OK DO NOT READ THIS IF YOU DO NOT WANT TO LOL I KNOW IT IS EXTREMLY LONG> IT IS MY SKETCH DRAFT OF THE SERMON I WAS ASKING ADVIE ABOUT EARLIER> IT STILL NEEDS A LITTLE WORK BUT I WOULD LIKE ANY ADVICE YOU HAVE LIKE PARTS THAT SHOULD BE MORE DESCRIBTIVE TO BE MORE EFFECTIVE OR VERSES THAT GO ALONG WITH WHAT I AM SAYING ECT> I THINK YOU GET THE POINT> THANKS TO ALL THE PEOPLE FOR THE ADVICE EARLIER!

Living outside the city walls being shunned by your family and friends you once counted as your closest relationships. The pain that went along with the sores on your skin is almost as bad as the pain of being exiled. Picture this with me…… You are sitting around a table with your family and closest friends. To your right are your best friends that you have grown up with and to your left are your wife and two wonderful children. You are all eating, laughing, and joking and you sit back and think to yourself nothing could go wrong. You are surrounded by the people you love the most and nothing could make this life God has blessed you with any better or any worse. You are completely content. While you are sitting at the table, realizing how blessed you are you notice a sore that has formed on your wrist you haven’t in the past. You don’t think much of it and you finish your meal and enjoy spending time afterward with the people you count closest to you and love so much. Later that night when your friends have left and the children are in bed you re-examine the sore on your wrist. You wonder what the sore could be but don’t think much of it and go ahead to sleep. Little did you know that little sore was going to be the beginning of what would change your life forever. Over the next couple of weeks it increasingly gets worse. You try to hide the ever growing sore from the people around you by covering it up hoping no one notices it. After you realize the sore isn’t getting any better you decide to go secretly to visit a priest and see if he could help or even heal you some how. When you get to the priest and he begins to examine your sore you wonder if he can heal it. Stories of men with leprosy pop into your head but you quickly push them out saying that could never happen to you. When you look back up from the priest hands examining you wrist you notice the grim look on his face. As he slowly backs up you ask him – “well, is there anything you can do?” The priest the answers you “well….. according to the law of Moses you are unclean. We will put you in carotene for seven days and then we will re-examine the sore and see if it has gotten better. Your heart is broken yet hopeful that your arm could get better over the next week. So through the next week you keep you hope high that your arm will heal. On the fifth day you begin to really worry because the sore has only gotten worse! You begin to pray to God knowing that if you sore doesn’t heal in the next two day you will be permanently exiled. You pray and pray that he will heal you. You search your life for any sins that may have brought this disease upon you. Each day closer to the priest examination is torture to you knowing what is immanent unless God decides to do a miracle. With no avail on the last day, the priest comes to re-examine you arm one more time. When he ask you to pull your sleeve up you do so slowly and painfully. As you sleeve slides further and further up your arm the priest retreats further from you. He quickly explains that you are unclean and must go to a camp outside of the city where you will stay until God sees it fit to heal you from this disease.WOW you whole world comes crashing down! The news you feared has come true. You can’t believe it. You don’t know how to take it…. You quickly go to your house and with tears in your eyes, try to explain to you children why you have to go away. Your wife doesn’t even touch you for fear of contracting the disease herself. While she is crying she says to you “Please don’t touch me. We can’t. What will happen if both of us contract the disease? What will happen to the kids?” Those words pierce straight through your heart like a burning sword. If leaving everyone you know isn’t enough pain you can’t even give your family a hug goodbye! As you leave you tell your wife to explain to you friends what has happened. You cry as you walk towards the gate of the city knowing everything you have loved and cared for is going to be left behind. No matter how bad you want it back you have to wait until you heal and are clean. All you can do is pray and hope that your disease will not be permanent and you will heal soon. Years pass while you are in this colony. The sore has now spread all over your body. It is more painful now than ever. You have long given up on God. Every day you can’t help but think about your wife and kids and your friends you left behind and haven’t seen since. No one has come to visit you and you can’t visit them for fear of what they would say. Also for fear you would spread the disease to them. The words of your wife still ring in your ear. You can still see the confusion in your children’s eyes when you told them you had to leave. You think to yourself what your children are doing. You wonder how they have grown up. Are they happy? Is someone providing for them? What if they are in pain? All of these questions torture you mind to the point that you can barley bare it sometimes to the point that you have thought of killing yourself to get it over with. You ask questions like – Why would God let this happen to me? What is the meaning behind all of this? Why won’t God heal me? – If all of the problems you have are not enough, you have friends in the colony that have succumbed to taking their own life. You have to deal with those deaths. You have to also deal with the natural deaths of you new friends in the colony. You just can’t see how God can be behind this… It feels like you are living in a constant hell.One of the things that keep you taking steps forward is the thoughts of how life used to be. How life could be if God decided to heal you. You think of what you would do if you were healed. You think of the things you would do differently. You think of the love you would show to the people around you that you haven’t seen for many years. But as each torturous day goes by you loose little by little the hope in God healing you.One day while you were sitting around with some of you friends, one ask if anyone in the group had heard of the man they call Jesus of Nazareth. You have heard stories of this man but you didn’t know you could believe them as true or if they were just rumors. You had heard things like this Jesus was the messiah the prophets talked about. You had heard many stories of his compassion and of him healing people. Again you can’t know for sure if these stories are true. Your friend goes on to tell the group that this Jesus that everyone speaks so much about is in the city right now. He has been teaching and healing in the Synagogue. Most of the men dismiss the thought saying it is just a rumor and this man Jesus isn’t even real. They ask the man if he had ever seen Jesus. If not how can he validate his story. Some of the men even make fun of the man telling about Jesus. The thought ends up sticking in you head though. You go home and lay awake in bed that night wondering if what they say is true. Is this Jesus who they say he is? Is he even in the city? For all you know the guy who told you he was heard it from a dishonest man trying to deceive him and give him false hope. Who knows? You fight back and forth wondering if what you heard is true. You can’t help but wonder if this Jesus of Nazareth could heal your painful disease and give you back your normal life again.Well the next day you start thinking about going into the city to see if you can be healed by this Jesus of Nazareth. You ask one of you friends what he thinks about the idea and he is quick to exclaim “Are you crazy?! Look at you. You would be risking your life going into that city! People might have you killed before you even get to Jesus. Even if they don’t kill you, they will mock and ridicule you for even thinking you could enter the city. Let’s just say you get to Jesus, what’s to say he will heal you? He is a Jewish man, he will probably want nothing to do with you because you are unclean. If Jesus is as powerful as people say he is, he might even have you killed for coming too close to him! You have to be crazy to think you could be healed!” You are silent because you are thinking of what he has said. You both part ways and you go to a place where you can really weigh the pros and cons of what you are planning on doing. You finally decide that whether Jesus decides to heal you or not, you don’t have much to loose. You have heard stories of Jesus being a merciful man and you believe if only you get to him, he can heal you. The next day you wake up early in the morning and you cover as much of you skin as you can conceal. You sneak out of the colony and head towards those city gates you exited years earlier that you were never to re-enter. You make your way slowly up to the fates and walk through them to make you way to the synagogue where you heard Jesus was preaching. As you walk through the streets memories of your earlier life flood your mind. You on the right you see the building that you had your first job at. Then you see the market you used to come to get food at. The emotions of these memories overcome you and you begin to cry. As you pull your veil off you face to wipe your eyes a person catches a glimpse of what you look like underneath. He exclaims “Oh what is wrong with you! Are you supposed to be here?” That draws the attention of men and women around you in the street. You hear someone yell “he’s a leper!” Men and women then try their hardest to get as far away from you as they can. You hear mumbles and mockery. Men and women yell at you to go back to where you came from. On man yells “Why have you come in here and put the whole city in danger? Leave and go back to where you came from or I will call for help!” You try to explain to him you are only trying to find Jesus but no one wants to hear anything of it. The fear of you has quickly grown into anger. People begin to yell even louder as you try to proceed to the temple. The taunt you and spit on you saying things like you are a dirty sinner. You are unclean and Jesus wouldn’t want anything to do with you! Their were people who ran ahead of you and warned others that you were coming. There were people yelling and saying you have no right to be in the city! Suddenly in the middle of the taunting and yelling you here a faint voice say your name. When you look toward the direction the voice came from you see your wife standing their in amazement with tears in her eyes. You could tell you presence made her uncomfortable so you suppress the longing to talk and hold her and proceed past her so she would not be embarrassed by you. You continue to proceed to the synagogue as you are ridiculed and mocked. The people you once knew as friends standing off to the side looking at you like they have seen a ghost terrified of what you might do. The best way to describe the way people were treating you is in a way that you are not human anymore. People didn’t realize you were human and you still hurt from what they were saying and doing. When you finally reached the synagogue there is a crowd of people flowing our of the door. You hear a voice that sounds so loving and gentle. Everyone else was completely silent. You try to catch a glimpse of the man who was preaching. You hang your head low and push your way quietly through the crowd hoping no one would notice your leprosy. To no avail, about half way through the crowd a man catches a glimpse of the sores on your face. He quickly pushes backward to get away from you. In doing this he pushes the people behind and around him. You know what happened in the streets and you fear what is coming next. All the attention was drawn to you and as people pushed away from you. The only person that was unwavering was the man at the front of the crowd. He stood there looking strait at you in silence. His eyes were so inviting and almost attracted you to him. A religious man steps up and say “ How dare you come here to the house of God! How dare you defile all of us and interrupt Jesus.” You hear the mumbles and gasp of everyone in the room as you just push right on by the religious leader and fall on your face before Jesus’ feet. Everything up unto this point seemed minute. You had thought about what you might say to Jesus when you got to him but you could only say one thing… You humbly say to him “If you are willing, you can heal me.” You can hear a few smug chuckles from the crowd but it doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters is what this man Jesus will do next. It surprises you when you feel the warmth of his hand on your shoulder. Then he says “I am willing, be healed!” Immediately you feel no more pain from the sores rubbing against you clothing. You can’t help but glance down at you hand and realize your sores are gone! You rise up to your knees and pull your sleeves back realizing all the sores were gone. You then feel your face for sores but find none. You look around at the crowd that has now completely become silent and see mouths open and eyes wide open and some people are ever shaking their head in disbelief. It was then you realized what you hoped and prayed for has really come true! You raise to you feet and filled with joy give the man who just healed you the biggest hug you could possibly give. Oh how long is has been since you had embraced another individual! Jesus tells you to not tell anyone how you were healed and go show yourself to the priest. But overwhelmed with joy you run to seen the people you loved and missed so much! As you run through the streets the same people who were mocking and yelling at you are now staring in disbelief wondering if you are the same person the saw earlier. You run into your house and give you wife a huge hug and tell her and your kids the great thing that had happened. Then you send a servant to go gather your best friends and bring them back so you could celebrate and tell them what had happened. That day and night you celebrate and share time with your friends and family once again. You wake up the next morning a new creation because of Jesus. You decide to go see Jesus again and tell him how happy and thankful you are but when you get to the synagogue you realize Jesus isn’t there……

For this leper his life was forever changed by a disease that God could have prevented. He was unclean in the eyes of the world and in the eyes of God. He probably thought his disease was due to some sin he had committed and never fully repented of. So just that fact people probably viewed him as a horrible unrepentful sinner. Though the cards were stacked against him he decided to have faith that Jesus could heal him of this disease. Because he had faith Jesus had compassion on him and healed him. We are also unclean. We are filthy sinners and it is not until we have faith in God’s unfailing forgiveness and his ability to cleanse us we are cleansed. We some times try to work to show God how sorry were are for sinning. We try to buy our way back into God’s love and grace. It is like we think Gad says “oh you did that, get back to me in a week, or month, or however long and maybe I will completely forgive you.” This is a wrong view of God’s grace. God can cleanse us no matter how much we have sinned and when he forgives and cleanses us, that is it. It is immediate. Just like the leper we are immediately forgiven of our sins. We bare them no more. If we ask forgiveness God will forgive us and forget our transgressions. We need to take heart in this promise. David describes this promise in Psalm 103 – as far as the east is from the west, so far has he removed our transgressions from us. Once we have come humbly before God and repented and asked forgiveness of God we are immediately forgiven and we can live in hope and with an indescribable joy. Like the leper who was cleansed we also have been cleansed of any dark spot we have that keeps us in a colony outside of God’s presence. Therefore we also should have the joy and passion the leper had to show and tell what God has done in our lives. In Jeremiah 20:9 Jeremiah expresses this concept like this - But if I say, "I will not mention him or speak any more in his name,” his word is in my heart like a fire, a fire shut up in my bones. I am weary of holding it in; indeed, I cannot. We are so excited and joyful that we can’t help but tell others about what God has done for us. It would be selfish and wrong to hold it in. We as Christians are called to share the gospel with other.