never come from the follower working hard at doing anything. They come from arriving at a place where Jesus is everything and we are blown away by His gift of love.

We, you and I, can never be anything other than what we are, broken, sinful, wounded, failing, hurting people. We need to accept our brokenness. 

When Jesus holds us, it's our brokenness that He touches. He invites us to lean back into to arms of grace. He does this because He loves us.

In trying to make ourselves loveable, we actually distance ourselves from true love. In pretending to be good, we are abandoning the life of grace. Jesus was nailed to the cross for those of us who are not good. Pretending to be anything else is delusional.

Our only option, our only need is to come home, and to take shelter from the storm within the safety of God's forgiveness.