By Jerry Drace
Jerry Drace
FRIENDSHIP, Tenn. — I had just walked into my house. The tree cutters were splitting the last of the limbs from the hundred-year-old hickory tree which had to be taken down due to a virus.
Suddenly I heard someone banging on our door. Rushing to the door to open it, I looked into the anxious face of the foreman, Rusty, who blurted out, “Jose, one of my men has been cut and is bleeding real bad! He may have lost a finger. Can you drive him to the emergency room? My truck is full of wood and it will take several minutes to unload it.”
We quickly wrapped Jose’s hand and applied pressure to stop the bleeding. In less than five minutes we were at an urgent care clinic. The medical staff examined the wound and determined that Jose needed to be sent to another facility due to the extent of the injury. By this time Rusty arrived along with Michael, the other young man on the crew. Rusty then drove Jose to a specialty clinic.
As I drove Michael back to our house, we were talking about Jose’s injury and how much blood he had lost. I asked Michael if he was a Christian and he said his mother and father were, but he wasn’t sure.
What he had just witnessed provided the perfect opportunity to share about the shed blood of Jesus.
I told him that Jesus shed His blood on the cross to heal the wounds caused by our sins. In addition to healing us, He forgives us of the very sins which caused those self-inflicted wounds.
Millions are bleeding today, not physically, but spiritually. While we might stop the physical bleeding, only the blood of Jesus can stop the spiritual bleeding. As the hymn “There Is a Fountain” reminds us, “There is a fountain filled with blood, / Drawn from Immanuel’s veins, / And sinners plunged beneath that flood / Lose all their guilty stains: / E’er since by faith I saw the stream / Thy flowing wounds supply, / Redeeming love has been my theme, / And shall be till I die.”
Jesus not only stops the bleeding, He heals the wounds. Jose will regain full use of his finger and Michael asked Jesus into his life. One healed physically, the other healed spiritually. One had the bleeding stopped, the other had the blood applied.
It’s all in the blood. B&R
