I recently was reading the story of the woman with the issue of blood in the fifth chapter of Mark. She touched the hem of Jesus’ garment and was immediately healed, without Jesus seeming to know who had touched Him, but that healing virtue had left him and impacted someone.
In the Old Testament, Jesus would have been considered ceremonially unclean from having touched or been touched by such a woman. In the New Testament, under a new covenant, the sick got healed and cleaned when they touched Jesus, the Messiah.
What about you?
When you enter a place, do you cause people to get closer to Jesus?
Can people touch you or reach out to receive something from your life, and be made whole– or get closer to their wholeness?
Are people’s lives improved by your involvement or your presence?
Do you impact every location where you set foot with the light of Christ inside you?
Or do you live in some kind of isolation, and only hang around other Christians without impacting the hurting world around you?
Do you keep yourself “unspotted from the world” because you’re afraid it will contaminate you if you are too involved in the lives of your neighbors?
I think the above is the biggest reason Christians are losing the “culture war”. We’ve not really been going into the world, where people can touch us and receive their healing, but we’ve been keeping ourselves from it hoping that our numbers outnumber their numbers and that the people we vote into office would win their elections and change the land for us since we’re not already doing it ourselves.
Evidently, the opposite is happening, at least in the Western world.
Do you want to win a culture war?
Go and touch the lives of those around you.
Give people the opportunity to be made whole, instead of thinking imposing our will on them through legislation is going to do the trick.
Making sure our laws are the ones passed in the land is not going to solve the problems and change people’s hearts that desire to commit the things we believe to be lawlessness.
Revolution will come from a change of heart.
It’s going to come from your neighbors knowing you care about them as a person and want to share the life of Christ with them for that motive. The point of being salt and light, is we are in the midst of something, not isolated all in one place.
I once heard someone say that the Church is like manure–if you keep all in one place, it stinks. But if you spread it around, it will produce life and beauty.
Amen.
