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

I know one thing: that woman’s spirit was made alive. I know she was birthed out of the very bosom, the being, the center, and the ocean of the Godness of God. He knew that she was His daughter. If He is God and she’s a daughter of God, a real, genuine, honest-to-goodness. Divine creature. One third of her is divine; not all of her, one third of her. I think in the day of the resurrection, or in the day of the consummation of the ages, she might have more divinity in her than that. Not now, but then. He called her His daughter because of something that happened in eternity past. She was chosen for the foundations of the world to be marked off in Christ.

Now I give you a mystery. He said to her, “Your faith has healed you.” Now is that correct? Somebody explain that to me. Did her faith heal her? No. Technically, His power healed her. His power healed her; it said so right up there, but He said her faith healed her. He also said power had gone out from Him. Now, what had healed her, please? Would her faith have healed her without His power? Would His power have healed her without her faith?

Well, I’m gonna put it this way. If she had been in a rejecting mode, could His power have healed her? Not likely. I think the answer is still yes, but He doesn’t work in those worlds. Why is He not sitting down in Nazareth right now, healing all the sick people in Nazareth? Why is He over in Capernaum? It’s because it wasn’t a good atmosphere to work in. It was a negative atmosphere of rejection. They were in a rejection mode. So He moved over and made Capernaum His adult hometown; not His childhood hometown, His adult hometown. He had a good thing to work there with. He had an accepting mode; an accepting atmosphere was operating, and His power works more effectively there.

So, I have to say one element is necessary, and the other one sure doesn’t hurt. I also have to tell you that when you have His power present and your faith present, there is another element working. And that is sovereignty. He doesn’t always do what your faith wants Him to do. Thank God. Otherwise, we would have made Him our slave. If faith alone could make God its servant, then all men would have faith to do all sorts of things. They would have made God…reduced Him to an idol, or worse, a genie—a slave to our lusts. We would have had faith that we could be rich; that we could murder; that we could live in sin.

I thank God for the sovereign limits of His will. That the exercise of our faith does not bind Him to do anything we demand of Him, but that if we have spiritual faith, we can be saved under any conditions. We cannot force Him after that to do our whole bidding all the time, but sometimes you have a knowing, and you know He will do a certain thing.

So from your viewpoint, there is a relationship between faith and power. There is a relationship between knowing and His sovereignty. Now, did you follow that? Was that clear? Your faith relates to His power. Your knowing, your internal sense, relates to His sovereignty. Sometimes you know that His sovereign will is to do something. You have that sense. Well, Gene, once the Lord spoke to me, and I knew He was going to raise that child from the dead, and the child didn’t rise from the dead. Well then, I would say you need to go back and check your knowledge; it may have come from somewhere besides your spirit. In fact, I’m certain it did.

I’ll quickly tell you that I have three experiences related to my spirit. There are times when I know, and I’m dead wrong. God, have pity and mercy on me. Rarely have I ever brought the church of God into all my wrong suppositions about my spirit’s internals. When it comes to affecting someone else’s life through my internals, I wait days, weeks, months, and sometimes years to be sure it is my spirit. And brothers, I want you to know that was true in Isla Vista. When I was there for 12 years with you, with those things that affected the church, I moved very slowly. Once I made up my mind that it was the Lord’s will, then I moved like lightning. It always looked like I was moving quickly.

The second one is that I have a sense within my spirit about God’s will, and I misread it. Maybe with the first one, I get it wrong. The second one, I get it half right. I’m almost certain. The most vivid memory I have of that was that I really felt one day that something tragic was happening to someone. I had an overwhelming sense about that person. I had the sense that they had died. I lived in terror for two days, and the first words that person said to me when I saw them were, “I just got saved.” I started crying, and I grabbed them in my arms and said, “You’ve died to your sins.” Sometimes my spirit doesn’t do me just right. Sometimes I can’t read God’s mind.

Then there’s a third relationship I have, and that’s when I’m right. I know I’m right. And it turns out that I have understood in my spirit the mind of the Lord. I might add a fourth one, and that is my state most of the time: I don’t have the foggiest idea of what’s going on. (laughter) I don’t know, and I don’t know, and I know I don’t know.

My faith relates to His power. My senses relate to His sovereign will. I either…and I have four possibilities there…I misinterpreted; I get it half right and half wrong; I get it right on the button; nothing is going on in there at all; or something is going on, and I don’t have the foggiest idea what it is. That’s generally my relationship to Jesus Christ within my spirit as far as having knowings.

Daughter, your faith has made you whole; go in peace and be well of your scourge. Well, He has left the seashore, where He was talking about fasting and feasting. He left it to go heal someone who is dying…on the way to Jairus’ home. He meets a woman who is healed by the touch of His garment. He still hasn’t gotten to that house yet, and finally He arrives. Just in the midst of all this, someone else arrives, and it’s some of the people from… Jairus’ home, who says, “Master, teacher, rabbi, don’t bother. He didn’t make it. You stop to talk to that woman. He didn’t make it. She’s dead.”

Well, who is it that says Fear not; only believe? I’m going to reread the passage. While He was still speaking, some came from the home of the synagogue official. One of them said to Him, ” Your daughter has died. Trouble not the teacher further. But Jesus, having heard the word that was spoken, said to the official of the synagogue, Fear not; only believe. She will be restored. And He allowed no one to go with Him but Peter, James, and brother John.