Desperate Faith W/Dr. Branson Parler

Good morning.

It's good to be with you this morning.

Thank you, Amar, for that introduction.

Yeah, my wife, Sarah, and I have been married for 23 years.

We have six kids.

So if you do need to borrow a 10-passenger van for the amazing race, uh you want a large team, you you know where to go.

Uh I in addition to uh my my main full-time job, I'm a professor of theology with the foundry.

We do church-based teaching, training, equipping.

I also serve on staff as associate pastor at Fourth Reformed Church in Northeast Grand Rapids, but I'm grateful for the opportunity to be with you today to open the word together.

As we begin, I want you to think about two questions.

And the first is this where are you desperate in your life today?

Where are you desperate in your life today?

Notice I did not ask, are you desperate?

Because my hunch is that each one of us carries desperation about something into this place.

Maybe it's health, maybe it's finances, maybe it's relationships, marriage, child, a job situation, loneliness.

Where are you desperate today?

Second question.

Do you ever compare yourself to others?

In your relationship with Jesus or maybe in what you're desperate about, here's something I've noticed: it's easy to compare ourselves, our desperate situation, to others, and either minimize our own desperation or minimize someone else's.

And so as we open the word of God today, we're going to see that no matter our differences, no matter who you are or what type of desperation you are facing, those with desperate faith discover the power of Jesus.

Those with desperate faith discover the power of Jesus.

I would invite you, out of respect for God's word, to rise and body your spirit if you are able, as we open Mark chapter 5, to hear the story of Jesus' encounter with two desperate people.

Mark 5 · chapter mention

Mark 5, 21.

When Jesus had again crossed over by boat to the other side of the lake, a large crowd gathered around him while he was by the lake.

Then one of the synagogue leaders named Jairus came, and when he saw Jesus, he fell at his feet.

He pleaded earnestly with him, My little daughter's dying.

Please come and put your hands on her so that she will be healed and live.

And so Jesus went with him.

A large crowd followed and pressed around him, and a woman was there who'd been subject to bleeding for twelve years.

She had suffered a great deal under the care of many doctors and had spent all she had.

Yet instead of getting better, she grew worse.

When she heard about Jesus, she came up behind him in the crowd and touched his cloak, because she thought, if I just touch his clothes, I will be healed.

Immediately her bleeding stopped, and she felt in her body that she was freed from her suffering.

Now once Jesus realized the power had gone out from him, and he turned around in the crowd and asked, Who touched my clothes?

You see people crowding against you, his disciples answered, and yet you asked, Who touched me?

But Jesus kept looking around to see who had done it.

And then the woman, knowing what had happened to her, came and fell at his feet, trembling with fear, told him the whole truth.

He said to her, Daughter, your faith has healed you.

Go in peace and be freed from your suffering.

While Jesus was still speaking, some people came from the house of Jairus, the synagogue leader.

They said, Why bother the teacher anymore?

Overhearing what they said, Jesus told him, Don't be afraid, just believe.

He did not let anyone follow him except Peter, James, and John, the brother of James.

And when they came to the home of the synagogue leader, Jesus saw a commotion with people crying and wailing loudly.

He went in and said to them, Why all this commotion and wailing?

The child is not dead, but asleep.

But they laughed at him.

After he put them all out, he took the child's father and mother and the disciples who were with him and went in where the child was.

He took her by the hand and said to her, Taletha kum, which means, little girl, I say to you, get up.

Immediately the girl stood up and began to walk around.

She was twelve years old.

At this they were completely astonished, and he gave strict orders not to let anyone know about this, and told them to give her something to eat.

This is the word of the Lord.

May be seated.

Where are you desperate?

As we look at this passage and Jesus' encounter with these two people, the first thing I want us to see, the first thing I want us to notice is that faith grows out of desperation and hopelessness.

Faith grows out of desperation and hopelessness.

Two main characters in this passage: the woman with the flow of blood, this woman who is bleeding has no one.

For twelve years, here's what you have to understand.

Maybe you know this, maybe you don't.

In the Old Testament Levitical law, this woman is considered perpetually unclean.

She has to live alone, away from her family.

She can't attend celebrations at the temple.

She couldn't participate in the regular gatherings at the synagogue.

She spent all her money in hopes of healing.

But it never came.

And worse, those who were supposed to help didn't.

We don't have details, but Mark tells us not only did she not get better, but she suffered under the care of doctors.

She has no one, no family, no friends.

Alone.

Desperate.

He was a speed chess fanatic.

And if you've never seen speed chess, look it up on YouTube.

It's crazy.

He had a great sense of humor.

He loved reading, he loved Jesus.

He lived in Bacolid City, the island of Negros, Occidental, Philippines.

And he was one of the skinniest guys I've ever met.

For a reason.

When he was a boy, both of his parents passed away.

He went to live with his sister and her husband.

They didn't have much money, but his brother-in-law was cruel.

He barely gave Henry enough to eat to get by.

He beat him.

Henry had no one.

The people who were supposed to protect and care for him didn't.

And so even as he grew older, Henry's malnourishment stuck with him.

When I met him, he had the joy of the Lord, but he didn't have much.

He owned two shirts.

One to wear and one to wash.

He eventually left his sister's house, but he barely scraped by.

Desperate.

But then one day Henry was listening to the radio, which happened to be carrying a preacher from the far-off land of Texas by the name of Chuck Swindall.

And through that radio preacher, Henry heard something.

He heard Jesus say to him, son.

Jairus' daughter.

Jairus' daughter, did you notice how old is she?

Twelve.

How long has this woman been suffering with the flow of blood?

Twelve years.

For as long as the woman with the flow of blood has been alone twelve years, this girl has been surrounded by family and friends.

She has a father who's a synagogue leader, a leader of the religious community, an advocate on her behalf.

He's out there seeking out Jesus for her.

They have a place of position, power.

She's sick, and the house is surrounded with people, likely praying and ministering to the family.

When Jesus comes there, people are already there wailing and mourning.

This family, this girl is far from alone.

And yet, like the woman in this passage, the reality of disease and death has come to this house.

Synagogue leader or not, death was there.

Surrounded by family or not, death was there.

All the family, social position, and prestige could not change the reality that death was there.

Jairus was desperate.

My friend Gary just passed away a couple of years ago, but Gary was a successful businessman.

He started from a hard scrabble beginning in the Creston neighborhood, just down the street from our church.

He eventually owned and ran his own company.

Gary worked hard.

Gary played hard.

He liked sports cars and motorcycles.

He was very generous.

In his 50s, Gary was diagnosed with a form of cancer that only about 3% of people survive.

The doctors proposed a form of treatment that was intense.

They warned him the cure was likely as bad as the disease.

And I remember hearing Gary describe what this did to him.

The skin falling off the inside of his mouth.

Terrible hallucinations, his wife talking about what she had to do when he couldn't tell the difference between reality and fiction.

Gary was desperate.

A man who had almost everything reduced to a shell of himself, to his dying day bearing the marks of the cure that beat cancer, but also beat him up and down in a way that would not get better this side of the resurrection.

And then this is what's most amazing to me at the end of all this.

You know what Gary says when he tells the story about this period in his life?

That was the best thing that ever happened to me.

Why?

Because Gary knew desperation makes us see reality clearly.

Disease makes us see reality clearly.

Death makes us see reality clearly.

Dust you are, and to dust you will return.

Naked I came from my mother's womb, said Job, and naked I will depart.

My wife Sarah, who's one of my favorite theologians, has this sign that I'll admit I don't like.

But it's just it's this little, she just jotted this down and it's in the inside of one of our cupboards.

And here's what it says Anything that makes us need God is a blessing.

Anything that makes us need God is a blessing.

Did I mention we have six kids, right?

Desperation is a way of life.

But I want to ask you this morning, people of God, can you acknowledge I am desperate?

Have you lost hope in any good thing other than God Himself to satisfy?

Because to discover the love and the power of Jesus, I want to encourage you today, lose faith and hope in anything other than Jesus.

Desperation.

The second thing that jumps off the page to me as we look at this passage is this.

Desperate faith doesn't care what the crowd thinks.

Desperate faith doesn't care what the crowd thinks.

Jairus came, Jairus fell at Jesus' feet.

Remember, he is a synagogue leader.

Already some people love Jesus, some people hate Jesus.

Most people are confused about Jesus.

That's why did you catch this at the end of the passage?

Jesus tells his followers, like, don't go spreading this.

Why?

Because people are confused about Jesus.

The crowd is confused.

He was so desperate that he was locked in on Jesus.

And so I want to ask you, where might the ridicule of the crowd stop you from being desperate for Jesus?

I mean, if I get associated with Jesus, what are people going to think?

I mean, do respectable people follow Jesus?

I mean, in an age that values knowledge, you might be perceived as unenlightened.

In a culture that values freedom and autonomy, you might be perceived as oppressive.

In a culture that values hard work and upward mobility, you might be perceived as lazy and unmotivated.

In a culture that values political influence at any cost, you might be perceived as weak.

Desperate faith doesn't care what the crowd thinks.

The woman with the flow of blood heard about Jesus.

And she came into the crowd.

Now, if you know anything about how the purity laws worked, if you were clean or unclean, the way that this works is if you're clean and I'm unclean and I touch you, your cleanness doesn't make me clean.

My uncleanness makes you unclean.

So for her to jostle into this crowd, she said, I don't care.

I don't care.

She was so desperate that she was locked in on Jesus.

She didn't care that others would see her, others might know that she's unclean and is now somehow contaminating them.

She is moving to Jesus.

Do you let the religious boundaries of the crowd keep you from Jesus?

Sometimes the boundaries we set up keep people from Jesus.

Let me tell you about a time when I was desperate.

When I was nineteen, my parents' marriage was falling apart.

Due primarily to my dad's infidelity.

Did I mention my dad was the pastor at our church?

The response from many, understandably, I get this, was hurt and betrayal.

But my whole family became outcasts at the church that had been my only church home for my whole life.

Our family was isolated.

My parents honestly didn't have friends who could walk with them through the crisis.

And that summer I found myself asking over and over again.

If this is what the church thinks of us, what does Jesus think of us?

Are those two one and the same?

And I went back to the Gospels.

I read them voraciously with a new lens because all my life here I was the pastor's kid.

I was the insider.

And I went back and read Matthew, Mark, Luke, John and said, How does Jesus treat the outsider?

How does Jesus engage those who didn't fit with the religious boundaries that had been set up?

How did he interact with people like my family?

Outcasts.

One of the things I noticed, I don't know if you've ever paid attention to this.

Jesus' mom got pregnant before she was married.

You guys okay, good, you guys.

Okay, yeah, we're gonna ready with this.

Did you ever think about this?

God could have set this whole thing up, so that wouldn't have been so obvious.

He could have come two days before the wedding, and that would not have created any problem for anybody.

What does that tell you about God?

He's the original destroyer of theological worlds.

That there's a reason that when Jesus encounters people over and over again, especially women who are identified as sinners, who do you think Jesus sees when he sees them?

His mom.

His mom.

Over and over, Jesus embraces sinners, tax collectors, outsiders.

And so I learned because I read my Bible closely, never confuse Jesus with the crowd.

Never confuse Jesus with the crowd.

The crowd might recoil, the crowd might cast out desperate faith, doesn't care what the crowd thinks.

We're going to Jesus.

And when Jesus came to Jairus' home, the crowd was mourning.

The crowd said, look, she's dead.

The crowd laughed at Jesus.

They mocked.

Jesus went with Jairus into that room.

Notice who gets to go into this room and see this?

Not the crowd.

The laughing crowd.

The crowd with the boundaries.

Jesus said, Jairus and his closest disciples, we're going to go into this room.

You're going to see something.

Only those who are desperate enough to have faith get to walk into that room and see the unleashed power of Jesus.

And so, people of God, I want to ask you this morning are you like Locked in on Jesus?

Are you so desperate for him that you don't care about ridicule, you don't care about the religious boundary, you don't care about what the crowd thinks or how the crowd reacts?

I'm going to Jesus.

I'm going to Jesus.

And so the next thing I want to see here, desperate faith reaches out and touches Jesus.

I love this part of the story.

They're walking along, Jesus asks, Who touched me?

The disciples are like, Okay, Lord.

What do you mean, who touched you?

There's this whole crowd of people.

Something happened here.

The disciples, they're understandably incredulous.

Many people were in the crowd, only one touched Jesus in faith.

Many made casual contact with the body of Jesus.

Only one accessed the healing power of Jesus.

And part of what this does mean is that faith is action.

Faith reaches out, faith goes.

Great preacher Charles Spurgeon says it's not every contact with Christ that saves men, it's the arousing of yourself to come near to him, the determinate, personal, resolute, believing touch of Jesus Christ which saves.

Can I say it this way?

Be aggressive.

I grew up in Iowa, but I've been around West Michigan long enough to know like I if I'm sick, do I want uh, can I say this?

Do I do I want a Dutch Reformed person praying for me?

I say right.

Maybe, but let me clarify this.

Or do I want my good charismatic friends praying for me?

Okay, okay.

What I mean by that is they weren't just sitting back saying, well, Lord, we we pray for them to get better, but you know, the always the tack on, but but whatever, God.

But what?

They are aggressive.

This woman is like, there's Jesus, I'm gonna go reach out, ask for help.

Are you desperate enough to reach out and touch Jesus?

I will admit, I have a problem with asking for help.

Maybe you can't relate to this, but often my wife, I'll be doing something around the house and my wife is like, you know, your friend Jeff knows a lot about plumbing.

Why don't you ask him?

I got it.

I can figure this out.

Right, two days later, uh Jeff.

Right.

Can you recommend a good plumber?

Because I really messed this up.

Um we don't like to ask for help.

A couple years ago, about a year and a half ago in the fall, uh, I was scheduled to do a Saturday workshop along with Jeff Fisher down in Kalamazoo.

Uh earlier in that week, uh just out of the blue, I couldn't identify any cause, but all of a sudden my back started hurting.

Um and not just kind of like the doll ache that it's like, yeah, you're in your mid-40s and you have six kids, so something always hurts from wrangling, you know, wrestling with the boys, or you get on a trampoline and regret every second of that.

I started to get this sharp pain in my back, and as as the week went on, it got worse and worse to the point when I was uh sitting in my chair trying to work on uh preparing the workshop for Saturday, I couldn't even breathe normally because it was just this kind of stabbing pain.

And so I uh at a certain point I was like, okay, Lord, I'm just gonna email uh some folks, some friends at the church where we're doing this workshop, and just let them know hey, can could you guys actually pray for me?

Could you I think there's something going on here?

So I emailed three three folks from down there.

Within a couple of minutes, I had a response uh from my friend Peg who leads the prayer team.

Uh and and she said, you know, I think there's some kind of spiritual warfare going on.

This isn't just that you're you know medium old.

And so I said, Oh, okay.

Uh I need to pray and ask for God's healing and strength.

About 10 minutes later, uh an email from my friend Pastor Joel came up, and the email was a prayer for healing.

And I read through that prayer, and the very last line in all capitals was Lord help.

And when I read that line, it was like there was a hand that started to kind of push me down in my chair.

Body kind of leaning forward a little bit like that.

It felt, I felt kind of a little bit of a burning sensation in my back, kind of like icy hot.

I know what that is again.

I started to sort of both laugh and cry at the same time.

What's going on here?

And for about the next 15 minutes, uh, God, you know, brought me more and more face down.

Why?

Lord help.

Lord help.

And and I went from being able to hardly sit in my chair and breathe to the acute pain going away.

I stood up, went downstairs, a pastor and a couple elders were there, I asked them to continue praying for me.

Why do I find it so hard to pray that two-word prayer?

Lord, help.

But I want you to see that when this woman in particular comes to Jesus, when she reaches out, when Jesus asks, Who touched me?

He's trying to figure out not just who touched him, but he wants to draw the woman out of the crowd.

Why?

Well, when we think about healing that Jesus provides, there are some, both in Jesus' day and in ours, who think about healing only in terms of physical healing.

But Jesus is always going deeper than that.

What is the healing that she needs most?

For twelve years she has suffered, for twelve years she has been alone.

She reaches out and touches Jesus.

He wants to look her in the eye, to lock eyes with her so that he can say this word to her.

Daughter.

Daughter.

This is a story about two daughters, and Jesus is intent that this woman knows that she is his daughter.

He sees her.

Help me see how you identify with me in this place.

And listen for his voice to say to you, my child, my son, my daughter.

Because when you reach out in desperate faith, you will come to know the immense love of Jesus for you.

Last thing I want us to see today is this faith testifies.

Faith testifies.

Matthew, Mark, and Luke all record this story.

Mark doesn't mention this detail, but the other two do.

That when this woman comes, she touches the edge or the hem of his garment.

Numbers 15, 38 and 39, we get this command.

God says, speak to the Israelites and say to them, Throughout the generations to come, you are to make tassels on the corner of your garments with a blue cord on each tassel.

You'll have these to look at, and so you will remember all the commands of the Lord.

And so every devout Jewish man wore this outer robe with four tassels on it, one at each corner.

In Mark 6, the next chapter, verse 56, there's this little phrase that is extremely significant.

It talks about Jesus, and it says this wherever he went into villages, towns, or countryside, they placed the sick in the marketplaces.

They begged him to let them touch even the edge of his cloak.

And all who touched it were healed.

Where do you think people got that idea?

Where do you think people thought, hey, if I can just touch the edge of his cloak, the hem of his garment, I'll be healed.

But this woman did not keep it to herself.

She knew the power of Jesus.

She knew the place of desperation that she was.

She knew what Jesus had done for her.

And I would encourage you, think about all the things that we talk about, all the words that fill our day, all the things we get excited to share.

I'm not telling you not to do that, but I'm asking you.

If you know the love and power of Jesus, then testify.

Then talk about it, then share.

Say, here's the desperate place I was, and here's what he did.

There's a reason that over and over in Scripture, God says, remember, tell your children, repeat.

Because he shows up.

And let me tell you, scripture is honest about the fact that there are times of difficulty, there are seasons of desperation, there are periods of dryness.

It's not easy.

That is why we remember, why we tell ourselves over and over again here is how God showed up.

Here's what he did for me, here's how he provided a way forward.

You know what?

One of the most common words in the Psalms is wait.

Wait.

What does God tell the people of Israel when they are at the Red Sea and Pharaoh's army behind them?

What does he tell them to do?

Get scared, get worried, run around like chickens with your heads cut off?

I didn't do that.

What do you do?

What does he tell them?

Stand firm, watch, wait.

What's the first command Jesus gives to his disciples in the book of Acts?

Everybody wants an Acts 2 church where people know they're flocking, they're being baptized, people are coming to know the Lord.

What's the first thing Jesus says to his disciples in the book of Acts?

Wait.

Wait.

And so as we wait, we remind ourselves, we testify, we remember, we share who God is and what he's done.

People of God, imagine a church desperate to fully discover the love and power of Jesus.

Desperate.

Imagine a church where we go to Jesus for ourselves and for one another aggressively.

Aggressively.

Imagine a church willing to stand up and testify about who Jesus is and what he's done in my life.

That the God we're talking about is not just the God of Moses.

It's not just the God who shows up for Jairus and his family and for this woman with the flow of blood, but this is a God who is alive and real today in my life.

He is active, he is powerful, and he wants to share who he is with others through you and me.

That is his plan A for getting the news out.

You realize this?

It's us.

It's us.

And so we have to speak.

We have to share.

We have to testify.

People of God, my prayer for us is that God does whatever he has to do to give us a desperate faith so that we discover again and again and again and again and again the love of Jesus, the presence of Jesus, the power of Jesus for us.

Let's pray.

Lord, we are grateful that you are a God who is with us, that you are active, that you are alive, that you want to show who you are.

Lord, I pray that you would help us to acknowledge our desperation.

Lord, I pray that if we're lying to ourselves, if we're lying to others, if we just be honest about how much we need you.

To know that we do indeed have a friend in you, that we can lay all our burdens, all our cares upon you, that you are with us, that you are the God who will never leave us or forsake us.

And Lord, I pray that your spirit would loosen our tongues like you did on the day of Pentecost, that you would enable us to tell everybody of the goodness of who you are, of how you show up, of how you rescue, of how you save.

Lord, we give you thanks for your great love, for your great power.

We pray this in the mighty name of Jesus.

Amen.