What's He Trying to Prove?

Jesus was forever telling people, “The Kingdom of God is near.” Okay, but what did He mean? What exactly was He trying to prove when He said that?

Well, He actually didn't stop there. What He really meant was, The Kingdom of God is near AND here is what it will be like.

The blind receive sight, the lame walk, those who have leprosy are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the good news is proclaimed to the poor.

Matthew 11:5-6

While the miracles that Jesus presented proved that He is who He said He is, they also showed in part, what the Kingdom of God will entail, in full, when He returns to judge the living and the dead.

In the Kingdom of God, there will not be any sickness, no more death, no more injustice, no more tears, no more suffering, grief and unbearable loss. In God's Kingdom peace will reign. There will be no more storms or dangerous waters. There will be more than enough food for everyone. In the Kingdom of God, people will know how to love one another.

When Jesus told people, “The Kingdom of God is near,” He was showing in striking detail the difference between life as we have chosen it to be on earth, and life as God will give to us if we will only humble ourselves before Him and admit that we cannot fix ourselves.

For people like atheists, that is simply too much to ask.

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.