We find Jesus, our One and Only Hero, to be both willing and able to heal the leper. But we also find an unwillingness on the part of the healed man to abide by Jesus’ instructions, resulting in a curtailment of Jesus’ ability to enter in towns and neighborhoods as he might have desired. Jesus as willing and able stands in contrast to our willfulness, that unbelief and disobedience that continue to crop up in our lives. We find that much more than our bodies being healed, our hearts need to be saved by this Jesus who is both willing and able.

Jesus’ day is marked by speaking the truth and confronting evil. He allows the woman who is laid aside to resume her serving, and he opens his life to the public. He makes time for prayer, and he makes preaching a priority. Followers of Jesus need regular exposure to the truth, even as they prepare to confront evil in their lives and in their world. They will serve, and they will seek help in removing/overcoming barriers to service. They will pray, and they will put the testimony of Jesus into words.

The days that God gives us are not to be marked by consumption or by boredom. They will be marked by some of the same kinds of concern that marked Jesus’ life.

We are memorizing this Psalm in our Fighter Verse exercises. God’s Word instructs us that the exercise of the soul is more necessary even than the exercise of the body, and this section from Psalm 103 directs to some of those exercises.

Jesus did not instruct his disciples to lead. He told them to follow. We must observe closely how Jesus takes followers and makes them into different people who do different things.

Wow. For a preacher, this exposes a boatload of material. “you shall bruise his heel.” Baptism by (almost) immersion. Goliath’s exposed forehead.

But I was reading Titus this morning, and was struck with my own problem: not an achilles heel, but an achilles heart. Whatever our strengths, our hearts are terribly vulnerable to the darts of the devil. “For we also once were foolish ourselves, disobedient, deceived, enslaved to various lusts and pleasures, spending our life in malice and envy, hateful, hating one another.” (Titus 3:2–3 NAS95) The next verses show us how God has changed our situation, but we find that it is easy to revert back to sinful patterns.

Let’s ask God to protect our Achilles hearts. Pray that He would protect us from the poison darts that would lay us low.

For the follower of Jesus, we are wrapped up in Good News. He takes our bad news and transforms into good news. This is because “the season if fulfilled,” that is, a page has turned, but cosmically, and personally; a new day has dawned. Also, because “the kingdom of God has drawn near” in Jesus. And so, as we “repent and believe the Gospel,” we embrace the explosion of a new Christ-life in us and purpose to walk closely with Jesus day by day.