By Alex Florez
In general, I was a healthy kid, but when I got sick, it was scary. I would get extremely high fevers and hallucinate with such vivid clarity that I still shiver thinking about some of those episodes. My mom would rush me to the emergency room, desperately hoping that someone could treat and heal me, but the result of every one of those ER visits was the same: “unidentified virus.” Clearly, I was sick, but no one knew why, and it’s hard to treat an unknown illness.
I’ve taken my own kids to the doctor for everything from a busted lip to a serious lymphatic condition. Being a parent is tough because it’s hard to name an illness you can’t see. Your kid tells you how grievously sick they feel, but to the naked eye, they seem more or less fine.
This reminds me of the diseases of sin and death. Someone’s life may be utterly rife with sin, and their depravity is plain to see. We may focus on the glaring errors of their outward behavior and forget that the disease is at the heart of the patient, burrowed deep within and eating the host alive. We may determine with unwarranted self-righteousness that there is no available diagnosis: this is just a bad person, beyond the hope of repair.
On the other hand, we encounter someone who seems to have their house in order, and their shortcomings seem trivial. But what if the seemingly benign surface symptoms are evidence of a dark, insidious illness lurking within?
We’re all sick, but not all of us know it. Maybe we’re afraid to go to the doctor because we don’t want to hear the diagnosis—that our disease is terminal. Some of us are just a little more conspicuously symptomatic; the disease simply presents itself in different manners from one person to the next, from one culture to the next, from one gender to the next, from one generation to the next. But we all require the same treatment: the intervention of Jesus.
One of the reasons I love Jesus is that He promises to actively seek the sick. All that is required is that we acknowledge the desperation of our condition, “For the Son of Man has come to seek and to save the lost” (Luke 19:10). Our Jesus loves to see His people healed and brought back to life.
I humbly recognize that it is not for me to determine who’s sick enough (or too sick) to be eligible for God’s healing. I must relinquish all my inadequate and inaccurate diagnostics and trust that the Lord knows exactly what to do for every patient willing to surrender their eternal well-being to Jesus. All who are terminally sick with sin and death are invited to approach Him with unequivocal confidence and to confess: “Jesus, I’m sick, but I know that you can heal me.”
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