Take a few deep breaths to center your heart and your mind as you prepare to meet with God.

Meditation on God

Matthew 10:28 says, “Don’t be afraid of those who want to kill your body; they cannot touch your soul. Fear only God, who can destroy both soul and body in hell." While most of the forces in our lives can only affect our physical selves, God is our Father and creator, and has the power and ability to access our minds, hearts, and souls as well as our bodies. Take a moment and marvel at how deeply complex God made you.

Teaching

Jesus left Tyre and went up to Sidon before going back to the Sea of Galilee and the region of the Ten Towns. A deaf man with a speech impediment was brought to him, and the people begged Jesus to lay his hands on the man to heal him. Jesus led him away from the crowd so they could be alone. He put his fingers into the man’s ears. Then, spitting on his own fingers, he touched the man’s tongue. Looking up to heaven, he sighed and said, “Ephphatha,” which means, “Be opened!” Instantly the man could hear perfectly, and his tongue was freed so he could speak plainly! Jesus told the crowd not to tell anyone, but the more he told them not to, the more they spread the news. They were completely amazed and said again and again, “Everything he does is wonderful. He even makes the deaf to hear and gives speech to those who cannot speak.” (Mark 7:31-37)

Imagine living life in total silence. One of my family’s favorite Christmas movies is “It’s a Wonderful Life,” where at George Bailey’s lowest point, an angel saves him and gives him an experience to see what the world would be like without him. For him, it is a blessing to see how much he has made the world a better place, but then the experience ends and he is brought back to the real world. The guardian angel's words are, “You’ve been given a great gift, George. A chance to see what the world is like without you.”

2000 years ago, there was a man living like the world was there without him. Before there was wide-spread sign language, before there were special school tutors to work around disabilities like his, and before there was the ability to talk through text or email, there he was. Whether he was standing out in the street or living wherever he lived, he was alone. No one could talk to him the way they could talk to each other, he could not talk for himself, and worst of all, the religious purity laws of their day made people afraid to get near him or touch him. Nothing about his condition required people to stay away, but there was a harsh stigma: figurative deafness was a common scriptural analogy for being ignorant of or rebellious in your relationship with God, and physical deafness was often attributed by people to demon possession or God’s judgment. No one wanted to be near him, and he was the kind of person people would act like they didn’t see when they passed by. But then Jesus walked into town.

When Jesus first meets this man, he looks at him. He sees him. He acknowledges a man in pain, a man made in God’s image, and a man suffering from being socially ostracized as well as his physical disability. Jesus wasn’t concerned with what others were worried about and brought the man off with him away from the crowd, showing compassion and care where others rarely did. Jesus often violated parts of the religious purity law that everyone else held to by healing through physical touch. In this, He offered closeness that was often held back from people like this man from the fear of “catching it.”

As Jesus goes to heal the man, he looks up to heaven and sighs. He is looking at His heavenly Father, sighing at how far sin and death have distorted and broken the men that His Father made. Just as God the Father knelt down to the dirt and formed it into man–into His very own image–Jesus is kneeling down to re-mold and restore the hearing and speech that God placed in man from the beginning. In one moment of compassion from Jesus, this man regained his hearing, his speech, and his dignity, and the crowd echoed God's pleasure after creating man: where God said, "It is very good," the crowd says, "everything he does is wonderful!"

Examination

Romans 8:28 says, “And we know that God causes everything to work together for the good of those who love God.” God is not only the God of creation, but also recreation, fixing what is broken in us, and using the evil that has been done in the world as the catalyst to create something right. Take a moment and thank God for things in your life that He has fixed, healed, and recreated.

Now, ask the God who formed you from the dirt to re-form and re-make those things that are still broken in you.

Memory Verse

As you go throughout your day, take hope in God’s words from Revelation 21:5.

“And the one sitting on the throne said, “Look, I am making everything new!” (Rev. 21:5)