Life of Christ #8 – What Happens When Faith Touches Jesus? | The Power of Christ

If you happened to turn on your TV and are watching us, we’re looking at the life of the Lord Jesus Christ through the eyes of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John all at once. We’re in a book (The Life of Christ in Stereo) that has brought us to page 62, entitled A Woman is Healed, and a dead girl is raised. We are trying to discover what was going on inside Jesus Christ, and what was going on in His relationship with the Father. We’re not trying to make personal application here particularly.

I’m going to tell you out there, and I’m going to tell you here, brothers. That mostly what we have for the next two pages are recitations, recountings of miracles. I cannot say these written words give us much insight into what was going on inside the Lord. Picking up from the fasting and feasting of our last time together, some questions came up as the Lord walked along the shore about why His disciples were having such a great time when everybody knows religious people are not supposed to have a good time. They’re supposed to fast, suffer, and be unhappy like the Pharisees.

Now then, while they are literally standing there discussing this, a situation arises. A ruler, the man in charge of the synagogue, probably in Capernaum – this almost certainly is taking place in Capernaum – comes up to the Lord and falls down at His feet and begins to worship Him and says to Him, ” My daughter is dying; she’s at the very point of death; come lay Your hands upon her that she may be healed. Immediately, you recognize that He’s not like the centurion who knew it could be done at a distance. The Lord responds to this man based on where he is. He says, I will come.

We’ve already touched on this before, but frankly, I am surprised that the Lord is favoring the favored. This man is important, and the Lord is responding to him. Now, maybe the writers are just telling us the outstanding things, like, you know, the Secretary of State got saved. Well, that day hundreds of people got saved, but how often does the Secretary of State get saved? The President got saved. That hardly ever happens. And this is like a Baptist preacher getting saved, or he’s coming to somebody who’s of some, to a Methodist for help, or perhaps it’s simply because it stood out as something unusual. But the Lord responds, and He goes with the man.

Now, you have to realize that when we think in terms of a big crowd around the Lord, I’m not sure our imaginations are big enough. We probably picture the Lord with maybe a dozen, fifty, or a hundred people around Him, but when He stepped out into public, He may have been literally surrounded by 5,000 or 10,000 people. It’s possible. Why? Because they were trying to get close to Him so He could come, touch them, and heal them. It is very possible that people were coming to Him from all over that end of Israel. One verse indicates that people were coming as far as Damascus on rumors that a healer was down there somewhere.

Anyway, at least several hundred people are pressing in around Him; I trust they’re using good sense to give Him enough room not to kill Him, and that there’s a little pocket where He can move, and He’s trying to move forward. He’s pushing His way through the people…and there is a lady. Now, truly, here is someone who is not notable. Here is a nobody. She’s pushing her way through the crowd, trying to get to Him, and I must tell you a story one of my seminary professors told me.

A medical doctor once wrote a book on Luke’s writings from a medical perspective. This doctor pointed out many things no one had noticed before, showing that Luke clearly had a medical mind in both the book of Acts and the book of Luke; here is one place where the doctor pointed something out. You have Matthew telling the story, but he is obviously anti-medical doctors. Here’s a woman who’s been sick for 12 long years. All these doctors have hurt her. She’s had all her money taken away by the doctors. She’s suffered painfully at their hands. She’s lost everything she’s got.

Well, when Luke told the story, he said she had an incurable disease. I believe Luke names several diseases that the other writers pass over. But Luke is coming in here to defend his profession, and he is saying this woman had a disease that cannot be cured, whereas Matthew is just running down the MDs of his day. I personally tend to be a little more in Matthew’s camp. I don’t think Luke…I don’t think most doctors enjoy poor health.

Anyway, she has spent everything she had. She’s getting worse. She’s heard about the Lord, and she knows something. She knows He doesn’t have to see her. Does not have to pray over her. Does not even have to touch her. She knows she will be healed; not if she touches Him, but if she can just touch His robe. Now that is incredible. That was quite a discovery. Now we read the story, so we’re ahead of her. We knew this could happen, but she didn’t know that could happen. Neither did anyone else.

Why His garment? Another question, and it just stands out here. How did she know? And which part of her knew? I’m going to use a term. This woman had “a knowing.” Perhaps you’ve never heard that term before. It is not new to me, but I’m using this word in a very special way. She had a knowing. This is not logic. This is not rationalism. This is not theology. This is not the soul’s intuition. This is a knowing. This is something we don’t typically experience. She is intuiting. She is having a knowing. And by the way, her knowing is accurate. She touches His garment, and instantly this issue of blood, this hemorrhaging in her body, dried up.

Here is her second knowing. She sensed she was healed. Here are two “knowings” within one paragraph. Now, in Foundation Stones (a set of messages Gene delivered prior to these) and in other times that you brothers have heard me speak, I have spoken about the fact that the Spirit has a way about it that is, in many cases, different from the soul. The soul can be very intellectual, and its intellectualism can be separate from the Christian faith, even if it’s dealing with the Christian faith. I would say that’s where most teaching comes from; most of what we get in our seminaries, Bible schools, and Bible classes is the soul’s capacity to grasp, with its intellectual powers, what’s in front of it.