What is your greatest need? To be healed? Well, that is a great need when you are seriously ill. But a far greater need is to be on the road to heaven, to have Christ as your Lord and to know his blessing. This is our greatest need: to have spiritual life, eternal life, a heavenly objective, and to have the strength of God within us and the new nature that he alone can give us. Don’t say that your greatest need is to have whatever may be your great trial in life, to have your illness cured. Great as it is, it's far below your spiritual need. Nine lepers thought leprosy was their all-consuming greatest need, and there was nothing else. We sympathize, that was a tremendous need, but not the greatest need. If you have limited needs, you need your horizons expanding, you need to be looking up at far greater things. May you, in answer to prayer, have considerable help with your earthly needs, but your eternal, spiritual, heavenly needs are infinitely greater and more important.
How can I have the mercy of God? How can I have my sins forgiven? How can I receive a new life? Maybe I will come to the Lord, and I'll say, ‘Oh Lord, I have got some problems, there are some things wrong with me. I commit some sins, but you know that on the whole I am better than other people, and I live quite a good life, and I've done some quite good things.’ You can't come to the Lord like that. If I come to the Lord like that, I'm speaking nonsense. In God's holy sight, I am utterly corrupt and rotten. He sees right into my heart; he knows everything that's the matter with me.
If I am going to come to the Lord, there is only one way I can come to get his ear. I say, ‘Lord Jesus, have mercy upon me. I deserve nothing but to be condemned. I am nothing. I have thrown away my life. I have spurned and slandered my God. I have been full of selfishness and worship of number one. I have wanted my own pleasure and my own way. I have told so many lies. I have done so many wretched and horrible things.’ We all have to make a full confession. How many among us have done foul things, even perverted things, even filthy things? How many people have sinned against God's natural order? How many people are adulterers? How many people have abused themselves with mankind in the language of the King James Version? There is every kind of sin in us. We say, ‘Wash away my sins. Give me a new life and a new beginning.’ The leper teaches us even how to ask for the blessing of God. We learn it from the lips of the lepers.
How were those lepers healed? How are we saved? Jesus of Nazareth went to their village. He came from heaven to earth, was born as a babe and one day he went to their village and he healed them. That is how we are saved. Jesus Christ came from heaven, went to Calvary's cross, took my sin and yours also if you are one of those who will repent and will seek him. He knew each person for whom he would die, for whom he would purchase salvation, and he went on Calvary's cross and his heavenly Father looked upon Jesus Christ, his Son, the eternal Son and he punished him instead of us. He put all the punishment due to us for our sin upon Jesus Christ so that he could forgive us. Because Jesus Christ has taken away the punishment of our sin, he now has the right to pardon us, and change us, and make us his children. Without him we have got nothing at all. He is the only one who ever atoned for the sin of any man or woman. He loved the leper, and as he extended all his compassion and his power to the leper, so he extends his kindness and his compassion to spiritual lepers.