Well, it's a delight to be back
up here in the Big Mow. See you all again. Good to see
Joe and Bonnie. I haven't seen them in a while.
It's great to see them. Brian and Mary and the young'uns. Good to see all of you again.
It's a blessing to be here. It always is. Now, I preached for
you a number of years. Like you said, probably 30 some
years, more than that. On the old Rock Church and up
here too. Here and there. And I'm not a fellow that keeps
good records of anything. I'm not built that way. And I
don't put down on the messages when I preach them or where I
preach them. I just preach them. So if you've heard this message
before and you want to take a nap, go right ahead and I'll wake
you up just before it's time to eat, okay? Mark chapter 5. We begin reading with verse 21. And when Jesus was passed over
again by ship unto the other side, much people gathered unto
Him, and He was nine to the sea. And behold, there cometh one
of the rulers of the synagogue, Jarius by name, And when he saw
him, he fell at his feet, and besought him greatly, saying,
My little daughter lieth at the point of death. I pray thee,
come and lay thy hands on her, that she may be healed and she
may live. And Jesus went with him, and much people followed
him and thronged him. And a certain woman, which had
an issue of blood twelve years, And had suffered many things
of many physicians. And had spent all that she had,
and was nothing bettered, but rather grew worse. And when she
had heard of Jesus, came in the press behind Him and touched
His garment. For she said, If I may touch
but His clothes, I shall be whole. And straightway the fountain
of her blood was dried up. And she felt in her body that
she was healed of that plague And Jesus, immediately knowing
in Himself that virtue had gone out of Him, turned Him about
in the press and said, Who touched My clothes? And His disciples
said unto Him, Thou seest the multitude thronging Thee, and
sayest Thou, Who touched Me? And He looked round about to
see her that had done this thing. And the woman, fearing and trembling,
knowing what was done in her, came and fell down before Him
and told Him all the truth. And He said to her daughter,
Thy faith has made thee whole. Go in peace, and behold of thy
plague." And while he yet spake, there came from the ruler of
the synagogue's house certain which said, Thy daughter is dead. Why troublest thou the Master
any further? And as soon as Jesus heard the
word that was spoken, He said to the ruler of the synagogue,
Be not afraid, only believe. He suffered no man to follow
Him save Peter, and John the brother of James. And he came
to the house of the ruler of the synagogue, and seeth the
tumult, and them that wept and wailed greatly. And when he was
come in, he saith unto them, Why maketh ye this ado and weep? The damsel is not dead, she is
asleep, but sleepeth. And they laughed him to scorn.
But when he had put them out of the house, he taketh the father
and the mother and the damsel and them that were with him,
and entered into where the damsel was lying. And he took the damsel
by the hand and said, Talitha Kumai, which is being interpreted,
damsel, I say unto thee, arise. And straightway the damsel arose
and walked, for she was the age of 12 years. And they were astonished
with great astonishment. And he charged them straightly
that no man should know it and commanded that something should
be given her to eat. And this story is the report
of the salvation of a sinner. And when I say that, I say that all the miracles that the Lord
did were pictures of the salvation of the sinner in some aspect. The healing our Lord did for
this woman and for the young child did not keep them from
passing from this earth in natural death. They would die. So we know that these miracles
that He performed told us something else. Said something else about
His ministry. And this is the report of a salvation
of a sinner. But it is the report of someone
butting in on the Lord's conversation. This woman's story is a sacred
pause, a providential parenthesis in the story of Jarius and his
dying daughter. Jarius' daughter is sickened
to death and he has come to get help from the Master. In verse
22 and 23 it says, "...he sought Him greatly." In Matthew chapter
9 and verse 18 it says, "...he worshipped Him saying..." Same
language. "...he worshipped Him." He besought
Him. He begged Him. It could be that worship in its
basis is seeking the Lord for mercy and grace. rejoicing in
what He has done, but always standing at the door of mercy.
Because if one thing we need as children of God every day,
it is the mercy of God. We never outgrow that. We never
get past that point. As old Scott Richard said, if
you ever graduate from the place of being a sinner, you are in
trouble. You are in trouble. We are just saying, only a sinner,
only a sinner saved by grace. In all probability, the fame
of our Lord and His power to heal was the headline of the
day. Throngs had gathered around Him. He had just healed a demon-possessed
man in Gadara, and that feat had increased and excited His
appeal to the multitudes. It says in verse 21 that they
thronged Him, they followed Him, they were watching Him. An important
truth is set forth in the contrast and comparison of the demoniac
of Gadara whom the Lord healed in Jarius, the ruler of the Jews
who came before Him and begged Him to heal his daughter. There
is a great divide in social and moral status between these two
men. But the fact is that great need
is a societal and spiritual equalizer. If you really need something,
you are going to find some way to meet your need. And the demoniac
needed to be healed. And Jarius' daughter needs to
be healed. And that need brought both of
them to the Lord Jesus Christ. It's the great equalizer of this
thing called need. And that is a thing created by
God in a person. It's equated to thirst in Scripture
or hunger. And you can't make yourself hungry
and you can't make yourself thirst. Your body will get hungry when
you're out of food. Your throat will get thirsty
when you have no water, but you don't make that to be so. These
are things you feel and know. And that's why they're used of
God to talk about. And it's expressing the fact
that there's a need that must be met. And that need is the
great equalizer. It's a passage status. We have
a demoniac and a ruler of the synagogue. Both approaching Christ
with a need. A need. In truth, the status
is a vapor. It's a smudge mark on the written
report of human existence. One day, isn't that right, soon
every soul here and every soul upon the top side of this earth
will all be exactly the same. We hear a great push today about
equity. Well, hang around. It's coming. It's coming. The prince and the
pauper The scholar and the sluggard will both occupy a small pit
of real estate about six foot deep and will be nothing more
than the putrefaction personified. That's what you will be and I
will be. And finally, there will be equity in this world. Great need in time and circumstance
makes us all beggars at mercy's door. Our Lord had begun His
journey to Jarius's house. He was going to heal this young
woman, but was halted in His progress by a woman with a chronic
condition and a great need. And since our God is a God of
order, this pause was not only for her benefit, it was for the
benefit of Jarius also, and the benefit of Jarius's daughter.
It was a divine delay, a providential predestinated delay. During this
brief heaven-ordained interlude, a scheduled intrusion to heal
this woman, Jairus' daughter lapsed from dire infirmity to
extreme mortality. And when Jairus heard the news
that his daughter was dead, I can't imagine what went through his
mind. He had begged the preacher to
come and heal her. The preacher said, sure, let's
go, and headed toward the house. And he was interrupted by this
woman. who reached out and touched the
hem of the Lord's garment. Here before us are two fathers
and two daughters, two curses, two miracles, and one Lord over
all. These words used in the passage
are words designed to address a real comparison of these two
females in this episode. This woman with an issue of blood
and this dying young 12 year old girl. These two females are
universally representative of all of humankind. These two females,
though all humanity is viewed and judged in the last Adam and
the first Adam, the maladies of these two females picture
the condition of all human beings, men and women, as they are in
nature, as they stand before the thrice holy God, as they
are born in this world. And what makes these two representatives
of all humanity? How do they represent you and
me, this woman with the issue of blood and this dying child
and dead child? Their conditions are curses.
Both of them are curses. The woman with the issue of blood
has been in a constant state of menses for a dozen years. She's hemorrhagic. She's anemic. This is not only a sad and dire
condition that she was anemic and her life was a continuous
hemorrhagic existence, but because it was her menses, she was cursed
by the law. In Leviticus 15, she had to leave
the camp during her time of the curse. That's what my mama used
to call it. When she had her menses, she'd
say, I've got the curse. I've got the curse. She had to
leave the camp. If she sat down on a bed or a
couch, that couch had to be removed. That couch had to be cleaned.
She had to stay outside the camp until her menses was finished.
And then before she could come back into the camp, there had
to be an atonement made for her. Before she could be welcomed
back into the camp. That was a curse. Her condition was such
that she was excluded from the camp, a pariah. considered unclean
and could not be received back into the camp until a blood atonement
was made by the priest for her. While she had her issue, she
was cursed. She was cursed when she came
up to the Lord Jesus Christ. And this is the state of all
humanity before God. It is what issues from man from
out of his heart that defiles man. It is what issues from her
out of her womb that defiled her. Our Lord said in Mark chapter
7, it is not what you eat or what you take into your body
that defiles you. Now that is what most people
think, that drinking and chewing and smoking and things like that,
that defiles you. That does not defile you, what
you eat or what you drink, even if it is some horrid drug. It
does not defile you. What defiles you is what comes
out of your heart. Murders, endings, adulteries,
an evil eye, blasphemies, these all proceed from the heart, that
black hole in man's soul, the heart of humanity. We're cursed. We're cursed. Because of what man is, he is
cursed and cannot please God while he is yet in the flesh.
He cannot be received among the brethren unless there is a blood
propitiation made by the great high priest for him. He is an
outcast and a pariah. Without the shedding of blood,
there is no remission of sin. Not just any blood will do. This woman, if it was just any
blood, could have made atonement for herself for the last twelve
years. But not just any blood will do. The blood of a perfect
sacrifice must be what is offered. She shed much blood. Being cursed,
she could do nothing for herself. She was reduced to the status
of a beggar. Said she had spent all she had.
That's what the text says. Spent all she had. She was wholly
dependent on the benefaction of someone outside herself. It
was also clear that the best and the wisest of Adam's race
that she had approached, even though they had tried, could
not aid her in her distress, but only served to make her situation
worse. That's what it said. She had
suffered of many doctors. And she was worse off than when
she began in verse 26. Her physicians were like those
who had helped Job. They were forgers of lies and
physicians of no value. I remember hearing Jack Shanks
preach a message on this down at Arno many years ago. And he said she had been to Dr.
Religion and got no help. She'd been to Dr. Works and Dr. Law and Dr. Do Your Best and
Dr. Get Right With God. She'd been
to all those doctors and none of them had helped her at all.
And like Jarius's daughter, likewise Jarius's daughter is a universal
picture of the curse of humanity. She was dying and she was dead. She was dying and she was dead.
This is most the physical and spiritual state of men. I can't
fully explain spiritual death. I don't know anybody that can.
I've tried to figure it out, tried to tell what it is, but
I know this, I know what natural death is and I think that's why
God spoke in that kind of language so we can look at natural death
to something that we can get some idea of what it is. to be
spiritually dead. We know that a person when he's
physically dead has lost the ability to comprehend. He's lost the ability to communicate. He's lost the ability to have
a relationship with his environment. He has all the equipment he had
when he was born. But one aspect is missing, the
one aspect that cannot be seen. And that aspect is life. We can look at a coffin and we
can see our brothers and our sisters as we buried many of
them over the years. They looked just like they looked
when they were alive. They had noses, but they smelled
not in eyes, but they see not in ears, but they hear not in
a heart, but it had no beat. They were the same. But we couldn't talk to them
anymore. And they couldn't talk to us. Dead. Spiritual death has something
along those lines. Something along those lines.
And this girl, this 12-year-old child was dead. She was dead. Man is dead in trespasses and
sin. As Scripture said, death is the curse and the penalty
for sin. In the day that you eat of that fruit, you shall
surely die. Was the promise to Adam? Death reveals a total inability
and impotency to do anything at all. It is a curse inherited
by the imputed sin of Adam. By one man's sin entered the
world, and death by sin. So death passed upon all men
in whom all sinned. Death is the curse of the law.
It's the curse of the law. The law says die. The soul that
sinneth, it shall die. Why? Because that's what the
law says. That's the penalty for sin. Jesus Christ our Lord
was without sin. So the law really had nothing
to do with him. It has nothing to do with the
righteous man. And he was perfectly righteous in all he did. Well,
how did he keep the law? If it had nothing to do with
him, because he was a righteous man, how did he keep it? He didn't keep it in the sense
that since he fulfilled it, he kept it by dying. That's how
you'll keep it too. That's how you'll keep the law.
That's how every man keeps the law, he dies. Because that's
what the law says. The sinner shall die. The sinner
shall die. That's the curse. Thank God Christ
has removed us from that curse. How? By dying. By dying and being
hung on a tree. Stands to reason that a dead
person is beyond the help of humanity. Nothing short of a
miracle of grace will suffice to unclench the vice grip of
Thanatos. The only way death is undone
is by the death of an effectual substitute, and that's the Lord
Jesus Christ, the Lamb of God. As our Lord moved toward Jairus'
house, pressed by the crowd, this sick woman, this cursed
woman, reached out and touched the hem of the Lord's garment.
crowd of people. They were pressing upon Him.
And here she crawls and presses through this crowd and reaches
out and touches the heel of His garment. And she did so because
she believed something. She believed something. This is faith. She believed that
if she could touch, because that's how it's recorded, that if she
could just touch His garment, she'd be healed. Why did she believe that? Her
faith was born as all faith is. In verse 27, she had heard. What had she heard? She heard
about this one coming down to this demoniac of Gadir, who religion
and nobody else could help, who was a crazy man who cut himself,
utterly depressed and ruined, manic and crazy. And the Lord
had healed him. healed him so much that he was
clothed in his right mind and wanted to follow Jesus. The Lord
said, no, you can't follow me. Go home and tell people I've
had compassion on you and love you. And so he did. She had heard. Strange thing,
this matter of hearing. Faith comes by hearing, and hearing
by the Word of God. How does that work? I asked that
question one time, how does electricity work? And the fellow said, really
well. That's how the gospel works. That's the only way I can explain
how it works. It works really well. When Joe
stands up in the pulpit and preaches the gospel, or Drew stands up
and preaches the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ, when that
gospel is preached, it does its job. We don't know what it's
going to do. If we hang around long enough,
we may find out. It does what it does. To some
who hear it, oh, it smells like life. It's a savor of life. It tastes like life. They desire
it. They want it. I want some of
that. And to others it smells like death. They say, I don't
want anything to do with that. It always does that. The way you
came in here tonight will not be the same as the way
you leave tonight. Because you've been confronted
with the power of God unto salvation. where in the righteousness of
God is revealed from face to face. She heard that Christ was
healing, and she believed. She believed. Faith comes by
hearing. It says in Romans 10, Whosoever
shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved. Well, how
then shall they call on Him whom they have not believed? And how
shall they believe on him whom they have not heard? And how
shall they hear without a preacher? And how shall they preach except
they be sent? So faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the
Word of God. Faith is the gift of God. It's
given by God. It's granted by God. She believed
because God had given her faith to do so, because she had heard
of Christ. In this blessed action we see
the providence of God. Her sickness and her cure were
ordained of God. She was sick and for 12 years
she bled. Why? So one day the great and
wondrous sovereign providence of God will bring her on her
knees and in the dirt and in the dust, pressing between men
and women's legs to get to this one character and reach out and
touch him and be healed. This is the providence of God.
Her sickness and her cure were ordained of God. And this all
took place before the eyes of another needy, helpless sinner
named Jarius. They just headed toward his house
and they were stopped. They were stopped. Jarius needed
this incident too to occur at his time because of what he was
about to hear. Even the words of our Lord were
meant to encourage Jarius. Our Lord tenderly looked at this
woman and He called her daughter. Daughter. Daughter. Why did He call her
that? Because He is the Heavenly Father.
Our Lord tenderly looked and called her daughter. Jarius had
besought the Lord and said, My daughter is sick. My daughter
is sick. And our Lord cured this woman
and called her His daughter. because He is the everlasting
Father. She is the daughter of Abraham as evidenced by the fact
that she believed on Jesus Christ. All who believe on Christ are
of Abraham, sons of Abraham, seed of Abraham. It says in Galatians
3, the remarkable words spoken to her by our Lord had designs
on Jarius, on Jarius. Thy faith has made thee whole.
What a statement! Thy faith has made thee whole. that Christ cured this woman
has never been in question. Virtue and power flowed from
Him to her, and she was cured. Never, however, discount the
words of our Lord. These are the words of the healer
speaking to the healed. And He says to her, the one who
gave her the faith, says to her, Thy faith has made thee whole. Not only did Jeriah see this
woman miraculously healed, but he heard the Master laud her
faith. These words are truly for her because she has no illusion
as to how she was healed. She said that. She told all the
truth. She knows what was done in her. She knows. Faith pleases God and she who
comes to God must believe that He is in the reward of them that
diligently seek Him. Your faith has made you whole.
Faith in Christ honors God because His holy rest is in God. I think Scott Richardson said
this one time, the words like these, thy faith has made thee
whole, thy faith has saved thee, that the Lord said to people,
he says, faith puts the crown of glory on the king of glory.
That is what faith does. What does faith believe? It believes
what God has said. It does not rest on its own intellect
or its own understanding. It believes what God has said. Did God create the world in six
days? Yep. Is God absolutely sovereign? You betcha. Did God choose whom He will save? Absolutely. Did God choose who
He reprobates? Yep. That's what the scriptures
say. Not what men want to say in order
to somehow say, well, you know, God's not like that. You know,
preachers like to say, I don't want to accuse God of sin. How
did sin come into this world? By man, yes, by man. Was it ordained? It wouldn't have happened if
it didn't. It could not have happened. God is sovereign. Before man ever sinned against
God, there was a lamb slain from the foundation of the world.
Blood was shed before the world began. Why? Because death was
coming on this planet. that God was about to create. Faith believes what God says. Faith is the gift of God and
honors God. As far as our experience of grace
goes, it is only realized in faith. We begin in faith. We live by faith. We stand in
faith. We walk by faith and not by sight. We have peace with
God by faith. We see the glory of God by faith. And faith is not possessed of
power. Faith is possessed of confidence
and assurance in Jesus Christ. My faith does not have any power.
How is yours doing? She had believed in so many people.
and so many remedies. But when she only believed in
Jesus Christ, she was healed. Jairus' daughter
however cannot exercise faith. She's dead. Her recovery addresses
the power of God over death, the curse. She is raised from
the deathbed of sin by omnipotent grace. However, because our Lord
had said these things to the woman with the issue of blood,
He now addresses Jarius in the same manner. If a man dies, shall
he live again? The crowd ain't going to be on
your side. You can count on that. They laughed
him to scorn when he went in there. Think of what Jarius had
seen and heard right in his midst as his road to his house was
interrupted He heard thy faith hath made thee whole. Go in peace
to this woman. Go in peace. And yet, while these
words were yet upon the tongue of the Master, that Ephesus come
with words that would cast down the heart of the Father, thy
daughters did. Thy daughters did. Now what is the response
of the Master? Be not afraid. Only believe. Has not faith been proved before
your eyes, Mr. Gerais? I cured my daughter. Can I not also cure your daughter? Only believe. This blessed providential
parenthesis has revealed to Jairus that faith can do what faith
can do and what it always does. Only believe. This is not a plea
to just believe. He is not saying only believe.
He is saying only believe. As the old fellow said, the emphasis
is on a different syllable. Only believe. Faith is not about
power. Faith is about confidence in
Jesus Christ based on what He has said alone. Thy faith has made thee whole,
go in peace." And the Lord went into that room
with that dead girl. And the daughter's cure is likewise
truly revealing. She is made alive by the voice
of the Lord Jesus Christ. How He addresses her is full
of gospel grace, pressed down and running over. Talithah, kumai,
literally means arise my little lamb. Arise, my little lamb. John 5
says there is a day coming when the dead shall hear the voice
of Christ. And they said, Here shall live. She heard it. But you know, our
Lord said, My sheep always hear My voice. And they followed Me. He took her by the hand and said,
Get up, young one. She got up and said, give her
something to eat. Give her something to eat. Arise, my little lamb. I wish I could get this in my
head because I'm always about doing stuff. Always trying to
fix this and fix that. I wonder what my life would be
like in this old world.