Boundless compassion—rooted not in any sentimentalism, but in his own blood-stained cross—that ought to make us want to root out every vestige of remaining sin in our lives. We can’t live in the sin he died to free us from. We must be driven, by his own loveliness, to make war on our sin. 

While He was in one of the cities, behold, there was a man covered with leprosy; and when he saw Jesus, he fell on his face and implored Him, saying, “Lord, if You are willing, You can make me clean.“ And He stretched out His hand and touched him, saying, ‘I am willing; be cleansed.’ And immediately the leprosy left him.Luke 5:12-13 (NASB95)

The vile skin disease of leprosy was designed by God to be a picture or a parable of human sin. John MacArthur calls it an “irresistible analogy” of sin. The leprosy of sin has infected all mankind to the core of our being. All our faculties—our minds, our hearts, our wills, our consciences—have all been diseased by spiritual leprosy. Because of that, we all stand in need of cleansing from that great fountain that is the blood of the Lord Jesus Christ. Therefore, we must come to him alone for cleansing, and we must come to him in precisely the way that this leper comes.
Consider five observations from the scene in Luke 5.
1. The Sinner’s Contamination
A leper, unclean and potentially dangerous to others, had long been commanded to live in isolation according to the law. Because of that, a leper was often a stranger to the comforts and pleasures of any sort of companionship. In some cases, he would struggle to remember what it felt like to touch another human being. The man in Luke 5 who approached Jesus would have been an outcast, a castaway. Not only was leprosy defiling and isolating, it was also eminently shameful. A leper’s uncleanness became his identity, as he was required to cry, “Unclean!” signaling his uncleanness to any passersby.
As we consider the awful corruption of leprosy, we must see ourselves in this leper. How appropriate is the picture leprosy is of the corruption of sin that afflicts each one of us by nature. Like leprosy, sin is defiling. Isaiah 64:6, “For all of us have become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous deeds are like a filthy garment.” Like leprosy, sin’s defilement is totalizing. Our entire constitution is infected with sin. Like leprosy, sin isolates. It makes man unfit for fellowship with God. If physical uncleanness couldn’t dwell alongside the manifestation of God’s presence and people in Israel, how much more does our spiritual uncleanness alienate us from the very presence of God himself?
In our sin, we have belittled His glory. We have preferred filth over beauty. Nobody should want anything to do with us, least of all the thrice Holy God of the universe. We are outcasts, fit only for the depths of hell itself. If we had any sense of ourselves at all, we would cry out in grief over our betrayal and for mercy from Him who we betrayed.
2. The Sinner’s Contrition
We can do nothing to rid leprosy from our bodies. Still less can our filthy rags rid the sinfulness from our souls. But the leper in Luke 5 sees Jesus. And when he saw him, verse 12 says, “He fell on his face and implored him.”
This is total brokenness, total humiliation. This man knows who he is. He knows he is undeserving, and so he takes the posture of humility, of reverence, even of worship, as he says in the next word, “Lord.” This man does not try to soft-sell his condition. He doesn’t say “Yes, sure. I’ve got a little leprosy, but on the whole, I think I’m a pretty healthy person.” We certainly hear much of that mindset today as sinners flatter and deceive themselves, convinced their sinfulness isn’t as foul and vile as the Bible says it is.
The leper comes in full confession and acknowledgment of his uncleanness, just as the truly repentant sinner must come to Christ, not making excuses for his sin, but openly confessing that he is totally corrupted, recognizing that he has no hope for forgiveness apart from the mercy of God. And so he falls down, bowed in abject humility, and begs God for undeserved grace.
3. The Sinner’s Confidence
But in one sense, this is not supposed to happen. According to the law of Moses, this leper shouldn’t be approaching anyone, let alone a rabbi. What drives his holy recklessness? Consider the sinners’ confidence. Verse 12, “He fell on his face and implored him saying, ‘Lord, if you are willing, you can make me clean.”
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In light of the cross and everything Jesus would have to endure at the hands of Pontius Pilate and the Jews, this is a profound statement! Jesus “loved His enemies” to the point that He would lay down His life for them while praying “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.” That is…mind-blowing! This flies in the face of religion and our modern “progressive” Christianity/ cancel culture. 

Last Friday morning, I awoke early (like before the crack of dawn early!) and meditated on a well-known, often-quoted-out-of-context passage of Scripture. I’ve read these verses countless times and it hits me anew even now.
27. “But I say to you who hear, Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, 28. bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you.”
LUKE 6:27-28 (ESV)
He Who Has Ears to Hear…
Jesus’s first words were for those “who hear” which tells me that there were some—perhaps many—sitting in the crowd who wouldn’t be able to hear His message (including more than just the Pharisees and Sadducees). In light of our modern era, Jesus’s words pierce just as deep.

…pray for those who abuse you.

When I read those words last week, they gave me pause. (Imagine that, getting triggered by Scripture!) An intrusive memory flashed through my mind like a movie. A familiar scene that tried to form into a flashback (if I hadn’t been so focused on writing notes while I was reading, it definitely would have!): my college abuser—who had groomed me so well he didn’t have to use force—kissing me, his hands in places they shouldn’t have been. For 6 months, various incidents happened. Most times, I didn’t fight him. I didn’t know I should have.
As an abuse survivor with PTSD, I know there have been a myriad of times when I didn’t want to obey that part of Scripture—especially when the PTSD symptoms spiked. Hours, days, lost because of dissociation caused by night terrors and intrusive memories, nocturnal panic attacks, and flashbacks that made me lose sense of reality. With PTSD comes flashbacks, where my brain goes back to and believes it’s 2014 even though the calendar says otherwise. For example, I’ll think I have a class I’m late for or homework I forgot about when, in reality, I don’t; I haven’t since I graduated. And in almost every single one of these flashbacks, I see… him. He’s still 29; I’m still 22.
Jesus’s words are hard to hear, harder still to obey, especially when coming out of a flashback or panic attack. It takes a while for my body and brain to catch up. And in response to the trauma, sometimes too often for my liking, I would harm myself; it was easier than trying to forgive him when I knew I didn’t mean it. When you start abusing yourself in response to someone else abusing you, things get complicated fast. My prayers, especially the first few years after graduation, were more along the lines of “God, please kill him!” or “God, please come get me, come save me from this hellish nightmare!” while I was in the midst of self-harm and would soon after have to pray for repentance.
Biblical Math vs Trauma Reality
As a student of the Word, I know what Scripture says about forgiveness and loving your enemies. Jesus has a math formula for that: “70 x 7” right? But then… the pain of trauma worsened and I started questioning YHWH.
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It was the habitus [habitual behavior] of patient endurance that made Christianity both deeply disturbing and yet attractive to outsiders amid the turmoil, paganism and hurly burly of the first century.

What did the early Christians actually do?
In Evangelism in the Early Church,[1] Michael Green declares ‘A priority of the early Christians seems to have been to have personal conversations with individuals.’ But Green’s emphasis on every Christian being a personal evangelist got it wrong.
That is the claim of Alan Kreider’s recent investigation into the church of the first few centuries, The Patient Ferment of the Early Church: The Improbable Rise of Christianity in the Roman Empire.[2] In fact, the teaching given to Christians in those early days after the apostolic period contains no instruction in, or pressure to do, what we call personal evangelism. It seems that Green was assuming twentieth century evangelistic methods and trying to find a rationale for them which simply wasn’t there. In the NT there is no constraint put on ordinary believers to buttonhole their neighbours and confront them with the claims of Christ. Rather what we find is that Christians are to ‘make the most of every opportunity’ when their stand-out lives provoke questions from people (Col 4:5-6; 1 Pet 3:15). It is a responsive witness, not an aggressive one.
This also looks much more like what Kreider finds in the writings of early fathers like Justin, Tertullian and Cyprian and what has been discovered of ancient catechisms.
The church during those years not only withstood empire-wide persecution but grew remarkably. How did it grow? We need to ask that question. As we see the current state of the churches in the West, we must have wondered at some point whether we have been missing something vital—something which builds better churches in the long run.
I do not think that we should swallow what Kreider has to say uncritically. But it is worth pondering what he has found in his investigation of the sources.
Four Basic Elements
According to Kreider the early church grew through a combination of four things, all of which are counter-cultural, to a greater or lesser extent, to current mainstream evangelicalism. These were:

Patience—this virtue was centrally important to the early churches and early Christians. The first attribute of love, according to Paul, is that it is patient (1 Cor 13:4). Whatever the circumstances, patience reigned.

‘Habitus’—habitual behaviour. They took seriously that it was behaviour that spoke truly about what they believed. ‘We do not speak great things, but we live them,’ said Cyprian.[3] A ‘Sermon on the Mount’ patient generosity was to be the Christian’s default setting even under persecution.

Catechesis and worship—the churches committed to forming these habits of behaviour in their members. A thorough catechesis, which majored on a changed life rather than simply the acceptance of certain doctrines, was the way habits were nurtured. Deep engagement with God in worship provided the motivation in maintaining that changed life.

Ferment—they relied not on Christian activism, but on God’s invisible power to fulfil his plans, which was seen as not susceptible to human control. Kreider chooses the metaphor of fermentation because, though it is a relentless process, it is both unseen and not in a hurry. The churches were grown by the life of the Spirit not by thrusting evangelistic strategies.

These elements of church life don’t look very much like the exhortations we receive in our churches today. This should make us curious. It was the habitus of patient endurance that made Christianity both deeply disturbing and yet attractive to outsiders amid the turmoil, paganism and hurly burly of the first century.
Character Formation
Instead of making it as easy as possible to become members of the church, it was emphasized that to become a Christian meant committing oneself to a deep change of life. A course of catechesis before baptism and joining the church could take up to three years.
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