[00:00:00] Speaker A: You.
[00:00:01] Speaker B: Hey, thanks so much for listening to this message. My name is Jason and I'm one of the ministers here at the Madison Church of Christ. It's our hope and prayer that the teaching from God's word you hear today will bless your life and draw you closer to him. If you're ever in the Madison, Alabama area, we'd love for you to worship with us on Sundays at 830 or 10:30 a.m. If you have any other questions about the Bible or want to know more about the Madison church, find
[email protected] be sure to also check out our Bible study podcast, Madison Church of Christ Bible studies. Thanks again for stopping by.
[00:00:37] Speaker A: So excited to see all of you here this morning, back from your vacation. Some of you, some will be coming in later this afternoon. We'll continue to pray for them and their safe journey. But it's awesome to be able to come together and receive this encouragement of supporting each other, worshiping God together, and that just helps us all be inspired and encouraged in our walk. And I'm thankful for that every single Sunday that I get to see your faces. And I appreciate you all so very much. We're in the middle of a study called arise to life. And what we are doing is for the last couple of weeks and for the next few weeks, we will continue to be talking about these stories in the Bible. Maybe some of them are familiar, some of them may be a little less familiar of moments where someone was dead and God brought them back to life. So there's the spoiler alert for all of these stories is they all end with someone getting their life back. And that's a great thing, right? And as we study those texts, I'm sure there are things that we can for sure realize that God is greater than death and that he has the power over all those things. And we can look at every one of these stories, and that can be the point of the message for sure. But I think sometimes if we take a moment to slow down and just read through the text, we'll also maybe see ourselves in the middle of it and find some practical things that will help us in our own christian walk and in our own development in our faith. And so we're trying to do that with these stories. And last week, you remember Andrew talked to us about the shunamite woman who her son was dead, and Elisha came and he was raised from the dead. And you remember that, that when he came to, one of the things that Andrew brought out in his message was that the boy sneezed seven times and Andrew got into the depths of what that number seven represent, the idea of perfection. And it was really interesting to think about how God places all these different numbers in the scriptures and sometimes they're just the number of something. And then there's sometimes where things are symbolic. And so when you think about that life, this kid was completely dead and he was fully, perfectly restored back to life. And those sneezes were a representation of that number seven. Well, the story that we're talking about today is going to be in Luke chapter eight. So if you want to turn your Bibles there, you can do that, Luke chapter eight. And we'll go back and forth between Luke eight and Mark chapter five, and we'll even jump into Matthew chapter nine a little bit, because all of those texts have this story in common. And while I say there's a story, I want you to understand that there is a story that links them together and it has as a part of it the number twelve. So I thought that was interesting, what Andrew expressed last week. And I want to give you a little bit about the number twelve, because in this story you're going to see twelve years from the moment this story begins, some things happen and we'll get into those in just a few moments. But as I look at the story and these twelve years that you're going to find in this story, it got me thinking about the number twelve in the Bible. And of course, you are probably already doing this in your mind if you think about it. The first thing I think about is those sons of Jacob, right? They became the twelve tribes of the nation of Israel. And God watched over them and protected them and helped guide them through the wilderness and into the promised land. You'll remember the twelve spies that were sent to check on the land to see if it was a place that they felt like they could go in and take. You'll remember that there were twelve pieces of unleavened bread in the tabernacle. There were two stacks of six bread, cakes, wafers, bread, you know what I mean? Anyway, and there were lots of other things. There are twelve minor prophets. There are twelve gates to the city of Jerusalem. There's a lot of different things that we can look at. And we can see that number twelve flowing through all the scriptures. You can look to the New Testament, you can see that Jesus called twelve apostles. And in the same way that those twelve tribes or those twelve patriarchs of Jacob became the nation of Israel, that these twelve patriarchs in the faith, in the apostles became sort of the patriarchs of the church. And so you got the physical Israel, and then you've got the spiritual Israel. So there's a lot of different connections that are in there. And so when you look at all of these, there's a lot of things in scholarship that they'll study and they'll look into numerology and a lot of different things. And they basically come to these conclusions, is that that twelve represents completeness or it represents divine order or God's authority and power. And so to kind of gel those things together is the idea that God is in the background of our lives, that he is in control, that he is sovereign over everything, that he puts order to things, and he shows his divine ability and his power and his authority over things. And so when we look at any story that has that number twelve, sometimes we can see those things and those elements come to life. And so as we look at this story, there are some of these kind of moments where you will see all of these things. God's divine order. You'll see his power and his providence. You'll see his ability to complete a situation and to bring it to fruition. And it starts twelve years prior to our text. So let me try to help you understand this. There's two stories, and they converge at the same exact time. And they had a very similar starting point. I want to give you a picture of a young man and his wife, how they are a new family, and he is a ruler who works in the synagogue, and he's a great guy. He's the kind of guy that would have been at the door greeting you. He would have had a smiling face. He would have been the kind of person that would have been in your home if you had something going on with your family, offering up prayers on your behalf. He would have been the guy in the worst of tragedies, would have been there on the spot for you. He would have been known by a lot of different people. He would have had connections to the community. He's good at networking. He's a guy who would coordinate and lead the worship assemblies, and he would assign different people to do different things. He would have people assigned for the scripture reading, and he would order that service. And he was a guy that obviously would have been appreciated and loved and well respected. And he had this wife, and their dream was to have a family. And they pray for, I'm sure God gives them the blessing of this child, and they don't know it at the time, but it's going to be the only child that they have. And so they have this beautiful daughter. And you know how it is. We've seen it here at Madison. I mean, we got babies popping out everywhere. I mean, they're springing out of the nursery. They're doing all kinds of things. And it's such an exciting time. We've seen it even this past week. And what I love about that is when someone does have a child, people just surround them with love and support and want to bring food and want to encourage them and just want to be there for them. But I think there's such an excitement in that time of life because you begin thinking, I wonder what this child is going to be, what they're going to be like, what's their personality going to be? And we can hold on to that and just be excited about the future. Who will they marry? What will they end up doing? What will their contributions in life be? And I'm sure that this family in this moment is just overjoyed with what's going on in their life. And there's just such a happiness. There's the ability to serve and to work and to minister, so to speak. But then to have this beautiful thing happen in your life around the same time. Contrast that by another woman who lives in that same general area. And she herself all of a sudden comes down with a struggle, a health crisis. She has an issue of blood. It just means that she's hemorrhaging, that she's bleeding, and there's no way for her to fix it. She seems to look for everything imaginable that could help her with that and to get her through that crisis. But it's just unending. And the pressure is mounting and things are just getting very difficult in her life. So I want you to imagine those two scenarios and those two lives, and then I want you to fast forward twelve years, and in twelve years later, Jesus is now on the scene, and he's beginning to preach and teach, and he's beginning to heal. People. And the sight have recovered. The blind have recovered their sight.
He's begun healing people of their infirmities. And in fact, he is over across the sea of Galilee at the land of the gatherings where he comes across this guy who lives among the tombs. You've heard this story about the man with the legion of demons. Jesus casts all those demons out and he throws them into a herd of pigs and they go drown themselves in the water. And the people of that area were so upset with Jesus that they banished him, they pushed him away and said, get out. And so Jesus leaves that scenario and he comes back across the lake and he comes back to Capernaum. And that's where we find our story twelve years later, from the beginning of what we talked about with these two families. So it says when Jesus returned, the crowd welcomed him. And that's different from what he had experienced on the other side. Right? He got banished on the other side. And here he comes to a place and it says there was a group of people or a crowd welcoming him. And it says they were all waiting for him. So they're standing there knowing that he went across and they know that he's going to come back at some point. And so they are literally just camping out, waiting. It's like people do for concert tickets, I guess. Sometimes they're sitting there waiting for Jesus to return and he comes. And it uses the term crowd. And if you look at that word and you look at that term, you're going to get the impression that it was more like a mob. It was a busy, chaotic group of people. And the word picture that you get as you study it is that even as he gets out of the boat and he gets on a dry land, that they come across him so quickly that it's almost like he's pressured and he's pushed back in toward the water. Okay, well, in the middle of this, there was a man named Gyrus who was a ruler of the synagogue. Remember the guy I described, it says, and falling at Jesus feet, he implored him to come to his house, for he had only a daughter, about twelve years old, and she was dying.
So this may not be a big deal to you, but as I look at scripture and I read, oftentimes it will say a ruler of the synagogue or a jewish official or someone in the Sanhedrin, oftentimes it will talk about the position, but it won't necessarily give the name. But in this particular case it does. And the name of the guy is Gyrus. And in fact, Mark, chapter five goes on to say specifically gyrus by name. Well, why is that significant? Well, I kind of gave you a picture of who this guy was, someone that in that community would have been well known, respected, loved, appreciated. He would have pretty good resources and the ability to do some things. And so when you think about the love that he had, the support that he had from other people, you think about his connections with all the people in the community. Certainly he would have tried everything in his power to find a way to get his daughter the help that she needed. And it's here that he finds himself where, and to put it, kind of in terms of, we would understand hospice is in like the family has been gathered around. They're individual, waiting for this child to pass away. There's nothing else that can be done. And all other resources and all other things have been exhausted to the point where this is it. And I want you to capture for just a moment, Jairus. In his circumstance, it means that because he's a Jew and because he's a leader among these people, that he holds fast to the law of Moses. And not only that, but what Jesus has been doing has caused such a ruckus that there's not support for that. In fact, Jesus is considered the enemy at this point. Like, he is blasphemous. He is doing things from their perspective that are beyond the law of Moses. And so, therefore, he's a heretic. And so when you think about all of these things together, I'm hoping you're putting yourself in this circumstance. He has reached a point of desperation where he's willing to risk it all for the sake of coming to Jesus. And here's what it says about him. He fell at his feet.
And folks, in those times, in those days, falling at someone's feet was, to be honest, it was a sign of worship. It was a sign of rendering yourself useless for the sake of that person to do something for you. It was to give yourself fully to them. And as he pled with him, he said, my little daughter is at the point of death. Come and lay your hands on her so that she may be made well and live.
Can you see yourself in that person? Can you see what's taking place? Can you feel the urgency in which he comes to Jesus?
But in recognition of this, though he had all the resources, though he had everything around him, whatever he had was not enough. And so it's only when we recognize this that we empty ourselves that we can really stand before Jesus and ask for that rescue. And I'm reminded of what Jesus said in a sermon on the Mount, Matthew, chapter five.
Jesus said, blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. What's he saying?
The people who are ready to empty themselves and just throw themselves at the mercy of God and say, I need you.
That's what poor in spirit is. And he certainly has that about him. But also notice that even with all that support and all the things that are going on, and really, when you look at him, you probably just thought of him as a successful guy.
Those things don't really matter with life. Sometimes things come our way that are difficult. Everyone is going to have to humble themselves before Jesus, and I think this is evidence of that. He's doing things right. It's not that he has sin in his life and all of a sudden his daughter is sick. This is a guy who is serving and working hard and doing the right things, and yet he finds himself in this most desperate situation. And he can be asking himself, why is this happening? But instead, he's doing everything he can to find a way to get her what she needs. And so he even he is humbling himself before God.
And so it says, jesus being moved by that went with him, and the people pressed around him. And some words that are used there is also the idea of thronged. And if you look up those two words, you're going to find the idea of suffocation, like choking out, the idea of something being bundled together and tightened up. It sounds like this group of people were right on top of him. It's kind of like I think about my earliest days of coaching soccer, that four and five year old soccer team. You know what I'm talking about, right? They kick the soccer ball, but you don't know where the soccer ball is. All you do is you watch the pile of kids, like, just moving around the field, and there's a lot of kicking, and every once in a while, the ball will go squirting out. That kind of thing, that kind of crowding. No, this was more oppressive. In fact, the idea is to the point of affliction, the idea is that Jesus was being pushed in on every side, and every one of these people were trying to get to him. It's more like if you go to a concert and you see people pushed up around the front and there's a barricade up front to keep you away from the stage, and everybody keeps pushing harder and harder, and people up front are having a hard time breathing. That's kind of the scenario here. And I hope you're seeing this with your mind's eye, as Gyrus has Jesus in this crowd trying to maybe pull him and tug him in the direction of his house as he's trying so desperately to get Jesus to his daughter. So I want you to imagine that the urgency, the panic, the desperation.
And then I want you to pan the camera over to the back of the crowd, because it describes something else that takes place. And it says, and there was a woman who had had a discharge of blood for twelve years you remember the woman we talked about to begin with?
Well, the reality is things had not gotten better for her. She had not received any healing. And in fact, as the Bible describes in one of these accounts, it says that things were just getting worse and worse. So it says, though she had spent all her living on physicians, she could not be healed by anyone. And isn't it interesting, Dr. Luke here, physician Luke is the one who, you know, we're all doctors, we could do some good things, but there's nothing that could be done for this woman. She has reached the extent of her limits.
Here's something that we need to recognize about that woman. As you think about her circumstance, that issue of blood, that hemorrhaging that takes place, she would have been considered unclean. Look in Leviticus and you'll see in Leviticus 15 and I'll gel it down. What is basically the situation for this woman? Her issue made her unclean for seven days upon every occurrence. So if she was bleeding, then there were seven days that she had to wait. But if this perpetuated for twelve years or not, it doesn't say whether it was intermittent. Then she had some moments back and forth. But the idea here is that she is isolated, set apart. She's unclean. She can't touch anybody because anyone that touches her and everything that she touches becomes unclean. So if you touch something that has touched her, you yourself also become clean. And even those people would have to wait till the next evening before they could do their purification and then be made designated clean again. So this woman had to stay away from everybody. So if this is going on for ten or twelve years, consider the isolation, consider the desperation, consider the loneliness.
But not only that, the exhaustion of all of your means, all of your relationships, and you feel weak and weaker every day for twelve years.
Well, what does this woman do? Said she had heard reports of what Jesus could do, and so she came up behind him in the crowd and touched his garment. Why did she touch his garment? Why didn't she grab him and hold on to him? She said in her mind, if I touch even his garments, I will be made. Well, consider the faith of this person who says, I don't know much about him, but I've heard about him. I don't want to trust in him. And even if I can get so close as to touch the hem of his garment, I'll be made clean. And she believed that with all of her heart. And she says, I'll be made well. And so she did. And in those days, the Jews would wear these garments where each corner of that garment would have a specific tassel or whatever, and those things would kind of separate the Jews away from everybody else with how they wore their clothes, and that would kind of signify who they were. In her mind, if I can just touch one of those things, I'll be healed. And it says immediately the blood afloat, the flow of blood dried up, and she felt in her body that she was healed of her disease immediately.
And I don't know how you see it. I hear people shouting.
I hear people pressing in on Jesus. Jesus, Jesus calling his name. I feel the chaos of the moment, the mob mentality. They're all around him. He's pressed in. You've got Jairus dragging him, trying to get him out of there and get him to his house, and you've got all this going on. And all of a sudden, I just see this woman on her hands and knees, just lunging through the crowd to see if she can touch the tassel of his garment.
And she does, and instantly she's healed.
There are times when risk must be taken in order to follow Jesus.
Well, what risk are you talking about, Brandon? Well, this woman would be violating the law to be around people at all. And so she was committing what we would view as a crime by being out among the people. And certainly she would have known beyond a shadow of doubt that she was not to touch anybody. And in this scenario, she is so desperate on her last leg that she will reach through that crowd and probably touch ten other people on her way to Jesus. But she did that because that risk had to be taken in that desperation.
So Jesus, perceiving in himself that power had gone out from him, immediately turned about in the crowd and said, who touched my garments? Now, this is funny to us because we recognize the mob, the crowd, the pressing in on him for just a moment. Leave her for just a second and go back to Jairus. Here he is trying to get, desperately get Jesus to his daughter in hopes that he can do something to heal her. He's in this moment. He's in this crowd. He's fighting it tooth and nail. And in the middle of all this, Jesus stops and says, who touched me? And everybody's like, well, I mean, what do you mean, who touched me? I can imagine Jairus maybe thinking in his mind, like, who touched you? Who cares? Right? Come with me. My daughter is dying, and I don't need another delay. She's healed. It's great. It's good. Let's go.
He says, who touched me. And in the middle of all this and all that chaos, Jesus stops and he's looking through the crowd to try to find this woman and says, Jesus said someone touched me, for I perceive that power has gone out from me.
There was something different about this. There are people all around him. Everybody's touched. It's like a big touch fest. I mean, everybody is all on top of each other. They're all pressing on him. They're all calling his name. They're all looking for a moment with him. And in the midst of all that chaos, Jesus is asking who it was. I just want you to understand something. Jesus realizes this, and we should too. And that is there's a huge difference between proximity to Jesus and a touch of faith. And you can use that metaphorically or you can use it in the truest sense of the touch.
Look around this audience.
Just take your head and move around.
There's a big group of people in this room.
And you could say that we're all gathered here with Jesus, right? We're all gathered because we want to know more. We're here to worship. We're here to draw strength from one another. We're here to fill our hearts up with his word and all these things. But I want you to be aware of something.
You can be all around Jesus and not be moving in faith.
And there is a very true sense in which we can be guilty of finding ourselves in proximity. Oh, yeah, I go to church every Sunday. Oh, yeah, I'm at all the events. Oh, yeah, I have great friends and they all go to church with me. You can say all those things, but what I want you to recognize is there's a difference in that and a difference in you acting in faith, letting him transform your life, to make decisions differently, to live differently, to challenge yourself deeper in your faith, to grow and to be what you need to be for God. There's a difference in being in the proximity of Jesus and reaching out in faith. The woman saw that she was not hidden. In other words, it became apparent that Jesus had centered his eyes on her, and she knew she was caught. And again, feeling all that guilt and all that horror of what she's gone through, and now know that she's caught in doing what she's done, she came trembling and falling down before him, declared in the presence of all those people, listen, I got to tell you what's happening right away. She's sharing her testimony. She's saying, let me tell you, I've had this issue for twelve years, and I thought that if I could just get to Jesus, that if I could just touch him, that he would heal me.
And she's telling everybody this, how she had been immediately healed.
But the thing that jumped out to me in that text is, yes, her excitement.
But I also thought about her coming trembling before Jesus.
I'm sure this is part of my just life experience and maybe hearing messages about how far sin takes us away from God. And it's true. I mean, Isaiah, chapter 59, reminds us over and over again that when we have sin, we're separated from God. We're taken out of his presence. We don't have a relationship with him in our sinfulness.
But I think sometimes in that mindset of us recognizing that we don't want to sin, we don't want to hurt God, we don't want to separate ourselves from him, we don't want to take ourselves away from him in the process. What we lose in the middle of all that is the mercy that he extends when we come back.
And here's this woman who knows she's made a mistake. And it's the guilt that consumes her and makes her stop and be afraid. And I'm afraid sometimes that we allow our gift to condition us to fear when God looks our way.
But it's the same one who says, I love you.
It's the same one who died for us. It's the same one who would do anything in the world to bring you back. Look at Luke, chapter 15. There's three stories there to remind us of the rejoicing that takes place when someone comes back home and repents and does the right thing. And here this woman stands in abject fear of Jesus, and Jesus is just there to save her. I want to remind us of this, that when we come to Jesus with our sin and we lay that upon him, he doesn't become sin. Well, the Bible says he took on sin so that we might become the righteousness of God, right?
But it doesn't make him angry, and it doesn't make him sinful. It actually makes us unclean.
And that is a remarkable truth. Instead of us fighting through all that guilt, just recognize your guilt, but come to Jesus and make things right, and he'll heal you again and again. That's what first, John, chapter one, tells us that we have this special relationship with him, that we can have that perpetual forgiveness when we just confess the things that are wrong in our life. We don't need to be afraid about coming clean. We need to be excited about being renewed in that relationship. Together. Jesus is teaching us this.
So he said to this woman, daughter, your faith has made you well again. Go back to her world. She's ostracized. She's separated. Probably doesn't have much family. She doesn't have many people that are around her. You don't know exactly what the situation is, but in this moment, Jesus brings her into the family by calling her daughter. And he said, it's your faith, your trust, your confidence in me that has made you well. And then he says something that translators will say. It's probably better rendered not go in peace, but go into peace.
For twelve years, there's been no peace for twelve solid years. There's been no good moment.
There's not been a moment where I can experience with other people. There's been no relationship. There's been none of these things. And all of a sudden, Jesus has restored her completely and given her the freedom to go worship, given her the freedom to go serve other people, given freedom to go out and tell other people about Jesus, what an awesome thing that he's done for her. And it happened in an instant.
And so I want you to understand something. There was a full surrender involved there. And, in fact, peace is only found on the other side of full surrender. You don't hear about battles in war, really, where two armies are going at it. And then one of them says, well, I'll tell you what. We'll stop fighting over in this area if we can just call it true. So we just call it.
We'll call that a partial surrender. And the other side go, okay, that sounds great. You all just stop fighting here, and everything will be just fine. No, the surrender happens when you give it up, when you give it completely over, and you say, that's it. We are not fighting anymore. That's what a surrender is. And I'm afraid it's the same way with us. Sometimes we think in our lives there are things that we can hold on to, things that we can do, and we say, well, I know that God doesn't like these things, but it's just kind of who I am. And so maybe I'll give up some of these things, but this is this other thing. And I know it's not all that God honoring, but it's just kind of who I am. And we somehow, in our mind, sometimes will say, hey, that's surrender. No, it's not, brother and sister. No, it's not.
God wants your full surrender, giving it over to him. And these two stories reveal what it's like to throw yourself away to give yourself life in Jesus Christ. And that is exactly what happens here.
So here you have Jairus as he's in this crowd and in this mob trying to get Jesus to his daughter. And he just saw this person healed. And I'm sure there was shouts of hallelujah. And there was all kinds of things that were going on, and people, I'm sure, were celebrating with this woman. And in the chaos, he's like, okay, that's great. That's great. Let's move on.
And so he's got the fear that's in there, but there's a little bit of hope because he just saw what took place. If I could just get Jesus there. And in the midst of all that, while he was still speaking, someone from the ruler's house came and said, your daughter's dead.
Don't trouble the teacher.
Know there's a sense in which fear can start inside.
And I'm certain there are moments in all of our lives where we've had fear. Fear of the unknown, fear of what's coming next, fear of how what is going on in my life is going to change things. I'm certain that when we're taxed in those really, really difficult moments, that we find ourselves a little bit afraid.
But what compounds that sometimes is we're surrounded by people who kind of add on top of that, and you have this fear that comes from within coupled with doubt from without. And in the middle of that that can be crippling to our faith. If you surround yourself with people who are looking to blame God, if you are surrounding yourself with people who don't put their confidence in God or don't say, hey, you're going to make it through this. They're not lifting you up during that, but they're tearing you down and saying, why do you trust in those kinds of things? If you find yourself in that, that's what's happening here. It's not that the person that comes from the house is bad. It's just they're coming in saying, hey, there's a limit to what Jesus can do.
Like, he's healed people. Yeah, that's great. He's cast out demons. That's awesome. He's given the blind their sight back. All that is wonderful. But he can't do anything about this girl who is now dead, so leave him alone. And in the middle of all this, if you have fear from within and you have doubt coming from outside, just imagine what that does to you. But it's in this moment and it's so amazing to me because Jesus says, don't fear. It's almost like in the middle of all that chaos, he zeroes in on him and says, hey, don't be afraid.
Just believe she's going to be okay.
And I love that, that Jesus does that and he tells the same thing for us. Don't be afraid.
Believe things are going to be okay.
Real faith is found when what we think we know gives way to hope. And I want to remind us that hope in the scriptures when you look at it, is not some kind of thought project. It's not something that we just mentally have said, well, I hope in the best. No, hope is something that God has inside of us, that he's promised us some things and because he's promised those, we can have some certainties about those things, that God is going to be with us, that he's going to help us through the trials, that he's going to help us work through the challenges that we go through life. It's not that we lose everything. It's that we hope in it. We trust in it, we have confidence in it. Biblical hope isn't a certain thing.
So when he came to the house, he allowed no one to enter with him except Peter and John and James. And the father and mother of the child says all were weeping and mourning for her. And of course, as you can imagine, we've all been to funerals. We've been to those moments where someone's died and we're all gathered around. There's a lot of tears and a lot of mourning, and there's something to that, that the family was obviously upset.
And Jesus comes in and says, don't weep. She's not dead, but sleeping. And they laughed at him knowing that she was dead.
What family member all of a sudden changes from sorrow to laughter?
It doesn't make sense, does it? But if you look at other versions of this, in Matthew chapter five, it says Jesus saw a commotion of people weeping and wailing loudly. Okay, well, that's to be understood as well. But then in Matthew chapter nine, it says, jesus saw the flute players and the crowd making commotion. Okay, now we know a little bit more what's going on. See, at these times, if you were a person of any kind of financial means, it would be like these people would know that someone was dying and they would be on the ready, on the spot, ready to let everybody in the community know that you're mourning. And so they would do the mourning for you. You could worry about the details and they're doing the morning and the screaming and the wailing, and they do a big show. And it was like, I don't want to offend any lawyers out here, but it's almost like, you know, call me Alabama. I am your know, that kind of thing. They would just be there, opportunistic and ready to jump in and to put on that scene. So everyone would know that the sorrow is here in this house. But I want you to catch what Jesus said.
He said, go away, for the girl is not dead, but sleeping. And they laughed at him. Jesus is teaching something very important here, and I think it's simply this. All of us need to remove faithless influences from our life. Now, notice I didn't say faithless. People said faithless influences.
I want us to recognize that in this moment, there's no room for silliness.
These people are grieving, they're hurting, and Jesus wants to take those who are faithless and get them out of the situation. Now, you may say to yourself, well, Brandon, don't we need to evangelize? Don't we need to tell everybody about Jesus? Don't we need to be merciful and kind and thoughtful to people and those kinds of things? Absolutely. I didn't say get rid of the people, but if they have a bad influence on your life, what I want you to do is turn off the volume.
Remove those people and their influence from your life.
I'm not saying don't approach them. Don't talk to them about God. I'm not saying don't teach them. I'm saying love them in spite of who they are, but do not let their words penetrate your heart.
Jesus is telling us, get rid of those faithless things in your life. So, taking her by the hand, he said to her, talitha kumi, which means little girl, I say to you, arise. And this expression is a very endearing expression. It's kind of like sweetie or sweetheart.
It's a tender terminology. It's not know, going through the drive thru at Jack's and that lady, that's kind of creepy. I'm not talking about that.
But here is Jesus talking to this girl, maybe in the same terms that the father would have said to her.
Very tender. You know, when I wake up, my boys to get up, and they were growing up, and it got harder and harder as they got older and wanted to sleep in long, it'd be harder and harder to get them up and get up, boys. And after a while, I called it the tow truck. You know what I mean? You grab them by the toe and pull them out of the bed, right? That's how you wake them up. Like get up, and then you yank them onto the floor.
But if a child is sick, and especially a little girl, what do you do? You kind of get closer to the bed. You get on top and you say, hey, are you okay? It's time to get up. And you're tender. You're kind. That's what Jesus does. And it says, immediately the girl got up and began walking. She's twelve years old. And immediately they were all overcome with amazement in the power of Jesus.
Death is just a short nap. I wish so badly that we could comprehend death in the same way Jesus does.
We think of things as so just finite right here on this earth. And we think everything that we do is about right here and now. And yet the message comes over and over and over through the scripture that this world is not our home. We're just passing through. The treasures are where laid up somewhere beyond the blue. We don't know exactly where it is. But what I do know is that God is preparing us here for what will take place later. And so when a person dies, I don't want you to see it in the same way that we see it. I want you to see it the way God sees it, which is this is a passage from one life to a better situation. And while these people are hurting and Jesus responds to their hurt, I want us all to begin fastening our mind, to recognize that the day we die is the day we're living for all of this life.
But with Jesus, and when we have his blood and when we are washed clean, when we are his child, there's a promise of a resurrection later and we can arise to life.
So Jesus and I'll never understand this necessarily. People have speculated. Why is it that Jesus would say to them, don't tell anybody about this? Well, some have suggested, and you can imagine they've said things like, well, if that were the case, I mean, every single funeral would be inviting Jesus to come and do the ceremony or whatever.
I'm sure it would have gotten chaotic if that family had gone on this exploration of telling everybody about what Jesus did for them. But the reality is just a few verses later in Matthew, chapter nine, verse 20, it says, and the report of this went throughout all the district. I mean, people are going to talk, right? But it was better for those people who saw what it did for them to be that voice that sent Jesus power out and about to other places.
So here we are we got two different scenarios, two different kinds of situations.
They're both in that twelve year moment, right, where one is the birth of a child, the other one is the beginning of this illness. Jesus heals both of them in different ways and different styles. They're totally different circumstances in life. And I think the point that I want to make from all this is simply this, that Jesus is moved more by your faith than your circumstance.
We've all got something different going on in our lives. Every one of us have a customized problem that we're dealing with, right?
But Jesus is not so much worried about the circumstance you find yourself in. He's worried about whether or not you're going to trust him.
And that's something power for us to be reminded of. But also there's risk involved in seeking out know.
Jairus was willing to forfeit his position, his situation, his circumstance. He would do whatever he had to do for his daughter. And if I were to ask the men in this room, what would you do to go to what extremes would you do? Would you go to to save your child's life, their physical life?
But the better question is not so much what would you do to save their physical life. It's to what extent would you risk everything to save their spiritual life?
What risk would you take to bring Jesus to your child?
And then finally this is don't just stand in proximity.
Don't just come and be a part and just stand afar off.
Don't be a part of the crowd, but not really yourself. Invest your heart fully in trusting in Jesus.
I think we can be guilty of that. And I'm encouraging all of us to take that next step, to push deeper, to trust deeper, to pray more, to study more, and not that those things automatically yield spiritual growth because your heart has to be in it as well. And you have to desire to be what God wants you to be. But I'm asking all of us to consider where we are and what things we might need to do to demonstrate our trust in Jesus.
It's already been mentioned, I think this morning in the early service, it was a prayer offered that talked about how when we have been baptized into Christ, we've clothed ourselves with him.
But then also we are raised up to walk in newness of life. And if you have not done that yet, I hope that you will consider that this morning that you will surrender your sin and that Jesus'blood will wash away your sins and that you'll be raised up to walk a new life. But it may be that you just need encouragement now. You need someone to know that you need them.
It may be that you're fighting isolation and loneliness and that you need to know that people here love you. It may be that you're battling a private sin that you just can't relinquish. And I'm saying to you, today day, it takes risks. But when you follow Jesus, you get eternal life for it. And that is a beautiful thing. And I hope this morning, if there's any of those needs, that you will come. While together we stand and sing.
