More Than A Touch

We revisit the woman with the issue of blood and push past the miracle to the moment Jesus stops, turns around, and restores a person who has been hiding for years. We explore how a “finished work” lens changes faith, prayer, and identity so we stop living as our condition and start living as sons and daughters. 
• why Jesus stops after the healing is complete 
• how long-term pain turns into identity and self-labeling 
• reading Mark 5 slowly to notice what we usually skip 
• faith as receiving what Jesus already carries 
• finished work language that reshapes how we pray 
• Jesus calling her out to move her from hidden to seen 
• “the whole truth” told after healing, not before 
• “Daughter” as restoration beyond the body 
• leaving with peace rather than performance 
• why the Bible never tells us her name and why that matters 
We pray that you draw the prodigal sons and daughters back home to this place.

Transcript

Copy Transcript Copied

Setting The Theme With A Song

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Well it's good to see everybody this morning. Um that song The Truth, I I love that song. Uh but it actually spoke into uh a lot of what we're gonna talk about this morning, and it it just uh you'll you'll see when we get into it. But that song is so powerful because you know that that one question in there, you know, just looking at how how much if we continue to look at something in our life or speak things in our life that has become uh you know an identity to us. And that's really that's a I think that's an important question to ask that we don't ask enough, you know, to ourselves. So uh, but anyway, I'm gonna get started straight into it this morning because I want enough time. I don't want to keep you too long, but I want to get through this this morning. I gave you a little bit last week, uh, a little bit of insight into where I was going this week. Uh it came out in the sermon when I was doing some research and stuff last week. So this one here is uh more than enough, uh, more than a touch. I'm sorry, more than a touch. We uh we've talked about Esther. We we broke that story of Esther down. Uh we've we've looked into it, we looked a little bit deeper beyond just the traditional story. Uh we went into David and Goliath. We all know that's a familiar story. We we dug a little bit deeper into that, looked at what it uh, you know, some of the underlying stuff beneath the

A Familiar Miracle Revisited

SPEAKER_00 1:30

surface. And today we're gonna do the same thing with a with another very familiar verse that uh Cynthia has already brought up to y'all uh with the woman with the issue of blood. Uh very popular story as well, but we're gonna do something a little bit different today with it. I hope it was different for me. Uh I loved reading it and studying it and digging into it. And I hope you'll see a few things. We're not uh we're not just gonna read all the verses together because I really want you to get the impact of seeing each one of these verses sort of broke down individually. There's only like five to six of them that we're gonna walk through. And this is the only place we're going this morning, but I want to show you some stuff in here.

SPEAKER_01 2:12

Uh so again, this is a very familiar story. Everybody in this room has probably read this story hundreds of times, heard it, preached on hundreds of times.

SPEAKER_00 2:23

So you know the story. You know that this woman was sick for 12 years with an issue of blood.

SPEAKER_01 2:29

Uh, she had gone to doctors, many doctors, as Cynthia just said. She spent everything that she had trying to receive, trying to buy a healing. Uh, she spent everything to get better, but the Bible actually tells us she actually got worse. She didn't even get a little bit better. She actually got worse. Then she hears that Jesus is coming, and uh she says, if I can only touch, I know we say it a lot because it sounds good, if I can only touch the hem of his garment. You hear that phrase in Matthew, but in Luke and uh the other chapters, what you'll hear is if I can only touch his clothes. That's the way, and what we're gonna read today is out of Mark. So out of Mark and Luke, it uses the word clothes. Out of Matthew, it uses the word if I can only touch his garment. So same thing. Uh I do like the part in Matthew because if you go back into Jewish tradition, that's really what it's talking about is the fringes that was hanging off of his clothing. So if I can only, and that to me, that's just a little bit more, showing a little bit more power into it. I don't have to touch his clothes itself, I just need to touch the fringe. It's like the little string hanging off the edge of his clothes. But anyway, I like the way Matthew, I mean the way Mark breaks it down. So we're gonna read it through Mark. You can go and I took all three of them and put them side by side and looked at them. But I want to teach it this morning out of Mark chapter 5. But again, she heard Jesus was coming, and that thought popped in her head. If I can only touch his clothes, I will be made well. I will be healed. So she got to the crowd, she she reached out, she touched Jesus, and immediately she was healed. Now that's where we usually stop this story. And we preach some awesome messages on this. I'm sure I've preached them myself. I've heard many of them preached, and this is where we go to. This is the title we usually give it. You've got to have the faith that this woman had. And we'll take off of that and we'll talk about the faith that she had and how we can build that faith and what it means to have that supernatural faith. And I'm not taking anything away from that because this was a woman of amazing faith. But I want you to think about something a little bit different.

Why Jesus Stops After Healing

SPEAKER_01 5:08

If all Jesus wanted was for her to be healed, why did he stop? I'm gonna pause right here just a minute. If all Jesus wanted was for this woman to be healed, why did he stop? It's a question I've never really thought about before until we start digging a little bit. She touched him. She went through the crowd, and and I really have to, if when you go back and you look at the details behind this story, and her being a woman with the issue of blood, and she was not supposed to be out in public. And she, if she did walk out, she had to, anytime she came around people, she had to say unclean, unclean. I mean, there was a tradition there. So I just kind of imagine her kind of sneaking through the bottom of the crowd to try to get up close enough to where she could touch him when he came by. So she made it up there. She made it through the crowd. The miracle had already happened. So why did he stop? This gets a little bit deeper than what we normally preach. Because we've always stopped it with the miracle. The miracle happens. Jesus could have kept walking. He could have walked on, and guess what? The woman was still healed. He could have kept going down the road, never stopped, and the woman received what she came to receive. But he stopped. He turns around and says, Who touched my clothes? Again, some translations we've always heard about who touched me? And I think that's where the story gets really good. Because the miracle, again, I want you to see this. I've said this twice already. I'm gonna say it one more time. The miracle was finished. The miracle was done, but Jesus wasn't finished with the woman. That's a part of the story that we overlook, I think, so often, because she came for a miracle. She crawled through the crowd for a miracle, she she tried everything and it never worked. And she said, if I can just get up and touch him, then I'll be healed. And she crawled through the crowd, she got her miracle, but Jesus says, I'm not done yet. He could have kept walking and it been. She still received everything that she wanted, but he stopped. This is why this was more than just a touch. And that's what I want to talk about today. Why was this more than just a touch? Mark starts the story out by saying this, and I want to just read verse 25 right here in Mark chapter 5, and I want you to see it and read each one of these verses individually with me.

When Pain Becomes Identity

SPEAKER_01 8:20

Now, a certain woman who had a flow of blood for 12 years. 12 years. Think about that for a minute. 12 years is a long time. That's long enough for something to become natural to me. It's long enough for it to become something, a normal part of my life. And when I think of, and I also think it's one of the dangerous things here about living with something for so long because you start accepting it as who you are. At first, she probably thought, I've got an issue. I've got a problem going on. But after 12 years, I wonder if she started thinking, I'm the woman with the issue. What do we call her? We call her, we call this story the woman with the issue of blood. Mark addresses this lady as the woman with the issue of blood. And I won't even get into it right now because this is not where I want to go with it, but this woman's name is never addressed. She is addressed as the woman with the issue of blood. So there's a difference. She probably thought at one point I just got a little issue. A few months into the bleeding, just got a little issue. A little bit longer into the bleeding, I got an issue I need to take care of. But twelve years of the same thing happening, going to every doctor and nothing changing, doing everything you can do and seeing nothing get better, I have to believe that she then became the woman with the issue of blood. Even in her own mind. See, there's a difference in how we see that. And I think we've all done that at times. We may not admit it, but I think that we've all been there. Something happens to us and eventually it starts defining who we are. You get rejected enough times that eventually it's not, well, people rejected me. It's that nobody wants me. You know, it's amazing how things change. You fail at something a few times, and it's no longer, well, I failed. After a little while, it becomes, I'm a failure. It becomes something on the inside of me now rather than just something happening on the outside. And something happens in our past and eventually it becomes our identity. And that's where I think this woman was at. Her condition had become her identity. But here's what's very interesting about this story. Mark identifies her, as I said a while ago, identifies her by her condition. Jesus never did. Now, again, this is a familiar story. So we could go through and we could read this story, and you will know it because you've heard it so often, but there's little things that we miss in there simply because it becomes so familiar to us. Jesus never identified her by her condition. Look what it says

Finished Work Faith Changes Prayer

SPEAKER_01 11:50

in verse 27. When she heard about Jesus, she came behind him in the crowd and touched his garment. I love that because something changed when she heard about Jesus. I'm keeping your mind on 12 years a minute, because 12 years is a long time to go through something. And then all of a sudden, I don't know how she heard it. Maybe she was just sitting by her door and she heard people coming by saying, Hey, did y'all hear Jesus is coming today? And something on the inside of her began to shift. Something in her thinking began to change. For 12 years her condition had been telling her one thing, but now she hears something different. Jesus is coming. Verse 28. For she said, If only I may touch his clothes, I shall be made well. See, the obvious sermon point right here is the woman had amazing faith, as I said earlier. But the finished work lens, and this is something I've been telling you, and I can't help it. It's who I am, it's the way God created me. When I look at things now, when I read verses now, when I hear these familiar stories now, and I go back and read them, I don't just read them the same way I used to. I begin to read them through the lens of the finished work. And I want you to see this because I'm telling you, you're gonna see something in here that you've never really paid attention to before because you're looking at it with a different perspective. This woman certainly had amazing faith. There's no doubt about that. But when you take a finished work lens and you begin to see it through that lens, it takes you underneath the faith itself, where we normally stop at. And it causes you to ask a deeper question of faith in what? Yes, she had an amazing faith. Yes, she had a supernatural faith. But faith in what? She wasn't trying to convince Jesus to become her healer. She believed he already was. Well, I'll be healed. She never got there yet. Jesus was not even there yet. But this thought entered her mind. And see, this shifts the way we see the story. She didn't say if I can touch him, maybe he'll decide to heal me. She was basically saying, if I can get to what he already carries, I'll receive what he already is. That's different. You only see that when you begin to look at this through the lens of the finished work. Why do you say that? Because it was finished already. What she was asking for, what she was imagining in her mind was not something one day. She was saying what he has is already complete, what he has is already finished, and if I can just get close enough to touch his clothes, I'll receive it. He didn't become a healer that day. She knew already that he is a healer. And if I can just get close enough to touch him. This woman believed in the finished work. Some people say, oh, that finished work crap that y'all are teaching is new age. No, it's not. And I'm proving it with these stories. This woman realized and believed in the finished work. How do you know that? Because of her language, the way she said stuff. She didn't say, well, if I can get close enough, then maybe he'll decide to heal me. No, she knew it was going to happen. There was something on the inside of her that knew. Her faith didn't create the power. The power was already in Jesus, and she knew that. And that's a big difference. See, sometimes even we do this. We approach God like we're trying to convince him. You don't have to admit it. You've been at an altar many times trying to convince God. You've laid down at an altar many times and tried to manipulate him. I have. All these things I tried to negotiate with him if he would just do this thing that I needed. That was pre-finished work. Can I tell you? That's before I understood and had a pre and had a finished work lens. Because now I don't beg anymore. Now I don't have to sit at an altar and have those types of conversations anymore. Because I believe that it's finished now, and I believe and I look at it from a different perspective. Like she did. How many times have you sit at an altar and said, God, please, please do this? Or this one here, this is the most famous one. God, because we want to sound humble. God, if it be your will. Well, if you look in your Bible, you'll see his will. His will is already there. We don't have to ask him for it. And we joke about that, and it sounds arrogant to say it like that, but it's really the truth. If we would read his word, the New Testament, the Old Testament, and we're showing now that it's not just the New Testament that we can see this in. It is even in the Old Testament that we can see some of this stuff in. But his will, the testament, that is his old will, his new will. That's what testament means. So we can go in there and we can see what's already been accomplished. We can see what's already been provided for us. So we do that though. I've done it many times. God, if it be your will, just let this come to pass. God, if it be your will, just let this happen. Holy Spirit, will you please open the doors of this place today and we just welcome your prayer. Really? We we have to welcome the Holy Spirit in here? Or do he come in with me? We just pray that Monica and Ronnie just has so anointed today so they can bring in the Holy Spirit. So if the Holy Spirit's not here, we can blame it on them. Because the music wasn't good enough. I mean, think about some of the crazy things that we we say sometimes. We pray sometimes. And I'm telling you, this is where the finished work has changed my understanding on things. It's changed my language, it's changed my prayer life. It don't make me any better. If you believe in finished work, it don't make you any better, but it will change your perspective. And some people will look at you and say, oh, he thinks he's no, that's not it. I just talk different, I think different. My perspective is different. It's not better, it's just different. I don't beg God anymore. I surrender to what He's already done. I receive what's already there. That's a difference. But if we're if we're starting in the wrong place with our prayer life, have you ever thought

Power Was Already There

SPEAKER_01 20:12

about that? And that's some of the things I just mentioned. Sometimes I think we're starting in the wrong place. Well, how can you say that? Prayer is prayer. Not really. Because I used to sit at an altar and beg. That's not prayer. I thought it was then. And I'm not knocking anybody still in that place to believe, but I'm just saying from how our perspectives shift. That was begging God. That was negotiating and trying to make a deal with God. And I was starting from the wrong place. What if we're starting with what we're trying to get God to do? Listen to this. We're starting from what we're trying to get God to do instead of starting with what Christ has already done. What's he going to honor? His word. And if he's already said it, and I can get down here and come into agreement with what he's already said, rather than beg him for something that he's already completed, and I'm over here waiting on him to complete it and begging him to complete it and asking him if it be your will, and he's sitting over there saying, I've already done it. Can you just agree with it? And see, sometimes it's that agreement, no longer begging, but the agreement where boom, now stuff starts to manifest. Why? Because I'm in agreement with him. And when I can agree with him, he can now manifest these things in my life. That's the finished work. In enough. That is the finished work. Jesus doesn't need us to finish what he started. He said it's already finished. And this woman, as I said earlier, she realized this. She wasn't making Jesus willing. She was responding to what she had heard and believed. Listen to that. What she had heard and believed about him. She didn't just hear this. She believed it. She believed he was a healer. She believed healing was on the inside of him. And if I can just get to him and touch his clothes, I'll receive what he's already got. So she reaches out and she receives. Let's take a look at where the miracle happens in verse 29. Immediately, I love that word. Immediately, the fountain of her blood was dried up. And she felt in her body that she was healed of the affliction. Immediately. Anybody ever had something happen immediately? It's an amazing experience. Especially when you've been praying for a long time. When you've been seeking God, when you've been going to every doctor, when you've paid all that you can pay, you've given everything you have for 12 years and immediately. 12 years of sickness and then immediately. She knew something had changed. She didn't come to convince have to convince herself of it. She didn't have to get back home and say, well, I feel different than I've always felt. She didn't have to wait a few hours to try to convince herself. She knew the power was already there. She didn't create it, she encountered it. And that's a perfect picture of the finished work. We aren't trying to convince Jesus to become something for us. We're discovering what has already been made available in him. And we're just simply receiving it. So all this happens, and immediately the fountain of her blood was dried up, and she felt something change in her body, and she felt she was healed of the affliction. And here's the part I love. Jesus stops.

Called Out For A Public Encounter

SPEAKER_01 24:42

This is the most amazing picture. If you can pick this the way I picture these things. I try to put myself there. I try to put myself in there. And imagine Jesus walking down this road. And all of a sudden, this woman crawling up through the crowd because she doesn't want people to see her. She knows she's not supposed to touch anybody. I mean, if this woman would have accidentally been seen and touched somebody, they might have killed her before she ever made it up there. So she's got to be really sneaky about how she gets there. That's not, that's my words. That's kind of the way I picture it. She's got to be real sneaky about it. And she walks, goes up and she touches him, and all these people's everywhere. And he's walking along, and all of a sudden he just stops. And he turns around and says, Who touched me? Who touched my clothes? And this is the question that I want you to ask yourself at this point in the story. Why did Jesus stop? The original question we asked, but why did Jesus stop? Look at verse 30. And Jesus immediately, immediately, think about those words, she immediately received the healing. And then Jesus immediately knowing in himself that power had gone out of him, turned around in the crowd and said, Who touched my clothes? Now I can just picture some people thinking, you know, like he's probably got this entourage around him and they're trying to protect him. And he stops and says, Who who touched, who touched my clothes? And I bet the disciples stood up and they was ready to roll. Somebody done touched the man. We fixed to figure out who done it. We fixed it to take care of it. He wasn't even talking about that. He felt power come out of him, leave him. Now, again, if I'm one of the disciples, and we're we're you picture this again, he's walking, and there's people everywhere, and I'm one of the disciples, and he stops and turns around and says, Who touched my clothes? I'm probably gonna look at him and say, Dude, really? All these people's trying to get you, they're just surrounding us. We can't even hardly walk. People's bumping and all up against us, and you're gonna turn around and ask, Who touched you? Really? I'd have probably had to question him on that. But see, here's what you got to see here. Jesus wasn't confused. He wasn't looking for information, he was calling her out. The woman who didn't want to be seen, it sounds kind of mean at first. The woman who was sneaking and crawling and probably didn't want to be seen because they probably wouldn't have let her even get close to getting to him. The one who was trying to stay hidden, Jesus stops and says, I'm gonna call her out. Sounds kind of rude until you see the reason he was doing it. This is awesome. And when we stop at the healing, we miss this. You gotta go into this and really ask some questions. The healing had already happened. Keep saying that. But Jesus was not finished with the encounter. There was more to it. She came thinking, if I can just touch him, I'll touch him, I'll get my healing, and I'll get away. That was probably what was in her mind. But Jesus says, no, no. Come here. She wanted to remain anonymous. Jesus wanted her to be seen. She was hoping for a private miracle, but Jesus wanted a personal encounter. He wanted to reveal who she was. Look at verse 33. But the woman, fearing and trembling, knowing what had happened to her, came out and fell down before him and told him the whole truth. This is amazing. If you want something to study, go in there and study what the whole truth is. Research. What the whole truth is. But it goes into a little bit of detail when you ask that question, what was the whole truth? Why did it say, why didn't it just say she knelt down and she told him everything? Why did it specifically, why did he Luke use these words, the whole truth? Now can you imagine this? She's been holding, hiding for 12 years. Now the whole crowd, everybody in the crowd's eyes are on the woman who's been hiding for 12 years and did not want to be seen. And she steps forward and tells Jesus the whole truth. The Bible says she told him everything. She told it all. But here's what I think is significant. Again, when you look through the finished work lens. She told him the truth after she had already been healed. That is

Telling The Whole Truth After Healing

SPEAKER_01 31:04

so powerful. Because most of the time we would go up, like we do in church services, and we go up to an altar and we tell the pastor or the healer or the evangelist, whoever's there, we tell him everything that's going on with me in hopes of being healed or receiving a healing. The difference in this story was the healing already happened. Jesus stops, calls her out. She tells him the whole truth, not so she can get healed, she tells the truth after she's already been healed. That's powerful right there. That's something we need to see. That's finished work. There's no other way to look at that. Why? The miracle was finished, the healing was complete. But then something else happened on the other side of it. Verse 34.

Daughter Over Condition

SPEAKER_01 32:04

And he said to her, Daughter, your faith has made you well. Go in peace and be healed of your affliction. This is again a powerful moment right here. Because Jesus, when I was reading this, I was thinking this Jesus could have called her anything. He could have said, Are you the woman who touched me? He could have called her the woman with the issue, like everybody else did. At this point, he could have called her the healed woman because she was already healed. But he doesn't. He calls her daughter. And I think Jesus is doing something here that goes way beyond healing the body. For 12 years, her condition had been telling her who she was. Now Jesus is telling her, you're no longer your condition. Wasn't just about the healing. Again, we preach healing. This goes deeper than healing. This goes into identity. Who she was. You're no longer your condition. You're not what happened to you. You are not your past. You are no longer the woman with the issue. You are now daughter. I think it's amazing that her healing happened in such a private moment. What I mean by that is, again, she was down there at the bottom. And some people may say, well, why do you keep saying that? How do you know she was crawling? I don't know for a fact she was crawling, but if she reached down to touch the hem of his garment, she had to be down low. She wasn't standing up top, touching his head when he walked by. She was down on the ground, number one, because she had an issue and she was not supposed to be seen, and also because of where she touched at. Common sense just tells me she was probably on the ground, laying down, because it made her not be able to be seen. But I think it's amazing that this happened, the miracle happened in private. Nobody probably even seen what she was doing. Because I believe that if people would have seen her reaching out to touch him, being who she was, somebody would have stopped her. Somebody would have popped her hand and got it away from him. Somebody would have said, No, you can't touch him. She can't even touch regular people. They certainly are not going to let her touch Jesus as he walks by. So it happened in private. But Jesus made sure her restoration happened publicly. That's awesome. You don't see that when you stop at the healing. That don't really catch your attention. This is where the finished word gets real. Because he's doing something here. The healing didn't make her a daughter. Now think about that. She didn't become a daughter because she finally got healed. Jesus didn't say, Now that you're healed, I'll call you daughter. The healing didn't create her identity. Jesus just simply revealed it. Even after, I mean, the the healing had already happened, but he was revealing. The healing is an afterstory. We make it the story. But the healing was already done, and now Jesus is doing something different. He said, forget about the healing. You've already made yourself well because you had the faith to touch me. Boom, gone. Now I want to speak into something a little bit deeper. This is what we miss sometimes. And again, this is where the finished work, if you don't look at it through a finished work lens, you don't see this a lot of times. You may see it, but you don't really dig down into it. See, when we look at it through the finished work, we we realize we don't have to, we don't have to perform. And maybe God will accept me. It's not about that. It says, in Christ you have already been accepted. We don't work for it, we work from it. We work from a place that's already complete. We don't perform so God will love us. We simply respond to what we already know about Him. He is love, He does love us. That's a different perspective. And here's what I want to make this personal.

Walking Out With Peace And Purpose

SPEAKER_01 37:11

Here's where I want you to take it, not just say, boom, great story for everybody to hear. No, make this personal for you. Maybe you've been talking for so long that you've mistaken a voice for your identity. Maybe there's something you've been saying, maybe not for 12 years, but for a while, and you've mistaken that voice for your identity. Maybe you've experienced something that has now become the way you see yourself. Maybe it's rejection or failure, something you did, something someone did to you that you can't forgive. Maybe it's something you've been carrying for years. And somewhere along the way you started saying, This is who I am. But this story shows us something. It shows us more than just the healing. It shows us that Jesus doesn't call us by our condition. He doesn't define us by our past. He doesn't hold our mistakes and our failures over our head. He focuses on restoration, on redemption, and on relationship. All that seen in this one story. He calls you daughter, he calls you son, and that's the finished work. I don't think I've ever preached a message, and I didn't mean for this to come out like this, but I've never I've preached on what the finished work is, but I think this defines it more than anything. This defines it better than when I tried to teach on it and what it was. Because this is an example of it that you can see and understand and read about the last part. I said it while ago, but I want to read it one more time. The last part of verse 34. We skip over that. Why wouldn't Jesus say that? He just healed her. Go in peace. But I love those words. He didn't say now go prove yourself and try to earn what you just received. He simply says, go in peace. Why? Because she didn't have to go back and pick up the identity she walked in with. She crawled into the crowd as a as the woman with the issue. And now she's walking out as a daughter. She crawled in trying to hide, and now everyone sees her. So I'm gonna close right here with this, with this thought. Why this is more than just a touch. It's more than a touch. She came to Jesus because she needed something. And Jesus fulfilled that. He gave her exactly what she needed. But he didn't stop there. She came for healing, but he also gave her identity. That's more than a touch. The healing was the entry point into something much bigger. That she wasn't even coming for. She wasn't expecting. She had no idea in her head that Jesus was going to turn around, stop, and call her out in the middle of the crowd. This is my opinion of it. I believe if she'd have thought that, she wouldn't have gone. She'd have stayed home. She came for a healing and she got it. But Jesus said, I gotta give you more. There's more to her. Jesus would not allow the story to end there. Because if all she received was a healing, she could have easily walked away that day and said, I used to be sick, but now I'm healed. But Jesus wanted her to walk away saying, I know who I am. That's why he stopped. That's why he asked, Who touched me? That's why he looked at her and called her daughter. Because he wasn't simply trying to stop the bleeding. He was trying to restore the woman who had been defined by the bleeding. He was trying to bring restoration. That's more than a healing. That's more than a touch. The touch brought the healing. But he wanted to bring more. And that's the deeper meaning we miss. If we reduce this story simply to she had faith, she touched Jesus, and Jesus healed her. If we reduce the story down to that, now that's true. Hear me. That's true, but there's so much more to it. The finished work isn't just about getting something from him, it's about discovering what his finished work says about every single one of us. And that's why, I've said this so often, but that's why we can't read these familiar stories only at surface level, as we've always heard them. We gotta be willing to go deeper. We gotta be willing to dig a little bit. We gotta be willing to ask some questions. Because just like this story here, if we see, all we see in this story at surface level is a woman who got healed. We missed the woman who found her identity and got her name back. And that's really to me that's more important than the healing. But we've made it about the healing. The finished work allows you to ask the deeper questions, it allows you to see something more than just the miraculous. And we got to be willing to ask those questions.

Why Her Name Is Left Out

SPEAKER_01 43:20

Now, one pretty amazing thing too, and you probably know this, but I just kind of researched just because I was curious. Besides Matthew, Luke, and Mark, the three places that this story is mentioned in the biblical text, this woman was never mentioned again anywhere in the Bible. So we don't know. We don't know what her name was. We don't know where she lived at. We don't know if she ever encountered Jesus again. We don't know if she stayed healed or if she became afflicted again because we never hear anything else about her. But the more I read that, and the more I looked at it through a finished work lens, the more I thought maybe that's the point. Maybe Jesus left us with exactly what he wanted us to see. And he left us with exactly what he wanted us to know. We didn't need to know her name. All he wanted us to see was she's daughter. She's daughter. Through everything she's been through, she's daughter. So we don't need no more information. I believe that's why it was left like that. Because we know and we see everything that he wanted us to see. We see restoration, we see identity, we see healing. But if we stop on the surface, we miss so much. We just see healing. And that's a great thing to see. But man, there's so much deeper. There's so much more that's down there. And when we take a different look at it, we'll see things in these stories, in this scripture that we've never seen before. We'll look at them from a perspective that we've never looked at them from before. And it will change. It'll change the way you read scripture. It'll change the way you see God, the way you see Christ. Because when you see this woman from that perspective, it's one thing just to say she's a woman of great faith. But to see the restoration that happened, to see Jesus call her out in the crowd like that and do it on purpose. Why? Because he had a purpose behind it. To see what the purpose was, that I'm not just going to heal you, but I'm going to restore you and I'm going to give your name back. That's powerful. And that's stuff that we miss. If we don't read deep enough, if we don't aren't willing to ask those questions. So I want to continue to challenge you when you read something. Think finished work. Think through that lens. Because if you do that, I'm telling you, it will it will bring so much out of this story and out of this scripture. I'm going back reading stuff now that I've preached on for years. And now I'm going back and saying, man, look at all the things I missed. Look at all the things I didn't see. That's important. Why? Because it shows us Jesus. It points to him. It points to his character. It points to who he is. And if we know who he is, then it changes our perspective of the Father. And that's what matters. Because what has religion done and tradition a lot of times? It's gave us a wrong perspective of the Father. So when we can read scriptures through a certain lens that brings back into perspective who the Father is, I want that all day. I want to see something different. I want to see who he really is. And these stories show you that. They show your relationship. They show you redemption. They show you restoration. And that's who he is. Let's

Closing Challenge And Prayer

SPEAKER_01 47:42

pray. Father God, we thank you. We thank you for your word. We thank you for what you're doing in this ministry. We thank you for what you're doing in every single person in this room, Father. I pray for each one. I thank you that you're speaking even deeper things into him. Father, you're teaching us to look at this word and see this word in a different way. You're teaching us to be able to see and understand the true nature of the Father. Not just see him because of the way we've always been taught, but to truly dig into this word and see him through Scripture, see him through examples, see him through the love and the things that he's done in this scripture. So, Father, we thank you for what you're doing. And I pray for every person in this room. I pray for the ones that's connected to this ministry who call this place home, but have not been here, have been, for whatever reason, have been gone, Father. We pray that you draw them back into this place. They are a part of us. We need them here. We want them here, Father. So I pray that you draw the prodigal sons and daughters back home to this place. And Father, we thank you for what you're going to do in this community through this ministry, for the lives that we're going to touch, for the uh the people that we're going to come into contact with, the doors that's going to open up for us to do the work that you called us to do. And Father, we'll be careful to always give you the praise, honor, and glory in everything in the mighty name of Jesus. Amen. Amen.