This is the famous story of Jesus healing the paralysed man who was brought by his friends to Him. An old favourite with Sunday school teachers because of the great story that; to reach Jesus they had to dig a hole in the roof of the house and lower the man through!
Of course, Jesus heals the man physically after he has forgiven his sins and dealt a cutting blow to the scribes. I must have read or heard this story a thousand times and yet God seems to continually use it stimulate my thinking.
They paralyse man could not bring himself to Jesus. He needed his friends to do this. But his friends could not take him directly Jesus either. They had some obstacles; some barriers to remove first. And this is what has been highlighted for me in my latest reading.
We don’t know if the man wanted to see Jesus or if his friends had just thought that it was a good idea for them to meet. So to me this seemed that the friends were the ones that were trying to instigate this introduction.
The first obstacle in their way was his disability. They had to physically make the effort to take their friend to a place where they could meet Jesus. The second obstacle was the crowd which they successfully negotiated by going to roof. This only created 2 more problems. Firstly they were now high up above Jesus and secondly there was a roof in the way!!
We know that they overcame these two and eventually introduced their friend to Jesus where he received his healing. So what am I babbling on about? Our job is to introduce our friends to Jesus. But to do that we need to remove the obstacles, some of which could be out own making, and lead them to actually meet him. We need to not introduce our friends to our religion, or some other distorted picture but we need to introduce them to Him.
What those obstacles are I’m not sure. They are probably different in each case. And how we remove them is another big question. But I think if we check our thinking to make sure our evangelism is focused on introducing people to the person of Jesus we may go a way to answer some of those other questions.
This is certainly something I’m doing at the moment. What do you think? Am I talking rubbish or does this hit a nerve?
