Give Me a Hand
By Grant Gaines
What is more rampant than rabies and causes nearly as many people to get sick per year as the flu? If you answered Lyme’s disease, you would be correct. And while Lyme’s disease may not be terribly familiar to you, its carrier sure is. If you’ve ever gone on a scenic hike or camped in the great outdoors, you’ve certainly took measures to combat these Lyme’s-disease-carrying-critters also known as ticks.
Ticks are everywhere. In fact, there is an average of 171 ticks on a deer at any given time[1]. To give you a point of comparison, that’s about one tick per spot on a fawn (baby deer). But despite the abundance of ticks around us, the reason Lyme’s disease is likely not on your radar is because, quite frankly, Lyme’s disease is simple to prevent.
The only preventative measures you really need to take to avoid catching Lyme’s disease is to examine your body after spending time in a heavily tick infested area such as the woods, the farm, or the wilderness. That’s it—you just need to expose the ticks by bringing them into the presence of the light so they can be easily removed. The only thing that holds a person back from avoiding this illness is an unwillingness to expose their disease.
The transition here is so obvious that I probably don’t even need to continue writing in order for you to grasp the moral of the story, but I will continue anyways. Just as removing a tick from your body is relatively painless after you have first gone through the awkward and possibly embarrassing process of searching for and exposing that tick, removing sin from our lives takes on a similar journey.
The cure for sin has already been found, the battle has already been won, and the price has already been paid for your sins through Jesus’s death and resurrection many centuries ago. All that is separating you from the removal of this guilt and shame caused by sin is to go through the difficult and revealing process of exposing that sin. A certain man in Mark 3 found himself in a similar predicament as he came before the Lord.
What began as just another Sabbath day for this particular man turned out to be anything but ordinary. You see, this man had a shriveled hand (Mark 3:1) and in those days a physical deformity of any kind was viewed as a curse from God. With that being the case, it’s likely that this crippled man hid his deformed hand in the pocket of his robe all the days of his life, awkwardly avoiding a handshake or wave with the neighbors in order to dodge the humiliation of exposing this item of great shame to others.
But on this particular Sabbath day, a new Teacher by the name of Jesus the Nazarene rolled into the temple. Little did this crippled man know, but in a matter of moments this Carpenter who specialized in the construction business was about to radically transform this man’s hand and life.
But before He healed this man, Christ asked him to do one seemingly simple task first—“…Stretch out your hand…” (Mark 3:5, NIV). That’s it—stretch out your hand. But before you glaze over this request as just another minor detail to get lost in the overarching theme of the story, we must first consider the deeper implications of this invitation. You see, before this crippled man could ever have his deformity cured, he first had to expose it to Jesus. In other words, he had to reveal the thing he was the most embarrassed by and ashamed of by bringing it into the presence of the Light.
Oh how his heart must have been racing as he wrestled with the idea of extending and exposing his withered hand. Certainly he must have been pondering what his family, his friends, and his teachers would think when they saw the shriveled hand come out of his pocket for the first time. How long did he stand there with the fear of rejection and humiliation weighing on him before he finally built up the courage to pull his hand out of his pocket? Regardless of the length between the request and the response, the man finally obeyed Jesus’s command.
And it was only after the man moved his area of greatest weakness into the Light of the Savior that he was, “…completely restored” (Mark 3:5, NIV).
Don’t you know that God is beckoning you to do the same thing today? He longs for you to extend whatever you are most ashamed of—that lust, anger, greed, fear, frustration, or whatever other “spiritual deformity” you may have towards Him so that He can heal you.
As crazy, as unlikely, and as illogical as it may seem, God actually wants your sin, your junk, and your baggage. He longs to remove that sin from you as far as the east is from the west (Psalms 103:12) so that you may be free of condemnation and shame and begin to joyfully walk in His ways.
All the man had to do was stretch his hand towards the Restorer and he was healed, it was as easy as that. Upon moving his weakest area towards God, he was healed. God is inviting you to do the same today, are you answering His call?
Comments? Questions? Suggestions?
©Grant Gaines 2013
