Message Information
- Key Scriptures: Luke 8:40-56, NASB
- Series: Luke (2025-2027), no. 24
- Date: Sunday, July 20, 2025 (Morning)
- Venue: Central Baptist Church — Lawton, Oklahoma
- Speaker: Jared Byrns
- Audio File: Open/Download
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Different Families, the Same Need
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 there. The first hospitalization lasted about a month, followed by another two or three weeks when she had the surgery. It was an eye-opening experience because, especially in the area where she was, many of the children were heart patients, and we met people with many different stories.
You got exposed to a lot of people from a lot of different backgrounds. There were situations like ours, where everything 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.
As I have mentioned before, only a limited number of surgeons can perform these highly specialized cardiac procedures on babies. And one of them happens to be in Oklahoma City. But if you live in a part of the country without such a doctor, or your child needs surgery while the specialist is unavailable, the hospital may fly you elsewhere.
If this particular surgeon had been unavailable when JoJo needed surgery, we might have ended up in St. Louis, Pittsburgh, or somewhere else. We met people from all over the country, while we had the benefit of our parents living only ten minutes away.
We had this huge support system and places to stay. Some families could eat only because the hospital provided them a meal 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 of her surgery was the longest day of our lives because we had to hand our child to someone else, and there was nothing we could 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 are going to look at two stories that can become confusing because of the way the different Gospels present them and because the two accounts are intertwined.
We will look at two very different people with very different circumstances and needs, yet the same underlying need. Both found exactly what they needed when they trusted Jesus. Luke 8:40–56 records: and as Jesus returned, the people welcomed Him, for they had all been waiting for him. This follows the account we studied two weeks earlier, when Jesus cast demons out of a Gentile on the other side of the sea and the people begged Him to 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.
Understanding the Two Encounters
Her parents were amazed, but he instructed them to tell no one what had happened. A few details in this passage need explanation.
Several things happen 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 asks a question, it is not because He lacks the answer. 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 an audience in the sense that Jesus is putting on a performance, but people whom He is teaching about who He is and what He can do. Sometimes, for the people to understand what is happening, He draws information from the other person and brings the matter into the open so that He can address it publicly.
But it doesn’t mean that Jesus didn’t know. There is also a misconception about verse 46: “I was aware that power had gone out of Me.” This does not mean Jesus lost any of His power; it means His power had been exercised. 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 was consciously aware of it. Jesus also knew it would happen when He set out 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 detail may raise questions when we compare Luke’s account with Matthew and Mark. 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.
Reading Luke alone, we see that Jesus allowed only a small group of apostles and the parents to enter the house with Him. And then he says, she’s not dead, she’s just asleep, and it says they began to laugh. That reaction would be uncharacteristic of both the apostles and the grieving parents. They would hardly laugh at the One who said their daughter was not truly beyond hope.
They might have been shocked, but Matthew and Mark explain that professional mourners were already inside 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.
As we read these two stories—and by stories, I do not mean fairy tales— I mean stories of things that really happened. I can tell you a story about something that really happened during my day.
Lord over Every Circumstance
these people come to Jesus from very different circumstances and in deep need, yet Jesus handles each situation as easily 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. That does not mean He will simply provide every outcome exactly as we desire.
Or he’s going to give me this. We are asking for what we need, not necessarily what we want. 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.
Different Struggles, the Same Need
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. The two people and their circumstances were very different.
Some commentators will suggest that Jairus was rich. That is probably accurate because he was one of the rulers of the synagogue. They also suggest that the bleeding woman was poor, which is 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. Some remedies prescribed in that period would not have helped her. 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.
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, the synagogue ruler. 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. Jairus’ family was surrounded by people 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 were musicians present.
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. Peter was not mocking Jesus, but he did seem to make light of the question. When Jesus said, who touched me?
Everyone had been waiting on the shore for Jesus to return, so Peter’s answer amounted to, “Lord, who is not touching You? Everyone is touching You.”
The crowds are pressed in. I do not know how Jesus endured those crowds for the better part of three years. That is one reason we do not often attend sporting events or concerts.
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 lie down afterward. 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 chance was to enter, touch His garment, and leave unnoticed. 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 from which they came or the circumstances they faced in that 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, God’s provision does not always come in the form we want.
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. Whether His provision comes in a form we like or by means we would never have chosen, Jesus Christ is still Lord over every circumstance in our lives.
Whatever you’re facing today, he can handle. Whatever you’re about to face, he can handle.
Our Hope Is in the Who
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. Our hope is not in the how but in the Who. By Who, of course, I mean Jesus.
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’ power immediately. The Gospels emphasize that it happened immediately. They seem to be shocked by how quickly she was healed.
After twelve years of bleeding, it ended at once. They all say immediately, immediately.
She was healed immediately. And she was healed when she merely came and touched the hem of Jesus’ garment. Was there something magical about the hem of His garment?
No. Jesus soon explained what had happened. 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? I could write a book about my life titled And Then Things Got Worse. Eventually things improved, but sometimes circumstances worsen first.
We pray and pray. The lesson is not to give up when circumstances worsen, assuming they will remain that way. Keep praying, keep trusting, and 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.
Some commentators have speculated that the delay caused by the woman’s healing may have prevented Jesus from arriving before the girl died. That delay may have frustrated 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 was not denying that she had physically died.
He was making a point. He used language that would shock them and make clear that, for Him, raising her was no more difficult than waking her from sleep. 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 miracle took place privately. 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.
Why Jesus Varied His Methods
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. There was a reason for this variation.
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 believe He varied the means so that we would not begin trusting the how instead of the Who. I am not a Calvinist, nor 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.
We are just as susceptible to this as anyone 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. There may be other reasons Jesus varied the means of His miracles, but one important reason was to teach us 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. Before moving on, we should recognize how easily we can do the same thing in our own lives.
If every time I have a need God provides money to resolve it, what will I begin to trust? I’m going to start to trust that bank account.
If every time I am in difficulty God sends Bro. Jeff to help me, whom will I begin to trust? Jeff. That’s why God’s provision comes from different places at different times, so that we learn to trust Jesus alone.
Genuine Faith and Redeeming Grace
When we trust Him fully, something beautiful happens. 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.
Their approach to Jesus showed at least some confidence that He could address their situations. Perhaps they came because they had tried everything else and considered Him their last hope, but they still expected that He might be able to help. 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 ever gone to a doctor for help and fallen at the doctor’s feet? No. Because we understand, with all his or her medical training, the doctor is still a person like you and me.
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 He means what He says and will do what He promises. 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 the passage points beyond physical healing.
Jairus’s daughter received new life. She’s one of the few people ever raised from the dead. She became one of the signs validating Jesus’ ministry and His authority to raise the dead. And this woman was told that her faith saved her. Some translations may say “made you whole” or “healed you,” and that is true. But the Greek word used there, sōzō, is the same word used for salvation. I do not believe that word was chosen by mistake. 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. Before you say, “You do not know where I have come from or what I have done,” remember that I may not know, 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.
The Greater Healing of the Gospel
Although the passage describes physical healing, it also presents a picture of the gospel. He comes to sinners who share the same deepest need—some down and out, others up and out—and He alone can make things right. He did that for us at the cross. When He shed His blood, He took responsibility for my sins and yours. He was nailed to the cross and died as the all-sufficient payment for all our sin, paying it in full so that our slate could be wiped clean and the Father could see Christ’s 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. Now, if you respond to Him in faith, believe that He is able to save, and ask for forgiveness, you will 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.
