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

I have the sense that they are literally saying to Him, “Now, Lord, think about this for a moment. There are a lot of people around You. We’re all touching You. There’s no way to know who touched You. What do You mean?” Didn’t do any good. Immediately, He said, “Somebody touched Me.” Then He said it again. “I knew that power went forth from Me.”

Now, if these people think they’re in trouble, you can only imagine what this dear little lady’s thing is. Boy, I have done it now. I’m going to get zapped dead. I stole something from this incredible man, and He’s angry with me. She is getting just as far back; she has stopped moving. The crowd’s going forward, and He just thought, “Who touched Me? I want to know who touched Me. Alright, who was it?”

He’s waiting, and He’s not going to leave until there’s an answer, and she’s becoming more and more terrified, and the terror brings forth her confession. She comes plaintively, falls down before Him, and tells Him her whole story. Wouldn’t you have liked to have been there? Wouldn’t you have liked to have been there? All the people heard and, uh, I’m sure they rejoiced.

Twice the Lord says He knew. This time the woman knows; only she knows in her soul, in her head; she knows she’s in trouble. Her other two knowings were something deep within her. This one is outward and objective. The Lord had a knowing within Him that something had gone out of Him, and then He declared it. “I know power has gone from Me.”

I am just here at the very crux and the apex and zenith of everything, of the whole reason why I’m doing this study of the Lord’s life. It’s to say to you all that Christians have internal knowings. We have a world within our spirit. We have a realm within us. It does not look like, act like, or function like our minds, and here is a perfect illustration. The Lord had a sense that had nothing to do with His intellect. He knew something had happened inside of Him.

I’m looking at a mystery here. What on earth is He talking about? Where did the power reside? How did He know the power went out from Him? Did this happen every time He healed someone? If it was in Him, where was it coming from? By what means did He know? Was it painful? Was it a mild sense? Was it perhaps something beautiful that He sensed? All I know is that my Lord had a knowing that had nothing to do with His frontal lobe. Something had taken place inside Him, free from and apart from His mind; portions of His divinity were available to mankind, and could be tapped without even His knowing it from His humanity’s viewpoint. Just happened to Him without His own human knowledge. What a world this opens up to us. I don’t know what to do but sit in front of it, be reverent, and say to my Lord, “Lord, I, I am a Christian, and I have a right to this world, and I have a right to these things.”

Now, outside right now, there’s a theologian about to have apoplexy. He is saying, “Gene Edwards is speaking very dangerously right now. Get a bunch of Christians loose and leave them alone to say they’re all getting a word from God. We’ll have to lock them all up.”

Well, first of all, He was God, and He had no problem doing this. His disciples were learning from Him, but they had the check of the other eleven within them. Yes, we are to follow our internal senses; yes, we are fallen, and the Lord was not; and our internal senses may not be as trustworthy as His. But if we are Christians in a proper first-century sense, we will be Christians within a body and a community of people. We will be checked. Well, what if it’s the leader? I don’t care who it is; if he’s been around long enough, people will know something about him. If he is not simply fooling God’s people…if he is, then it’s okay; it’s outside of decency anyway…but if it’s within the realm of honesty, the body itself comes to know its members. I know a lot of people who have been in the body of Christ who would get up and say, “I have a word from the Lord,” and it wouldn’t be listened to, or it would be taken with a grain of salt, or maybe a whole salt shaker. Other people, if they said it, would be listened to, and their words would be weighed heavily because of their track record.

Now, He has the greatest track record of all, but I have a right to an internal knowing, and so do you. We all do. He is the pathfinder of our faith; He did not live this kind of internal life and leave us void of such things. If He had, He would have said something about it. He left us a path He found and a way He walked, and it’s for us to follow in His steps, not in the steps of Aristotle, Socrates, and Plato, whom we follow because we follow intellectualism.

I know that none of you can fully appreciate this; unless you’re theologically trained, you cannot appreciate what I’m talking about. The day I walked into a theological study, I walked into a world I just…I’ve been through college. I knew what intellectualism was, but I’ve never seen anything like this. I was in a world of diagramming everything, analyzing everything. We knew more and more about less and less till we knew everything about nothing. We were in a world where, instead of studying the New Testament, you studied all the great minds thinking about what it said. They used big words; God used little words. We had to learn how to think in big, abstract terms about little bitty things God said. Yes, we were still studying the Bible, but by the time we got through this, when we got to that, the heart and soul and being of it had been taken out. We were more blind than the simple little 80-year-old lady who was taking this at face value. And that this was, when we left there, whether we wanted to or not, we left there with the impression that this was Christianity and this was the Christian faith and this is, it left its mark on us and perhaps forever.

Brothers and sisters, He had a knowing: the internal sense of spiritual things. Your spirit has not been shot dead and a Bible stuffed in its place. Your spirit is operative. You have the Scripture, but it does not take the place of a living and dwelling God within you. And that’s the story to me of this miraculous occurrence. Here are two people who have a knowing.  At the end, He said to her, “Be of good courage, daughter.” She’s older than He is. He’s 30, 31. She’s got to be at least 32. I get the impression she’s a lot older than that, don’t you? Daughter. Why did He call her daughter?

She had been destined before the foundation of the world to have a living spirit. She had been born of God. By the day of Pentecost or by the crucifixion and the resurrection, that woman would have a living spirit within her. She would have God’s nature in her. He was speaking outside of all…free from time and space. He was not thinking that, right now, you may not have a living spirit in you. Maybe He put one in her by the power of what would be in the resurrection; I don’t know.