I Am Willing

 DEVOTION

THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO MATTHEW

I AM WILLING

Matt 8:1-4

8:1 When he came down from the mountainside, large crowds followed him. 2 A man with leprosy came and knelt before him and said, "Lord, if you are willing, you can make me clean." 3 Jesus reached out his hand and touched the man. "I am willing," he said. "Be clean!" Immediately he was cured of his leprosy. 4 Then Jesus said to him, "See that you don't tell anyone. But go, show yourself to the priest and offer the gift Moses commanded, as a testimony to them." 

NIV

Why wouldn’t a crowd follow him, considering what good doctrine he taught with all authority? However, the big story here is this leper and what happened when he came to Jesus. We notice that he knelt, he humbled himself, he recognized something about Jesus, something special about him, that he knew he must kneel before him. This could symbolize the diseased state of someone with a sinful soul, or in the state of sin, in need of the redemptive act of Jesus to be healed, to be made whole, saved from his corruptive sinful state. However, let us just look at this on the surface, of a leper, a man with a horrible skin disease, who is considered unclean, and must quarantine himself from the rest of the town, including all his family. We do notice that this leper does not have any question whatsoever about the fact that Jesus can make him clean. He does not ask Jesus if He is able, but if He is willing. This leper makes is clear that if Jesus is willing Jesus can make him clean. Jesus says those wonderful words, that should ring out to anyone who comes to Him humbling themselves, “I am willing, be clean!” and in this case, immediately he was clean. If, we took this on that deeper level, seeing the leper as representing a person’s sinful state, and when that person knees humbly before Jesus, then that person is immediately saved. But what about on the surface, with so many of us believers who have some form of disease, such as this Covid, where we must quarantine ourselves from the rest of the community? Should we not be able to kneel before our Lord and tell him that if he is willing, He could make us whole? He could cure any disease, any infirmity, or illness, if only he were willing. Wait, He said He was willing, at least to this leper, so was that the once and a lifetime that Jesus was willing to heal? No, we have listed for us many times He healed, and sometimes we are just told that He healed them all, all who came to Him. We say that we believe in healing, it is part of most evangelical and holiness churches, statements of faith, or the, what we believe statements. So how come so many of us believers are not healed? It is a real dilemma to ponder on. We wonder if we are really coming to Jesus with the faith this leper had. Maybe we put more faith in the medical profession than we do in Jesus. Just a thought, not a judgment, for not one of us can know another man’s heart, for all we can see is the outside, the appearances we project on the surface, God is the only one who looks at a man’s and knows that man’s heart. Maybe we do come to Jesus, but we hang on to just enough doubt that, first, He is willing, and second, that He will make us whole. Maybe we might just think that we have too much unworthiness to ask Him, that we feel we do not deserve His healing. We just are not sure of any of it. But what we know is that Jesus is able to heal us, He is willing to heal us, so it has to be something on our end that makes the difference. We simply cannot believe Jesus is not able, or that He would tell us, No I am not willing, stay sick, stay unclean. It seems we want to quote what He told Paul, that His grace is sufficient, so stay with that infirmity, to excuse us not being healed. Don’t know, again, we cannot know why any one of us is not healed, but we can only know our own hearts. Let those words of Jesus soak in, “I am willing, be clean!”