The disease of Leprosy is a dreaded disease to get today even with modern medicines, but in Israel it was a death sentence. Leprosy was an animal poison that got into the human blood stream, fermented and multiplied there and infected the entire body. It would begin to affect the nervous system causing a person to lose all feeling in their skin and then would also cause the skin to ooze a sick substance which was infectious and carried the disease. For this reason alone, a person infected with leprosy was banished from society and forced out of a normal life to live with other lepers in the ten or so horrible years that it would take him to die. Because of losing feeling in his skin, the leper would often accidentally lose parts of his body {adlib}. The most common type of leprosy would mutilate and distort the facial features and joints of the body and then cause the skin to break and boil and recede so that the white of bones and red flesh would be visible. Usually the disease would cause the skin and hair to turn white and would cause the lips of the victim to drop revealing the gums and teeth in a permanent ugly countenance. Because the disease was primarily spread through fish without scales and unclean pork the law forbade the Israelites to eat those type foods (Leviticus 11:7-12). Because of their state of infectious disease and being banished from society, the leper had to go through life not being able to go into the cities and if they came within a few hundred feet of a person they had to cry "Unclean, Unclean!"

Leprosy is a type of sin. We know this because Paul used the familiar cry of the leper to describe the sins that would not inherit eternal life:

Sin is very similar to the effects of leprosy. Like the disease, sin is a death sentence. Leprosy could only be healed in those days by a miracle from God, Sin is healed only by the miracle of the New Birth experience. Sin is also infectious and also spreads generation to generation. A leper was not able to marry a clean person according to the law because they would infect them! A person infected with sin begins to lose all feeling and sensitivity toward God and His Spirit and begins to ooze an attitude and spirit of unrighteousness that is contagious! Because of a lack of feeling, sin causes a person to wound themselves with horrible wounds in the spirit that affect the person's entire being. Sin eventually breaks up the skin of "self-righteousness" and reveals the filth and disease by which a person is really infected. The spiritual lips and mouth of sinful person are affected with depression and unfulfillment and just as the children of Israel avoided partaking of anything that even looked like it might carry the disease, so should we realize that sin is such a serious infection that we should resist even the form of evil in our lives:

There are several stories of lepers in the scripture. One such story is found in the time of the prophet Elisha:

{The story of the Syrians coming against Israel. Things had gotten very bad so much that people were eating donkey's head, pigeon dung, and even human babies. Elisha the man of God told the king that God would work a miracle. The lepers went into the camp, God performed a miracle, and the entire city had food. The point is the lepers were not healed or cleansed and died a leper! They were content with be used of God without ever going to the man of God and getting healing through the Word of God! There are people like that today, they want a miracle and want their fleshly desires met but do not want to deal with their sin problem!}

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{Story of Naman and the little Jewish girl. Analogy that the girl was happy and well respected in Naman's house despite being a slave and away from her parents. Naman had to realize that he was a leper and needed God before he ever came to God. Naman thought the cure was crazy yet through a servant gently convincing him to simply obey the Word of God, he was cleansed! His cleansing was a type of water baptism. The Jordan river was the same river where John the Baptist baptized, Jesus was baptized and at least some of Jesus' disciples were baptized. It was the place where water baptism was instituted by God! Go on to tell about Gehazi sold out for money and changed his convictions for wealth, and he was cursed with the same curse of the one whom he sold out to!}

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The story of the ten lepers and Jesus:

{The one who came back to Jesus with praise and worship after the cleansing was made whole! This is a type of the Holy Ghost and a lifestyle of praise and worship to Jesus, will make whole the wounds that years of sin had caused!}

The one leper, however, still thought like a leper! {adlib: he would have to learn to stop cringing at people. He would have to learn to forgive the people that had despised him before. He would have to change his entire mentality from being a leper to being whole. The only thing worse than a person who never gets delivered from sin is someone who gets cleansed from sin, is made whole, and gets a new lease on life, and yet continues to act, think, and react like a sinner!}

Just because you are cleansed and your old sinful flesh buried and you are made whole and complete by God's Spirit doesn't mean that you are completely changed in your thinking! Notice Paul's commandment to the churches in Rome (who were all very established Christians even some of the people that had won Paul to the Lord):

(the fish in the aquarium with divided glass analogy. The shocker collar analogy about animals learning that they will be hurt if they go past a certain point so if those hinderances are removed, the animal will still not go past that point)

When a person receives the Spirit of God is reverses the damage done to our spirit but we must renew our mind to get the "mind of Christ."

The Bible says in Ephesians 4:17 that the unsaved walk "in the vanity of their mind" but verse 23 of the same chapter teaches us that Christians should "be renewed in the spirit of [their] mind."

How do you renew your mind? By changing your way of thinking to the way God thinks. How do we know the mind of God? The Word of God! This is why the scriptures are so important to us, we must continue to study the Word of God and change our way of thinking so that we see all situations like God sees them!

David prayed like this:

The person who meditates in the law of the Lord shall prosper. Why? Because they begin to get over their sinful mentality and began to see the world through the eyes of a holy God: