Dive Deeper

Mark 2:¹⁷ “When Jesus heard this, he told them, “Healthy people don’t need a doctor—sick people do. I have come to call not those who think they are righteous, but those who know they are sinners.”

When we begin to treat things like murder, adultery, stealing, and lying, they are just symptoms of the disease in our hearts called sin.

 Doctors tell us that symptoms vary and can be suppressed. Take malaria for instance, the symptoms vary in different people. For some their mouths become bitter.

Some people just feel pains and weakness in their joints. Some others begin to break out in sweat, have high temperature or headaches. The point is if you keep attacking the symptoms, you will not solve the problem. If you keep giving sweets to the person whose symptom is bitterness in the mouth, it will not solve the problem. What you are doing is treating the surface.

If you keep popping pills to supress the headaches, what you are doing is treating the symptoms. But as soon as you take an anti-malaria drug, you attack the base, and flush the parasite out of your system. What happens to the symptoms? They disappear. God wants us to get rid of the disease and the only way, the only person that can do that for you and I, is Jesus. Our efforts and our best intentions cannot help us. What matters most is not the symptoms you are showing but the disease you are carrying. Christ did not come to treat our symptoms but to heal our disease.

Being a Christian is not talking about a behavioural change. Unfortunately, church focuses too much on behavioural change. Which is why you hear statements like, now that you are born again you have to cover your hair, you cannot wear red lipstick, you cannot use lavender perfume – rules for behavioural change. Salvation is deeper than behavioural change. Jesus has not come to change our behaviour; He has come to change our lives. When your life changes, obviously certain behaviours will go.

But we need to understand that the behaviour is not the problem. The behaviour is like a symptom. At every prayer meeting, a pastor would consistently say, “O Lord, clear the cobwebs of our minds. One day a little boy that attends the meetings with his mother, got up and said, “O Lord, kill the spider!” Stop clearing cobwebs and kill the spider!

Prayer: Holy Spirit please rid me of sin in my heart, in Jesus Name. Amen!