Urging People To Do What The Lord Commands

Its hard to improve on the good thinking of others.

This quote came my way and caused me to think a lot about my own experience in sharing my faith and my commitment to telling others about what the Lord Jesus has done in my life. I share it in the hope that it will stimulate othes to think . . . and to pray . . . and then to act.

The bottom line is simple . . . people need the Lord.

"This is a day when we have become very clever at developing techniques, a day when we are apt to be urging people to witness; and what usually happens? They witness for a while, and then they stop. Then they are exhorted to witness again, so they go a little further, then stop again. But why do they stop?

Have you ever noticed in the Pauline epistles that Paul never urges Christians to witness nor has he anything to say about foreign missions? Nothing! How interesting! If you have to constantly be telling people to witness, something is wrong with them. If you always have to be pumping up people to get them interested in foreign missions, something is wrong with the people. What is Paul always doing? He is consistently bringing you to Christ and leaving you with Christ. When Christ is central in the heart of the man, what does the man want to do? He wants to tell others about Jesus, and he will do so effectively.

Let Jesus Christ be central in the heart of a man, and he is going to be burdened and troubled because millions have never heard of Christ. It is going to disturb him and bring into action. What he needs is not more exhortation; he needs Christ. And the Christ within him who died for the world will speak through him to that lost world. Without true passion for Christ, nothing works consistently. It loses its power."

Joseph S. Carroll in "How to Worship Jesus Christ"

An Ugly Disease

I have found myself studying the disease of leprosy recently in preparation for preaching a sermon about Jesus' healing of a leper. The New Testament tells us that Jesus felt compassion for this man whom Dr. Luke describes as being "full of leprosy" . . . he was in the advanced stages of this terrible muscular and neurological condition that also effected the skin in such a repugnant way.

Leprosy is an ugly, disgusting disease. Not nearly contagious, apparently, as many thought years ago, but it still maims and disfigures . . . and when diagnosed requires months of treatment to effect a cure.

Jesus healed this leper with a simple command, "be cleansed". Mark's gospel says simply that the leprosy "left him".

What a glorious event for this poor man. It had probably been years since he'd been touched by his wife or had been able to hold his children. He has been an outcast, discarded by society and relegated to the trash heap. He had to keep his distance from regular folk and was required to call out "unclean, unclean" when anyone approached . . .

And now he is clean! His rotten flesh restored. His open sores and maimed limbs renewed.

The Bible compares this terrible disease to another dreaded human condition called "sin". This disease afflicts every person on the planet and just like this leper, every one of us needs to come to the savior for cleansing.

Unlike this leper, however, most of us don't recognize the presence of this disease. Even when confronted by the fact that we live our lives in violation of God's law (called "transgression") and we fall seriously short of God's standard, His moral law (the ten commandments) we simply excuse it by claiming to be normal or simply "human".

Like this leper we must come to Jesus in humility and worship seeking His cleansing. We need to see the awfulness and ugliness of our disease. The prophet Isaiah said that our good deeds and righteous acts are like "filithy rags" in God's sight. They aren't good enough to accomplish the cure from this dreaded disease . . . after all, if the BEST we can do is viewed as "filthy rags", what must our worst stuff look like?