“Jesus took the blind man by the hand and led Him out of the village. Then, spitting on the man’s eyes, He laid His hands on him and asked, ‘Can you see anything now?'
The man looked around. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I see people, but I can’t see them very clearly. They look like trees walking around.’ Then Jesus placed His hands on the man’s eyes again, and his eyes were opened. His sight was completely restored, and he could see everything clearly.” Mark 8:23-25 NLT
I want to talk about these verses for a moment because I feel like a lot of us just read the crazy things Jesus did (like this), but we don’t meditate on it and follow it like we should. We just accept it as being Jesus, and we do not always follow His radical, crazy example.
That’s right. Jesus Christ is so much more than just our Savior. He is also the example we ought to follow.
Step into the shoes of that blind man for a moment. You hear that this Man who has being going around healing all who were sick has now come to the village you are in. Better yet, He said that He is going to heal you. How exciting! This Man leads you out of the village, (Do not forget you are blind, so you cannot see Him or where you are going.) then He spits in your eyes!
What in the world? What kind of thoughts would be running through your mind after that happened? That is crazy! But sometimes those are the kinds of things Jesus did. He did not always just lay His hands on people, nor did He always have people running by just to touch the hem of His garment. Regardless of how Christ did it, the man was still healed.
Sometimes Jesus did things like this to make us realize that God can and will tell us to do things that push us past the point of social acceptability and normality. When we are told by God to do things like this or when we read about what Jesus did, we are reminded that God doesn’t always work in a way that makes sense to us.
When something happens that goes against what society accepts as normal and when people are more willing to listen and do what God says—regardless of how crazy it may seem—than they are to what society says, two things happen: that radical, crazy action begins to get a lot of attention, and change begins to take place.
I want to share one simple and obvious fact with you all: this world needs change.
The kind of change that this world needs is the kind that is going to bring peace and not more violence. The kind that is going to fix what is broken and not justify shattered pieces. The kind that is going to help people heal and not convince them that their hurt is somehow a part of who they are. The kind that is only going to occur if people really start following the example that Christ set when He was here.
It is time for us, as Christians, to stop being timid and instead actively seek God and do whatever He asks of us. It is time for us to make God so big in our lives that we will do whatever it takes just to get closer to Him and just to see what He wants done carried out. When we do what God asks, people can be healed and set free by Him. God is the healer, not us. He knows exactly what a person needs and exactly how it needs to happen. We don’t. So, when He tells us to do things that don’t make sense to us, it could be exactly what someone else needed.
I would rather look crazy and know that I did what God wanted me to do than be “normal” and know that someone could still be hurting because God wanted to use me to help them.
I will leave you with these two questions: What kind of crazy thing is God asking you to do? Who is still hurting because you haven’t done it yet?
