Personal Care

I've heard that when a "new believer" asks, "Where do I begin reading the Bible?" you should tell him or her to begin in the Gospels. A lot of people think that Mark is the easiest to read, so start there. Others say that Luke is the most detailed, so that's the best place. And so on and so forth. There was a young man we were talking to recently who said he wasn't sure about this whole "Christian thing." Of course, we asked him to explain. He said he didn't like the examples he'd been given and so that left him feeling that all Christians were fake and he didn't want to be like them. We told him that a relationship with Jesus didn't have to be like what he saw in so many other people. We said that his relationship with Jesus would be unique to him. He said he still wasn't sure, so we challenged him to read the Book of Luke.


A few weeks later, we saw him again and asked him what he thought of it. He said, "There's a lot of healing in there. Every time I turn around, Jesus was healing someone else." His answer was such a unique way of looking at it, that it just kind of struck me as...eye opening. Here's someone who feels he has everything to lose by searching out "this Jesus person", and so read the Book of Luke and felt he's not gotten much out of it, because all he's seen Jesus do was heal people.


What if that's what we saw? Depending upon the version you read, the word, "healed" appears 39 times in the Gospels, and a total of 52 times in the New Testament. For someone actively seeking a healing for their life, that should provide a lot of hope. As we read in the Gospels, all who touched Jesus were healed, and many He healed with just a word. What about the man who was born blind, in John 9. The man, then healed, described the personal care that Jesus took in healing him, "[He] made some mud and put it on my eyes. He told me to go to Siloam and wash. So I went and washed, and then I could see," (John 9:11).


Perhaps, like this man, you did nothing to call upon you the pain or suffering you are feeling. Perhaps you were simply born into a fallen world, but Jesus wants to use your circumstances to touch you in a personal way, so that you will go and share with others all that He has done for you. Ask Jesus today, if He will touch you in a personal way. Ask Him to show you if there is anything that you must do. Like the blind man, are you to wash off the mud, the healing salve, or are you to just wait and believe. James 1:6 says that we must believe and not doubt. Waiting can leave you feeling weary, and weariness allows easier passage for doubt to creep in. Perhaps your only "assignment" is to wait without doubt. Pray and ask the Lord to give you strength, so that you will rise up, above the doubt and weariness, on wings like eagles, (see Isaiah 40:31).