Minister’s Corner: The cure

By: DR. BRIAN DORE’
Member of the VP Ministerial Alliance

Imagine walking into a medical clinic with a nasty infected cut on your arm. The doctor takes one look at you and says, “Get that gross thing away from me! Don’t you know better than to slice your arm up?” Then he walks off to his nice clean officer muttering, “What’s going on with people nowadays? It seems like everyone that comes in here is sick or wounded!”
Unfortunately, that’s how some of us react when we see the wounded people all around us. Let’s face it, society today is different than it was when a lot of us were growing up. It used to be that most people shared a “Judeo-Christian” heritage. Whether Christian or not, most people had a basic agreement about moral standards. That is no longer true. It’s not that most people in our society have rejected Christian values; many of them don’t even understand what Christian values are.
So let me give all of us a reminder. Sinners tend to sin, and sin always gets ugly. It messes people up. So stop and think a minute; how do you view the people around you who don’t share your tastes, values and opinions? Do you feel irritated? Do you go a step further and get angry? Or do you go even further than that and condemn them?
Jesus did not see the people around him as evil and disgusting. Instead, He saw them as weak, sick and in need of care. And Jesus described the cure when He told the Pharisees, “Go and learn what this means: ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’” (Matthew 9:13)