Healed at the Hem of His Garment

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So, I’ve had this problem with misdiagnosis. I’ve, over the last 15 years or so, I’ve had these tiny little blisters that pop up on my hands at random times. They’ll be on the palms of my hands.

They’ll be on the fingers. They’re irritating and they itch and they’re just, they’re not pretty to look at. They’re not there all the time.

They’re not there now. So I would look like a liar if you came and looked at them now. But I’ve had this issue and I never, I never had it and never noticed it before I went on a mission trip to Mexico.

and we were not like on the beach in Mexico. We were up in the mountains. We were wrangling goats with villagers.

We were eating things from carts, roadside stands that some of you would look at and say, I’m not eating that, but we ate from it anyway. And then I came back from Mexico and started getting these blisters and I thought I could have anything from anywhere. I could have something that textbooks don’t have.

And I talked to the doctor about it, and they thought it was one thing. At one point, they gave me treatments for this, treatments for that. It never worked.

And I thought, what are these mutant zombie blisters that I can’t seem to do anything about? And when I would use these treatments that the doctors would give, it only seemed to make the things angry. And it took me 15 years or so.

I’m not real clear on the timeline, just off the top of my head. But it’s only been within the last two years or so. And I was looking because all these doctors’ diagnoses had come back wrong, and they weren’t doing anything.

And so I’m looking to that world-renowned medical expert, Google, and Googling every possible description I can think of to go with these blisters. And finally, I saw a picture of something that looked like these things. And I did some digging and realized it was a form of eczema.

And not only that, but it’s a form of eczema that can be complicated. It can be exacerbated by allergies. And I’ve told you, I hold the title for the worst allergies of anybody that I know.

And so you get these, and it’s a form of eczema. It can be triggered by your allergy problems. And so I’ve tried everything at this point. I’m going to go get some of that over-the-counter eczema cream or eczema lotion from Walmart, and it helped.

That and just keeping on top of my allergy medicines, it helped. I mean, they come back from time to time, but they’re not nearly as bad. And it was so frustrating having to go through all the misdiagnosis.

Maybe some other time I’ll tell you about the time that they diagnosed me with asthma. After running all these tests and then figured out, you know, lose 90 pounds and figure out a better way to deal with your stress. And suddenly you don’t have the breathing trouble.

It went away. I didn’t have asthma. I went through all those tests and I guess I’m telling you about it now.

But they misdiagnosed me for years. The woman in the story that we’re going to look at today had an issue like that, only her issue was potentially more life-threatening because she’s dealing with, the Bible says, an issue of blood. Some translations say a discharge of blood.

She was bleeding more than she should have been at times when she shouldn’t have been, and there was no explanation. And typically, I’m not a medical doctor, but typically it’s better when the blood stays in the body, right? And so it was a problem that it wasn’t, And she had been to doctors for years and years and years, and nobody was able to help her.

There was no solution until she met Jesus. And that’s what we’re going to look at tonight, is this woman who went through all these misdiagnoses. And so we’re going to be in Mark chapter 5 tonight.

We’re going to look in the middle of this other story about Jesus raising the little girl from the dead. Mark chapter 5, and we’re going to start in verse 25. If you turn there with me in your Bibles, if you’d stand once you find it, or it’ll be on the screen.

if you don’t have your Bible with you tonight. But we’re going to read together from God’s Word, Mark 5, 25 through 34 this evening. It says, Now a certain woman had a flow of blood for twelve years, and had suffered many things from many physicians.

She had spent all that she had, and was no better, but rather grew worse. When she heard about Jesus, she came behind him in the crowd and touched his garment. For she said, If only I may touch his clothes, I shall be made well.

Immediately the fountain of her blood was dried up, and she felt in her body that she was healed of the affliction. And Jesus, immediately knowing in himself that power had gone out of him, turned around in the crowd and said, Who touched my clothes? But his disciples said to him, You see the multitude thronging you, and you say, Who touched me?

And he looked around to see her who had done this thing. But the woman, fearing and trembling, knowing what had happened to her, came and fell down before him and told him the whole truth. And he said to her, Daughter, your faith has made you well.

Go in peace and be healed of your affliction, and you may be seated. So this woman, we can see just from this brief passage, she had a medical problem. She had a serious medical problem, but she had more than a medical problem.

And that’s what we miss a lot of times when we read through this story. Her problem was not just the medical issue that she had going on. Now, it was a real medical problem.

I’m not trying to say that it wasn’t anything important or that it didn’t matter. She had some kind of bleeding disorder. It tells us there in verse 25.

People have, commentators have gone back and forth over what it was. And it really doesn’t matter. We just know she had a problem where there was blood where there shouldn’t be.

And any time we see that, it’s going to be cause for concern. I mean, I’ve had some of my children come to me with just blood, and immediately I panic. I’m not bothered by the sight of blood, even my own.

I don’t mind watching them take blood from me. But when it comes out of my children, it was a little different. It’s supposed to stay there.

So there’s this panic when there’s blood, when there’s not supposed to be blood. For her, this had gone on for 12 years. She had some kind of bleeding disorder.

We don’t know what it was. That’s okay because they didn’t know what it was either. It had gone on for 12 years.

It had only grown worse over time. Verse 26 says she had gone through all these treatments and it hadn’t gotten any better. It only grew worse.

And if memory serves, you can look at the handout I gave you, but if memory serves, Luke doesn’t dispute that. I maintain the Bible does not contradict itself, But Luke doesn’t mention how the doctors made her worse. He’s not quite as emphatic about that point as Mark is, which I think is interesting, and kind of goes to the fact that Luke was a doctor himself.

And he’s not lying, he doesn’t emphasize that particular point. And so it had gone on, it had gotten worse. The doctors had not been able to provide relief, and it wasn’t surprising given some of the treatments that were available at the time.

I read through some different materials this week where they talked about some of the treatments that would have been available. Some of the treatments, we’re not just talking about an early form of medicine here. We’re talking about something more in line with traditional medicine than anything we would recognize.

I mean, it sounded like witchcraft kind of stuff. You know, eye of newt, wing of bat sort of thing. Some of it even came from the Talmud, some of the Jewish religious writings that they suggested try this, try that.

And so some of the things that I read this week suggested these are the kinds of treatments that they would have done for these kinds of ailments. And we read this and think none of that would do anything. None of that would do anything.

You know, my wife does some of the essential oils, and I’ve been really skeptical about that. Now she has one that she gave me for a migraine. Oil is not going to do anything for a migraine, but by golly, it helped.

I had to eat my words. But she knows people that talk like this stuff can regrow a limb. I’m sorry, peppermint oil is not going to regrow your leg.

It may have some medicinal value, but you’re not going to find a blend of oils that’s going to regrow a leg. And my wife doesn’t believe that either, but some people talk about it that way. That’s the kind of thing.

We’re going to throw a powder of this, and you’ve got to get a sack of mud, and this bug, and you’ve got to wear the sack around. It did nothing for her. And the treatment she had tried had only made things worse.

And so we look at that, and we see this medical issue that’s gone on for 12 years. It’s gotten worse no matter how hard she tried. And that’s bad enough.

That would be problem enough. Some of you have dealt with debilitating medical issues for years and years. and you could tell us that that’s bad enough, but that’s not all there was to her situation.

She also had the added financial problem of the fact that she was destitute now because the Bible says she spent everything she had on these cures that weren’t really cures. So not only is she still sick, but now she’s also broke on top of it. Verse 26 said she spent all she had.

But in addition, there was a spiritual problem. Under the Old Testament law, she was considered unclean. Leviticus 15 talks about the rules regarding women who had unexpected bleeding problems. And under that Old Testament law, that would have kept her away from worship in the temple, and it would have kept her away from other people.

It kept her isolated from people who served God because under the Old Testament law, anything she touched became unclean. anybody, any person that she touched became unclean. And they too were separated from the temple and separated from other people until they underwent these rituals to be clean again.

And so she was, she was separated from other people. She was not supposed to be out in the crowd that day. As a matter of fact, there could have been some serious consequences for her if the, if the crowd, the mob, whatever you want to call it, had, had recognized what was going on, that she’s out there in and among them, but she was desperate.

The way she would have been looked at by other people is the way you get looked at today when you go into, especially over the last couple of years, you go into Walmart and you’ve got a cough and you know for sure it’s just allergies, but you start coughing a little bit and everybody gives you the stink eye. You know what I’m talking about? Yeah.

Like you’ve got the plague. They would have looked at her that way too. Get away.

Unclean. And you know, it’s miserable enough when you’re going through some kind of medical issue, when you throw the spiritual issue on there too. That she was unclean.

The law said she was unclean. And everybody would have kept her at arm’s length. It gets even worse.

Because some of us experienced this over the last two years. Going through extended periods of quarantine where you’re cut off from everybody. I just want to see people.

I just want to see other people. I just want to be around somebody. I just want to hug my family again.

But you’re cut off. Now, imagine going through that for 12 years, and you can begin to see where this lady was. She was in a hopeless situation.

She was in more than a medical problem. And then we see what happened here when she approached Jesus. He cured her when there was no other remedy for her situation.

She had tried everything else that anybody knew to do. For 12 years, nobody had been able to do a single thing to help her or even make things any easier. Her situation had only grown worse and she was desperate.

We know how desperate she was because she went out into the crowd when she wasn’t supposed to. And verse 27 tells us why she had done that. It says she heard about Jesus.

She’s at a point where she had nothing left to lose. If you were in a situation like this and you heard that there was some guy who might be able to fix it, wouldn’t you give it a shot? And so verse 27 says she came behind him in the crowd.

She touched his garment. She said to herself, if only I may touch his clothes, I shall be made well. And we don’t know whether this was superstition.

We don’t know whether this was incredible faith because there were schools of thought at that time that different things had miraculous powers. You know, that maybe there was something about his garment that would be enough. Maybe her faith in Jesus was just so strong that she said, if I could just get that close to Jesus.

Maybe it wasn’t, oh, he’s wearing a magic garment. Maybe it was just she had this incredible faith in Jesus. But whatever it was, we can see that this was an act of desperation on her part.

Ultimately, she was going to try this because there was no other way. There was no other way for this to be fixed. And so she goes out to Jesus, and she touches the hem of his garment, and verse 30 talks about how power had gone out of him.

Now think about this. Jesus is powerful enough that this woman was healed without Jesus ever having to even say anything to her. It says here that power had gone out of him.

Now I want to be clear here that this is not talking about, it’s easy to misunderstand phrasing like this and hear, well, power went out of him like he lost some power. That doesn’t mean that he lost some power. That means Jesus recognized that his power had been used.

It doesn’t mean that he ran out or that he lost some. If you’re starting from the premise that Mark is, and we’ve seen all throughout the book of Mark, that he’s making the case Jesus is God, God has infinite power. By definition, if he doesn’t have infinite power, he’s not God.

How do you lose part of infinity? You don’t. You send some out and there’s still as much as there ever was.

Jesus just recognizes that the power has gone out. Like, you know, if you were to fire a laser, that beam has gone out, right? Doesn’t mean that the laser has left the building.

Just some of the power has gone out that way. That’s what we’re talking about here. He recognized the power had gone out of him.

And verse 29 says, immediately, immediately, the fountain of her blood was dried up. So where it had been gushing forth, that’s the idea there behind the fountain, where it had been gushing forth, it had been uncontrollable, immediately it was dried up and she felt in her body that she was healed of the affliction. So he was able to do immediately what nobody else had been able to do in 12 years.

And when he did this, when he was able to heal her, he not only cured her medical problem, but he cured the spiritual problem as well. Because look at where the spiritual problem arose. This separation from God, from the temple, from the other people of Israel, it arose from the medical problem.

If he takes care of the medical problem, he takes care of that part of the spiritual problem. She would no longer have to suffer the indignity of this continual separation from God and from the other worshipers. Imagine if you showed up at church and because you had some kind of medical issue, we said, no, no, no, you’re not pure.

You can’t come in. There are some people that think that that’s the kind of thing we do. If there are churches that do that, shame on them.

But you’re not pure. You’re not up to our standards. You’re not dressed right, whatever.

So you have to be excluded. That would be embarrassing, right? I mean, most of us would be angry about that, but there’d be some embarrassment involved in there too.

She carried this shame and this sense of not being worthy, this sense of separation from God, this sense of exclusion from the temple, and Jesus immediately took that away from her. She was no longer ceremonially unclean. Now, here’s the thing.

We don’t see any reference here to Jesus being unclean. But everything she touched and everyone she touched was considered unclean under the law until it went through these purification rituals, not Jesus. And Jesus was all about following the law perfectly.

Now, not the Pharisees’ misinterpretations of the law, but he was determined to follow the law perfectly. So if Jesus was ceremonially unclean, he would have gone and done something about it. But he wasn’t.

That’s because when you come to God, your uncleanness does not make him unclean. His cleanness makes you clean. By touching him, she didn’t make Jesus unclean, he made her clean.

And what we need to understand, what’s hard for us to understand because it’s so foreign to our way of doing things, this idea of uncleanness is tied to sin. We think of uncleanness just as being dirty. My kids run around and get in the dirt and we give them a bath and it’s just part of it.

It doesn’t make them bad people, right? We hauled limbs to the dump yesterday. We were dirty.

It didn’t mean we were bad people. We’re not talking about physical uncleanness. We’re talking about this ceremonially, being ceremonially, my goodness, ceremonially unclean under the law where it says you are impure, you are unholy, you are unworthy.

It’s tied to sin because it wasn’t just these physical things that happened that would make somebody unclean temporarily until it was resolved. Sin would make a person unclean. Anytime somebody disobeyed God, Anytime somebody would think, say, do, or don’t, or not do anything that displeased God, it would make them unclean under the law.

And in both cases, it didn’t matter whether it was sin, it didn’t matter whether it was a physical issue, this uncleanness separated people from God. They both made a person unacceptable in the sight of God until it was cleansed. The uncleanness had to be cleansed.

By the way, if you’re listening to this and thinking, oh my goodness, what are they talking about living up to these impossible standards? people with physical issues, they’re unclean. We are not under the ceremonial aspects of the Old Testament law today.

I want to be very clear about that. That was something that was fulfilled in Jesus Christ. That was simply there to be a picture to the people so they could understand their sin and God’s holiness. Those were like the training wheels for people to understand why Jesus came.

So don’t take from this that we’re preaching, where you have to fill all these boxes, you have to check off the right boxes, you have to do just the right things, or you’re unacceptable. that’s not the point here but in their day there this issue had to be cleansed and whether it was sin whether it was some kind of physical issue whatever the uncleanness was under the law Jesus was able to cleanse it because he looked at this woman with this physical ailment and he was able to heal her but he also looked at people who he said to them your problem is your sin and he would tell him your sins are forgiven he could do that he could cleanse them where nobody else could folks our sin, unlike the ceremonial aspects of the law, our sin still makes us unclean before God. That hasn’t changed.

When I disobey God, that sin is a barrier that stands between me and a holy God. I can never be good enough on my own for God to accept me. But Jesus is able to cleanse us where no one else can.

The law can’t do it. People were trying so hard to follow the law, and if I just followed it to the letter. If I just did everything it said, then I’ll be right with God.

And Jesus pointed out they missed the whole point of the law, which was the heart. Because outwardly, we can do all the right things. We can do all these religious things.

We can look really good on the outside. And inwardly, our hearts can be as far from God as anybody else’s. I’ve known some people who were very religious.

They knew all the rules and even made up a few of their own, And they followed them all to the letter. Some of them, their hearts were just as cold and dead and far from God, at least as far as I can tell from the outside. The law and the following of the rules was never going to be enough to make any of us right before God.

But Jesus was able to cleanse the unclean where nobody else could. Now with this woman, just as with us, the cure requires faith. There was one condition for her.

The cure required faith. And we need to understand what happened here. when Jesus asked her in verse 30, who touched my clothes?

Right up to now, Mark has been making the case that Jesus Christ is God. We’ve seen that in all the things that Mark records Jesus doing, the healings, the raising people from the dead, the calming of the storms. And I wish if I could go back in time, which I can’t, but if I could, I would teach this passage and then come back to the one about Jairus’ daughter. But you can’t unring the bell.

But up to now, he’s been making the point, the case that Jesus Christ is God. And so for him to ask who touched my clothes seems like a funny question. But as my kids know, a lot of times people will ask questions they already know the answer to.

Who did this? Charla likes to investigate when they do stuff. Yesterday, my mother put a slice of wheat bread in our container of brown sugar because it had kind of dried out.

She said, this is something I saw that it’ll make it freshen up again. So by the way, if you haven’t heard that, you got a free life hack there as well on top of everything else at church. So she put this in the container.

I said, Charla, what you ought to do, call the kids in here and ask them, who did this? Don’t lie when they start saying, it wasn’t me. It wasn’t me.

You tell them, I know exactly who did this, and I want you to tell me. Sometimes we ask questions that we already know the answer to. By the way, we didn’t count on Benjamin saying, it was Nana because she had the brown sugar out last. try to have fun with the kids and they just don’t want to play along when jesus says who touched my clothes he’s not asking because he doesn’t know it’s not a question of ignorance on his part it’s a call for her to confess he’s calling the one who touched his clothes to speak up and admit it he’s not saying I don’t know who did this he’s saying I want the one who did this to speak up and tell everybody because she was healed already she was healed she knew it the blood the bleeding had stopped.

She felt it. Jesus felt the power go out. She was as healed as she was going to be.

She could have walked away and they could have gone on and nobody would have known what happened except for Jesus and the lady. Instead, he stops and he says, who touched my clothes? She had faith enough to believe that he could heal her and he gave her the opportunity to say it in public.

And he looked at her and he saw her trembling. And verses 32 and 33 tell us it was because of the miracle she had just experienced. I suspect part of it was too the adrenaline and the fear of being this person who’s not supposed to be in the crowd and could get in trouble with the crowd if they realize you’re out mixing with them, but you’re just desperate enough to do it anyway.

There’s a lot going on in this woman’s life this day. And she’s trembling. She’s frightened.

And Jesus looked at her and said, who touched my clothes? I mean, she’s got to answer. He looked through the crowd until he saw her.

But because he called her to come and confess publicly, come and, come and, and when I say confess, I don’t mean like he’s interrogating her like she’s done something wrong. He wants her to say it out loud. Tell the world about this faith that you’ve had.

Tell the world about this, this healing that, that, that has come to you because you dared believe that God could do it. He said, come tell the people. And so as a result of this, verse 33 says, she came and fell down before him and told him the whole truth.

She fell down in worship and submission and she spilled her guts and told him and everybody else about everything she had been through, about her fears in coming there, about what Jesus had done just simply because she touched the hem of his garment. And Jesus said to her in verse 34, daughter, your faith has made you well. Go in peace and be healed of your affliction.

He says there was no magic to this. There was no, this wasn’t a spell. This wasn’t your eye of new thing that you got from the doctors, your faith made you well.

This is not a name it, claim it thing, but she believed that God could do it. And she believed and God rewarded that. And it required her faith.

There are numerous stories in the scriptures where the cleansing that God offers requires faith. And this is one of them. Our spiritual healing, just like this woman, our spiritual healing requires faith in Jesus Christ alone.

It requires coming to him and believing that he can do what nobody else can do. Let me tell you, if you’re here tonight thinking that by being in church, somehow it’s going to make you acceptable to God, it doesn’t work that way. If you’re watching online and you’re thinking, well, I’m doing this religious thing by listening to the sermon, and that’ll move me closer to being right with God, it doesn’t work that way.

Some people think, if I just fill out a check to the church, that’ll do it. That doesn’t do anything. I mean, it helps us keep the lights on, but it doesn’t move you any closer to God.

And we’re not going to pretend that it does. People think about all kinds of religious rituals and just being nice. Folks, God is absolutely holy.

I could not reach his standard of holiness on my best day. I wouldn’t stack my best five minutes up against his holiness. You and I can be right with God for one reason, and one reason only.

It’s the reason that Kaylee sung about earlier. It’s the fact that Jesus shed his blood for us. It’s the fact that every sin you and I have ever committed, Jesus took responsibility for that on Himself, and He was punished in our place.

He paid everything that we owed, and He took all the judgment, all the justice, all the wrath that we deserved. He took all of that, and He was punished in our place. He was nailed to the cross, and He shed His blood, and He died, not as an accident of history, but He knew where He was going, and He went there on purpose so that He could pay for our sins.

Whatever you and I can do is never going to cut it. The book of Hebrews says that in that one act of sacrifice, Jesus accomplished what all the religious rituals of all the religious people throughout the world never could, our forgiveness. If you want to be right with God, Jesus has already paid the price.

If you want to be cleansed and be righteous before a holy God, Jesus has already made that available. So what is it we have to do? Faith.

Believe. Believe that Jesus is God in human flesh who came to be our Savior. Believe that Jesus died to pay for your sins in full.

Believe that he rose again three days later to prove it. And believe that he means what he says when he promises you eternal life. And ask him for it.

You don’t have to work for it. You don’t have to earn it. You can’t.

Nobody could do anything for this woman. And Jesus was able to cleanse her. Jesus had the cure for her spiritual problem and for ours as well.