--JESUS: Our Hope and Comfort ~

Jesus is presented with a man who is deaf and has a speech impediment. Perhaps he stammered. Maybe he spoke with a lisp. Perhaps, because of his deafness, he never learned to articulate words properly.

Jesus, refusing to exploit the situation, took the man aside. He looked him in the face. Knowing it would be useless to talk, He explained what He was about to do through gestures. He spat and touched the man's tongue, telling him that whatever restricted his speech was about to be removed. He touched his ears. They, for the first time, were about to hear.

But before the man said a word or heard a sound, Jesus did something I never would have anticipated.

He sighed....

No doubt you've done your share of sighing.

If you have teenagers, you've probably sighed. If you've tried to resist temptation, you've probably sighed. If you've had your motives questioned or your best acts of love rejected, you have been forced to take a deep breath and let escape a painful sigh...

All these sighs come from the same anxiety; a recognition of pain that was never intended, or of hope deferred.

Man was not created to be separated from his Creator; hence he sighs, longing for home. The creation was never intended to be inhabited by evil; hence she signs, yearning for the Garden...

And when Jesus looked into the eyes of Satan's victim, the only appropriate thing to do was sigh. "It was never intended to be this way," the sigh said. "Your ears weren't made to be deaf, your tongue wasn't made to stumble." The imbalance of it all caused the Master to languish.

So, I found a place for the word sigh. You might think it strange, but I placed it beside the word comfort, for in an indirect way, God's pain is our comfort.

And in the agony of Jesus lies our hope. Had He not sighed, had He not felt the burden for what was not intended, we would be in a pitiful condition. Had He simply chalked it all up to the inevitable or washed His hands of the whole stinking mess, what hope would we have?

But He didn't. That holy sigh assures us that God still groans for His people. He groans for the day when all sighs will cease, when what was intended to be will be. ~~

-From: "God Came Near"
-By: Max Lucado ~