The Healing Power of Jesus

The human body is simply phenomenal, isn't it?

When you just think about the wonder of the human body, it's mind-blowing, because our God who fashioned and designed this body made in His image is phenomenal.

One of the most amazing aspects, I think, of this incredible body that we have been given is its capacity to heal.

Isn't that amazing?

And healing itself is just amazing.

Be it a cut on your finger or an open heart surgery scarred down your chest, the ability of the body to heal is extraordinary.

In 2011, 26-year-old mining engineer Turia Pitt was living her best life out in the Australian outback, and she was very fit and athlete.

She was in a 100-kilometer ultra marathon race, and she was caught in a grass fire in that race, and it was a great tragedy.

She was burned terribly after being helicoptered to hospital.

She was left alive but with burns to 95 or 65% of her body.

At the time when it happened, she was just unrecognizable.

She tragically, again, lost seven fingers in the accident.

But after 200 medical procedures later and two very challenging years of recovery, this is what she looks like now.

And she's scarred but living a full life.

We find it harder, I would suggest, to heal from trauma, would you agree?

Trauma can be a real challenge.

And on top of that, I think there is something that we simply cannot heal from without outside help, and that is sin.

The effects of sin eternally on a human being, we can't heal ourselves.

That's what we celebrated in communion today.

We need God to fix the problem.

We need to be saved.

Sin wrecks us eternally as people.

And so we need a power outside of us to heal and save us, and that's what the Gospel is, that power that saves.

Today's message is entitled The Healing Power of the Gospel.

And it's based, as we just heard, in Mark 5, where we hear about a synagogue ruler named Jairus who receives a healing for his daughter, and also an unnamed woman who receives a healing for herself.

Firstly, we find that Jesus has the power to heal.

You might be here for the first time, I don't know, or you might be watching this online, either currently or in many years to come.

And you may not have ever heard, Jesus healed people.

It was extraordinary when he walked on this earth, got in human flesh.

It was eventful.

He healed many people.

And so here we have two stories that in Mark's classic style, he has sandwiched together.

We start with Jairus, and then we have the unnamed woman, and then back to Jairus, which sends us a message that they're meant to be dealt with together, these two stories of Jesus healing people.

They complement and complete one another.

This is one of the few people that we hear given a name.

We're given the disciples' names, but not many others so far in the Gospel of Mark, that we're told about this synagogue ruler named Jairus, who has a very sick 12-year-old daughter.

I'm just gonna read a little bit again from verse 22.

When he saw Jesus, that is, Jairus, 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 then later, after following Jairus to his home, we read in verse 41, he took her by the hand, that is, Jesus, took the girl by the hand and said to her, talitha cum, which means little girl, I say to you, get up.

Immediately, the girl stood up and began to walk around.

The Bible says those that were there were astonished because Jesus raised a 12-year-old girl to life because Jesus has the power to heal, amen?

Jesus has the power to heal.

One reason the girl had died was that Jesus was delayed by the woman who came to him and, as it were, extracted a healing for himself from Jesus by touching the hem of his garment.

The text of the woman says in verse 27, 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 realised that power had gone out from him.

He turned around in the crowd and 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.

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

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

Go in peace and be freed from your suffering.

What a beautiful encounter.

Power left Jesus.

The woman touched his clothing and then, boom, boom, she was healed.

How?

Why?

Because Jesus has the power to heal, amen.

Jesus has the power to heal.

The driving verse we've been mentioning about the Gospel of Mark is chapter one, verses 14 and 15.

The time has come, Jesus said, the kingdom of God has come near.

Repent and believe the good news.

Anything could happen.

Anything could happen when the king of the cosmos was walking around in the human body.

When God became human, when the king came near, the kingdom came in power.

So where the king is, you find the kingdom.

My father-in-law was an electrician, but he was a lot more than that.

He's a wonderful man, but he was just the most handy person you'd ever meet, on a par with Max, a million, I'm sure.

But when Alan was at your house and you had a problem, do you know anyone like this?

Someone who's so handy you're like, this is sorted, I don't care, this problem, it's getting fixed today.

Do you know who I'm talking about?

Someone like that.

When they come, and when they're in your space, you know the problem's gonna get solved.

We had this idea, we wanted to get the TV from down here up there.

If you look around, you see a TV on that back wall, and we said midweek to Max, we've got this idea to get the TV out of the way and up there, but he had a few ideas and we ended up getting it done, but I knew once Max got involved, it was gonna get solved.

And so now we have a clear front, nothing to trip over, because if you get the right person up close in the vicinity of the problem, things change.

And I guess that's what I'm saying.

When Jesus is present, he fixes broke things.

He has the power to heal.

Now, it's a debate, isn't it?

Does he heal today?

Does this Jesus who clearly healed in the New Testament in the first century, does he heal today?

And we could have a debate about it.

I've found that it's less frequent these days that I find someone that says, I just don't believe that healings are for today.

And that's probably because you've seen something where supernaturally, God, by his grace and mercy, has given a healing to you in an answer of prayer.

The first time I can remember seeing something that was just out of the blue, amazing, wonderful as a healing was in India.

And this is a picture of me, looks a bit like Benjamin.

When I was 22, on my first mission trip to India, and we were in Andhra Pradesh, and we were going out doing these sort of crusade, old school crusades, in these remote villages.

There would be hundreds of people around, and we were trained up in how to pray for the sick.

And this little boy, not the one that you can see there, but a little boy came to me and said, would you come with me and pray for my grandfather?

He needs to be healed.

And I was by myself, and I thought, I don't want to go by myself because I might catch a disease by someone that's sick.

I'm just being honest.

I was like, I'm okay about catching a disease in the name of mission, but I want someone else to catch it with me.

So I found someone else.

I said, hey, Kerry, come with me.

We have to go and pray for someone.

I'm not catching this thing by myself.

So we went down a whole lot of lonely laneways, and I just remember thinking I was in the Bible.

It was a very poor part of India, and I felt like I'd been transported back into the first century.

And we went and met the grandfather of this little boy, and the grandfather put out his hand, and I went to shake it, and it was just a stump.

And I looked up at his toothless smile, and I was like, okay, this is real.

And then the boy said, my grandfather has this lump on his back, can you pray?

And we're just like, I guess, I guess we can.

We pray for this lump on his back, and we lay hands, and the lump disappeared.

It was just the most bizarre thing to experience.

In the backblocks of India, we prayed in the name of Jesus for an old Hindu man with no hand and no teeth, and the Lord Jesus healed him.

He heals.

Jesus has the power to heal, and sometimes he does it today.

Very frequently, he doesn't do it the way that we expect, but he does heal.

And secondly, I think from the text, we find that faith is required for the healing to occur.

The woman was suffering with a long-term bleeding problem.

She believed with all her heart that if she just could touch Jesus' clothing, just touch his clothing, she would be healed.

She did it, and she was.

The strange part of the story is that Jesus feels the power leave him, isn't it?

There's this sense of the woman took power from him, and he straight up says, daughter, your faith has healed you.

Go in peace and be freed from your suffering.

Faith was required for this healing to occur.

It's not the only time we hear about faith being required.

Lord willing, next week, we'll look at another passage where Jesus goes to his hometown, and it says he can't do many healings because there wasn't much faith.

So it seems like there is this idea of faith being connected to healing from Jesus.

Jairus clearly demonstrates faith in Jesus to heal.

He pushes through the crowd and falls at the feet of Jesus, begging him for help.

He's a synagogue leader, a synagogue leader from Capernaum, where Jesus did so much of his ministry.

And I guess it's not hard to imagine that he's a spiritual leader, but he's hearing about another rabbi who is demonstrating the power of God and as Corinthians tells us, Jews chase power and Greeks chase knowledge.

And so he's a synagogue leader, a Jew, and he's looking for the power that opens up the Red Sea from Yahweh.

And there's a rabbi, he doesn't understand what's going on, but he's willing to take his need before this rabbi who is demonstrating power and ask him, would you do something to help my daughter?

I think it's pretty obvious Jairus is filled with faith.

Faith in these circumstances is required for healing to occur.

Jesus says to Jairus in verse 36, don't be afraid because it says he was afraid.

Don't be afraid, just believe.

And it's the same idea that the disciples had this fear when they saw Jesus are calming storms.

They were afraid.

Jesus says, look, I know it's out of your comfort zone.

Just believe, don't be afraid.

There's this painful application, I think, that comes from those two statements.

Jesus has the power to heal and faith is required for healing.

Because some of us in this room have lived through the worst stuff anyone could live through.

Losing people that we love when we've been Christians, praying with others with immense faith for Jesus to heal, and yet he doesn't heal.

And there's this awful situation that arises, is it my fault?

Is it my fault?

Did I not have enough faith?

I don't think that's what the Bible teaches.

I don't believe that's what the Bible teaches.

I think that life is far more nuanced than that, and there is a broken world that we are living in, and there is a profoundly mysterious free will that God has given within the realm of his sovereignty.

Would you agree?

And God allows free will of humanity to play out, and sometimes that brings the carnage that you would expect from free will from a broken humanity.

And for some reason, he does allow pain to manifest itself, and I think the perfect example of prayers not being answered is Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane saying, Father, would you take away this cross, take away this cup?

And he says, no, no, you're not gonna get healed as it were.

Not only is faith required from the woman, ownership publicly of this faith seems to have been important to Jesus.

Jesus could have allowed the woman to slip away, but after receiving the miracle, he drew attention to her.

So I think it's true from this passage, it's clear, Jesus has the power to heal and faith is required.

In our life, I think faith is always required, but it doesn't guarantee a healing.

Is that fair to say?

It doesn't guarantee healing, but what is guaranteed is God is good, amen?

God is good and he invites us to come and bring our requests to him and our needs.

And then we honestly wait for him to do what is best because he always acts in a loving way to the world and to his children.

So do you need to be healed?

Do you need God to heal someone for you?

It's possible.

We sang the first song today, God Can Do Anything.

And we want to just keep believing and bring our needs before the Lord.

Jesus heals and he requires faith.

But I want to say to you, I don't believe that's the main point of this passage.

It is our point.

It's a significant point.

Jesus heals and it requires faith to access that healing.

But I don't think that's the main point.

I think the main point is the two 12s.

I think the main point of this incredible passage is the fact that there are these two 12s.

And it points us to my third thought.

Everyone needs healing because everyone needs saving.

The 12s tell us that everyone needs healing because everyone needs saving.

The word used in Greek for healing is sozo and it's the same word for saving.

And this is not an accident.

Healing and saving are the same root words, sozo.

So, Tyriology, the saving work of Christ on the cross.

When Jesus saves a person from sin and judgment, does he not heal that person from the impact of sin?

Saving and healing, healing and saving, they're so similar.

Faith in Christ saves us by healing our relationship with the Father.

Faith in Christ saves us by healing our relationship with ourselves and others.

And faith in Christ sometimes accesses the power that fixes our ailments with our body.

Who needs healing and saving?

Everyone, everyone.

This is the point of a woman bleeding for 12 years and a 12 year old girl who gets raised from the dead.

You might remember when we looked at Revelation last year, the significance of numbers in Hebrew apocalyptic literature, in the genre of apocalyptic.

I wonder if you remember what 12 represents.

And of course, Mark writes in an apocalyptic way towards the end, I think it's chapter 13, about the very end.

It's one of the passages we look at that describe what will happen in the end times.

I think he's using this apocalyptic idea when he talks about 12 years of bleeding and a 12 year old girl is saying, this is really about humanity.

It's not just about a woman or a little girl.

This is the meaning of the number 12, which you find in Revelation, it refers to humanity.

Everyone needs what they're chasing.

We all need to be saved.

And then therefore we all need to be healed.

If you know you need to be saved from your sin, you know you need to be healed.

Because the salvation that Jesus gives us through his grace and accessed by faith is not just to get into heaven.

It is that and it's also that we be healed now from the power of sin upon our lives, amen?

Not sinless perfection, but victory, the power of moving through sinful strongholds in our lives.

In Jairus, we have a man with agency and authority, position, power, prestige, yet the imminent death of his little girl brings him to the same place as the leper of Mark 1.40.

And this is a really important little snippet of detail along the way that we have to remember.

If you look back in Mark chapter 1.40, a leper falls at the feet of Jesus and asked to be made clean.

Would you be willing?

Jesus says, yes, I am willing.

Everyone expects a leper to fall at someone's feet.

They're outcasts and sort of in a hopeless situation.

But Jairus, yeah, Jairus, the powerful synagogue spiritual leader of the Capernaum Synagogue, he does the same thing as the leper of chapter 1.40.

Then one of the, verse 22, one of the synagogue leaders came when he saw Jesus, he fell at his feet, pleading earnestly with him, my little daughter's dying, please come and put your hands on her so that she will be healed and live, begging at his feet.

What a level of pain and suffering is.

What a leveler.

We all need to be saved.

We all need to be healed.

This woman has spent all of her money on local healers, but she's still infirmed.

Bleeding like she is, she's ritually unclean.

She's a leper.

She's got no access to community, and that's why she sneaks the touch when no one's looking.

This woman is desperate.

But everyone thinks she's desperate, too, verse 33, she touches because she came and fell at his feet and trembled with fear.

She told him the whole truth.

Everyone needs healing.

Everyone needs saving.

I wonder in this room, who do you relate to?

Don't put your hand up, but lots of us can relate to Jairus, I bet, because you have a job that has given you power and control, and in the little world of Australia, in this little pocket of history, you are a winner.

You've done really well.

Jairus is the person you can probably relate to, but many of us can relate to the woman.

If you're just honest, you're like, I don't feel powerful.

Maybe I'm an immigrant, maybe there's all sorts of aspects of my life story that put me in a place where I can wholly relate to that woman.

I feel like I'm on the outskirts.

Ben, my son Ben, gave me a great tip of a book called Strong and Weak by Andy Crouch.

It's a fantastic book, and it's built around this sort of thesis of human flourishing.

And there's a picture here that takes an x-axis and a y-axis.

And it talks about his idea is that human flourishing is the mixture of authority and vulnerability.

Authority meaning power, agency, responsibility.

Vulnerability is powerlessness.

It's ultimately suffering.

Can you look at that and see how it works?

If you don't have any vulnerability and you just have authority and power, you can move to an exploiting type of life.

If you don't have any authority, no agency, no responsibility, no power to choose, it's pretty much suffering.

And a lot of people since COVID are living in this quadrant three, the bottom left, and that's a really yucky place to live, where you pull away from the vulnerability of community and you also don't take any risks.

You don't take charge, you don't have agency, you don't step out with authority.

And that's where a lot of our society is living, in the quadrant of withdrawal.

Can you see where the woman has come from in the quadrant?

She's probably quadrant two, most of her life.

She doesn't have a lot of authority.

But with great courage, she has moved up and to the left, which takes her to the right.

She's taken this step of reaching out, of pushing in, of taking responsibility, and she's moving towards flourishing.

Can you see that Jairus has come the other direction?

He's got all the authority and the power, but like the leper, he's fallen at the feet of this rabbi and desperately asked for help.

Where are you in that, maybe?

Maybe you can relate to that diagram in need of authority or vulnerability.

I would put it to you that healing will probably involve both, to courageously and humbly come to the feet of Jesus, where we all need to end up, where we ask for help.

The 12-step program, I haven't been through the 12-step program, which is often used for people struggling with addiction, but I'm familiar with it.

And often the first thing we think of is Alcoholics Anonymous.

And the 12-step program is built around these three ideas.

There is a higher power, and we would see that higher power as was the person who started the whole Alcoholics Anonymous, as God.

And then the second idea is I am weak and vulnerable.

I can't fix myself.

And the third part is the step is God, please help me.

Or it could be summarized as you can, I can't, please help me.

You can, I can't, please.

I'm gonna let you take control of my life.

Please help me.

I have my own thesis.

Give me just the luxury of two minutes to run it past you.

I've asked before from this pulpit, who wakes up just before dawn and has a bit of an anxious time of it.

And lots of people back then raised their hand and said, yeah, it's quite common.

And I think it's true that at some point I would propose it's about four o'clock till 4.45, but of course that depends when you went to bed.

But there's this time in the very early hours of the morning that many of us know what it's like to wake up and have our heart racing.

Wake up and be overwhelmed with what has got a hold of our life.

Something that you're wondering, is this an addiction?

Something that is making you feel sad, out of control, because it's deeply important relationships that you feel like you've messed up.

I'm not still gonna, I'm just looking for faces that give me some acknowledgement that this might be the truth amongst other humans other than me.

But I would put it to you from a complete pastoral layman that I wonder if the brain is doing some really good work, which we know it is.

It's deleting files, it's sorting stuff, it's getting rid of the garbage, and there's a vulnerability going on in the brain.

Throughout the night, sleep has been perfectly designed by God to restore us.

And that's a lot what's going on up here.

And I wonder if you sort of wake up and you, you find yourself putting out the trash.

Your brain, you sort of wake up into a zone of immense vulnerability.

Now, you could be thinking about some weird dream that's probably unhelpful, but I wonder if what's actually happening in these early hours is we've had four to eight hours of spiritual discipline.

We've had silence.

Most of us are silent.

When we're asleep, you've had solitude.

You've just been by yourself in the presence of God.

You've had submission because that's what sleep is.

I'm submitting to the fact that I am not sovereign, God is, and if I snore, I'm snoring, Lord, you are sovereign.

Lord, you are sovereign, not me.

And I think we wake up out of that, sometimes maybe into a moment of helpful vulnerability where we can actually reframe that challenging time of the day and embrace it as Lord, Lord, I'm an open book and in need of sleep and vulnerable, is this thing that is front of mind now that I'm feeling so worked up about, is that something I need to bring before you and say, you can, I can't, I want you to change me, are you with me?

I've done this and been amazed because what struck me is I've been a Christian for years.

I preach this stuff all the time and say, you know what?

Jesus can change you, God can, but there are some things in my life that I've woken up and gone, I'm not happy with this.

And I was just struck recently a month ago with this sense that you might think you're Jairus, the teacher, preacher, you need to fall at the feet of Jesus, same as anyone else and say, Lord, help me, have mercy on me, a sinner, I'm stuck and I have found Jesus turn up and do what I couldn't do and change me.

And he can do the same for you.

But it may not happen without a vulnerable acknowledgement.

You can, I can't, please help me, amen.

I can't do this in my own strength.

I can't habit stack my way out.

I can't get all the things lined up the right way.

It is a deep healing event that needs to happen.

I am saved as a Christian, but I need saving.

Again, you might be wondering, isn't this story just about physical healing?

Can't we just be encouraged today, leave today with a bit of an encouragement that let's go and pray for healing?

And I think, well, go for your life.

But I don't think it's what you find in verse 43.

The whole little vignette finishes with, he gave strict orders not to tell anyone, let anyone know about this, the girl being raised from the dead, and told them to give her something to eat.

Jesus told the woman that touched him to own up, because no one else knew.

But right here, if he was trying to set up a ministry of the miraculous, obviously, he would say to the girl, tell everybody, tell everyone, I'm here to heal people.

But it's more than that.

What do you think of immediately when you see Jesus raise a girl from the dead?

What's the story about?

It's about the resurrection, isn't it?

Isn't this about the event that heals?

The event that saves when Jesus, like we celebrate it, would die on a cross and rise from the grave, defeating death, conquering sin.

That's what this story is about.

That's what the 12s are about.

It's about humanity and our desperate need as common, humans across the planet through all ages and all history.

We need to be saved and Jesus is the one who can do it.

We need to be healed.

He has the power to heal.

Faith is required and everyone needs it.

The Bible is really clear.

I don't know if you're here and you're not a Christian, but I wanna just let you know the Bible's clear.

In Romans 3.23, it says, all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.

All need to be healed.

All need to be saved.

No one gets a life that's good enough or lives a life that's good enough to get a perfect score.

And God is holy and perfect and no one unholy can enter into heaven.

But there's a way.

God demonstrated His love for us in this Romans 5-8, that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

And then Romans 10-9 says, if we believe and confess with our heart and believe in our heart and confess with our mouth that Jesus is Lord, we will be saved.

There is healing and saving available to everyone who acknowledges, I am a sinner.

We fall at the feet of Jesus the same as everyone else and say, have mercy on me, a sinner.

But it doesn't end there.

Many of us have already done that.

And many of us are not living, I'd say probably the majority of us are not living in the fullness of life that's promised to us.

But it's available.

It's available.

And I believe these stories point us towards a healing and a saving, a saving and a healing that's available for you, even though you know Jesus.

But you're not walking in the freedom he wants you to walk in.

Fall at his feet.

Can I encourage you?

Tonight, when you go home after this service, fall at his feet either physically or metaphorically and say, Lord, help me in this area.

I don't wanna live out of fellowship any longer.

I don't wanna live out of fellowship with my own self.

Help me, Lord.

Point me in the direction of the ways, the habits, the practices that will teach me to be the person who lives the sort of life you want me to live.

We were designed by God to flourish, but it will require courage, responsibility, authority, and vulnerability, suffering, humility.

It's the servant king life that we see Jesus live, isn't it?

He is the one who has all authority and yet all humility.

Jesus has the power to heal.

Faith is required for healing.

Everyone needs healing because everyone needs saving.

Can I ask you a challenging question?

If you can relate to what I described early in the morning, if you'd like to publicly acknowledge that, like the woman who reached out and touched the hem of his garment, I want to encourage you to stand and say before your peers, yeah, I need saving and I need healing and I'm open.

Yeah, this gives me an opportunity to fall at the feet of Jesus publicly.

I'm not going to ask you to say anything, tell any of your story, but it could be a powerful moment where you say, yeah, I don't want this anymore.

You can, I can't, I want to let you.

Can I invite you, anyone who'd like and then I'll pray.

It's a couple of people maybe.

Praise God.

God see, touching the hem of the garment.

Jesus has the power to heal, hallelujah.

Anyone else want to just say?

I fully believe you can, and I fully believe I can't, and I want to let you change me.

Let's pray.

Lord Jesus, you are the one who saves.

You were sent to seek and save the lost.

And there are people standing here who are throwing themselves at your feet.

See you next week.

I thank you that you know everything about each one, that they don't need to write an essay and tell you their story, because you know it.

We thank you, Lord Jesus, for that incredible and beautiful insight that you give us from your word, where you said to the woman, daughter, your faith has healed you.

So we all ask, Lord, would you be so gracious to say to the women and men standing here now, son, daughter, your faith has healed you, and take them on a journey of healing and empowering and flourishing.

In Jesus' name, Amen.

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