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Sunday, August 4, 2013

Stay In Touch

This is the message given in Onida and Agar Sunday, August 4, 2013, and that will be given in Gettysburg Sunday, August 11, 2013.  The Bible verses used are Luke 8:20-36.

As we continue to look at the top hymns from our Hymn Hysteria tournament, today we're going to talk about He Touched Me.  He Touched Me reached the Final Four.  It did not have an easy road there, either.  It defeated such favorites as Fairest Lord Jesus, This Is My Father's World, I Love to Tell the Story, and Have Thine Own Way, Lord before finally losing to Amazing Grace in the semi-finals.
“He Touched Me” was written by Bill Gaither in 1963.  We talked about Bill Gaither and his wife, Gloria, a few weeks ago, when we talked about the hymn “Because He Lives”.  Gaither wrote "He Touched Me" after a revival meeting he'd been asked to play the piano for.  After the meeting, he was riding home with the speaker, Dr. Dale Oldham. They were talking about how deeply they had felt the Holy Spirit at the meeting.  Oldham told Gaither, “You should write a song that says, 'He touched me, oh, he touched me.” Gaither could not get those words out of his head, and so he stayed up all night and into the next morning writing this song.  It was soon recorded by Gaither's own group, but it's also been recorded by many other people, including Elvis Presley and Barbra Streisand.
Of course, the gospels have a lot of examples of the healing power of Jesus' touch. We heard a couple of examples of that in our Bible reading today.  Once Jesus' ability to heal became known, people crowded around him.  They swarmed around him.  The way it sounds, there were times Jesus could barely move because of all the people around him, trying to get his attention, desperately wanting Jesus to heal them.  Our reading tells us of a woman who pushes her way through the crowd, just trying to be able to touch the edge of Jesus' robe, because she's so confident that the touch of Jesus can heal her.
When we think of Jesus' healing, that's the sort of thing we usually think of: physical healing.  We think of Jesus allowing a blind man to see.  We think of Jesus making a paralyzed man walk.  We think of Jesus, as in another example in our Bible reading, bringing someone who's dead back to life.

Physical health is very important, of course.  Any time we lose it, we realize just how important it is.  When I was a kid, there was a Geritol commercial that said, “When you've got your health, you've got just about everything”.  I know that's pretty dated cultural reference, but there's still a lot of truth in that.  Most of the people on our prayer list are there because they're having problems with their physical health, and we're asking the Lord to heal them.
But as important as our physical health is, it's not the only kind of health we need, or even necessarily the most important kind.  We can be very healthy physically, but still feel sick inside.  We can be the picture of physical health, but still be hurting terribly.
And that's why Jesus is sometimes called the great healer.  Jesus did not just heal people physically.  He healed them emotionally and spiritually, too.  When Jesus touched someone, he did not just make them feel better physically.  He made them whole.  He truly healed them, inside and out.  And he still does.
That's what our song, “He Touched Me”, talks about.  It talks about being wounded spiritually.  It talks about carrying around this heavy load, this burden of guilt and shame.

A lot of us have felt like that at one time or another.  We know how far short we fall of who we should be.  We may not like to talk about it, we may not want to admit it to anybody, we may not even want to admit it to ourselves, but we know.  Deep down, we know.  And we feel guilty about it.  We feel ashamed of who we are.  And that hurts.  It's not a good feeling at all.
And then, as the song says, Jesus comes along.  Jesus touches us.  Jesus comes into our hearts and into our lives.  And when that happens, as the song says, we are no longer the same.  We change.  Everything about our lives changes.
It changes because that heavy burden is gone.  Remember, Jesus said we should come to him with our heavy burdens, and he will give us rest.  When Jesus touches us, when Jesus takes away that burden of guilt and shame, we get rest.  We get peace.  We get a peace that fills our hearts and fills our souls and gives us a joy we've never known before.  It's a joy that floods our soul.  Because when Jesus touches us, we feel whole, maybe for the first time in our lives.

I think the reason we love the song “He Touched Me” so much is that it speaks to the emotion and the spirit.  It recognizes that our faith is not a matter of the head.  It's not a matter of the intellect.  Our heads are involved, of course.  I'm not saying we should shut our minds off.  God asks for faith, but God does not ask for blind faith.  God expects us to use the brains God gave us.  Still, the song is “He Touched Me”.  It's not “He Taught Me”. It's “He Touched Me”.  There's a reason for that.

Remember, when Jesus was asked about the greatest commandment, what he said?  He did not say, “Memorize as much scripture as you can.”  He did not say, “Study the Bible every day.”  He did not say, “Understand everything there is to understand about God.”

What did he say?  Love God.  Love other people.  Jesus said the greatest commandment is love.

Love is an emotion.  Love is a matter of the heart.  Love is a matter of the soul.  The head is still involved, of course.  But it's like the Apostle Paul wrote.  We can be the greatest geniuses in the world, we can be the biggest achievers in the world, we can even be the biggest givers in the world, but if we don't act out of love, it does not amount to anything.  It's all meaningless.

The only way the things we do matter is if we do them out of love.  And the only way we can do things out of love is if the Lord has somehow touched our hearts and touched our souls.

So, has Jesus touched your heart?  Has Jesus touched your soul?  Has he touched mine?  These are not rhetorical questions.  They're among the most important questions we ever ask ourselves.

If we're not sure, there's a way we can tell.  The second verse of the song gives it to us.  It says that once Jesus has touched us and healed us and made us whole, “I will never cease to praise him.  I'll shout it while eternity rolls.”

That's how we feel if we have Jesus in our hearts.  That's how we feel if we have Jesus in our souls.  That's how we feel if Jesus has touched us and healed us.  Our souls our flooded with joy, and we cannot help but praise Jesus always.

Now maybe you're thinking, “Wait a minute.  Nobody can feel that kind of joy all the time.  It's not possible.  I believe in Jesus as my Savior, but I still get down sometimes.  I still get depressed sometimes.  That's just the way it is.”

And you're right.  It is.  It happens to me, too.  I mean, I think I'm a happy, optimistic person, but I'm certainly not filled with joy all the time.  Ask Wanda.  I get down sometimes, too.  I get depressed sometimes, too.  We're all human, and it happens.

But you know, the people who Jesus healed still got sick again at some point in their lives.  The people who Jesus raised from the dead did eventually die again, and this time they stayed dead.  Just because Jesus touches our lives once does not mean that we'll feel joy and peace forever.

But when that happens, when we get down, when we get depressed, we need to do what the woman in our Bible reading did.  We need to get back to Jesus.  We need to be touched by Jesus again.  And we need to do whatever we can to get close enough to him to have him touch us.  We need to open our hearts.  We need to pray.  We need to fight, ask, beg, plead, do anything we can to get back to Jesus.  To have him touch us again. To have him take away that burden of guilt and shame again.  To get that peace that fills our hearts and gives us that joy that make us want to do nothing but praise him again.

Each one of us needs to be healed.  Some of us need to be healed physically.  Some of us need to be healed emotionally.  Some of us need to be healed spiritually.  Some of us need all that and more, besides.

Whatever kind of healing we need, we need to go to Jesus.  We need to fight through the crowd.   We need to fight through anything that's between us and Jesus.  We need to open our hearts and our souls and let Jesus touch them.  When we do, Jesus will make us whole.  And we will no longer be the same.

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