Dealing With Issues Series

• Boston's Charles Street jail used to be home to the city's most notorious characters. Among its former inmates was Frank Abagnale, Jr., the con artist portrayed by Leonardo DiCaprio in the feature film "Catch Me If You Can" (Steven Spielberg, 2002). Once the paragon of prison architecture, the facility fell into disrepair by the 1960s, when it became overcrowded, riotous, and filthy with pigeon droppings. The building was condemned in 1973, and the last inmates transferred in 1990.

• Seventeen years and $150 million dollars later, the Charles Street jail is now Liberty Hotel, which boasts luxury accommodations that cost from $319 to $5,500 per night. With restaurants named Clink and Scampo (Italian for "escape") and a bar named Alibi, designers celebrate the building's past.

• Former inmate Bill Baird visited the hotel on the 40th anniversary of his arrest and was amazed at the renovation. "How you could take something that was so horrible," he observed, "and turn it into something of tremendous beauty, I don't know."

• Regardless of your ISSUES, Jesus wants to make something beautiful out of your life.

• This story is well known, but in it are some precious truths that we should consider today.

• Jesus returned to the West side of the Sea of Galilee. There, a throng of people met Him.

• Hoping that Jesus would somehow notice him in the crowd, was a ruler of the Temple in Galilee.

• His daughter was dying, “Jesus, if you could just come and lay your hands on her, she would be healed.”

• Jesus agreed to go and they began their journey. However, there is an interuption.

Mar 5:24-26 And he went with him. And a great crowd followed him and thronged about him. 25 And there was a woman who had had a discharge of blood for twelve years, 26 and who had suffered much under many physicians, and had spent all that she had, and was no better but rather grew worse.

• A hemorrhage, issue of blood, a discharge that wold not stop. We need to understand her plight.

• Her situation was far worse than her physical condition indicated.

• First, Jesus was going to a 12 year old who was dying because she had contracted some kind of illness.

• This woman had been sick for as long as the little girl was alive. 12 years.

• Lev 15:25-27 "If a woman has a discharge of blood for many days, not at the time of her menstrual impurity, or if she has a discharge beyond the time of her impurity, all the days of the discharge she shall continue in uncleanness. As in the days of her impurity, she shall be unclean. Every bed on which she lies, all the days of her discharge, shall be to her as the bed of her impurity. And everything on which she sits shall be unclean, as in the uncleanness of her menstrual impurity. And whoever touches these things shall be unclean, and shall wash his clothes and bathe himself in water and be unclean until the evening.

• For 12 years, this woman had to live without human touch, in isolation.

• She had to live in shame for something she could not help.

• Most people would prefer health to wealth.

• This woman had both 13 years earlier, but she spent all of her wealth and was still unhealthy.

• Now she was sick, rejected and lived in poverty.

• She probably lived in much physical pain, not just due to the illness, but some of the treatments.

• The Talmud (ancient Jewish writings) gave 11 different cures for bleeding. Beside tonics and other remedies, one cure was for the inflicted to carry the ashes of an ostrich egg in a linen bag in the summer, and in a cotton bag in the winter. Another cure was to carry around a barley corn that was found in the dung of a white female donkey. One scholar lists common remedies of that day to include eating grasshopper eggs, carrying around the tooth of a fox, and carrying around the fingernail of a person who has been hanged! Common remedies also included cutting and burning of the infected area.

• The physical pain, even from the the treatments, paled in comparison to the emotional pain she bore.

• Rejected, shunned, despised even by her own family, she must have been seriously depressed.

• Then she heard of some hope.....

Mar 5:27-29 She had heard the reports about Jesus and came up behind him in the crowd and touched his garment. 28 For she said, "If I touch even his garments, I will be made well." 29 And immediately the flow of blood dried up, and she felt in her body that she was healed of her disease.