He came off the mountain, have we?

1When he came down from the mountainside, large crowds followed him. 2A man with leprosy came and knelt before him and said, "Lord, if you are willing, you can make me clean." Matthew 8: 1-2 NIV.
I love the book of Matthew and the "Sermon on the Mount" is one of my favorites. In history there have been many great speeches by many great men. However the sermon Jesus delivers is the basis for how we should live our lives. The people were "amazed" at His teachings.
The sermon itself however isn't my main focus, and I guess I didn't even notice this until I was teaching Matthew chapter 8.
What I did notice was these words "he came down from the mountainside".
Now imagine your giving a sermon or speech and people are so amazed they don't want you to quit. Your saying profound even life changing things, people are applauding, your in the zone and you don't want it to end.
How easy would it be to stop?
What I find lacking in myself, and probably you feel the same, is that I don't want to come down.
Look at the first thing Jesus does when he comes off the mountain. A leper, who has no business being anywhere close to "clean" people, and Jesus does what He always does, reaches across and touches this pathetic, crushed and sick person.
The next person he heals isn't a Jew, the next isn't a man.
You see Jesus could have stayed on the mountain and taught many things, I'm sure people would have come to listen. But Jesus wasn't just about verbal communication, He communicated His love in other ways.
He got off the mountain.
Maybe as Christians we talk to much, maybe we sit in a place where many can hear us, perhaps we spend most of our time telling people how rotten they are and that they should be more like us.
Maybe it's time we came down off of the mountain and engage a culture using our actions and not our words.
But if I'm honest the path of least resistance is really way more attractive. Let the people come to us so that they can listen to our words. That just costs us a little wind.
And when we do that we scratch our heads and try to figure out why the lost aren't coming to hear our profound statements. Try to figure out why the church doesn't grow.
Jesus knew that words alone wasn't going to get it done. He came down off the mountain.
Have we?