"No More Gaps"    Sounds like a tubethat you can get at the hardware store. This amazing product has the capacity to make ordinary craftsmen likemyself look better than we really are. And I’m told that even the real tradesmen use more of it than the rest ofus would like to think is necessary.

There used to be a wayof thinking about God that was described by the words, “the god of thegaps.”  It is based on the ideathat “god” was used to fill in the gaps of human knowledge.  To quote a rather trite example:  people used to think that Godcontrolled the weather patterns. Now we know that “el Niño” or “la Nina” is what controls theweather.  The assumption is that weshould not pray to God about the weather but figure out how to influence “el Niño”and  “la Nina.”  Since some streams of human knowledge doubles every two years and the average across the range of streams is a doubling every six and a half years, it seems like god's turf might be getting exponentially smaller.  It is a rubbish idea of course.  If we were to use the Bible as a guide and Jesus as the supreme revelation, God is much more involved in transforming what is already there than he is working to neatly fill in our gaps.

I want us to thinkabout God and another gap.  The gapis the comparative measurement between what we ARE and what we COULD BE aschildren of God and servants of his purpose.  In a funny kind of way, God is a “god of the gaps.”  Just look at any day in the ministry ofJesus and we see that part of what drove Jesus was the desire that there be “nomore gaps.”   When a man withleprosy came to him as a beaten, outcast Jesus took responsibility for thehealth gap, the social gap and the self-esteem gap.  I love the dialogue between the leprous man and the Son ofGod.  The question for the leper isnot whether Jesus CAN heal him but whether he WANTS TO heal him.  It is a question of choice, notcapability.

LEPER:            Ifyou want to you can make me clean.

JESUS:                        Iam willing, be clean.

The leper thought thatthere might have been a personal relationship gap.  He wasn’t sure if Jesus liked him, perhaps he was too busyor maybe leprosy was going to be considered elective surgery and he would berequired to wait.  The reason Ilove this incident is because of what it reveals about Jesus.  Those of us who have never had longterm sickness or who have never been on the end of deep seated discriminationwill have no way of relating to what was inside the man as another day dawnedin his miserable existence.  Notonly did he have a disease through no fault of his own, but also he lived as anexile in his own community.  Thecommunity could give him no hope of a cure and simply gave him a life sentenceof social disdain.  He was shunnedevery day he lived.  I wonderwhether he ever considered that the gap between his current condition and itsresolve could ever be bridged.

The presence of Jesusin the region must have raised a very strange set of feelings for someone likehim.  He knew that people had beenhealed of leprosy.  The challengewas getting close enough to Jesus to attract his attention.  If that challenge was successful thequestion was whether Jesus would WANT to do anything about his condition.  We have to understand that this man wasused to being rejected, hated and ignored. After all, Jesus was supposed to bethe Son of God and in this man’s world he had been told that his condition wasthe sign of God’s judgment.

What was inside Jesus when he woke up thatmorning was a reservoir of selfless love more than enough to embrace a thousandlepers let alone a single leper. What was also inside him was a deep longing to fill the chasm thatseparated lepers from normality and their God ordained destiny.

When the leper got toJesus he found that there was, in fact, no gap between God and himself.  Jesus not only heard him but alsoresponded.  He not only responded butalso moved forward and touched him. He also discovered that because of Jesus he was lifted from his prisonand delivered from the oppressions of disease and could return to his home andfamily and live a normal life.  Nomore gaps.

This leaves me withtwo thoughts.  The first one has todo with myself and my own destiny. What separates me from that destiny is not sovereign because of theredemptive power of Jesus Christ demonstrated everywhere, but definitely herein Matthew 8.  I need to bring mypresent condition with all of the gaps to Jesus knowing that he no only CANremove the barriers but also WANTS to do just that.  The second thought has to do with the people I will havecontact with today.  I want torepresent Jesus to them and part of that must be the desire to come to themwith a confidence that the gaps between where they are and where they weredesigned by God to be can be bridged and they can cross over.  I therefore need inside of me what wasinside of Jesus.

There will be peopletoday in my spheres of involvement who will be like lepers.  These are the people who no onelikes.  They are the people whohave warped their way into social estrangement.  Sometimes it is not their fault and sometimes it is entirelytheir own fault.  Regardless, theyare lepers.  Jesus knew how to lovelepers and his love gave them the chance they needed to be made whole.  I am hopeful that I will more and morerepresent that same chance for the lepers I know and the ones I don’t yet know.