Touched by Grace: Why Every Soul Needs Jesus’ Healing Touch
- Jack Selcher
- Nov 24, 2024
- 3 min read
Updated: Jan 29
Summary
Humans are created for connection, and our need for touch points to a deeper spiritual longing for God. Sin separates us like spiritual leprosy, leaving us unclean and disconnected. Jesus became human to bridge that gap. Just as He touched and healed the leper, He still reaches out in grace today, offering forgiveness, cleansing, and a restored relationship to all who come to Him by faith.
Babies need skin-to-skin contact to develop emotionally and physically. We never outgrow our need for a positive touch.
Our Lifelong Need for Positive Touch
Positive touch significantly benefits the mental and physical vitality of healthy adults by reducing pain, stress, depression, and anxiety. It benefits mentally or physically challenged adults even more.1
Positive touch releases oxytocin, which increases trust, diminishes stress, and forges emotional ties between people. The advantages of such touch highlight our need for connection with others.2
The God-Planted Longing in Every Heart
We have an often unrealized but innate need to connect with God. Billy Graham said that anthropologists find a form of religion in every culture. His explanation was a deep yearning for God in every heart to fill the empty spot in their souls. God planted that yearning because He wants them to seek and know Him personally. 3
God’s Desire to Be Found
God created all the nations on earth from one man. He decided beforehand their boundaries and when they should rise and fall. His purpose was for them to seek, feel their way toward, and find him (Acts 17:26-27).
Why Jesus Became Touchable
We need God to touch us and be touchable. That is why Jesus, God’s Son, became a man. He came to touch us and make us whole spiritually.
Matthew 8 records Jesus’ physical healing of a leper. This passage has spiritual implications for us. People didn’t touch lepers in the first century, but Jesus did.
“Large crowds followed Jesus as he came down the mountainside. Suddenly, a man with leprosy approached him and knelt before him. ‘Lord,’ the man said, ‘if you are willing, you can heal me and make me clean.’ [My comment - Leprosy rendered its victims and anyone who touched them ceremonially unclean (Numbers 5:2-4)].
Jesus Touches the Untouchable
Jesus reached out and touched him. “I am willing,” he said. “Be healed!” And instantly the leprosy disappeared. Then Jesus said to him, “Don’t tell anyone about this. Instead, go to the priest and let him examine you. Take along the offering required in the law of Moses for those who have been healed of leprosy. This will be a public testimony that you have been cleansed” (Matthew 8:1-4 NLT).
Touched by Grace
Our sins render us spiritual lepers. We are far more unclean than the man in Matthew 8. As a result, we are in no position to connect with God.
We have nothing attractive to offer Him. Our sins highly offend His holiness.
We don’t deserve His healing touch any more than the leper did. The good news is that Jesus touched and healed him and will heal us by forgiving our sins. When we reach out to Him by grace through faith, He heals us and makes us clean.
Jesus still says, “I am willing,” and “Be healed!” He touches us and removes our sins. Have you reached out to Him for the forgiveness of your sins? He is reaching out to you.
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