Tuesday, August 9, 2011

The Healing Stream

(ethoughts published today...)


“Is there no balm in Gilead?
Is there no physician there?”
Jeremiah 8:22 (NIV)

Jeremiah did not have an easy life. What prophet did? God kept sending them, and people kept killing them. It was no different with Jesus.

The lost souls of Jeremiah’s time couldn’t hear or see the one thing that would heal them. But when God sent The Word in the flesh, most people didn’t see or hear Him, either.

We are no different than the people we read of the Bible, the crowds who ignored the faithful Jeremiah. We are surrounded by false prophets, by knockoffs of the truth. We are held at bay by ourselves, even by a refusal to admit that we are sick at all.

Same as then, we feel satisfied, at least for a while, with a temporary fix to an eternal problem. Alcohol. Pornography. Fame. Even clothes or money or the best house on the block. The world offers something for everyone. But that Bible teaches that every fix is a Band-aid, an ice pack, a stitch that won’t hold or heal.

“I am the LORD, your healer.” Exodus 15:26 (NIV)

The one thing that can change hearts like ours is radical love. The Word. God shows us what that looks like in the life of Jesus, The Word become flesh.

“The next day John saw Jesus coming toward him and said, ‘Look, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!’” John 1:29 (NIV)

John and others saw, first the life lived and then the life-changing love, on Calvary. The balm of The Great Physician. The healing stream of blood.

The healing stream of love.
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