"The Miracles of Jesus", Part II: Desperate to Daughter

Focus passage: Mark 5:25-34

 

We bow our head in anguish. We are desperate and nothing is turning out right. Life seems overwhelmed with problems that just don’t seem to have any answers. 

Illness, job loss, and divorce break us till we despair that life might as well be over. We are angry with the world and can be angry with God. This shouldn’t happen to me. Why is it so easy for everyone else and so hard for me? We can live in our self-pity or we can turn to the Lord. Desperation is like the desert. The heat of life takes away all your strength. You can either turn toward God letting Him guide you through your troubles or you can turn from him and wander till the troubles dry up your soul. Jesus wants to turn the "desperate" into "daughters and sons" of God. 

• She didn’t feel good enough to talk to Jesus v. 28:  She was a woman with lots of problems and no answers. She had spent all she had and was left broken and in pain. She couldn’t ask him for healing like thousands of others because she was unclean according to Mosaic law. Yet, she believed that she would be healed if she could just touch Jesus. He could help her where others had not been able.
  

• Jesus wants to lift her soul v. 32: He could have just let her slip away. There was important ministry to do with Jairus since his daughter was dying. Yet he would not let her go. He wanted to be more than just a healer. He wanted to be her savior and her friend. He wanted to lift up her spirit as well as cure her body. He stopped the crowd so He could heal her soul as well as her body. He wanted everyone to know that she had been healed so she could lead a normal life.

• A new relationship is born v. 34: She had faith in a healer. Jesus wants her to have faith in a friend. This is the only place Jesus calls someone daughter in the gospels. A new relationship has been born. She had fallen at his feet in fear afraid he would be mad at what she had done. He instead calls her daughter. He tells her go into peace. Go and have a new life. You were an outcast and now people will call you blessed. You were an unknown, but now your story will be told for centuries to come. He didn’t just heal her, he gave her a new life.
  

The question in life is whether we are desperate enough to turn to Jesus. Do we believe that He can and will help us when life overwhelms us and sucks all the life out of us? 

A stroll through the gospels tells us how eager Jesus was to heal people. He healed their bodies from illness and He healed their souls so that they could live a full life again. The woman reached out in faith and Jesus reached back in love. There is no reason for anyone to in bondage to their problems. We can always reach out to Jesus in prayer asking to touch His power and to feel His love. Our Lord will never turn away the desperate who come to Him in faith. He will heal them inside and out.