The Woman with the Issue(s)

John, I want to get into the message today because I got a lot to share and I'm eager to share it with you.

We started a collection of talks last week that we picked on the theme Interrupted, and we're working out of Mark chapter 5 and talking about a season or really kind of a day where Jesus is interrupted a few different times and talking about what do we do with life interruptions.

Mark 5 · chapter mention

Last week we started really talking about Jesus' plan in Mark 5.

He was trying to really go around the perimeter of the Sea of Galilee and minister to people there.

So he used the Sea of Galilee as his mode of transportation.

Most likely why one of the reasons why he created an alliance with fishermen because they had the resources and the skills to be able to help him to uh you know accomplish his plan.

So he would go back and forth to Gentile areas and then go to Jewish areas and minister to people.

At the beginning of Mark chapter 5, uh Jesus basically cast a demon, several demons, out of a man uh in a Gentile region.

Mark 5 · chapter mention

And so the man's now been set free.

And he's so fired up about it.

He wants to be Jesus' best friend and he wants to travel with him and help him and serve him.

And Jesus says, you know what?

The best thing you can do is go home.

Go home to your family, go home to your friends and your neighbors, and be a blessing to them.

You've been set free, and they have things they need to be set free from.

So allow God to use you and your story and all that's happening with you to help them as well.

And so uh that's the beginning.

Jesus gets on the boat, goes across the Sea of Galilee, and when he gets out, there's a large crowd of people who were gathering because they knew Jesus was a problem solver and they all had problems they wanted to bring to him.

And so uh a man named Jairus runs to the front of the line, bows low before Jesus, and says, Jesus, I have the worst problem I can think of.

My little girl, my daughter, is on her deathbed and I need your help.

And so Jesus immediately squares away and starts to walk toward Jairus' house.

And while they're on their way, and certainly in a time-sensitive situation, uh Jesus is interrupted once again in verse 25.

Says a woman in the crowd had suffered for 12 years with constant bleeding, and she had suffered a great deal from many doctors, and over the years she had spent everything she had to pay them, but she had gotten no better.

In fact, she had gotten worse.

She had heard about Jesus, so she came up behind him through the crowd and touched his robe.

For she thought to herself, If I can just touch his robe, I will be healed.

Immediately the bleeding stopped, and she could feel in her body that she had been healed of her terrible condition.

Jesus realized at once that healing power had gone out from him, so he turned around in the crowd and asked, Who touched my robe?

His disciples said to him, Look at this crowd pressing around you.

How can you ask who touched me?

But he kept on looking around to see who had done it.

Then the frightened woman, trembling at the realization of what had happened to her, came and fell to her knees in front of him and told him what she had done.

And he said to her, Daughter, your faith has made you well.

Go in peace.

Your suffering is over.

Um, I consider myself to be a lightweight psychology enthusiast.

Okay?

What I mean by that is I'm an amateur, I don't have any licenses, I don't have any degrees, but I do spend a lot of time studying psychology.

I'm curious about it for a few reasons.

One, I just find it fascinating to understand how the brain works, how people think, why they think the way they do, what motivates them, what drives them, what they're afraid of.

I'm really interested in different personality types and the way people are wired.

And I find it useful on a personal level because um I want to know my own liabilities.

I want to know the liabilities connected to my strengths.

I want to know uh the areas where I could go off the rails or I could easily be lured into a mistake and end up with regret that I don't want to have.

So I'm always looking for blind spots and I'm looking for that through greater understanding.

Uh I think hopefully it will personally make me a better man, but I hope it will make me a better husband.

I hope it'll make me a better father, a better leader, a better pastor, and more equipped to serve the people who God has put in front of me.

Um I was reading recently, I was studying about narcissistic personality disorder recently.

And I find the more I study psychology, the more I understand some of these things, it causes you to sit in certain types of tension because there are things on the outside that might look the same, and you got to try to figure out what it is.

Another one example would be how do you know the difference between a narcissistic leader and someone who just has a really strong self-esteem?

Somebody who's really confident.

You know, confidence is attractive, and it's one of those things, by the way, that we try to infuse into our children or the people we love.

You grab your kid by the shoulder before school and you say, You listen, you you better bolster your self-esteem, square your shoulder, go in.

Don't let anybody tell you you're not as good as them.

Don't you let anybody tear you down.

Don't you shrink yourself small to make room for small people.

All right, you you be who God's called you to be.

Okay, you're the head, not the tail.

Okay, we give them all this pep talk and all this stuff, but what's the difference between self-esteem and what one of the traits of a narcissist is, is a grand uh a grandiosity.

Okay, self-aggrandizement.

Often they have big ideas and big visions, and they're gonna be a transcendent leader.

Yet they see themselves as superior, they see themselves as better, which is why they're often very entitled.

Okay, they take things and they expect things and all of this.

And so it can be hard to know because, yeah, confidence is an attractive quality, and we do want to have it, but we also don't want to have small ideas.

There's nothing wrong with big ideas.

You should have big ideas, but again, oftentimes the narcissists they see themselves as better.

When do you cross the line and how does that work?

And I study this stuff because I want to make sure I don't become that, and I also want to make sure I don't follow somebody who is that, because narcissistic leaders often, with their grandiose ideas and their puffed-out chest, get people to follow, and yet they are dangerous.

Dangerous.

And so we've got to be able to sort of see this and be able to discern.

Um by the way, this whole narcissist thing is not new, and it's one of the reasons why Jesus was misunderstood.

You want to talk about grandiosity.

Jesus shows up and he says, I am the way.

Not I know the way.

I am the way.

I am the truth, I am the life.

No one comes to the Father except through me.

Pretty grandiose.

Jesus came and they said, Show us the Father, we'll be satisfied.

He said, If you've seen me, you've seen the Father.

Claiming to be deity.

Jesus, who showed up and blew up thousands of years of law, thousands of years of divine, supernatural, God-given covenant, and brought in a new covenant.

Hebrews says he made the old covenant obsolete.

I'm here to take everything that you and your parents and your grandparents and all their parents, all they thought was right, I'm changing it.

Grandiosity.

And so, to many, by the way, he wasn't the first one to try to do this.

And so people just saw him as another, another narcissistic revolutionary who would just fizzle out once he just kept taking from the people, and people got sick of it.

Once he got power, absolute power corrupts absolutely.

So once he gets it, he'll just crumble like everybody else.

The difference in Jesus wasn't that he had small ideas and it wasn't that he had a poor self-esteem, and it wasn't any of that.

It was actually what we one of the key traits of a narcissist is that they lack empathy.

They don't care about the people around them.

You're only as good to me as you are good to me.

If you can help me, okay, if I can step on you to get a little bit higher, I'll do it.

But if not, I'll cut you.

I don't care if you're my mom, I don't care if you're my I'll I'll step on, I'll choke anybody, I'll I'll do anything to get to where I need to go.

They lack empathy.

They don't know or care about the feelings of the people around them.

And so they'll kill to get ahead in one way or another, whether it's literal or figurative.

What we see of Jesus, when you see his deepest motivation, it was that he didn't want to kill anybody or hurt anybody.

He actually came to become a sacrificial lamb.

He gave up his power and his divine rights and made himself obedient to God and ultimately took on the worst part of us to give the best part of God, to sacrifice himself.

But we see it most profoundly in his interactions, often with people who had been disenfranchised, people who were easy to step on, and yet Jesus stopped and didn't just highlight them.

He wasn't looking for a photo op.

He understood them.

He dug deep to empathize and to get them and then to change things that ultimately would cost him himself.

It this is beautifully illustrated in Jesus and his interaction here in Mark 5 with the woman with the issue of blood.

It says in verse 25 that uh the woman in the crowd had suffered for 12 years with constant bleeding.

She suffered.

Um let me take a little bit to unpack what that meant to suffer with bleeding.

Okay, what it's talking about is a constant 12-year menstruation.

Okay, now I'm not going to do damage to Mother's Day by standing up here as a man and even attempting to mansplain what a 12-year menstruation might result in, or what that suffering might be like.

So I'm gonna ask anyone who's ever had the issue of blood to imagine for a moment 12 years and it didn't stop.

And if you can just testify today that that would be horrible suffering, can I get a good hearty amen?

Enough said.

Now, to understand what, beyond the physical suffering, what that included was a social suffering that I'm gonna try to explain to you.

In Leviticus chapter 15, actually, back it up.

Leviticus 15 · chapter mention

Leviticus chapter 14, it talks starts to talk about ceremonial law as it relates to not passing around pathogens or bacteria and good hygiene.

Leviticus 14 · chapter mention

So in chapter 14 of Leviticus, it talks about leprosy.

If you have a skin issue where things are oozing and pussing and all of this, this is the type of social distancing you should do.

This is the type of uh cleansing, and that person will be considered ceremonially unclean, so you don't touch them or you are ceremonially unclean.

And so we have to contain this because we don't want to pass this throughout the whole nation.

It moves into chapter 15 to uh talking about the reproductive organs and you know, different essentially emissions or things that come out of those organs.

I'm trying to be as uh, you know, whatever, as kind as I can be without becoming crass.

But long story short, think about human uh I shouldn't have said it like that.

Um uh okay.

Read Leviticus 15 on your own time and your devotion on Monday.

But what I'm telling you is essentially they were talking about male and female reproductive organs, and if there are normal emissions, this is what you do to be to be clean, but there is a period of being ceremonially unclean.

Then it talks about abnormal emissions, which clearly is talking about diseases, which we really don't want to pass around.

So that means here's what that sort of social distancing looks like.

What it gets down to is both male and female, whenever there are these emissions, you are considered ceremonially unclean, so you're not to be touched, or that person is as well.

If you were to ride on a donkey and sit on a saddle, that saddle is ceremonially unclean.

If you were to sit on uh a couch, that couch is ceremonially unclean.

So there's a process of cleansing both the person and the thing, and so we're not supposed to touch and pass.

That's Leviticus 15.

The problem is normally in a normal cycle, in a normal person, there's a little season of this, a you know, six, seven-day season, where that happens and then you move on and you get back to life.

Which, by the way, for whatever it's worth, ladies, with the whole ceremonially unclean thing, yes, you had social distancing, but for that period of time you didn't have to do any housework or any child care.

For whatever it's worth.

Some of you are like, eh, it ain't so bad, you know.

I mean, you know, I'll go ahead and do seven days, you know, ain't no big deal, okay.

I be by myself, okay, it's not all bad.

Um, but that's how it worked.

And and so uh in a normal cycle, it created a season and a healthy, you know, cycle.

But when you have 12 years of this, 12 years, the spirit of the law was hygiene, but what it created now was an unclean woman.

You are unclean.

And the social ramifications started with your most intimate relationship, your husband.

Okay, so here's how they made law.

You had the Torah, which is 613 laws, but then the nation had a Sanhedrin, which was pretty much exactly the same, very similar to our Supreme Court.

So, so the Sanhedrin would create laws in the spirit of the Torah that were additional.

So, what they one of the issues they had was okay, if you have a woman who's bleeding, she this wasn't the first woman to have an issue of blood that was extended, what do you do with her?

What about her marriage?

Because within at that time, when people get married, it wasn't necessarily romance or we're crazy in love with each other, it was a bit of an arrangement.

And so a man often looked at a woman to her utility was uh her ability to reproduce, and then of course, the the uh you know the sexual gratification and the pleasure.

But in this particular situation, the issue was compounding because not only you have a woman who has an issue of blood, she's not able to reproduce, and number two, uh you're you weren't able to have sex with her within the old covenant while she was menstruating, but the third is her medical bills are now racking up.

The way that marriage worked is everyone had a prenuptial agreement, and you had, if you married a virgin, you your uh divorce prenup was she would receive 200 dinar.

If she wasn't a virgin, it was a hundred dinar.

So essentially, to divorce her, you got to give her some money.

Certainly not half, but you would give her some money.

It was actually not a ton of money.

So, what men would do in that day if their wife particularly had this issue, by the way, the only loophole was if a woman was bedridden.

If she was bedridden, couldn't get out of bed, you couldn't divorce her that easy.

But if she wasn't bedridden, like this woman who was powerful enough to fight through a crowd, you could do it.

So for men, it simply turned into a math problem.

Okay, she can't give me kids, she can't give me pleasure, and she's costing me a lot of money.

Is she costing me more than the prenup?

If it's more than the prenup, you go your way, I'll go mine, and move on.

So this woman, okay, if she was married, is on her own, and the money that she takes to go try to buy a solution comes out of her prenup.

So she loses that.

Not just her husband, she's not able to live in the in her house.

She's not able to go to her synagogue.

The synagogues, much like the law were slanted towards men, and so a woman uh couldn't go into every part of the synagogue.

There was the women's court, but now she's out of that too.

You can't go in there and make the you know the stuff in the synagogue unclean, and you can't make the people unclean, so you've now lost your synagogue.

You've also lost your friends because you go sit on their couch, it's now unclean.

So I can't sit on my friend's couch, I can't go to the synagogue, and I've lost my husband stuck 12 years.

There's some peculiar things about this miracle that doesn't show up anywhere else in Scripture, and I don't necessarily have the answer for you, but I think it's worth noting.

This is the one place in Jesus' life in the gospels that he heals, we'll say passively or involuntarily.

In other words, he, you know, the man who's lowered through the through the the roof, you know, and he looks at him and he heals him, or you know, he stands there one by one and meets need.

This is the only time that we have in scripture Jesus healed somebody and he found out at the same time they did.

He knew after.

He's like, whoa, whoa, whoa, what just happened?

You know, it wasn't he didn't choose.

The other thing is when they say, What's up, what are you talking about?

Everybody's touching you.

He says, Well, I felt the power go out of me.

That also was an anomaly.

Jesus never, any other time, there's no indication in scripture that when he was doing miracles, surges of energy were coming out of him.

It wasn't like he was feeding the 5,000.

He's like, you know, 498.

Hold on a second.

I got okay, healing people.

There's there's nothing in scripture that that that describes that.

So there's something here, okay?

And I want to be careful not to get into all kinds of conjecture and extra biblical assumptions.

I don't know, but in some way there was something that was so powerful about this moment, somewhere between God the Father and God the Son, that he has this moment that this is something to stop and make a big deal out of.

We know it was a big deal because he stopped and allowed himself to be interrupted from a really, really intense situation, from a high priority to go help Jairus' little girl, and yet it was a big enough deal to stop.

What was the big deal?

Well, I've talked about this before, but some things are worth repeating.

One of the things that was that was new and was really introduced through Jesus.

It wasn't that it started to happen at Jesus, but Jesus made people aware of it.

It was revealed uh in a greater way through Jesus, was a dimension of God.

The Old Testament, the Old Covenant greatly showed two dimensions of God.

One being that He was He is a powerful king.

They knew that as a nation.

They knew of God's power and his ability to deliver them, to save them from captivity, to light a sacrifice from heaven, to do whatever he wanted to do.

He could part the Red Sea.

They knew of his power.

Second, they knew of his justice, which is why they were so infatuated and in love with the law and law and law law law.

They knew of his justice.

What they didn't know of and they didn't fully understand, and was really revealed through Jesus, was God as a loving father.

It's almost never mentioned in the Old Testament, 39 books, barely talked about, and yet in the New Testament, hundreds of times Jesus says it just in the Gospels, calling God Abba.

But don't miss this.

This story of Jesus and this woman with issue of blood is the only place documented in the Gospels where Jesus calls a woman a daughter, a title, an identity he reserved only for her.

He didn't say to anybody else.

He was doing something significant because what he was doing, what he was doing in that moment was what he really came to do.

To help people to see through the lens of God, to understand the heart of God that He's not just, he's not only just and He's not only powerful, but He is loving as a Father.

And so Jesus, in His deity, in His oneness with the Father, looks at this woman and calls her daughter.

He could have just winked at her and kept walking.

But he stopped and he made a scene out of it.

He stepped away from another really important duty to be interrupted into this duty to make sure that she knew and to make sure not just she knew, but that everybody knew that she was a daughter.

That she was a daughter.

Now, here's what's really powerful.

According to the law and according to the psyche of the day, for an unclean person, a ceremonially unclean person to touch someone made them unclean as well.

And yet, when this woman touches Jesus, she does not make him unclean, but he makes her whole.

Jesus made a habit of touching unclean people.

I mentioned lepers.

What do you do with what did they do with lepers in that day?

They took lepers with all of their seeping pores and all of their fear around the passing of pathogens and took them and put them in a colony.

We're gonna take you and put you out here, okay?

And and nobody, you don't go there because you don't want to catch what they've got.

And yet Jesus barges right into the leper colony and starts touching these people, he starts healing them.

Why?

Because lepers don't make Jesus unclean, he makes them whole.

So he touches a woman who's ceremonially unclean with her blood.

He touches dead bodies.

To touch a dead body made you ceremonially unclean, except Jesus is sending a message to the bodies, to the lepers, to the woman with the issue of blood, and to everybody else who has an issue of any kind of being unclean and says, When you touch me, you don't make me unclean.

I make you whole.

I make you whole.

You see, what Jesus is introducing is the love of God.

And so this is this is what happens, by the way, when we care more about law and perimeters and cleanliness than we do about love, which is frankly kind of messy.

If you create borders and clean lines and expect love to fit into that, it ain't gonna work.

It doesn't happen.

If you've ever really loved somebody, you've ever really loved somebody, really been loved by somebody, you know it's kind of messy.

It's kind of dirty.

You you can have cleanliness, you can have clean, you can have love, you can't have both.

Love is messy, love is difficult, love is tough.

And so Jesus shows up to make sure when she touches him that she is whole and that he's not afraid of her mess, he's not afraid of her issue.

We talk about her suffering here and and we talk about what she tried to do.

You know, the Bible says she spent all of her prenup on trying to be delivered.

And I went and studied this because uh I wanted to understand this woman a little bit better.

And and so um I I I actually was studying uh Adam Clark, who's one of the great theologians, he wrote a com uh commentary, I read a few different commentaries to try to find historical documentation of what sort of remedies you would give a woman with an issue of blood.

Okay, what this would look like.

And what I'm gonna read you, these are these are historically documented, I'm not making these up.

But you get this woman, imagine you're her, you you're desperate.

I've got to fix this.

If I don't get this domino down, the rest of them don't matter.

I've got to do this, and and so this is what she she did.

Uh these types of things for remedies.

There's 11 different ones that are outlined in the Talmud.

Um, okay, here we go.

Uh take gum of Alexandria, which is tree sap, of alum, herb, and crocus hortensis, which is a flower, and the weight of Zuzi, which is a metric of weight, and let them be bruised together in pestilent mortar and grind them up and given in wine to a woman that hath an issue of blood.

But if this should fail, take of Persian onions, nine logs, and boil them in wine, and give it to her, and say, Arise from thy flux.

And if she doesn't snap out of it, if this should fail, set her in a place where two ways meet.

In other words, a road intersection, and let her hold a cup of wine in her hand, and let somebody come behind her and affright her and say, Arise from thy flux.

If that would happen to not work, take a handful of cumin and a handful of crocus and a handful of fenu Greek, which is another herb, and let these be boiled and give her to drink, and say, Arise from thy flux, just snap out of it.

If perchance this would fail, dig seven ditches.

I'm not making, you guys think I'm making this up, but historically documented.

Dig seven ditches and burn in them some cuttings of vines not yet circumcised, so vines not quite four years old, and let her take in her hand a cup of wine.

Okay, they keep giving this lady wine.

I mean, you're adding, no wonder she got worse, right?

I mean, you're talking now that we got issues of blood and alcoholism, and it's just getting worse.

And let her be led from this trench and set down over that, and then let her be removed from that, and then set down over another.

And in each removal, say unto her, Arise from thy flux.

Snap out of it, lady.

If that wouldn't work, then they just keep going.

And here's what I'm gonna tell you it goes downhill from there.

At one point, they've got her carrying around an ostrich egg in a linen bag.

I'm not making this up.

And then from there, it gets okay, like you can go online, look it up on your own time.

If I was to start doing it, it would be in very bad taste on Mother's Day.

It would suck the air out of this room.

But these are the type of things that this woman was then told to do.

I tell you this to say, first of all, if we're thinking of personal application, be careful how much potion you give people.

Be careful how many arise from thy flux, because this lady had been probably heard her fair share of arise from thy flux for 12 years and being told to snap out of it, and why can't I just snap out of it?

And this potion didn't work, and that potion didn't work, except probably the most amazing thing about this whole thing is this woman still had enough faith and hope to fight through a crowd to touch Jesus.

That's amazing, frankly, mind-boggling, almost unbelievable.

How do you, after having been kicked out of the synagogue, kicked out of your own home, divorced and given a little bit of money, running through one potion after another, one person after another who says, I think this one's gonna work.

You've been taken up out of trenches, you've been scared at intersections, you you've had all of this stuff, that you still have hope enough, even if it's a little flame.

I don't want to be on this lady's team.

I want this lady on my team.

Who is this woman that that that maintains the courage and the hope to say, I'm going to try again.

I'm not going to lie here and get mad, and I'm not going to lie here and get weak, and I'm not going to quit.

That I've heard something about this Jesus, and I'm going to fight my way through it.

I'm going to, yeah, I'm going to have to fake it till I make it a little bit.

And and man, like, think about this.

Everybody's touching Jesus, but not everybody's getting healed passively.

Not everybody's, you know, Jesus isn't having all that.

There's something about this lady.

And Jesus, notice, he acknowledges this.

He hunts for her through the crowd.

And he calls her daughter.

And then he says to her, look what he says next.

He says, daughter, daughter, your faith, your faith has healed you.

Jesus had a certain kind of, I don't know, I don't know what to call it.

He he had a certain receptivity or a soft spot or he was eager to collaborate with people who maintained a humility and an openness and a hope and a faith and a trust and a belief.

Even if, like this lady, it was somewhat convoluted, probably with some superstition and probably with some negative emotions and feelings, and yet in some way there was a glimmer, a mustard seed of faith.

And he said, I'll help you.

I'll respond to that.

It's one of the things, if you really, really look at Jesus, if you study him within the gospels, you see at times different dimensions of his personality come out.

There are times he's almost a bit combative, or he's unnecessarily vague.

Somebody'll ask him a question, he could totally answer it and he'll kind of answer it with a question, or he'll sort of leave it vague.

And and Jesus had this really amazing, miraculous ability to have the insight to know the difference between a sheep and a wolf.

And he knew he knew that he could find sheep in every single sector.

Like he certainly found this.

Like this woman, by the way, even though she was down and out, you can, you know, you do know you can be a down and out wolf.

Hurt people, hurt people, and you can come out clawing and biting and hard-hearted and with a chip on your shoulder and be quite destructive.

And yet there was something within her that was still pliable and was still open and was receptive and had hope.

And so Jesus saw something within that.

It was it was not just the down and out people.

Jesus found sheep among tax collectors.

Jesus found sheep among Pharisees, around some of the religious oppressors and some of the legalists.

In fact, John 3, which is some of the great gems in all of Scripture.

Imagine the Bible without John 3.

I don't want to.

It's amazing.

Some of those great gems came like Jesus giving nuggets to a Pharisee who is a sheep, not a wolf.

And when you bring whatever you've been through, having the strength and the toughness and the resilience and the willingness, even if you can barely get there, even if it's just all you got to be able to come to the feet of Jesus.

By the way, this is what both the woman with the issue of blood and gyrus have in common.

They went to Jesus' feet.

They went humbly to him.

And it says actually, when he found her, she was trembling.

She was trembling.

Don't take the trembling as weakness, because this is a tough lady.

It's a tough, takes a lot of toughness, takes a lot of toughness.

And Jesus says to her, unmistakably, your faith healed you.

Well, what about his power?

Well, of course, but he wanted her to know, he wanted her to know that she could join her faith with his power anytime.

He wasn't wearing a magic robe.

And he wanted her to understand that had she hardened her heart and stayed in her house, the miracle wouldn't happen.

That there was a there was an attitude of her heart and her spirit that put her in a position for healing.

And like we're going to talk about next week, she was going to need more healings than just this one.

Because Jesus said to her, Go, your suffering is done.

But he was talking about the 12-year-old in her body.

There was a lot of other stuff that was attached to that issue and suffering.

That she was going to have to find more healing over time.

And Jesus said, Don't mistake it.

You need to understand, this is attached to your faith and your attitude.

You had a choice and you chose this, which led to a healing that would not have happened if I just walked through town and you stayed on the perimeter.

A few quick observations, and then we'll get out of here.

I think it's worth noting that neither Jesus nor the woman with the issue of blood denied that there was an issue.

I think at some point you have to admit your issue.

And I do think there's something about sometimes when you have an issue to deny it, especially when you've been hurt on every front.

And the spirit of the law was to be sanitary, yet you have been now labeled unclean.

You could see a woman in that position going, you know what, forget this whole system.

Yeah, I'm gonna bleed on everything.

Yeah, you heard me.

I said it.

I'm gonna bleed on everything.

I'm gonna go in your synagogue, I'm gonna bleed.

I'm gonna bleed on your couch, I'm gonna bleed on your saddle, and I'm gonna go blood.

I'm gonna go to my ex-husband, I'm gonna bleed all over the porch, and I'm gonna bleed.

Yeah, that's right.

Hey, no, no, you ain't fixing him.

I don't wanna be fixed, I wanna bleed, all right?

You don't like my blood?

She didn't deny there was an issue.

And Jesus didn't deny there was an issue, and he healed her of her issue, and then she was able to move forward, and he included her, he brought her back, and and I think, ooh, two things I I want us to do off of this.

We go, what okay, Greg, cool, great story.

What does this have to do with my life?

I think there's two big things.

One is to understand the spirit of the law, to understand not only God is powerful king and just judge, but God is loving father, and to go, what is your role in the world?

Like you look at Jesus, how he takes this woman who is seen as unclean, he stops the whole thing and he brings he's bringing her back.

He wants to bring her back, he wants her back in the synagogue, he wants her back in society, he wants her, okay, he's re-establishing her.

And I think if you're in a position of power, you know, I do think there's been a tendency in our world at times to take things we don't understand or we perceive to be unclean or maybe they are unclean.

Whatever it is, we push, we push things out, you know.

Lepers were put in leper colonies.

People push the perimeter, and Jesus goes, No, actually, I see you.

I empathize.

This is why Jesus was not a narcissist.

Yes, he had grand ideas, yes, he had a healthy self-image, but Jesus empathized, he could see.

It wasn't to his social advantage or political advantage to square away with this lady and to help her out.

That didn't make him popular.

If anything, he's talked about he's touching unclean.

It was very unpopular, but he cared that deeply, and and not just about taking away her physical pain, but including her that she is not unclean.

You can't make him dirty, he makes you whole.

So he's doing that, and I just thought, gosh, I we talk about igniting a movement around our church.

I'm thinking, I love to gather people in church and I love to worship together and all of it.

It's great, but like when you go from here, some of you are in positions of leadership, you have positions of influence, you can make decisions, you can create things, you can design things.

God's given you that kind of mind.

You've developed skills, you've put yourself in positions of leadership and power.

What are you gonna do with that?

Look around.

You know, I I had the most incredible as I was studying this, I was thinking two weeks ago, I was on a Zoom call with a tech company, and they asked me to be on it because I have children with autism and they wanted to learn more about autism, and I was a little thrown because I'm like, look, I don't know anything about tech, and I'm not an autism expert, so I'm trying to figure out what you guys want from me, why am I here?

This can't be a uh, you know, counseling session for me.

Okay, I have a counselor, I can talk to him, I'm not trying to make your company sad.

What are you trying to accomplish with this call?

What's your point?

And when it got down to it, this company, their point was they're trying to figure out how to better understand people with autism so that they could give them jobs, and they were saying, you know, our current system for interviewing people uh often would create a red flag around things that are normal to a person with autism and their eye contact or their social skills or their ability to answer certain questions, but their brains are powerful to be able to do certain things, and so they're like, How can we do better?

How can we get better and be able to identify wherever someone is on the spectrum to be able to employ them, to give them an identity and to give them a way of paying their own bills and to bring them into our society, you know?

And I'm sitting there and I like wow, this feels very Mark V to me.

This feels very new covenant to me.

I'm thinking, boy, this this uh this type of thinking ought to be coming out of this room.

It really should be.

And thankfully that one kind of did, actually.

There's a lady in our church who was part of that.

She's not the only one, but there was a she's part of that.

And I'm sitting there and I'm I got off the phone, I went, went to my wife, I was like, this is pretty wild, you know.

A hundred years ago, my son Hudson has autism.

I take him to the doctor, I'm like, I don't understand what's going on.

And they say, Oh, he's a genetic freak.

He's uh one in 32,000 is, you know, blah, blah, blah.

It doesn't normally happen.

And you need to, you need to send him to an institution, you know, you need to send him to a colony, you need to send him to what what?

No, it's my son, and I would have taken him home and tried again.

And then when I tried again, all my instincts, if they were as bad then as they are now, I would have made things worse.

So instead of getting better, he grew worse.

And so then I go back to the doctor and I'm like, what do I do now?

And they're like, We told you, put him on a train, let the professionals handle.

Sorry, sir, it's really sad, but you gotta do this, and that's what we would have done.

And my wife and I would have bawled our eyes out, and we would have put him on a train, and he would have gone to an institution, and people, some maybe who were sinister and some maybe who really meant well, were just ignorant, would have strapped him to a table, or would have hit him with shock therapy, or would have done a lumbotomy, or got into his brain and tried and experimented with stuff and made him worse.

And I'm like, what a day we live in.

Here I am today on a call with a bunch of people who it's not even a mandatory call, who are laboring trying to figure out a way to try to take somebody who was pushed into a leper colony or somebody who was pushed to the perimeter, who was considered unclean or not understood or whatever, and going, how do we bring them back in?

How do we bring them back in?

So if you're in one of those positions, okay, I don't know what I don't know what it is.

I don't know what it is because I I don't think you're supposed to do everything, but maybe you're supposed to do something, especially if you've been put in a position like that.

You know, maybe it has to do with recidivism, maybe it has to do, um, maybe maybe it does have to do with autism, maybe it has to do with mental health.

Well, I I don't know.

I don't know what it is.

Allow the Lord to speak to you.

That's what excites me about these moments.

It's not just what happens here, it's what starts here, and that the Lord ignites in the heart of a person when we catch the heart of Jesus.

Here's the second thing.

And I'm over time, so I gotta go fast.

So listen fast, I'll talk fast, we'll be done.

Um, I I couldn't get past the fact that this lady lost her synagogue.

That just didn't sit well.

I couldn't get past it.

I'm thinking, man, it's bad enough that the law says you can, you know, be easily divorced and whatever, and your husband's doing the math.

I it's bad enough that it's that.

It's bad enough you can't sit on your friend's couch.

It's bad enough you can't, but you lost your synagogue.

You lost your ability to gather.

And I just I started to think about all the issues, right?

Because this woman, the woman with the issue of blood, really was a woman with the issues, and she really represents all of us and the variety of issues we have.

And I went to our survey that you guys filled out, and I was looking at the top three.

You know, we started to create some reports off of the survey, the top three things, the issues people are dealing with.

Number one in this church are people who are feeling completely alone and unsupported and struggling on every front and walking through divorce.

Lost their marriage, they don't know I'm trying to do this the right way, I'm trying to do this a healthy way, I've got to heal, and I want to get better going through this, and I don't know what to do, and I feel alone.

The second are people who just feel alone in life.

For whatever reason, right now, that's how they feel.

The third is mental health.

And I gotta tell you, I stand here today, and in one sense, I feel confident as the body of Christ, as the body of Christ, that healing happens here and it happens uh as as God touches people as they come in contact with the body of Jesus, so we should never sell ourselves short.

But the second is I feel extremely ill-equipped, and I I'm not the guy with all the answers.

So even with things like mental health, I don't know how much of it is chemical.

I don't know how much of it is COVID.

I don't know how much of it is is the information age and the stress of social media and the the social things and the political things and interpersonal stress.

And about I I don't know.

I don't know how that's all connected.

So I'm not up here saying it's this, that, or the other thing.

I just know people have issues and they're struggling, and I don't want them to lose their synagogue.

I don't want them to lose their church.

I don't want them to be pushed out, pushed out either forcefully or passively going, I can't take that there.

So here's what we're gonna do.

This Wednesday night, we're simply gonna open the church, 6 30 to 8.

We're just gonna pray for each other.

We're gonna pray for each other.

Bring your issue, whatever it is, whatever it is, whatever it is.

It might be mental, it might be spiritual, it might be an issue of grieving, it might be a physical issue, whatever it is, come and we're gonna pray together.

And here's what we're not gonna do.

We're not gonna try to fix you.

We're not gonna tell you to rise from your flux, we're not gonna give you onion-boiled wine, and we're not gonna make you any promises and guarantees.

What we're going to do is pray and to make sure that you have a friend that you can sit on their couch, even if you're bleeding.

That you have a that you have a synagogue or you have a church that cares about you, that will invite you in with your issue, that will pray with you and not leave you abandoned and alone, and we'll go to Jesus together and we'll trust him and we'll see what he does.

So I invite you, 6 30 to 8.

By the way, you don't have to be here for the whole thing.

Come as late as you want to come.

Stay for five minutes if you want, come get prayer and leave.

You do whatever you want.

It's just gonna kind of flow eight 6 30 to 8 this Wednesday night.

If you're on digital, by the way, we're gonna be live as well.

We're gonna have our digital prayer team.

So if you're in another place and you can't physically be here, we want to serve you as well.

I end today with um communion.

We talk about the woman with the issue of blood, and we talk about the fact that unclean people don't make Jesus unclean, but he makes them whole.

And in many ways, this whole story is a foreshadowing of the cross of what Jesus would do with his blood.

And so today I want to give you the opportunity to bring your issue even in your mind in prayer.

If you pull back that top layer and you pull off the body of Jesus, today we receive it symbolically as the sacrifice that he made for our sin.

The fact that there's no issue too great.

I think people often hesitate to bring things to God for one of two reasons.

Either they think their problem's too big or they think their problem's too small.

And there's no problem too big, and there's no problem too.

Too small to bring to Jesus.

So today, as we receive the symbol of his body, and then pull back the other layer and receive the blood of Jesus today.

When the Apostle Paul described communion, he said, Hey, whenever you do this, do it in remembrance of me.

Think of remember, remember.

Not just memory, think of member, remember.

You lose a finger, you're dismembered.

You put it back on, you're remembered.

Do this in remembrance.

You have, some of you have separated from God.

You've separated maybe because of your sin, or you've separated because of your pain, or you've you you've been dismembered.

Today is about remembering, remembering, reconnect, reattach, reattach today to the Jesus that stopped the whole parade, stepped away from a priority, for an equal priority, spoke to a woman, called her daughter, the only lady that got it.

And remember with him today.

Let's take a moment, allow the Lord to speak to each one of us as we process his word.