Walking the streets of Frankfurt in the summer of 2008, I noticed a battered rose tossed carelessly into a fountain along with a pack of discarded cigarette butts. The scene immediately caught my eye because despite the lingering sense of a regretted night full of smoke and abandoned romance, a strange kind of beauty graced the fallen petals.While I loved the photo, I didn't think about it too much more until seeing this video:
Truly, though in our sins we are battered, bruised and fallen, Jesus does not hesitate to reach out and embrace us in our filth. In Mark 1:40-45, a leper approaches Jesus and asks to be healed. Mark writes that Jesus was "filled with compassion" and reached out to touch the leper, then commanded the leper to be healed. Despite the fact that leprosy was contagious, untreatable at the time, and horrifically disfiguring, Jesus laid hands on this man without hesitation.
This physical healing represents the greater work that Christ does in our hearts, taking upon his shoulders the sins of the world. God does not expect us to clean up our act before we come to Him because it is impossible to make ourselves pure before Him. Instead He died for us who were already dying in our sin and gave us new life. Now, "if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come! All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting men's sins against them" (2 Corinthians 5:17-19). No broken, bruised, or fallen past can keep us from being free and blameless before God once we have trusted in Jesus.
