Different Struggles, Same Savior

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We spent last week focused on the anniversary of the church, and rightfully so. My wife is big on anniversaries. She likes looking at her Facebook memories and telling me what we did seven years ago today.

We ate at such and such place. But over the last month, we’ve looked a lot at photos from OU Children’s Hospital. It was four years ago this month that we’d been here less than a year and suddenly found out Jojo had to have open heart surgery. And you all were so gracious to walk with us through that time and support us through that time.

but it was such an eye-opening experience to spend that month or so. Well, the first time she was in there was about a month, and then about two or three weeks when she had the surgery. It was an eye-opening experience because you, especially in the area where she was, it was a lot of kids that were heart patients, and you got exposed to a lot of people with a lot of different stories.

You got exposed to a lot of people from a lot of different backgrounds. There were situations like ours where it just came completely out of the blue. We didn’t know until she was born that there was a heart issue.

And I remember Charla kind of beating herself up. Is there something I did? Is there something I didn’t do?

Is there something I should have done differently? We became acquainted with kids and families who were in there, and sometimes there had been substance abuse during pregnancy that may have contributed to some of those conditions. We met families who were there from all over the country.

Because there are only so many people, I’ve mentioned this to you before, there are only so many people who can do these very detailed cardiac procedures on babies. And one of them happens to be in Oklahoma City. But if you’re in some part of the country where there’s not a doctor, or something happens and your child needs surgery while the doctor’s on vacation, they will fly you.

Like if this one man had been on vacation when Jojo needed surgery, we would have ended up in St. Louis or Pittsburgh or who knows where. But we met people who were there from all over the country where we had the benefit of our parents just lived 10 minutes away.

We had this huge support system and places to stay. People up there who were able to eat only because the hospital provided them a tray. And we were blessed to not be in that circumstance.

We met people from all different circumstances and in different situations, but we were all there for the same reason that our children were suffering some malformation of the heart that needed to be fixed. And we were there because that was one of the only places in this country where we could go to get it fixed. And we all sat there hoping that it would be fixed.

The day she had her surgery was the longest day of our lives because you have to hand your child off to somebody, and there’s not a thing you can do. It’s completely in somebody else’s hands. And we talk a lot about faith.

There’s a lot of faith involved in handing your child over to somebody and saying, I hope this gets fixed. If you’ve ever been in a situation like that, or in a situation in general where you’ve had to trust somebody with such an enormous need, it gives us some glimpse of what the people were dealing with in the passage that we’re going to look at this morning in Luke chapter 8. We’re going to look at a couple of stories that they get a little confusing sometimes, the way the different gospels treat them, and the fact that it’s two stories entwined in one.

But we’re going to look at the circumstances of two different people who were very different, had very different needs, ultimately the same underlying need, and all found exactly what they needed when they came to trust Jesus. And so we’re going to be in Luke chapter 8 this morning, and we’re going to start in verse 40. I’ll give you just a second to turn there with me.

And once you find it, if you’ll stand with me as we read together from God’s Word, if you don’t have the Bible or can’t find Luke chapter 8, it’ll be on the screen for you. But we’re going to read about these two people and the needs they had and how they came to Jesus with that hope that He was the only person that they could come to who could fix these problems. Luke chapter 8, starting in verse 40, it says, and as Jesus returned, the people welcomed Him, for they had all been waiting for him. This is right after two weeks ago, we studied how he had been on the other side of the sea, casting demons out of a Gentile, and the people had panicked and said, please leave, please leave.

So he comes back to his own side of the lake, and the people are delighted to see him because they’re excited about the miracles that he could perform. And there came a man named Jairus, and he was an official of the synagogue, and he fell at Jesus’ feet and began to implore him to come to his house. For he had an only daughter, about 12 years old, and she was dying.

But as he went, the crowds were pressing against him. And a woman who had a hemorrhage for 12 years and could not be healed by anyone, came up behind him and touched the fringe of his cloak, and immediately her hemorrhage stopped. And Jesus said, Who is the one who touched me?

And while they were all denying it, Peter said, Master, the people are crowding and pressing you. But Jesus said, Someone did touch me, for I was aware that power had gone out of me. When the woman saw that she had not escaped notice, she came trembling and fell down before him and declared in the presence of all the people the reason why she had touched him and how she had been immediately healed.

And he said to her, Daughter, your faith has made you well. Go in peace. And while he was still speaking, someone came from the house of the synagogue official saying, Your daughter has died, do not trouble the teacher anymore.

But when Jesus heard this, he answered him, do not be afraid any longer, only believe and she will be made well. And when he came to the house, he did not allow anyone to enter with him except Peter and John and James and the girl’s father and mother. Now they were all weeping and lamenting for her, but he said, stop weeping for she has not died, but is asleep.

And they began laughing at him, knowing that she had died. He, however, took her by the hand and called saying, child, arise. And her spirit returned and she got up immediately and he gave orders for something to be given to her to eat.

Her parents were amazed, but he instructed them to tell no one what had happened. And you may be seated. A couple of things that I want to go over in this passage that I would have done as we went through verse by verse, but I didn’t want to keep you standing that whole time while we went through them.

You’re welcome. There’s a few things that happened here. First of all, this idea of a hemorrhage, we don’t know exactly what happened to her, but this woman had been bleeding for 12 years.

She had been unable to stop it. Not only are there tremendous medical problems that that can cause, but there was also the cultural problem that she was considered ceremonially unclean. We’ll talk about that a little bit more in a moment.

But she comes up and touches Jesus, and he says, who touched me? As I pointed out to you before, We believe that Jesus, being fully God, would have known who touched him. Frequently, when Jesus is asking these questions, it’s not because Jesus wants to know, he already knows.

It’s because Jesus either wants somebody to admit it so they can have a conversation about it, or it’s for the benefit of the people who are listening, so he can begin to engage in front of the audience. not audience in the sense that Jesus is putting on a performance, but he’s teaching people about who he is and what he can do. And sometimes for them to understand what’s going on, he needs to draw a little bit of information out of the other person, have kind of a public admission of what’s going on here so that then they can talk about it.

But it doesn’t mean that Jesus didn’t know. Sometimes there’s also this misconception about verse 46, I was aware that power had gone out of This doesn’t mean that Jesus lost any of his power, but it means that his power was used. He was aware that however that works, I don’t fully understand it.

I’m not God. Amen. But however it works, Jesus understood.

He could feel it. And let’s be honest, Jesus knew it was going to happen when he headed there that day. But Jesus was aware that this healing power had gone out from him to heal this woman.

And so he calls her to acknowledge what she had done. One other thing that may raise questions, and tonight we can get more into these issues if you come back as we compare also what Matthew and Mark say about this event and look at it piece by piece. But when you start to compare the other Gospels, you see there are people already in the house when Jesus gets back to Jairus’ house.

Because just reading through Luke, I read that he wouldn’t let anybody but this small group of apostles and the parents come into the house with him. And then he says, she’s not dead, she’s just asleep, and it says they began to laugh. And I thought, this is really uncharacteristic for these apostles, and it’s really uncharacteristic for the grieving parents that suddenly we’re going to laugh about, oh, look at the crazy guy who just said our daughter’s not really dead.

If anything, they might be a little shocked, but I don’t see them laughing, but there were already mourners, as Matthew and Mark tell us, there were already mourners in the house. Jesus didn’t let the crowd follow him in from outside, but there were already mourners in the house. So these are just a couple of things that we need to be aware of to make, number one, to make the story make sense, but also to demonstrate there’s not a contradiction here in some of these details that people like to pick out.

But as we read these two stories, and understand too, when I say stories, I don’t mean like fairy tale stories. I mean stories of things that really happened. I can tell you a story about something that really happened during my day.

But in these two stories, these people come to Jesus with very different circumstances and deeply in need, and we see Jesus just step up and handle each of these like, to him, it’s as easy as breathing. And these stories are here to teach us that Jesus is the Lord over every circumstance of life. It does not matter what circumstance you or I face today.

Jesus Christ is Lord of it. Jesus can handle it. And you may say, oh, great, that means he’s just going to magically pay that bill.

Or he’s going to give me this. Again, we’re asking for what we need, not necessarily what we want, as the kids learned about earlier. Jesus being Lord means he has an understanding of our circumstances that transcends our own understanding.

And the way he will deal with our circumstances for our good and for his glory may not line up with what we expect or want. But it doesn’t mean that he can’t do it. I’m sure that Jairus didn’t want to go through the ordeal of his daughter dying before they got there.

I’m sure the woman didn’t want everybody to know that she had come. I’m convinced she didn’t want everybody to know that she had come up and touched Jesus’ garment. And yet he worked through both of those circumstances.

He’s Lord over every circumstance in life. It just doesn’t mean that his lordship is going to take care of those circumstances in exactly the way we want them to. But there were two people, and the two sets of circumstances, they were all very different.

Some commentators will suggest that Jairus was rich. That’s probably accurate, being one of the rulers of the synagogue, and they’ll suggest that the bleeding woman was poor. That’s probably accurate as well.

We don’t know if she started out poor, but one of the other gospels tells us she spent her entire livelihood on doctors who had not been able to do anything for her. And I read about some of the things they might have prescribed based on the medical knowledge of that day, and there’s no way any of it would have helped. So when they say she was poor, we don’t know if she started out poor or not, but she was poor now.

So these two were in very different circumstances. He was the ruler of the synagogue, as verse 41 said, he was the one in charge. He was the one who led worship and arranged things, and he was considered an elder among the people, somebody who was highly respected.

But her issue of blood that’s described there in verse 43, if we go back to Leviticus chapter 15, we see that somebody with a medical issue like that was considered ceremonially unclean, which to us doesn’t mean a whole lot, but imagine you had something wrong with you physically that people also looked at and said, oh, you must have done something wrong to end up in that circumstance, and now you’re not fit to come to worship. You cannot be in the Lord’s house. Imagine the shame that would be involved in something like that.

And people would look at ceremonial uncleanness, and sometimes there was a sin component involved in that. Sometimes you just go through the rhythms of life and end up ceremonially unclean. I’m having real trouble saying the word ceremonially today.

But you would end up ceremonially unclean, even without any kind of conscious sin on your part. But that idea of uncleanness there in the Old Testament is there to showcase the holiness of God and to remind us of the fact that we fall short. In her case, this was not something morally that she had done wrong.

It was something that happened to her, and yet she still would have been kept at arm’s length from the people, not able to come to worship, not able to participate fully in the life of God’s covenant people. And so she was kept estranged. In that regard, they could not have been more different.

You had the ruler of the synagogue and you had an outcast from the synagogue. You had Jairus. That’s how I heard it growing up.

I think it’s Jairus. Sometimes the oaky just comes out. But Jairus’ daughter had presumably 12 years of health.

We don’t have any description that there had been anything wrong with her up to this time. And after 12 years, she’s suddenly on death’s door. After 12 years of life, this woman had been walking around for 12 years with illness.

I don’t know what the significance of that is, but both of them, the number 12, the 12-year thing, features prominently in their story. She had 12 years of persistent sickness, different circumstances. So for one, this seems to have been a sudden onset thing, something that nobody expected.

And for the woman, this was just the way her life had been for years and years. Dairus’ family was surrounded by those who cared. You see in verses 51 and 52, there are people in the house.

The other gospels tell us this. There are mourners there. There’s a band there.

I don’t fully understand that culturally. But there were people around them, and this woman slipped almost unnoticed through the crowd. Jesus is the only one aware that she’s even there.

As a matter of fact, and I meant to bring this up too as I was going through some of the points at the beginning, the disciples seem to think it’s a crazy question. I wouldn’t say Peter is making fun of Jesus, but he is kind of making light of the question a little bit. When Jesus said, who touched me?

And everybody’s been there waiting on the shore for Jesus to get back. Peter’s answer is kind of, Lord, who’s not touching you? Everyone is touching you.

The crowds are pressed in. I don’t know how he did this for three years, or for the better part of three years. We go to, well, we don’t go to sports games or concerts for that reason.

But if you go to something like that, or we go to the convention and there’s 20,000 people and they’re pressed in, I need to lay down afterwards. I can’t deal with that kind of crowd. And Jesus just had it constantly on him.

And the disciples were saying, Lord, everybody’s touching you. Jesus said, no, no, there was something different about this one. Jesus, because of the massive nature of the crowd, Jesus is the only one who notices this woman.

Everybody’s there for Jairus. Nobody notices her. Jairus approached Jesus openly in verse 41 while the woman tried to come by stealth.

She thought her best shot was to get in and get out and nobody noticed her. There’s a certain amount of shame there. There’s a certain amount of maybe fear that Jesus would rebuke her.

Jairus faced a sudden urgent calamity with his daughter while this woman had been struggling for years. He was comfortable making a request of Jesus while this woman could only hope to touch the hem of his garment. These were very different people, very different circumstances.

But despite their differences, they had the same need. They needed hope and they needed healing. And fortunately for them that day, Jesus was able to provide both.

He was able to provide both regardless of the circumstances they came from. He was able to provide both regardless of the circumstances they faced at the moment. Just because one had a 12-year ailment that nobody else had been able to handle didn’t make it harder for Jesus to handle.

Just because one came with this sudden onset that nobody could have seen coming, it didn’t mean that Jesus didn’t see it coming. Jesus was able to handle their deepest problems and meet their deepest needs. Again, that doesn’t mean that God’s provision always comes in the form we want it to.

Sometimes we will pray and pray and pray for years and years and years for God to resolve a situation, and then when He does, we say, no, Lord, not like that. But then usually on the other side of that, maybe years down the road, we can look back and see the wisdom in His approach. But whether it comes in a form that we like, whether it comes in a form that we would have willed for ourselves, whether it does that or not, whether it comes in a situation that, in a means of provision that we would not have picked out.

Jesus Christ is still the Lord of every circumstance in our lives. Whatever you’re facing today, he can handle. Whatever you’re about to face, he can handle.

And when we get to the way he handles these circumstances, this passage teaches us that our hope is not in the how, but in the who. Now, I realized after I wrote that, there’s a band from, I think, the 60s called The Who. That’s obviously not what I’m talking about.

Predates me by a couple decades. Our hope is not in the how, but in the who. Our hope is in Jesus.

He is the who. The circumstances surrounding these two people were not the only ways the two encounters differed. How the healings played out was also different.

The woman experienced Jesus’s power immediately. I mean, the Gospels go to great lengths to point out it happened immediately. They seem to be shocked by how quickly she was healed.

Twelve years of bleeding, and it’s just gone like that. They all say immediately, immediately. I think Mark says it a couple times if memory serves.

She was healed immediately. And she was healed when she merely came and touched the hem of Jesus’ garment. Now, was there something magical about the hem of the garment?

No. Jesus tells her, and we’ll talk about it in just a moment, what it was. Jesus tells her what it was.

But she was healed immediately. She was healed when she reached out and touched the hem of his garment. But for Jairus, the circumstances continued to grow worse before they got better.

Have you ever been in a situation where you prayed for God to deal with it, and you felt like it only got worse before it got better? Oh my goodness, I could write a book about my life called, and then things got worse. Eventually got better, but that seems to happen sometimes.

We pray and pray. See, the goal there is don’t give up when things start to get worse, because you think, oh, they’re just going to stay worse. You keep praying, you keep trusting, You keep walking by faith because sometimes things do get worse, like in Jairus’ case.

They do get worse before they get better, but it doesn’t mean he’s not going to handle it in the end. His daughter, when you say, what do you mean they got worse? His daughter died before Jesus got there.

As a matter of fact, some commentators have speculated that maybe the reason why he didn’t make it in time to save her before she died was the fact that he spent so much time investigating what was going on with the woman who was bleeding. And maybe that was frustrating to Jairus. We know that others said, Lord, if you’d been here, my brother would not have died.

But for Jesus, raising her from the dead was no more complicated than waking her up from sleep. That’s why he says in verse 52, she’s not dead, she’s only sleeping. Jesus is not lying, but we’re also not dealing with a case where she’s actually just asleep.

She’s actually dead, but Jesus is making a point. He’s using language that would shock them and get their attention to make the point that for him, This is no more difficult than just waking her up. And so he says, she’s not dead, she’s only sleeping, because to God she is.

And so Jesus came to Jairus’ house, and he privately commanded the girl to get up. Verse 51 tells us he didn’t let the crowd in. This was kind of a private deal. And in verse 54, he commanded her to get up.

So the woman got an immediate miracle. She got it by touching the hem of his garment. It took place in public, despite her trying to keep it private.

For Jairus, it was not immediate. It was probably frustratingly slow. It happened because Jesus came to the house and it happened privately.

Everything about these miracles was different. The only common denominator in these two stories is Jesus. It’s not the how, it’s the who.

Jesus frequently, we see this throughout the Gospels, He frequently varied the means of His miracles, how He accomplished the miracles, just like the Father did in the Old Testament. He varied the ways He worked. And there’s a reason why he did this.

As we study through the Gospels, we see some of these miracles, and the stories are a little weird, and we say, why would he do that? I think part of it is that he changed it up so that we did not begin to trust in the how, but kept our trust in the who. Now, I am not a Calvinist. I’m not the son of a Calvinist. But one thing I agree with John Calvin on is when he said the human heart is a factory of idols.

We will come up with things to worship and trust other than God. Our hearts would start to trust the garment. If he kept healing people by touching his garment, we would start to trust the garment.

Maybe not us specifically in this room, although we’re susceptible to it as anybody else. But as humanity, we would start to trust the garment. If he always did it by saying, get up and walk, we would start to trust those particular words.

Those are the magic words that you say, and that’s how God works. We would trust the water pots. Like in John 2, where at Cana, he said, go fill up a bunch of pots with water, and he turned them into wine.

We would say, that’s how he works. He uses those water pots. Mark chapter 8, when he spits in the dirt and makes mud and puts it on the blind man’s eyes, we would start to trust the spit if he did that all the time.

We would trust the loaves and fishes. The reason Jesus changes the way he does some of his miracles, there may be other reasons, but I’m convinced one of the big ones is that we need to be taught not to trust the how. Our faith doesn’t belong in a method.

It doesn’t belong in a means. It doesn’t belong in a timeline. Our faith belongs in Jesus alone.

And I think that’s what we can learn from the comparison of these two stories. And when we trust Him fully. So, before I move on from that, we can start to do that in our own lives.

If every time I have a need, God provides financially for me to be able to pay the way out of that situation, what am I going to start to trust? It’s not a trick question. I’m going to start to trust that bank account.

If every time God sends some other person, say every time I’m in a jam, God sends Brother Jeff to help me out of it every single time, who am I going to start to trust? Jeff. That’s why God’s provision comes from different places at different times, so that we learn to trust Jesus alone.

And when we trust him fully, something beautiful happens here. Just like in this story, Jesus responds to genuine faith with redeeming grace. Both of these people came to Jesus, Jairus and the woman, in verses 41 and 44.

For them to approach Jesus the way they did shows some level of confidence that he could address their situation. Now, maybe it was the confidence of saying we’ve tried everything else, he’s our last hope, but they came to him at least expecting that maybe there’s something he could do. There was at least that level of confidence in Jesus.

Both of them fell before him at his feet. This is a worshipful thing. When Jairus in verse 41 and the woman in verse 47 fell down at his feet, this acknowledges his power.

Have you gone to see the doctor looking for help and fell at his feet? No. Because we understand, with all his or her medical training, still a person like you and I are.

But to come to Jesus and fall at his feet acknowledges that he is someone or something more powerful than we are. It’s an acknowledgment of his power. And both believed, Jairus and the woman.

Folks, this is faith, the willingness to come to him, believing that he can do something, acknowledging who he is, at least as far as you understand it, acknowledging who he is, believing that what he says, he means, and what he means he’ll do. That’s faith. So the only other common denominator between these two stories, other than Jesus, is their faith.

And when they exhibit this genuine faith, Jesus is gracious to them. Both of them received healing. Jairus’s daughter was raised from the dead, and the woman was healed from her 12-year ordeal. But it’s not just the physical healing involved here.

Jairus’s daughter received new life. She’s one of the few people ever raised from the dead. She’s one of the signs that jesus gave validating his ministry that he’s able to raise people from the dead And this woman was told that her faith Saved her some translations Maybe maybe one you’re looking at this morning say made you whole or healed you and that is true But understand that the greek word there sozo that’s used is the same word for salvation I don’t think it’s by mistake that that word was used something spiritual happened in these people because of their faith in Jesus.

And he does the same thing for us. No matter what circumstances we’ve come from, no matter what circumstances we face, Jesus and Jesus alone is able to meet our deepest needs, no matter what they are. And before you think, but you don’t know what I’ve come from, you don’t know what I’ve done, I don’t, but he does.

And you tell me the sin that’s so big that Jesus couldn’t pay for it on the cross. Tell me how your sin is bigger than his ability to atone. You won’t be able to name one.

Jesus and Jesus alone is able to meet your deepest needs, and He does it when you respond to Him in faith. When there’s that genuine faith, that falling, even metaphorically, falling on your knees at His feet, acknowledging who He is, and believing that He can do for you what He says He’ll do. That’s faith, and Jesus responds to that in grace.

And while we’re talking about physical healing here, this is a picture of the gospel. This is what He he comes to people who have that same need sinners some down and out some up and out and he comes as the only one who can who can make things right and he did that for us at the cross when he shed his blood he took responsibility for my sins and for yours and he was nailed to that cross where he shed his blood and he died as the only all-sufficient payment for all of our sin to pay for it in full so our slate could be wiped clean and not only that but that the father would look at us and see his righteousness instead of our unrighteousness. He came to pay for our sins and cover us in his righteousness.

And then three days after he died, he rose again from the dead. And now to those who believe, if you’ll respond to him in faith, if you’ll believe that he is able to do that, and you’ll ask for that forgiveness, you’ll have it. And that’s where the new life starts.

That’s where we’re made whole. That’s what salvation is. That’s what the gospel is.

Jesus extending his grace to sinners, not on the basis of anything we can do or earn, but solely because of faith, and faith specifically in what He has done.

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