Scripture: Mark 2:15-17
And as he sat at dinner in Levi’s house, seek many tax collectors and sinners were also sitting with Jesus and his disciples—for there were many who followed him. When the scribes of the Pharisees saw that he was eating with sinners and tax collectors, prescription they said to his disciples, “Why does he eat with tax collectors and sinners?” When Jesus heard this, he said to them, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick; I have come to call not the righteous but sinners.”

Thought for the Day: Who goes to the doctor when they’re well? I don’t. It’s not until I have a cold or a broken bone that I finally get into the doctor’s office to be made well again. But when we’re physically sick, we know we have something wrong with us, because the sickness presents itself in sniffles, coughs, whatever.

I think it’s a little bit more difficult to realize when we have a spiritual sickness. And really, that’s what sin is, a spiritual sickness. The tax collectors in this story aren’t sinners because they’re tax collectors, they’re sinners because their lives have become focused on the material world to the point that they have forgotten God as a real and active presence in their lives.

Jesus was (and remains) a healer, not only of physical infirmities, but also (and I think more importantly), of spiritual brokenness. Jesus, created as a perfect manifestation of love, surrounded himself with all the most broken of us, so that he might help us find God in our lives again; so that we too, like him, might know the incredible life that we can live when we rediscover an intimate relationship with the universal creative force of love that is our Holy God.

Prayer: Help me refocus my life in you, Glorious God! Help me see beyond my material self, and into my true nature, which is united in spirit with and by you, Eternal One. Amen.