FAITHful:The Story Within a Story

Mark chapter 5, verses 21 through 43, 18 verses. I think we can handle it.

Mark 5:21–43

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 is dying.

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

So Jesus went with him, and a large crowd followed and pressed around him.

Didn't you get that? Okay.

And a woman was there who had been subject to bleeding for 12 years.

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

that 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.

Or this is the word sozo, saved, rescued.

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

And once Jesus realized that power had gone out from him. He turned around in

the crowd and he asked, who touched my clothes?

You see the people crowding against you, the disciples answered,

and yet you can ask who touched me?

Man, what? Some pretty brave disciples questioned Jesus.

But Jesus kept looking around to see who had done it. When the woman,

knowing what had happened to her, came and fell at his feet,

and trembling with fear, she told him the whole truth.

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

Your daughter is dead, they said. Why bother the teacher anymore?

Overhearing what they said, Jesus told them, don't be afraid, just believe.

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

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, and he put them all out, and he took the child's father

and mother and the disciples who were with him, and he went in where the child was.

He took her by the hand, and he said to her, Talitha kum, which means little

girl, I say to you, get up.

Immediately the girl stood up and began to walk around. She was 12 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.

It'll be a minute. I knew that was going to happen.

I'm just a hot mess, friends. Let me ask you a question today.

How much of a hot mess do you think I am? No, just kidding.

Do you believe God can do anything?

Woo! I know that whether you said amen or not, I'm sure that not a person in

this room or watching online would answer that question, no.

But here's a follow-up question for you. Have you ever felt that though God

can do anything, he's probably not going to do something in my current situation or circumstance?

Perhaps a better way to frame that is, I believe he can, but I'm not sure he will.

Again, I have a pretty good idea that that phrase, I believe he can,

but I'm not sure he will. At some point, maybe not always, maybe not today,

but at some point that phrase describes every person in this room.

I believe he can, I'm not sure he will.

And then when you filter that through some of our cultural and religious and philosophical lenses,

like the cultural understanding of our cultural experience with Christianity

that I grew up in and the charismatic church and some even from the word of faith movement.

I'm not a fan of it, but there is beauty in it.

But you filter that idea that I believe he can, but I'm not sure that he will

through all these different lenses. It can even lead to a more deeper and existential question.

Do I have enough faith?

Or does God just play favorites?

Is my level of faith the problem? Is my ability to experience God's faithfulness

dependent upon my ability to believe?

At the heart of this lies a loaded word, trust.

Which is, in essence, synonymous with the word faith.

But it carries less of the spiritual connotation. We can say,

I have faith, but in our heart, we're struggling with trust.

And nonetheless, whether it's over-spiritual or too carnal, it's the heart of

the matter. It boils down to, do I trust God?

Do I trust God enough?

Is God trustworthy? And today, just for a few moments, that's my catchphrase,

Apparently, you can make an entire video from one message of me just saying, this one for a moment,

just for a moment, just for a moment.

Today, I wanted to dive in for just a moment. This moment into what the scriptures

tell us about God's faithfulness,

his trustworthiness, and our faith, and our trust, and how they fit into the

story of his faithfulness that he is telling.

First, we gotta go to God's faithfulness because we can't really answer the

question about our faith unless we answer the question about whether or not God is faithful.

We can't decide whether or not we can trust God unless we understand whether

or not he's trustworthy.

And a few weeks ago, we talked about Ruth.

I referenced what is the most quoted scripture by the scriptures.

And it's Exodus 34, verses six through seven.

This is when Moses has led the children of Israel already out of Egypt,

and they're now in Sinai, they're at Sinai, and he's given them the Ten Commandments.

And while God is speaking to Moses and giving him this beautiful Torah,

these beautiful instructions on how to live in such a way that God can be with

them, here are the people down at the bottom of the mountain,

because it's taken too long.

And at the foot of the mountain, all you see is clouds.

And so they asked Aaron to make them a God.

And it's a long story. It's not the message. And so after all that,

and Moses comes down and he breaks the tablets and he goes back up.

And this is when he's back up and he's speaking to God.

And God is saying, I'm going to make a covenant with you because Moses has said,

I can't, we can't do this unless you go with us.

And so God says, let's make a covenant.

And it says here as, as he passed in front of Moses proclaiming,

this is when he gives him his name.

This is where God self-identifies. And when somebody gives you their name in

the ancient Near East world, in the Hebrew world, the name came with all of the attributes.

It's not just like Josh or Joe or whatever.

Your name signified who you were.

And he says, the Lord or Jehovah, Jehovah, the compassionate and gracious God,

slow to anger, abounding in love and.

Faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands and forgiving wickedness, rebellion, and sin.

And then he talks about his justice, yet he does not leave the guilty unpunished.

He punishes the children and their children for the sin of the parents to the

third and fourth generation.

We're not going to dig into that part today, but here's what he says.

He gives the modifiers, the this is who I am.

I am loyal love has said abounding in has said and faithfulness right talked

about has said but today I want to talk about the second word that he uses,

It's this word called emeth, emet or emeth, which literally means truth at its simplest form.

It can be translated faithfulness or faithful, but at its core,

fundamentally, it means truth.

In fact, another variation of the word and exclamation is where we get the English word amen.

It's in Hebrew exclamation. And I was always told that amen means so be it,

but it doesn't. I mean, it doesn't a roundabout way.

What it means is that's true. So that's the truth.

Inside joke. We used to have a guy who used to yell all the time,

that's the truth. He's actually saying amen.

It's saying that is true. So when we pray and we say amen, we are saying,

God, meet us in your faithfulness.

Come and do what only you can do. And that is the truth.

It certainly means faithful, this word amen. But I think as humans,

sometimes we are limited and we

kind of lose the weight of some of these terms that we use all the time.

Faithful. It means God's not cheating on us. And that's true.

But when we attach this word truth to faithfulness, it becomes intrinsically

linked to something that can never change.

Again, truth can tend to be in our relative understanding something that means

it doesn't lie, which is true.

But truth is more than just that God doesn't. Because truth can be relative.

Because your, what's true, I mean, if you listen to anybody who grew up together,

their truth about an event that happened in their history, it's all different.

But it's true to them. And I'm not here saying we need to valify everyone's

truth, because only one story's true.

My story's true, but the word truth, immense, it's not just,

you know, it's my, it's not a lie.

When we apply it to something absolute like gravity or matter or space and time,

it becomes something so much more than doesn't lie.

It becomes something that cannot change.

God's faithfulness, in other words, his truth, his trustworthiness is more stable than gravity,

more stable than matter, than space, than time, and is eternally unchanging.

God is faithful and true, which is why over and again in the Hebrew Bible,

he is described as the rock. He's stable.

So our God is abounding in loyal love and truth, unchanging, stable faithfulness.

And there's so much that I would love to do a deep dive into the Hebrew Bible.

And I think next week my wife is preaching.

I mean, I know not, I think next week my wife is preaching and she's going to

even take this further and she's going to take us to an Old Testament story.

But today I want to fast track to Jesus and the story that we just told.

And in Jesus, we see the physical, incarnate embodiment of God's amen,

his truth, his trustworthiness, his faithfulness.

I am the way, the truth, that word attached to faith. It means I am unchanging in my faithfulness.

Now we've established God's faithfulness. He's faithful. He's unchanging and is faithful.

But what about our faith? What part does that play in this story that we are living in?

How much does my trust in God matter?

Faithfulness, faith. The verb variation connected to this word is hemet in the

Hebrew, which means to trust in, which means to put your stability in something,

to put your trust in something.

You have decided something is trustworthy, therefore I will trust it,

and I will be faithful to it.

In Greek here, we have the word pistis, which is the Greek equivalent to this

Hebrew word. It simply means to put your trust in.

Now, faith has so much packed into it, so much loaded into that,

and even through the New Testament, contend for the faith.

It's more than just believing. It is a faithful trust that causes my entire

life to be oriented around a way of being in God's story.

So faith, the Greek equivalent pistis, and throughout all the Old and the New

Testament, we see God's faithfulness interacting with humans who trusted or believed.

And then we also see him interacting with people that at times struggled in

their trust and their belief.

And then at other times still, we see God interacting with people who could not trust and believe.

And throughout all of it, God's faithfulness never changed. And there's an element

of both the Hebrew and the Greek words of faithfulness to the thing.

Sometimes when we say faith, it means I will be faithful in my trust,

in the thing that we are putting our trust in.

But here's the good news as we start this story is that God's faithfulness has

never been nor will ever be dependent upon my faithfulness or your faithfulness.

But there's something beautiful that happens something magical that happens

when the two intersect when my trust my faith interacts sex and interacts with

god's faithfulness so let's dig into the story,

that we started with here in Mark's account, it can be found in all three of the synoptic gospels.

That's Matthew, Mark, and Luke. Synoptic, which simply means seen together.

John is a whole different animal, written much later. It does not have this

account. It's kind of a different perspective, the same story.

It's not a contradiction.

But Matthew, Mark, and Luke are three accounts that we're meant to see together.

They have many things similar, most of the same stories.

And all three of them have this story. but we pick up this story in the middle

of a story already in progress.

And in this chapter of the story

already, we've seen that Jesus has just gotten into a boat at one point.

He's just preached to the masses and he's given all these parables,

the parable of the sower.

And then he says, let's get in the boat and go to the other side.

Doesn't say why he just says, Hey, let's go to the other side.

And they get in the boat to cross him in the 12.

And as they're crossing this unimaginable storm, this supernatural storm in

the Sea of Galilee overcomes them.

And as waves are spilling in, Jesus is sleeping in the boat.

And they're all like, oh my God, we're going to die. Jesus, we're going to die. And we know the story.

He gets up and he calms the waves with one word. That story has already happened in this chapter.

And then they cross over to the other side where they immediately meet a demoniac

filled with legions of demons and cutting himself.

And this terrible story. He's forced to live in the cemeteries and separated

and chains can't hold him.

And here Jesus encounters this man. And we know the story. He's delivered as

he asks them, what is your name?

Of course, the demons answer the real legion.

But then by the end of the story, the man has his own name and becomes a first

evangelist of the gospel.

He says he's one of the only ones. Usually he says, don't tell anyone.

He says, go and tell everybody what has happened to you.

And then following that, they get back in the boat because that's the whole

reason Jesus got in the boat.

We preached that message last year about calming the storm, but sometimes we

forget that even though we're in a storm, maybe the storm is there because Jesus is going somewhere.

God is always going somewhere. Jesus is always going somewhere.

Either we're going with him or we're asking him to go with us.

And they go back to the other side. And as they do, it says they're met by a

crowd who are waiting for him.

Let's just jump into that story. We're going to read it piece by piece again.

This is the only scripture we're going to read today.

So I promise we won't be here for two hours, just like one and a half.

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 is dying.

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

so she will be saved, so she will be rescued, and that she will live.

So Jesus went with him, and a large crowd followed and pressed around him.

Let's just take a moment and let's look at the players in this story.

Obviously, we've got Jesus. He kind of can go without being mentioned because

this is all about Jesus. He's the hero of the story.

But then the next players that we see are the crowd waiting for Jesus in their curiosity.

You see the crowd in the scriptures, whenever they mention the crowd,

particularly in Mark's account, and actually most of them, the crowd is symbolizing

the people who were just kind of there out of curiosity.

Curiosity, my friends, is not the same as faith nor trust.

It's like maybe something good can come out of this. Let's see what could possibly happen.

I don't have a lot of faith in it, but it could be really cool to see what might happen.

If you are here today out of curiosity, that's a great place to start. Welcome.

At least it gets you close to Jesus.

The curiosity doesn't really cost us anything and alone will not keep you close to Jesus.

The moment your curiosity is no longer peaked, the no longer you really care

because your curiosity has just kind of been exhausted, there's other things

to experience, the farther away from Jesus you will get day by day by day.

Curiosity is not a bad starting point, but it is not faith and it will not keep you in the story.

Then we have Jairus, the synagogue president, which sounds like a grand title,

but this is a town of at most a few hundred with two or three such offices.

He's not the only one in this small town. It wasn't really that prestigious.

That's not the point, but he is somebody who works within the Jewish structure, religious structure.

And since the time when Jesus moved from Nazareth to Capernaum,

he can't always have been an easy person to have in the village congregation.

He wasn't an easy person to have hanging out because he just kind of disrupted things.

Local experts in Jewish law were upset at some of the things he was doing.

And then there were murmurs around the place that if Herod Hurt found out he

was the one who ruled in the Judea, if he found out about some of these crazy

things he's saying about the kingdom, then we're going to have trouble with him.

And so Jairus, who's part of that system, he might well have felt he could do

without someone like Jesus in town.

At best, he'd probably want to keep a safe distance. I'll just stay part of the crowd.

Let others go after this Jesus. Sooner or later, our curiosity will either prove

that something will come of it or not.

It's better to preserve something like neutrality. Stay in the crowd.

There's no neutrality in Christianity. There's no neutrality in our faith with Jesus.

But here's the thing about this story and about this man.

Until this moment, he would have been part of the crowd.

But now tragedy has struck his family and his 12-year-old daughter,

almost the age when she would be getting married, her whole life in front of her.

She's dying and there's nothing he can do about it. There's nothing the officials can do about it.

There's nothing the religious structure can do about it. there's nothing to do.

And Jairus, like any other father would do, pockets his pride, forgets his fears.

Why worry about controversy or political danger when your daughter's dying and it rushes off to Jesus?

It doesn't just rush to him. It throws himself at his feet, so undignified. What will they whisper?

What will they say about him the next Sabbath? because we know they were.

Christianity, Judaism, none of it is free from the whispers.

I'm gonna preach a message on that in a couple weeks, I think.

The gossip, the witchcraft where we are trying to manipulate but somebody thinks

about somebody else, we all do it, and we know what's going on.

He didn't care what they said.

He needed God. He needed Jesus, and here.

Curiosity meets the reality that nothing else is trustworthy.

That meets his desperation. And sometimes desperation is the seedbed of faith.

And that meets the faithfulness of God.

Jesus says, I'll go with you. Of course, the crowd comes with him.

Then we get to this other part. Verse 25, and a woman was there who had been

subject to bleeding for 12 years.

She had suffered a great deal under the care of many doctors.

Had spent all that she had, yet instead of getting better, she grew worse. She gave everything.

Nothing worked. 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.

At once, Jesus realized that power had gone out from him. He turned around in

the crowd and he asked, who touched my clothes?

You see the people crowding against you? His disciples answered,

and yet you can ask who touched me?

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

And the woman who can see that he's looking for her, knowing what had happened

to her, came and she fell at his feet, trembling with fear.

She told him the whole truth. And he said to her, daughter, your faith has healed you, has saved you.

Go in peace and be freed from your suffering.

Here's the next player in the story. This old woman who has suffered for 12 years was bleeding.

And this is where we get a story within a story.

Because the story and the outer story is about Jairus. And all three,

as I've already said, all three of the synoptic gospels, they lump these two stories together.

It could be coincidence, but I can't imagine that it's not.

I can't imagine that it would be. These writers of the Gospels,

they're not just jouting stuff down.

I think sometimes we think that. It's just historians, the writing.

They are very intentional in how they write all of the books of the Bible.

And Mark does it a lot. He's always lumping these stories together.

And at times, actually, Mark and scholars, they call this a Mark and sandwich.

It's a little tidbit of scholarly-ness for you. and it's where the outer story

adds meaning to the inner and the inner adds depth to the outer.

And so these stories are together for a reason, yet they're two different stories.

And here we're caught in the suspense of a moment where Jairus is like, my daughter's dying.

A moment that will most likely have Jesus coming to a house to find a dead 12-year-old girl.

This is the suspense of this first story. This is an urgent,

you've got to come, she's dying.

And where thoughts of sorrow of what's probably they're going to meet would

mingle also with the threat of impurity, since contact with a dead body is one

of the chief sources of impurity in Jewish law. Jesus is a Jew.

So here he is, it's suspenseful, this first story on this way to what's probably

going to be something that would make him unpurity even go into the room. And here he is.

And then here now, on the other hand, in this story, within the story,

we have this woman who has chronic internal bleeding.

One of the other main causes of impurity was bodily discharge and those who

had them, especially women.

It's not fair, but they bleed more than men.

Her perpetual uncleanness and the consequences that came with it would explain

her fear, fear of the crowds.

Nothing has worked. I've tried everything. I'm still sick. I'm still suffering. I'm still unpure.

People can't come near me.

I'm afraid of the crowds because if I go into the crowds, they will see me.

And if I touch Jesus, they're going to be angry with me.

And even if I get healed, I'll be exposed and everyone will hate me. I'm afraid.

But here's the thing, her perpetual uncleanness and the consequences that kept

her at fear, that kept her to the reality that she can't be healed. Nothing has worked.

She's now come to the conclusion that no one else, nothing else can rescue her.

It's either this or nothing and her faith overcomes her fear her faith overcomes

her shame and it brings her to the faithfulness of god.

You see, in Jesus, God's faithfulness, it comes close to us in our uncleanness, in our shame,

in our pain, in our fear, and our trust in the faithfulness brings us to who has already come to us.

Faith doesn't bring God close. It just turns us towards the one who has already come close.

If I could just touch his clothes, if I could just sneak into the crowds,

I might get seen, but I've got nothing else.

Nothing else can save me.

Nothing else can rescue me. And one of the most remarkable things about this

story is that Jesus knows power has gone from him.

He knows that his faithfulness has intersected with faith. Dude, that's amazing.

And there's something in this story about the intimate nature of faith,

that even when we are afraid, our fear and our trust can exist at the same time.

You see, I was always taught, not always, but we hear this catchphrase,

faith is the opposite of fear.

Well, here we see a woman who's terrified. Even after the healing,

she's terrified. yet her touch drew healing from Jesus.

And there's something so beautiful about the intimate nature of our faith that

even when we're afraid, our fear and our trust can exist at the same time in the same place.

And when they touch the faithfulness of God, even in just reaching for his clothes, something happens.

Your faith has saved you, he says to her.

That was about more than the need. The need just brought her to the moment,

but the faith that brought her connected her to the story of redemption and

healed became something much deeper.

Because now, as she's free from her suffering, she's also now connected to this

story of God's faithfulness in a way that she never had been before.

I love N.T. Wright in his commentary on this.

He says this, and I want to say this to you today, when life crowds in with

all its pressure, there's still room for us to creep up behind Jesus.

If that's all we feel we can do and reach out to touch him in that odd mixture

of fear and faith that characterizes so much Christian discipleship.

If you're here today and maybe you feel like you've come and you're going through

a situation, whether it's in your body, in your family, in your life,

and you feel like, I just don't trust enough.

If you could just reach out just enough to touch his clothing,

his faithfulness, come on, meet you wherever you are.

If you feel like all I can do is creep up, then here in this moment today,

creep up on Jesus and know that all you need is just enough faith to reach and

his faithfulness does the rest.

Here in this story, within a story. And then we have the disciples as the next

character. they're not villains.

They're just people on a journey, trying to figure out what's going on and making their own assumptions.

And when Jesus says, as we saw, who touched my clothes?

What do you mean? Who touched your clothes?

And I think that we're supposed to get a little hint of sarcasm.

Like, it's a little wink there. Like, yeah.

Because they're like, there are people everywhere. Yet you say who touched my clothes?

This is, you know, for us who've maybe been in this a little while,

how many times have I been the voice of skepticism in the story?

Or maybe better, how many times have I been the one who failed to see beyond

what I thought the story was?

I think of Peter, when Jesus is telling his disciples and they're asking them

who he is, and then they say, Peter, you are the Messiah.

And then Jesus begins to immediately tell them the plan that he's going to go

and be arrested, going to be crucified.

But don't worry, I'm going to raise from the dead." And Peter takes him aside

and says, that ain't happening.

That's not the plan. That's not the story.

Jesus' answer is, get behind me, Satan. You are a hindrance to me because you

only see things like a human.

You don't see things the way God can see. I think of the disciples.

I think in this moment and how many times I have been like that.

They were on their way somewhere. They're following Jesus to a moment.

This is the plan. We're going to see another healing. Hopefully,

if not, if she's dead, we'll just get out of there quickly. But we are going somewhere.

And now you're saying, who touched me?

Is Jesus on our journey, or are we on his?

It's a pretty good question to ask yourself, maybe every morning you wake up.

Am I trying to bring Jesus onto my journey, or has he invited me on his?

Am I asking him to be a main character in my story, or have I been folded into his?

How many times have we missed a moment of seeing God's faithfulness because

we failed to see beyond our own story.

How many times is an interruption to my story, my faith, my prayers,

been something that I just saw as an interruption rather than a moment of deep

meaning as God is taking me, as Jesus is taking me on his journey.

Because when I'm on his journey, every moment, when I am in his story of truth,

When I am in his story of faithfulness, that means every moment of my life can

become a moment of meaning and power.

That's just a little side note, but I think important.

And then it goes on to say, while Jesus was still speaking, some people came

from the house of Jairus, the synagogue leader.

Your daughter is dead, they said. Why bother the teacher anymore?

Overhearing what they said, Jesus told them, don't be afraid, just believe.

Are now reminded that the other story is still in progress.

We had this story within the story, but I can only imagine this desperate father

as the story pauses, his journey pauses.

And now I can only imagine him bouncing back and forth on the balls of his feet.

Like, come on, Jesus, what do you mean? Who touched her clothes?

He waits for him and he's now talking to an unclean woman.

I could easily place myself in his shoes. Perhaps you can as well. Feel the fear mounting.

Feel the anxiety overwhelming. I came to you, and now come on, we are on a timeline.

Unlike the disciples who saw this as a distraction, for this father is more than a distraction.

It's a delay that could mean life or death.

Why are you not hurrying? Why is this taking so long? and then right on cue,

as the suspense heightens, messengers come to tell Jairus, your daughter is dead.

You shouldn't bother Jesus any longer.

I think for us as followers of Jesus, perhaps constantly trying to make sure

we have enough faith to access his faithfulness.

And we've asked and we feel like God's doing something, but then everything

seems to stop and it stalls out.

And we're waiting and we're waiting.

And when will I see your faithfulness in this situation, God?

Why is it taking so long? And for us, the voice of reason begins to come in

and whisper into our ears, it's too late. Why bother?

As the fear reaches its crescendo in our own lives, it's too late.

Why are you still believing for this?

Why are you still expecting God to do anything in this situation?

He hasn't done it yet. it's too late.

Stop bothering. Just go back to being a faithful member of the crowd.

Jesus, who has always had an inside track to the voices in our head,

has always had an inside track to the voices in our lives, who always overhears

our doubts, is never moved by that.

And he gently replies to Jairus, don't be afraid, just trust me.

If you're here today and you feel like you're having that inner dialogue and

you feel like even that brings its own source of guilt because doubt is a sin,

because we've misread scriptures like in James that if you ask God for anything,

but if you doubt, you're a double-minded man and don't expect anything from

God. That's not what it means. It's talking about loyalty.

If you ask God for something, but your loyalty is not to him,

it's like, I'm gonna ask whoever in the universe can answer this.

That's double-mindedness.

That's not a lack of trust. That's

not like, I doubt it a little bit and I promise you, Jesus overhears.

He knows your doubts and he's never been afraid of them.

And you can hear him whispering you today, even as you say, it's probably impossible.

You just haven't heard me, or you don't care.

Don't be afraid. Just trust me. I can imagine that telling Jairus not to be

afraid in this moment, telling him just to believe in that setting,

must have sounded like telling someone to paddle across the Pacific Ocean in a canoe.

Just don't be afraid. or see equivalent of your wife telling you,

just chill out or your husband, just relax.

Don't be afraid. But hear Jesus in this story all throughout his earthly ministry.

And today with us, his followers is ever moving us from fear to trust.

And fear has never been the hindrance to God's faithfulness.

Doubt has never been and is not the hindrance to God's faithfulness. but stopping.

Our fear, stopping in our doubt,

is the only hindrance to seeing God's faithfulness realized in our lives.

It doesn't stop His faithfulness. But if we stop moving, if He had stopped moving

towards the death of His daughter in His doubt, reasoning, He never would have made it.

God still would have been faithful. Jesus still would have been faithful.

He just wouldn't have seen it because he would have failed to come to the intersection.

And it goes on to say, 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, the synagogue leader,

Jesus saw a commotion with people crying and wailing loudly.

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

The child is not dead, but asleep.

But they laughed at him and he put them all out. And he took the child's father

and the mother and the disciples who were with him, and he went in where the

child was, six people in a room.

He took her by the hand, and he said to her, Talitha, kum, which is Aramaic

for little girl, I say to you, get up.

Immediately the girl stood up and began to walk around. She was 12 years old,

and at this they were completely astonished.

He gave strict orders not to let anyone know about this and then told them to

give her something to eat.

In his fear, in his doubt, numb with pain.

Finds just enough trust, just enough faith to take him just a few more feet,

take him a little bit farther.

And we know that he's with him. It says he only, Jesus only took Peter,

James, and John, but his father and mother, the father and mother of the child

are in the room. So he's with him.

He's found just enough faith. We know he's numb. We know he's scared.

We know he's overwhelmed by sadness, but he had just enough.

I'll walk with you to the end.

And as they draw closer, The worst is confirmed as they hear the customary ritual

of grief as professional mourners, probably accompanied by music.

Began the process of accepting and making the space to mourn.

Let's just accept it. We're now going to just mourn. And which is a process

in grief for this, but we're here in this story. Jesus is like, what are you doing?

And you know, we have plenty of outside and internal voices that can be louder

at times in our faith, working to convince us to just let it go, let it die.

But as this story tells us, Jesus was having nothing to do with it. She's not dead.

She's just sleeping. Again, another theme that we could dig into,

this phrase even, but we don't have time.

And the voices begin to rise to mock him, and they laugh as they mock us as

we put our faith in Jesus.

But then the crowd is left behind.

The mockers are left in the other room, and six people go into this little room.

Faith, though perhaps small and quiet.

Perhaps full of doubt, yet still enough to walk in the room.

It enters the room with the faithfulness of God into this place of death,

into this place of impossibility.

And this time, we're in the middle of the story.

It's a woman reaching with just enough faith to reach. Here,

as this man has had just enough faith to go in with Jesus, it's Jesus who does the reaching.

And as he reaches, he gives the command to Letha, Koum, little girl, get up.

This is one of the only times the original spoken language is recorded.

Why do they record? Why does Mark, which many believe is Peter's account,

why is it so important for him to put this Aramaic phrase in there rather than

just translate it into Greek? Little girl, get up.

Mount T. Wright says this, the best answer is probably that the scene and the

crucial words made such a deep impression on Peter and the others,

that whenever they told the story afterwards,

even in Greek to non-Jewish audiences, they kept the crucial words as they were.

It wasn't a magic formula. It wasn't a kind of abracadabra. I've seen people

take scriptures like this and they go to a song.

I got to say in Aramaic, it wasn't abracadabra.

It's just what he spoke.

They were the ordinary words you might use to wake up a sleeping child.

But part of this point of the gospel story and of the whole section of Mark

is precisely that the life-giving power of God is breaking into and working

through the ordinary details of life.

Our ordinary, imperfect trust,

imperfect faith, when it meets the extraordinary, unchanging faithfulness of

God at that intersection is the place where God's life,

where the kingdom is breaking in through our ordinariness that a word as it

did in this story the story within a story in the middle of a story.

Back to our original question. Was it the faith of the woman?

Was it the faith of the Father? Or was it the faithfulness of God?

Clearly, it was Jesus' power. Clearly, it was God's faithfulness.

Yet he says, your faith has rescued you.

Yet he says, just believe.

So the answer must be that faith, though itself powerless, is the channel through

which Jesus' power can work.

But our faith becomes the intersection of his faithfulness.

Did they have more faith than us? Clearly, they did not.

And clearly in scriptures, as it is in this story, the largeness of belief has

never had anything to do with the faithfulness of God.

In fact, I've said this before, But every time Jesus said, ye of little faith,

his faithfulness still did the miracle.

The bigger story, though, for us to take away is, it's not about the outcomes.

The outcomes are important, but the outcomes in the stories and in the gospels,

there was only three people Jesus raised from the dead.

I'm sure other little girls died. the bigger

story as these were

signposts pointing to was that God

through Jesus was causing the life of the kingdom to burst into the world to

remake it to redeem it to heal it to heal much deeper than sickness to bring

back to life more than just a few chosen people but all who put their trust in Him,

all who choose to turn to His faithfulness.

Do we take away? Do we trust God? I'm here to tell you we can trust him,

and we could, and we should believe for the impossible in our lives.

Though I believe these stories are signposts where Jesus is pointing us to what

the kingdom was coming to do, that he was bringing the kingdom,

it doesn't take away from the reality that we should still be the kind of people

that believe that the God, the same God we sang this song Friday,

the same Jesus that was walking those streets, the same Jesus that said,

Talitha Koum, the same Jesus that said, be still to the storms,

the same Jesus that said, don't be afraid, believe, is the same Jesus that goes before us now.

The same spirit that was in him is in us.

So I believe that even though these stories are pointing to something bigger,

that we should be people who believe that God can do anything,

that we should be able to and should believe for the impossible in our lives.

And I think that we have learned, or we do learn to expect too little.

Maybe it's because we think it requires a level of faith that we don't have

to believe for things that big.

Like I'm not praying over a dead body because I don't have that kind of faith.

When the scripture is time, I'm not telling you to go pray over a dead body.

I've been a part of those kinds of things and they're hard to be a part of.

Yet I had some friends, his brother died healthier than me, just a year older

died of a heart attack in the shower two little kids,

and that funeral leading up to that funeral they had him embalmed immediately

brought to the church and they were praying for him to come back,

and I went to that funeral I'm like what are we going to see but you know what

I didn't expect to see him get up and he didn't he didn't get up.

Friends who prayed over him, they believed he would.

And I said, man, to have that kind of trust, you might say, but he didn't. But you know what?

They went away from that, still praising God, saying he didn't answer this,

but I still believe he's the same God that could do it.

I think we trust him. Expect too little. I think we should expect more. Pray bigger.

Live bigger. And then with that, not let our trust live only in outcomes.

Pray big and hold the outcomes loosely and our faith tightly.

Pray for the outcomes, but live

in the reality that God's faithfulness is telling a story much bigger.

And as we keep trusting, as we keep believing, as we keep moving,

realizing that every moment in following Jesus becomes filled with meaning and

faithfulness and opportunities to see God do something we've never seen.

Following Jesus with this kind of trust, even our pain gets redeemed.

Our faith becomes the catalyst for others' healings.