I've got good news and bad news.
If you’ve ever heard that from someone, if you’re like me, you like to get the bad news first.
If your friend says it to you with a smile on her face you don’t take it too serious, but if a Doctor says it to you after doing a series of tests, the news he’s about to share is undoubtedly going to change your life.
I recently heard that there are now 2 confirmed cases of people being completely healed of HIV. Apparently, some people have a protein on their immune cells that prevents the Human Immunodeficiency Virus from latching on and rendering those cells useless. If such a person donates their bone marrow to a person infected with HIV, that person would acquire that same protein and the disease would then go into recession.
Now that’s good news for some people, but not for me because I don’t have HIV.
The way I feel about a cure for HIV is the way many people feel about the good news of Jesus. They might say “That’s great for people who need that sort of thing, but I’ve never felt the need to be that way”.
Did you know at least 1 in 7 people that have HIV don’t care that there is a cure. They don’t care because they don’t think it matters to them. It doesn’t matter to them because they don’t know they have HIV. According to the hiv.gov, as many as 15% of people with HIV have no idea that they have it. When they heard the news there was a cure, they didn’t know that good news was for them. If they did, they would be very interested in knowing how to acquire the cure.
The Apostle Paul said in Romans 5:12 that sin spread from Adam to all men so that death has spread to all men because all sinned. Just as HIV leads to AIDS, sin leads to death. 1.1 million People in the US have HIV, but there isn’t a person alive that doesn’t have the condition of sin. If someone knew they had a sinful condition that leads to death, they ought to be very interested in the cure.
That’s where our good news comes in! Jesus said in John 11:25 that He is the cure for death. He gives life to people who reach the climax of sin’s effect. In other words, when you die Jesus can give you life! One day that dead body will come out of the grave just like his body did. Our sin leads to death, but his death leads to life. If you have the disease, there is hope for the cure. But trust me, if you go on ignoring the symptoms and convincing yourself that you’re okay without Him, you’re not fooling anyone but yourself, and that’s sadder than not knowing at all.