So many times in our lives, us as Christians, and just really humans in general, people have an impact on us. They touch our life. Starting a series today, I'm calling it your first touch. I'm gonna give a couple of examples probably from the scripture about how Jesus, he was the first to reach out to certain people.
But in your life in my life, you can look back and see times where somebody touched you for the first time. Somebody did something kind to you, for you. Maybe you can look back and see a friendship or a relationship that wasn't good and it's left a negative impact on you. See, a touch can take you in so many different ways and be so beneficial to you.
I remember I was about six or seven years old and that was a man in my family's life. He was a family friend named Jim Kaler. He was a very good man. He was a former Marine.
Even though, if I remember right, Marines are never former Marines, they're Marines until they go to heaven, I guess. But so he was a Marine. And like, he was about 70 years old when I knew him, but he was, I mean, he was still a Marine. And where I'm from, if you were kind of bent the way I was bent, as a little boy, you would kind of gravitate towards tough men, hard men.
Not like in a negative sense, but all the little boys where I'm from, we either wanted to be John Wayne or John Elway or, you know, you know, Mark McGuire or Babe Ruth. You know, whatever what tough was. You know, if the rodeo was in town, we thought we were Cowboys. If we were going to a baseball game, we thought we were all baseball players.
But it was always kind of the manly attributes that would kind of draw us in. And this man, Jim, he lived down a couple of houses down from our house where we live. And he just had all of those attributes. He had big old hands that were, you know, rough.
And when I would see him, he would always do the same thing. And if you didn't know him and you didn't know our relationship, you would have thought he was very angry at me. But I would see him coming. I'd say, Mr.
Kaler and he'd hear me and he'd turn around and he'd have the meanest look you could think of on his face like. I can't even make a mean face, you know. That's my best one right there. But he would have this mean look on his face and I would run over to him and he would shoot his hand out like this.
And he was one of the ones that as a young boy, he would tell me, now listen, when you shake a man's hand, don't you ever hand him a dead fish? And I was like, what are you talking about dead fish? And he would tell me, you know, you squeeze a man's hand. So he'd give me that mean look on his face and he'd shoot his hand out and as a little boy, I'd run over and I'd grab that hand and I'd start squeezing.
And then he'd start squeezing and my hand, you know, was just buried in his bear paw mid of a hand and he would start squeezing my hand and I would be squeezing and I'd be biting my lip and right when it was really starting to hurt and I think he could tell it was really hurting me. Right when it was really starting to hurt, he'd stop and he goes, okay, you got me. And he'd let me win. This was Mr.
Kaler. He had an overwhelming impact on my life. He touched me when he didn't have to. He later came to work for one of my family's businesses and I would ride with him all around East Texas in a big van and I would help him when we were working.
And he would tell me stories and, you know, he probably inflated him if I had to guess because they were always awesome. But he would tell me stories about things that he'd done when he was a young man. And, you know, again, just as a little boy, you'd be dreaming about, oh, catching the biggest fish or shooting the biggest deer or, you know, just filling the blank just a little boy. And he would always do something.
We had season tickets to the high school football because in the town I'm from, you had church, then you had football, then you had everything else, you know. So football was a big deal. And they sat next to us at the football game. Matter of fact, we had a whole herd of people.
We all went to church together and we all just live life together, kind of like new heights. And so he would sit there, him and his wife, and I was, you know, six or seven years old. So it was my job to take everybody's money and to go get all the hot dogs and the popcorn and all those other things. And I would take it, I would come back with the box of all the popcorn and stuff and they'd all do it.
And then I'd sit down next to Mr. Kaler. And every now and then some of my friends would call up from the bleachers below or wherever they were and say, Brian, Brian, come sit with us. Brian, Brian, come throw the football, Brian, come on.
Hey, somebody drops up under the bleachers, let's go get it, you know, it's just kind of a good time. And every time I'd go to leave, wherever I was with Mr. Kaler, he would say, now you remember, if you think about doing anything, you're not supposed to do, I'm right here. And he would take two fingers and he would hit me on my shoulder.
I'm right here watching. And I was like, oh, I mean, he would get me hard. Like boom, I'm these Marines, real deal. And I was like, yes, sir, you know, ha ha.
And then he'd give me that mean look. And right when I was about to look away, he would smile. I just loved him. And it wasn't long, I knew him about two years and he died of a heart attack in the middle of the night, just went on to heaven, no problem.
But I remember the funeral, they were a great big church. And it was a military funeral. So they had an honor guard and they walked in and as a little boy, I knew I was gonna be real emotional. I've always been somewhat of an emotional person.
Now that you've seen my dad talk, you know where I get it. But I was always a bit of an emotional person. And I wanted to sit alone. So I asked my parents, can I sit alone?
Cause I just didn't want anybody to see me cry. And so I sat a long way away from everybody that I could and I watched the, I called them army guys, you know, when you're a kid, everybody's an army guy that's in a uniform. And I watched the army men come in and I thought I'm gonna do what they do. And they walked in with their head, the way you're supposed to hold it and shoulders back.
I mean, just looking like a million bucks and they lined the front row of that church and when they sat down, I sat down. And when they, you know, they just, they just glass-eyed, look forward. And I tried my best to glass-eyed, look forward. And if I saw one of them scratch their ear, I would scratch my ear.
I mean, everything they were doing, I was trying to do. And I was just overwhelmed with emotion. And then they came to the end of the service. And if you've never been to a military service, they played taps, which is, you know, just a tune that they play usually on a bugle or a trumpet.
So they had a man in the balcony of the church and he played taps really slow. And when he played it, I was just, I was so overwhelmed because I so missed my friend. I wanted that angry look one more time, which was total love. And maybe you got to be a little boy or maybe you got to be an old man to understand that, I don't know.
But it was a touch in my life. It was a man that didn't have to take an interest in me that did and had an overwhelming impact on me. And I'm going to tell you something that's not in the scripture, you don't even have to believe it, but it happened to me, sure as I'm standing here. I'm sitting, there's at least five rows before anybody else's around me.
There's nobody next to me, there's nobody around me. And when I was overwhelmed with emotion in the middle of that song, somebody tapped me on the shoulder hard, just like he used to, bang, bang, so much so that I looked around and there was nobody there. Now, I don't think that Mr. Kaler came down from heaven and touched my shoulder.
I just think God knew that a little boy could really use a touch. God can have an impact on your life. And sometimes it happens with a touch here and a touch there. In Mark chapter number one, verse 40, there came a leper to him, beseeching him, which is to say asking him and kneeling down to him, said to him, if you will, you can make me clean.
In today's terminology, there was a leper that came to him asking him on his knees saying, if you want to, I know you can heal me. Now, I'm gonna cover several points, that's just in that one verse. But the one thing I wanna point out is this man was a leper, he had leprosy, which was an epidemic in those days. There are still areas where leprosy is a major problem, but leprosy in those days would ransack a family, would ransack a person and several things would happen.
But one of the interesting things about leprosy is it's an external disease primarily. And it's very obvious when you have it. It's very obvious when it's affecting your life. Several things happen when you have leprosy, but one of them is one of the things in those days that you were required to do.
You had to walk around and to make sure that you didn't accidentally touch somebody and infect them. You had to walk around and yell, unclean, unclean. You had to tell everybody, stay away from me, get away from me, you couldn't have a job because you couldn't come in contact with anybody. Listen, you couldn't work at the coffee shop, you couldn't work at Walmart, you couldn't drive a truck, you couldn't do anything because you couldn't come in contact with anybody.
You had to keep a perimeter around you just for the safety and protection of everybody else. Even when you were begging, you couldn't go hand-to-hand, take what somebody was willing to give you. They would have to leave it on a tree stump or leave it on a log or they would have to throw it down or throw it at you. Could you imagine somebody being kind enough and you thought it was a nice thing when they literally threw stuff at you?
That was a blessing to a leper. They had to be constantly buffered by a certain amount of space because they were unclean and every day of the world, they were reminding themselves that they weren't clean. Another thing about a leper and again on the external side, they had to, they were constantly in pain. They were constantly hurting, they were wounded.
They had wounds here, wounds everywhere. And just when one might kind of start to feel better or maybe look like it's going to heal or maybe look like something's gonna happen, another one would break out. Lepers weren't constant agony, constant issue, constant pain. But not only were they in constant pain, listen, if you had leprosy long enough, your fingers, your toes, your ears, your nose, all of your appendages were gonna fall off.
Could you imagine your fingers just falling off? Your ears, your whole body just starts to fall apart. Lastly, one of the things that lepers endured is they couldn't be around their friends and family. They had to keep a space that would keep their friends and family, that would keep their friends and families safe.
They had to keep the buffers on. They weren't allowed to live in the protection of the city. They would have to go and live with other people that had their condition outside the protection of the city. They were in a weird way, their disease protected them because nobody would come around them.
But they would colonize and they would be surrounded by people that when they looked at their friend, their neighbor, whoever it was in that colony, that person they were looking at was experiencing the same pain, the same discomfort, and the same issues that they were. They were surrounded by people that were like them. So this man who comes to Jesus on his knees begging him, he doesn't question whether or not Jesus can heal him. He knows he can heal him.
He's heard about people being healed. Maybe he saw somebody healed that very day. Maybe one of his friends who was a leper came to him from afar and said, hey, it's me. Look, I've been healed.
There's a prophet that came to town that healed me. He didn't question whether or not Jesus could heal him. He just wanted to know, will you heal me? Do you want to?
You see, that's one of the most important things that we have to get through our human mind is the fact that God wants to heal you. Because if you think that God put the sickness on you, now you've got to figure out why would God want to get the sickness off of me? You see, he doesn't change. He's the same yesterday, today, and forever.
You and me, if you have children, would never take a jar that had a disease in it and pour it on your own child. As a matter of fact, if you did, in this society, the United States of America, we would put you in prison. And when you got to prison, even the hardest convict would deal harshly with you because they don't like how people mess with kids. Everything about humanity says don't mess with kids.
Yet there are people out there that have this thought that our father, who we can cry, Abba, father, who we can cry, daddy too, would somehow want to put a disease on his own children. No, that would be called child abuse. And the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, it's not a child abuser. So in your life and my life, the first thing we have to understand, this guy's not wrong.
He just doesn't have the Bible. This man with lepercy. You and me, we have the Bible. We understand that healing is the children's bread.
He's the God that heals us. The Bible continues to say that by the stripes on Jesus back, we are healed. It is not the will of God for you to be sick. He doesn't just have the power to heal you.
He desires to heal you. One place in our Bible, a third John 2, says, above all things, above everything else. I want these two things to happen. I want you to prosper, prosper.
What is it all about money? No, God doesn't want you to have lack in any area of your life or lack in money. He doesn't want you to have lack in peace and understanding and relationships. He so longs that you would prosper.
But then he says this, and being health. Above everything else, the God that we serve wants you to be well and well in your physical body. So as you go to God, you can't go to God in a manner that would question whether or not he desired to do it. This man wasn't trying to be wrong.
He just didn't have the luxury of our Bible. But you and me who have our Bible, we know that God does not put sickness on his own children and it is his will to heal us. So the man comes to Jesus on his knees and says, listen, if you want to, I'm not questioning your power because I know you can. But if you want to, you can heal me.
Will you do it? Jesus says, and the Bible says, Jesus moved with compassion, put forth his hand or stretched out his hand and touched him and says to him, I will. If you only hear one thing today, hear Jesus will. He's not just able, he wants to heal you.
He wants to bless you. He wants your children living for him. He wants your marriage to be strengthened. He wants your offspring to be so filled with God that they're literally pulling you towards the things of God, dragging you that direction.
He wants you so overjoyed with peace and love and kindness that you would never think of turning away from him. This is what he wants for our life, very plainly. He said, I will, when asked, but interestingly enough, we saw Jesus who miracles are countless different ways. Sometimes he would speak to somebody and he would say, listen, I want you to be made whole, but what's gonna happen is is while you walk, I want you to go show the priest that I have healed you.
And the Bible says that some lepers that he was walking, and the Bible says that as they went, they were healed. Another time in the Old Testament, there was a man with leprosy and the Lord instructed him to go invade in the Jordan River seven times. It didn't say that the prophet came out and touched him and he was healed. The prophet told him to go bathe in the river.
Jesus could have told him, here's the deal. Go down to the Sea of Galilee, put your head underwater seven times and you'll be healed. But you gotta think about the leper. He hadn't touched his children in years.
He never had any of those handshakes that I so missed. Nobody could touch him because it would risk them becoming what he was, but Jesus reached out and not in fear of becoming what the sick man was, but with total confidence in knowing that if Jesus touched him, he would become like Jesus was. You see, God has a way, an overwhelming way of knowing when you need a touch and delivering. He has a way, knowing when your wits in and delivering, but what I find interesting is there's certainly more than just this man here.
We oftentimes receive touch from God when we're pursuing God. We oftentimes receive a touch from God when we're following after God to the best of our ability. But Jesus touched him, told him not only am I able to heal you, but I absolutely want to heal you. And the Bible continues to say immediately the man was healed.
Now, leprosy was a terrible disease, but in some ways, metaphorically, it might be a great way to look at how we all are or how we all were at some point in time. You see, as a leper, you walked around and you had to yell out, I'm unclean, I'm unclean. But everybody you meet has a voice on the inside of them. It's railing against them, reminding them of what they've done, reminding them of what was done to them, constantly reminding them that in the big picture, yeah, you might have walked somebody across the street.
Yeah, you might have got your neighbor's newspaper and taken it to the front porch. But at the end of the day, in the big picture, you know you're unclean. Everybody you come in contact with, every person you meet on the job site at school, everywhere you go is having that same voice screen and rail it them. Now, if you know Jesus and you've been washed in the blood, you can speak back to that voice and you can remind that voice that, no, I'm the righteousness of God in Christ.
All things have passed away and all things have become new. But if you've never had that experience, could you imagine how devastated, do you remember how devastating it was for you? To be concerned about whether or not you can walk into a room because of what somebody might say or think about you, because of that voice telling you you're unclean, you're unclean, you're unclean, many times it's what we've done, other times it's what was done to us. I struggled with this in the first service because I wasn't sure about saying it.
But all I got to do is say the name Monica Lewinsky and a flood of thoughts come to your mind. What she did, what was done to her, the situation, she was quoted in an article just the other day and it says, my life was ruined at 22 years old. Everything that happened to me and everything I did has stuck to me like tar. The world reminding her unclean, and I'm not railing against her, I'm saying what she said.
But we're all that way, ours just wasn't printed in the internet and on the newspaper. Furthermore, the lepers are not only unclean, they're also in constant pain and you and me spiritually, though we feel unclean before we meet Jesus, we spiritually are in pain all the time. Oh, sometimes it ebbs and flows, I get it. Sometimes you have good days on purpose.
Sometimes the ball just bounces your direction. But if you say, you know what, I don't feel any pain, let me tell you something, just keep breathing because before it's over, something's gonna happen in your life and you're gonna want somebody to go through that mess with it. We're all in a state where it's just a constant source of being reminded that we're unclean and we're hurting and as soon as somebody walks in the room, somebody that's a loved one that loves you, maybe it's over coffee or maybe it's over dinner and they can say the one thing that can cut you to the bone and they say it, it just hurts. Can I just tell you, you're not the exception?
This is everybody. You say, well, well, who's our target? Everybody, everybody you meet. Oh, there's not the literal leprosy, but the symptoms are there on the inside.
Their digits, their hands, their fingers, their toes, their ears, their falling off, their lips falling off, they get where they can't hold a drink of water in their mouth because that hose in their mouth, it could you imagine their body is just falling apart. Maybe your body's not falling apart. Maybe it just feels like your life is falling apart. Maybe your marriage, don't you know that couple?
You know the one that make you sick with all their hand holding and they're sitting there and they look like they're 16 and in love and everything's just crazy and they've been married for like 462 years. And you walk in the house and you're trying to find just something nice to say because he left his silly work boots in the den again. How is it that they have it so figured out? And I'm trying everything I can over here and it's just so hard.
I feel like things are falling apart. Everybody you meet to some capacity or another is feeling that. Lastly, the lepers, they colonize. They go get around people that are in the same situation, having the same issues, having the same problems.
So when they look each other in the eye, they're surrounded by people that feel their pain but can do nothing for them. And if we're honest, don't we do the same? You find somebody that's offended for whatever reason and now you've got something you can talk about. You find somebody that has the same vice that you do and now you've got somebody you can feel more comfortable about what you know you shouldn't be doing because you're doing it with somebody else.
It just got real heavy in here. We click up, we colonize. We feel unclean, we're in constant pain. Our life is falling apart.
And instead of running on our knees to the one who can change it, we colonize with people that are experiencing what we are but can render no aid. But Jesus doesn't change just last week. We got two emails and I say emails because I don't know exactly how the stuff comes in. Sometimes it comes on through the Facebook or the Instagram and stuff.
So I just call all the messages, emails. So if I'm misquoting it, it's all emails to me, yo. We got two emails from people who had their lunch purchased for them by somebody from New Heights. And the person who purchased the lunch asked the waiter to go tell them somebody from New Heights just wanted to bless you.
And it's so impacted the person who had lunch purchased for them that they sent word to the church. It's so impacted us such an amazing thing. Thank you. And I know what you're thinking.
I wish somebody by my lunch. But that touch had an impact on that couple. So here's what I'm asking you to do. I'm asking you to on purpose look for the lepers of life.
And they weren't lepers, by the way. Matter of fact, I'm sure they're good people. I don't know anything about them. But everybody's hurting.
Everybody in some way or another feels as though something's falling apart. And you and me, the hands and feet of Christ, we can extend that hand and offer that touch. That might change their whole world. Our ushers have some cards I ask you guys to pass out.
Take a few of these cards with you. And this week, I want you to find a way. It doesn't have to be money. It doesn't have to buy a meal.
It doesn't have to be any of those things. Go ahead and pass them out, gentlemen. It doesn't have to be something like that. It could be you're having lunch with the person at work.
And they said, yeah, my kids just, you know, whatever he broke his arm playing baseball. And I said, OK, well, I'm a bless our father and Jesus name. Thank you for this food. Thank you.
This subway makes really good meatball sandwiches. And oh, God, I asked that Billy's arm would heal quickly in the name of Jesus, amen. And then you start eating your sandwich. And Billy's senior looks at you and says, man, thank you.
And you realize maybe he hasn't been touched in years. You see, the thing is we're all a spirit walking around in a body. And it's our spirit man. It's our spirit woman that has overwhelming needs and desires in our life.
And if we go too long in the desert and we don't have that touch, listen, when you get it, it's like a cool drink of water on a sunny day. So now when that happens, I just want you to pull the card out and throw it at him. Tell him you've just been touched. Here's your first touch.
So why do you pray like that? Well, that's how we pray at my church. Y'all pray like that at church. Power in the name of Jesus.
Because we don't know everybody's situation. What we know is everybody, at some level or another, feels unclean, is in pain, feels his other lives falling apart, and might have already colonized with people that can do nothing for them. They're just sharing their pain. Don't you know you've done it?
I've done it. You want to talk to somebody that's in the same misery as you? Let me tell you how it happened with me and my dad the other day. We're sitting there.
He got a ticket for running a red light. And Mom's like, how'd you do that? You know that squinted-eyed smoke. Move it on.
Y'all notice how I'm not looking right here at all. You got a ticket. And he goes to the pay the ticket or whatever, you know? And he's like, and you wouldn't believe it.
That line was like eight miles long. And immediately, I'm like, I feel your pain, dad. Because I got a ticket. Everyone just, we're just beating off each other's pain.
I mean, it's like a hardship fest going on. We're just like, yeah, we're eating our barbecue. We were eating with friends. One of our friends took off on it, man.
She said, I remember when I got a ticket, and they always this, and I'm just like, oh my gosh. We've colonized. That's what happens. We don't do anything with anybody that can help us in those situations.
We just want to meddle in it and marinate in it. Argh, I can't believe that. And then my sweet little wife's like, well, I've never had a ticket. So I told her, no, I can't either.
Let's scratch that voice from the recording. Thank you. Everybody needs a first touch. The next few weeks, I'm going to be teaching.
Next week, it's going to be a powerful time to bring a friend, because I'm going to teach. Listen, not just on how God touches you, but when you know him, how you can touch him. It'll be a powerful time to bring a friend. It's going to be a powerful time to bring a friend.