The Power of Jesus

We trust and hope in Jesus because his power overcomes sickness and death for eternity.

Note: This transcript was auto generated and may have errors.  If you would like to volunteer to review and edit our sermon transcripts before they are posted, contact Gail Peterson, gpeterson@calvaryefree.church.

[00:00:00] Imagine signing up to be a Bible reader, and then we hand you Leviticus 15. I’m going to read John 316. No you’re not. Leviticus 15. I promise it’ll all make sense here in a few minutes. Despite the odd scripture reading, our topic today will not be odd to anyone, really. It’s a passage for those who are searching for answers for, for for people who are hacking their way through the jungle of life, hoping in the next few steps they’re going to come into a clearing. It’s for it’s for people treading water, hoping to stay above water long enough to to get to the shallows and to put their feet down. The passage that we’re going to look at today is about hope. And we’ve all hoped. Hope is the desire for a better future. It’s it’s it’s the it’s wanting things to turn out okay. And I think we’d be hard pressed to find anybody in this room right now that doesn’t have a hope of some kind, a hope for something in the future, especially among those of you who are hurting and who are desperate. And today, we’re going to see a display of Jesus power that visibly depicts why our hope in Christ is sure. Like our passage last week with the man healed from a legion of demons. Today’s passage contains stories about the authoritative power of Jesus. But it’s not just power for power’s sake. Uh, you ever you ever see somebody pull up into a into an intersection, and you see next to you there’s somebody like a sports car, and they got a VA and they rev their engines so that you you can hear it.

[00:01:47] Right. And then the light turns green and they floor it. They take off and you can hear the power of the car until they get to that next light where they got there too early. And now it’s red and they have to stop just like everybody else. You know what I’m talking about. And you pull up next to them like, see, I’m here to, you know. That’s a display of power, but with no purpose behind it. Jesus displays a power. Always have a purpose. We know this because there are times when Jesus wouldn’t display his power if it would send the wrong message, or if people weren’t interested in the message. And so when Jesus does allow his power to be seen, there’s a reason for it. We learn something about Jesus when he displays his power and his deity. And what we see in Jesus display of power today is a depiction of hopefulness. If someone were to ask you why you hope in Jesus, you could read this passage that we’re going to look at today. You could read this to him and simply say, that’s why. That’s why I hope in Jesus. A picture is worth a thousand words. Relatives are always amazed just to see how big the kids are, right when they when they get a picture.

[00:02:58] Now you could just describe how big the kids are getting, but that that picture always gets a bigger reaction because it makes things clearer. These miracles today that we’re going to look at, they are pictures of our hope in Christ. They give a true sense of the enormity and the breadth of our hopefulness in Christ. We trust and hope in Jesus because his power overcomes sickness and death for eternity. So if you have your Bibles, you can go ahead and open them to Luke chapter eight. We’re going to begin in verse 40 today. It won’t be on the screen a longer passage, so you might want to turn there. You can use the Bible in front of you, there in the chair or or open up your phone. Go to Luke chapter eight, verse 40, and we have a little story within a story today. So what’s going to happen, Luke? Luke is going to start a story. Then he’s going to end that. Pause it. He’s going to give us another story. Then he’s going to round back to the first story again. And what we’ll see in these stories, taken together, is a hope that will overcome anything we will ever encounter in our short lives here on Earth. So let’s begin with the first account of Jairus and his daughter, verse 40. Now. When Jesus returned, the crowd welcomed him, for they were all waiting for him.

[00:04:21] And there came a man named Jesus, who was a ruler of the synagogue, and falling at Jesus feet, he implored him to come out to his house, for he had an only daughter about 12 years of age, and she was dying. I love how it says that the crowd welcomed him because they’ve been waiting there for him. Uh, it tells you just how short a time Jesus spent on the other side of the sea. He was there for one healing. And then he is back. And this this crowd has been hanging out. Because once you’ve experienced Jesus, once you’ve experienced Christ in your life, you’ve seen him work in power. You want to stay with him. You want to stay with him. I find a little, uh, a little bit humorous. Uh, anytime I read these articles about how much the church today is, is shrinking and is going extinct in the world for 2000 years, there has always been a crowd of people gathered around Jesus because of his transformative power. And anyone who has has been made new by Jesus. They’re going to want to be near him. They’re going to want more of Jesus. They’re going to they’re going to be clamoring for more of him. There are a fewer nominal Christians now. There are a few people who just use the label who are Christians in name only. That’s true. There are fewer people who want to celebrate Christian traditions or go to worship services without a heart of worship.

[00:05:53] That’s certainly reality. But the people who have seen and know and loved Jesus. If you’ve experienced the power of the gospel in your life, you’ve experienced the power of Christ in your life. You will always want more of Jesus. And that’s what’s happening here in this crowd. And out of this crowd comes a man named Jesus, who is the ruler at the synagogue. One of the rulers of the synagogue, now a synagogue, is a local place, place of Jewish worship, that is, that’s sort of a satellite place of worship out from the temple, and it’s designed for teaching in prayers. Jairus is a leader in a local synagogue. We don’t know what town they’re in right now. We don’t know where he’s a synagogue ruler, but wherever it is, that’s where Jairus is. A is a prominent religious leader in that synagogue. And once again, we see that there are Jewish religious leaders who are starting to trust in Jesus now, not all of them, of course, many of them hate Jesus. But what we’re starting to see is this trend toward people who have been worshiping the Lord in their throughout their lives and have become leaders in the Jewish community, trending toward trusting in Jesus, starting to see in him the fulfillment of some of the promises that they have been waiting for. And Jairus is an example of that group. We don’t know exactly what he believes about Jesus at this point, but clearly he thinks highly enough of Jesus to think that he can save his daughter.

[00:07:27] He thinks highly of Jesus power to heal, and so he comes to Jesus and says he falls to his knees, which is a posture of of humility and dependence, perhaps even worship. And he begs Jesus to come and to heal his only daughter, who’s 12 years old. Now. I had a moment this week that that that really resonated with me because my only daughter is 12 years old. And so I started to feel how desperate this man must have been. It’s interesting how as you read the Bible throughout your life, you know the Bible doesn’t change, but we change and different things stand out to us as we read Scripture. And this really stood out to me this week. It’s interesting. I could feel this man’s desperation at this point. And that’s where this part of the story ends. Pick it up with me in verse 42. As Jesus went, the people pressed around him, and there was a woman who had a discharge of blood for 12 years. And though she had spent all her living on physicians, she could not be healed by anyone. She came up behind him and touched the fringe of his garment, and immediately her discharge of blood ceased. And Jesus said, who was it that touched me? When all denied it, Peter said, master, the crowds surround you and are pressing in on you.

[00:08:56] But Jesus said, someone touched me, for I perceived that power is gone out from me. And when the woman saw that she was not hidden, she came trembling and falling down before him, declared, in the presence of all the people why she had touched him, and how she had been immediately healed. And he said to her, daughter, your faith has made you well. Go in peace. So as Jesus is traveling to Jairus house, a crowd is gathered around him and they’re pressing in on him. And we we meet a woman who’s been suffering from an affliction for as long as Jairus daughter has been alive. Notice that 12 years. I don’t think that there’s any significance to that, other than pointing out the coincidence here in this historical account, and then showing how these two stories are tied together for a reason. I think that that fact stood out as it ties these stories together. This woman is in a very bad situation, far worse than maybe we might even be picturing right now. It says that she has been issuing blood for 12 years. Uh, this would be like a menstruation period that that wouldn’t quit without being too graphic at a time in history when hygiene products were not what we have today, this would be much more horrible than we can imagine. She would have been a social outcast. She would have been very hard to be near.

[00:10:27] And worse, she would be completely cut off from worshiping the Lord in the temple or in the synagogue, just as we saw last week with the man who lived among the graves, she would not be allowed to go to worship. Leviticus 15, which you heard read earlier, says that a woman in this position must wait until the issue of blood has stopped before she can even begin the process of becoming ceremonially clean again. And while it’s happening. Everything she touches becomes unclean. Did you hear that in the reading? Everything she touches becomes unclean. Every bed that she lies on, every chair that she sits on is made unclean. Ceremonially unclean, and anyone who touches the bed or the chair or anything else that this woman has touched, would himself or herself become ceremonially unclean. Now, that may sound harsh to you, but remember, God’s entire law is designed to show us just how far we are from the Lord and how much we need to be made right so that we can be near him. That’s the purpose of the law. It shows us how incredibly far we actually are from having a relationship with God, of being able to stand in his presence. And these things that we read here, they may seem arbitrary to us. We might even argue that it’s not our fault or wonder why God would call us unholy and unclean for things that we can’t help. But remember that intent.

[00:12:08] Remember, the intent of the law is to guide us to our need for God’s grace. It guides us to grace. We need him to undo the brokenness of the world and to usher us back into his presence by his grace. So the ritual cleansings were a constant reinforcement of the idea that we must approach a holy God in holiness. We must be rid of the stain of this world to stand in the presence of a perfect God. So things like sickness and deformity, menstruation, disease, discharge, dead things. They were all symbols of a worldly decay that God used to create a scenario of becoming ritually clean so that we would learn about his holiness. Sometimes the symbols are actual physical uncleanness, like in the case of this woman’s sickness. Sometimes they’re just associated with brokenness, like touching a dead body or a grave. But all of it, all of those things, all of it points us to the truth that we can only come and stand in the presence of the Lord and be accepted by him. If we are whole and unstained by the things in this fallen world. And here’s the thing. Church. That’s still true today. That is still true today. The only people who can stand in the presence of God with any hope of being accepted by him are those who are made pure. You have to be without sin. You cannot be an unholy, dirty and broken person and be accepted into the Kingdom of God.

[00:13:59] More on that in just a minute. Okay, so take a little mental bookmark. Stick it in your mental book. Right right there. Okay. We’re going to come back to that. Right. So. So here’s this woman’s plan, okay? This is what she’s going to do. This is this is the plan that she came up with. She believes that Jesus can heal her. She has spent all of her wealth trying to find a solution from the doctors. And nothing is worked. Nothing has worked for her. So her plan is to push through the crowd and touch Jesus. And by touching him, she believes that she will be healed. But remember Leviticus, do you see how to a Jewish person, that plan would sound awful? Do you see? Do you see how wrong that plan would be? You’re going to push through a crowd of people with your unclean body and then touch a rabbi. Are you kidding me? That’s what you came up with. That’s. That’s the plan. Touching clean people makes those people unclean. That’s what they knew. You don’t get clean by touching things. In fact, you only make other things unclean by touching them. So this this woman would have had no reason to think that she that that that this was an acceptable thing to do. Which is why after she got done doing it, she didn’t immediately own up to doing it. She sort of thought she could be hidden in doing this.

[00:15:25] She would be in super big trouble with anybody, anybody who found out about this. But what happens? She pushes through the crowd. She touches the hem of Jesus robe and immediately she’s healed. She’s healed. And Jesus says, who touched me? First. Everybody denies it. And then Peter’s like Jesus. Everybody. Everybody is touching you. Everybody’s pressing in on you. What are you talking about? And Jesus says, no, no, no. Look, I can tell that someone has touched me in faith. Someone’s reached out to me in faith. Someone has touched me for healing because power has gone out from me. What Jesus is describing here is the opposite of what we have in Leviticus. Do you see that? It’s the opposite. When when an unclean person touches a person, it’s supposed to make that person unclean. See, the flow usually is unclean to unclean. But when an unclean person touches Jesus, they are made clean. See, the flow of power out of Jesus makes the broken person whole again. Church. This is why we don’t ask people to clean themselves up in order to come to Jesus and receive his grace. This is why we don’t say, oh, you got to be right for you. Be right with God. You better get your life right then you can be. You can fit into a church and then you can. Then you can learn about Jesus. No, no no no no. Jesus came for those people.

[00:16:56] Jesus came for all of us who are unclean in our sin, that we would come to him and just reach out and grab hold of them. By God’s grace, he makes us clean. That’s because the power of Jesus, the unstained, never sinful, holy God, came with a mission to undo the power of sin and death. So trusting in Jesus makes you clean so that you can be accepted by a holy God. You don’t clean yourself. Jesus makes you clean. Well, this woman now realizes that she’s not going to be able to do this quietly without admitting what she is and what she has done. And she comes forward and she falls down before Jesus. It says, just like Jesus, she also falls down before Jesus and tells the whole crowd why she touched Jesus. And what happened when she did and that she’s been healed immediately. Just. Just like the garrison man healed of demons, she immediately becomes an evangelist for the healing power of Jesus. Look what Jesus has done for me from any other rabbi or religious leader. We would expect at this point that this woman would be berated for her so carelessly making everybody unclean. But Jesus says that her faith in him has made her well, and that she should go now, knowing the peace of a person who’s been made whole by Jesus. Now, before we can see what this miracle teaches us, we have to conclude the first story.

[00:18:30] Pick it up with me again in verse 49. While he was still speaking, someone from the ruler’s house came and said, your daughter is dead. Do not trouble the teacher anymore. But Jesus, on hearing this, answered him, do not fear, only believe, and she will be well. And when he came to the house, he allowed no one to enter with him except Peter and John and James and the father and mother of the child, and all were weeping and mourning for her. But he said, do not weep, for she is not dead but sleeping. And they laughed at him, knowing that she was dead. But taking her by the hand. And he called her, saying, child, arise. And her spirit returned, and she got up at once, and he directed that something should be given her to eat. And her parents were amazed, but he charged them to tell no one what had happened. So Jesus is still talking with the woman when someone from Jairus house comes up to him and tells him that the that the daughter has has died. Can you imagine that? Can you imagine how heartbreaking that would be to see Jesus on his way? To heal your loved one, only to be stalled out by someone else who needs him. And that in that amount of time your loved one has died. Jesus responds, don’t fear, only believe, and she will be well. They get to the house and Jesus goes in with his top three disciples, and Jairus and Jairus wife.

[00:20:12] He certainly wouldn’t want that crowd to go into the house with him. And the people in the household, probably the extended family and the servants of that house are weeping. They’re mourning the loss of this little girl. And Jesus says, do not weep. This is the second time we’ve heard Jesus say, do not weep. He first said it to the widow at Nain back in chapter seven. Do you remember her? She lost her only son. Jesus instruction to her was, do not weep. And the reason they should stop weeping is that the girl is not dead, but only sleeping. And it says that the people in the house laugh at Jesus because they know that she’s dead now. Don’t picture a big, hearty laugh. Picture more of a cynical get this guy out of here. Laugh right? Because they know the truth. They know that the girl has died. So here’s the question that’s that we’re all faced with this morning. This is the question that we all have to answer okay. Is she dead or is she sleeping? Is she dead or is she sleeping? That’s the question that we have here. The house says she’s dead. Jesus says she’s not dead. It can only be one or the other. Right? This is not a subjective question. She’s either dead or she is not dead. It’s got to be one of those two. So who’s correct? Usually stand with Jesus on these, right.

[00:21:39] But. What do you do? We didn’t deal with this question. Back with the widow in Nain in chapter seven. We didn’t deal with it because there was no one. There was no explanation to the crowd. Then Jesus just went and raised the son to life. But here, before Jesus does anything, he tells us why they shouldn’t weep. He says she’s only sleeping, and they laugh at him because they’re certain that she’s dead. So which is it? Is she dead or is she sleeping? And the way that we answer this question has everything to do with how we think of the world, how we think the world works, and what we think of Jesus. See, if you’re if you’re a materialist, if if you believe that the only thing that exists is the natural world constrained by laws of physics, then you have to actually say, she’s just sleeping. That’s what you need to say, that if you’re a materialist and then you say, well, you know, mistakes have been made before, right? Mistakes. Mistakes get made. Sometimes it’s not unprecedented for people to think that someone has died when they really haven’t died. That’s that’s even true. Today I just read about a 76 year old Ecuadorian woman who who just last year woke up inside of her casket at her own funeral and knocked on the side of the casket, and they let her out. That actually happened.

[00:23:03] I mean, she wasn’t doing great. She died a week later, but it was a week later, right? By the way, do me a favor. If you ever find me and it looks like I’ve gone on to be in glory. Give it a minute. Okay? Just a little bit of time. Here’s the thing. If you think. If you think. That this little girl is just sleeping, then you’re going to have to explain why Luke would include a story about Jesus traveling all the way to Jared’s house to casually wake somebody up. Okay. You think people in the house didn’t try waking her up? Of course they did. So if she’s really dead. If this really is a miracle of raising the dead, just like we saw in Nain, why does Jesus tell these people that she’s just sleeping? Well, that’s because to Jesus, death is just sleep. To Jesus death. It’s just sleep. Human death. The consequence of our rebellion against God. Beginning with Adam and Eve. The wages of sin, according to Paul in Romans 623, is undone by the power of Jesus. That’s why his ministry wakes people from death. His gospel unlocks death for Jesus. It’s as easy to bring someone back from death as it is for us to wake somebody up from sleeping. What is final to us is temporary to Jesus. Jesus wants us to see from his perspective, not our perspective. He wants us to see from his perspective. That’s why he says that she’s just sleeping.

[00:24:41] When we have Jesus, we don’t have to fear death because Jesus has come to bring eternal life. So how do these two stories relate? How do we how do they relate? I mean, other than the two obvious answers that they relate because they happen at the same time that in God’s providence, these these things overlap. And also because they’re both example of Jesus power to heal those those things are obvious. But there’s something more here. And taken together, they show complementary perspectives on what it means to hope in Jesus. Now, I would tell you this morning, uh, to to put your hope in Jesus, I want you to put your hope in Jesus. But what does that actually look like? What does that practically mean? Well, here are here are the two perspectives on on what hope looks like. And the first is that hope in Jesus should be our first stop. Hope in Jesus should be our first stop. The bleeding woman’s faith in Jesus made her well, but she tried everything else first. She spent her life savings before finding a solution in Jesus. And that’s not an indictment of her. Okay? That’s not. She did the right thing there. Jesus. Jesus hasn’t been around for the 12 years of her struggle. His ministry only recently began in Scripture. At this point, she couldn’t have reached out to Jesus any earlier than this. But. But Luke tells us how nothing else worked for a reason.

[00:26:12] He spends time on that point for a reason. He wants us to know that now that we know Jesus, we can reach out to him right away, that we could go to him right away. Some some folks have this attitude, and sometimes I slip into this attitude of, of of trying everything else first, trying everything else first before we turn to Jesus and and, you know, everything that I can think of once I’ve exhausted every other possibility in my mind and my heart, then. Then I’ll turn to Jesus. And here’s the thing. If that’s you, still turn to him, okay, that that that’s fine. That God has led you along in this way. Uh, in the same way he’s done for this woman to get to the place where she’s got to reach out to him. But here’s the thing. You don’t have to wait. You don’t have to wait. You can turn to him now, with your fears, with your sickness, with your troubled relationships, with your sinful temptations. Now, there’s nothing wrong with going to doctors. I feel like I need to make this point in this town, okay? There’s nothing wrong. There’s nothing wrong with going to doctors. The point isn’t that. That she shouldn’t have gone to those doctors. It’s just that in her case, God sovereignly kept the treatments from working so that it would drive her to Jesus. And if you work in the medical community and you love Jesus, you’ve seen medical things drive people to Jesus.

[00:27:33] That’s what we’re seeing here. Her story is provided to us so that we know to turn and to trust in Jesus, and that he is the one who provides ultimate cleansing hope. The story isn’t a comment really on medical treatment at all. Luke himself, the one who wrote this book, is a doctor. Where we learn in. Paul tells us in Colossians that Luke was a physician. God uses gifted hands of doctors and nurses to bring healing. Luke knew that personally, but Doctor Luke wants us to know that the final, ultimate, eternal healing that’s found in Jesus. You need Christ. Don’t wait till all else fails. Go straight to the saving and healing power of Jesus. And the second perspective complements the first. And that’s that. Hope in Jesus shouldn’t be limited by what we think he can do. It shouldn’t be limited by what we think he can do. Jairus and his household had faith in Jesus, but it was limited to his power to heal the sick, not raise the dead. You see that they were all about going to get him when she was still alive because he can heal the sick. But once she died, they felt they had no need of him. The people who laughed at him were the people who trusted that he could heal a sick girl. They had faith in him, but only to an extent.

[00:28:58] They didn’t know who they had standing in their midst. They didn’t know yet. They needed to learn that about Jesus. They they thought they had a healer, when in fact they had God our Savior, who has the power to turn the world around with His Word. Jesus won’t encounter anything that’s above his security clearance. There’s nothing. There’s nothing above his pay grade. Nothing is going to happen in your life or mine, where it would be appropriate for us to think. You know, I’m not sure I can trust Jesus with this situation. I’m not sure he’s capable. This. This girl rising from the dead is a foreshadowing of Jesus rising from the dead, where he crushes the power of death so completely that Paul will later write, O death, where is your victory? O death, where is your sting? See, it doesn’t have a victory anymore. It doesn’t have a sting anymore. Those are rhetorical questions. Because there’s no victory for death. Because Jesus has beaten death. And anyone who is in Christ will move from this life into eternal life with Christ. He’s the one who has made us clean. You reach out and you grab Jesus and he makes you clean. He gives you the ability to stand before God with hope and confidence for eternity. He is removed the barrier of sin between us and God. He has conquered the grave. What’s left to cause us fear. What’s left to challenge our hope. Trust him first. Trust him with everything. Let’s pray.