“And Elisha sent a messenger to him, saying, ‘Go and wash in the Jordan seven times, and your flesh shall be restored, and you shall be clean.’ But Naaman was angry and went away, saying, ‘Behold, I thought that he would surely come out to me and stand and call upon the name of the Lord his God, and wave his hand over the place and cure the leper.’” – 2 Kings 5:10-11
Naaman, the mighty general of Aram (modern-day Syria) was prepared to pay any price or do any great deed to be cured of his dreadful disease. He knew his situation was serious and believed that a cure would surely require an extraordinary action. What he wasn’t prepared to do was simply believe in God and demonstrate His belief by doing something as mundane as seven dips into the Jordan river!
Angry and offended by the simplicity of what God offered through the prophet Elisha, he almost rejected the cure he’d traveled so far to receive. Fortunately, he was persuaded to do the trivial thing he’d been commanded to do as a demonstration of his faith, and he was healed. Because he did, he learned there was only one true god in the world: the God of Israel. He never could have learned that if he’d had to work or pay for his cure himself.
This remarkable story is an illustration of God’s grace that points forward to the struggle many today still have in accepting His grace. We desperately want to save ourselves. We know there’s a God and we know that something isn’t right in our relationship with Him. We want to make ourselves right with Him on our own terms by doing great deeds or making enormous sacrifices. Like Naaman, we’re prepared to pay any price. What we struggle to accept is that none of that can possibly restore the relationship between flawed and sinful humans and our perfect, holy Father in Heaven.
Instead, we must do something simple: believe. There’s no price we can ever pay to receive God’s spiritual healing, because God already paid the necessary price: He gave His Son to die for us on the cross. Now we must accept God’s free gift of grace through faith in Jesus Christ. Since that denies our desire to save ourselves, and many struggle to embrace God’s grace. Like Naaman, we still want our salvation to look elaborate, complex, and costly to us. Instead, our only hope is to accept a gift we don’t deserve and can’t earn by believing in Jesus. Have you fully accepted that gift? Or are you still struggling to save yourself?