Mark 5:25 34 -- “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,” “When she had heard of Jesus, came in the press behind, 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.” “But 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 unto her, Daughter, thy faith hath made thee whole; go in peace, and be whole of thy plague.”
l. INTRODUCTION
Hebrews 11:1 -- “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”
-Faith, that vague thing that preachers preach about. Faith, that elusive word that seemingly cannot be defined. Faith, that aspect of my life that often seems absent.
-I have heard said and preached, that if I just had a little more faith, God could work. When do you know when you have enough faith? Is there is a “faith” gauge on the soul that indicates either empty or full? (I will take a half a tank of faith, God. Or, Fill’er up, God.) How is it that God could work with faith as weak as what mine is? How is it that God could fulfill what he wants with feeble faith?
Romans 4:19 22 -- “And being not weak in faith, he considered not his own body now dead, when he was about an hundred years old, neither yet the deadness of Sarah’s womb:” “He staggered not at the promise of God through unbelief; but was strong in faith, giving glory to God;” “And being fully persuaded that, what he had promised, he was able also to perform.” “And therefore it was imputed to him for righteousness.”
-There are moments in my walk with God that I cannot even relate to the Scriptures of the faith of Abraham. I cannot imagine walking to the top of the mountain, challenging the prophets of Baal for my God to answer by fire. I cannot imagine walking to the Red Sea and stretching forth a rod and suddenly God parting the waters for safe passage. I just do not fit in with the Abraham’s, with the Elijah’s, and with the Moses’ types.
A few years ago, in fact for two years while we lived in Houston, we went to the airshow, called “Wings Over Houston.” It is amazing to notice the power of the jets as they fly in tight formations in the sky. Such precision and such carefulness is exhibited there. Such power and form is noted there. The F-16’s and the F-18’s of the Air Force Thunderbirds and the Navy Blue Angels are breathtaking in their flight patterns. Flying about 50 feet off of the runway they roared with power. They flew upside down, right side up, and sideways. But at that same airshow there were planes that were basically cropdusters with pilots not nearly as accomplished as those in the jets. If you are one of those F-18’s with faith enough to send sonic booms through the heavens, I salute you. If you don’t have F-18 faith, I understand. Maybe your faith fits in the crop duster category. Maybe your a lot like me, you aren’t flashy, you fly low, you seem to cover the same ground a lot, and some mornings it’s tough to get the old engine cranked up.
-Somehow, I just have a suspicion that I am not the only one who has trouble with their faith and trust in the Lord. I do have faith, it (at times, is just a little bit feeble). Forgive me, but I’ll not be preaching to the F-18’s, but I will be preaching to the cropdusters. I am preaching about, The Power of Feeble Faith.
ll. THE SETTING OF THE TEXT
A. A Certain Woman
-The Bible declares to us that there was a certain woman. A woman who had endured an illness for twelve long years.
-How long is twelve years?
It is 4,383 days.
It is 144 months.
It is 624 weeks.
It is 105,192 hours.
It is long enough to graduate from high school.
It is long enough to become a doctor.
It is long enough to exhaust all of your resources on physicians and health care.
It is long enough to physically exhausted and socially ostracized.
It is long enough to feel the breath of the creditors coming to take things away because of a lack of money.
It is long enough to have all hope wrestled away.
It is long enough for there only to remain just a feeble faith.
-Consider with me this woman. She is young, vibrant, healthy. She has a number of friends, close friends, friends who enjoy her company. She has her eye set for one of the young men in the synagogue. She is full of life and full of laughter and she suspects that the young man is interested in her just as much as she is interested in him. She has a warm home with parents who dote on her. She is the apple of their eye. There is nothing that they will not do for.
-All of that was to change though with one dreadful hour in her life. She suddenly finds herself in the clutches of a body that is violated by a malady. The issue of blood that refuses to stop. At first, she calmly talks to herself. “There is nothing to fear. This will pass and I will be fine.” But it doesn’t. It persists for a month, for two months, for six months. It continues and soon she informs her mother of the difficulty. Her mother is devastated because of the nature of the illness.
-Her mother finds it difficult to understand. How can my daughter be rendered unclean? The Old Testament Law stated that she was unclean (Lev. 15:25-27). There was nothing higher than the Law. What the Law determined was clean was clean, what was determined unclean was unclean.
-In this position of being unclean this young woman soon found that she was barred from the synagogue and from the Temple. Her worship was stifled. It was taken away from her.
-The mother begans to feel the stigma that will be associated with her daughter’s illness. What will Dad say? How will he react? What will the neighbors think? What will the synagogue think?
-Over the following months, both daughter and mother began to try to treat this malady. They tried everything. The Talmud, a portion of the Jewish Law written by the rabbis, had no less than eleven cures for this specific illness.
-The Talmud stated: Take of the gum of Alexandria the weight of a small silver coin; of alum the same; of crocus the same. Let them be bruised together, and given in wine to the woman that has the issue of blood. If this does not benefit take of Persian onions three pints; boil them in wine, and give her to drink, and say, “Arise from thy flux.” If this does not cure her, set her in a place where two ways meet, and let her hold a cup of wine in her right hand, and let some one come behind and frighten her, and say, “Arise from thy flux.”
-In another place the Talmud stated: Carry the ashes of an ostrich-egg in a linen rag in summer and a cotton rag in winter.
-With all of these proceedings, her faith began to waver. She went to doctor after doctor. Hopeful that each could help her to recover. But all to no avail. In fact notice what Mark 5:26 has to say:
Mark 5:26 -- “And had suffered many things of many physicians, and had spent all that she had, and was nothing bettered, but rather grew worse,”
-Over a period of time she found that with loss of blood, she became weak and anemic. She lost weight. Her eye sockets hollowed out. Her skin lost is supple turgor. Her eyes lost the glow. Her hair simply wilted. But more than all of the physical changes were the mental changes. She went from bright, vibrant, and outgoing to withdrawn, forlorn, and hopeless. She is full of despair, “I am not dead but I often wish I were.”
-Her despair affected everything about her. It affected the way that she dressed. It caused her to walk with head down, alone, and isolated. It caused her to be unable to look anyone in the eye for the fear of the discovery of her secret. Her associations extended only to those who were sick. She was unable to draw much encouragement from people of such like.
B. A Certain Man
-Somewhere in this certain woman’s gropings she heard about a man who had come to heal, to save, to remove the stigma of sin from the life of people, to be a world changer.
1. Trust in God
It was in the old days when Pentecost was not as well accepted as it is today. The place was Blossom Prarie, Texas. The family was that of C. P. Kilgore, the father of James Kilgore. Bro. Kilgore had gotten permission to hold revival services in the schoolhouse there. The temporary living quarters for the Kilgore family was a small one room abandoned shack behind the schoolhouse. It had been used for a smokehouse prior their using it and was quite dirty from the meat drippings that covered the floor. The Kilgores went to work on their “home.”
They swept the floors and scrubbed it with lye soap. Bro. Kilgore found an old iron bed stead and set it up in the shack. The children made pallets on the floor beside the bed. There was no closets for clothes to be hung, so Bro. Kilgore took big nails and nailed them into the studs around the shack and they hung their clothes there. Yet, they did not seem to mind because they were so involved in working for the Lord. Bro. Kilgore preached in the schoolhouse and people prayed through and received the Holy Ghost.
In the fall of 1923, the Kilgores were able to move from the tiny one room shack, along with five children, to an old farmhouse that had also been abandoned. They soon transformed it into a place to live also. Even though that the church had grown, it still was not able to financially support Bro. Kilgore and his family. So Bro. Kilgore decided to go away for a month to work as a crane operator in a lumber mill.
As the days dragged by, the supplies dwindled rapidly. Mama Kilgore used every trick that she knew to stretch the meals, yet several days before Bro. Kilgore was due back home, there was only a little cornmeal left. The oldest son, R.G. was sent to one of the families in the church to borrow a one half gallon syrup bucket of milk. He returned with the tin pail almost full of milk. Mama Kilgore set to work to make a pan of cornbread using the last of the cornmeal. After it came out of the oven, she divided it among the children and gave each of them a glass of milk to drink.
Before they ate, Sis. Kilgore and the children bowed their heads, and this was her prayer, “Dear Lord, thank you for our food. We ask you to bless it to the nourishment of our bodies. Please, Lord, provide us with food tomorrow, for this is all we have. Amen.”
R. G. broke his piece half in and laid one piece to the side of his plate. “Finish your cornbread, R. G. You need to stay healthy.” R. G. ‘s glance darted from his plate to Mama’s face. “I’m saving it for Tip, Mama.” “No,” she said, “Tip will have to catch himself a rabbit tonight.” “But Mama! He’s hungry!” “No, R.G.” Mama’s voice held firmness. R. G.’s head drooped forward. A tear trickled down his cheek. He labored to swallow each bite until his portion of the cornbread was gone. “May I be excused please?” R. G. asked. “Yes you may,” Mama said.
He pushed back from the table, then pulled his threadbare coat that left two inches of his wrists exposed. Calling to Tip, he left the house. Mama went into the other room to pray while Odetta and Blanche Faye cleared the table and washed the dishes. Junior occupied himself with the pebbles he had collected, laying them out on the floor in curious designs. Elizabeth had fallen asleep. R. G. was gone for over an hour and seemed to be in better spirits when he returned. Tip had found a rabbit. “I thought I heard a wagon coming down the road, but it’s too dark to see anything.” “Be still, I hear it too. Listen!” Odetta’s impatient order was directed at Junior, who rattled his pebbles together in his small hands. They listened. They could hear Mama praying but there was another sound too. It grew louder and louder until they identified the creaking of leather, the sounds of horses hooves, and the rumblings of a wagon. They discovered that there was more than one wagon, there were two!
Blanche Faye ran into the bedroom to get Mama in the middle of her praying. Lost in her prayer, she was bent almost to the floor. She finally asked Blanche Faye what was the matter. “Someone’s coming.” Sister Kilgore, took her apron and wiped the tears from her eyes and calmly walked to the door. When she opened it, in the yard were two wagons filled with potatoes, onions, hams, sides of bacon, syrup, yams, flour, cornmeal, lard, and canned goods. Later, that evening they sat down to a second meal. God still answers prayer.
-No matter how feeble that our faith may be, there is an old song that goes like this:
Standing on the promises that cannot fail,
When the howling storms of doubt and fear assail,
By the living Word of God I shall prevail.
Standing on the promises of God.
-She found out that he was somewhere in the region of Decapolis. So she began her trek. She found someone to loan her a small donkey to ride. She was so weak that she half-clung to the animal more than rode him. She was so weak that she could not gig him in the sides, she just spent all of her energy trying to stay on the donkey. She hardly could guide him, she just had to trust that he would follow the path.
-Arriving late in the night, so tired, so weary, so sick, she half falls out of the saddle and mumbles something to the inn keeper about a room. He speculates that she is drunk but she can pay so he determines that for the money he will let her stay besides it’s not like she will be there the whole evening, soon it will be day break.
-She stumbles into a small, dinghy room. She smells the stale sweat of some previous guest. She notices the traces of dirt at the edge of the wash basin. She notices that the towels on the linen rod are threadbare. She will only sleep for a few hours. The bed is hard, the pillow is lumpy, it has none of the characteristics of her home. But it does not matter this is her last chance.
-One thing that feeble faith will do is something. For God to move, we must move. Healing begins when we do something. Healing begins when we reach out. Healing begins when we take a step. God’s help is always near and always available but it only comes to those who are willing to become seekers.
-We don’t have to do much, but we do have to do something.
Write a letter.
Ask for forgiveness.
Let go of bitterness.
Allow anger to subside.
Allow resentment of your status in life to go out.
Quit being jealous.
Confess.
Call your mother.
Talk to your dad.
Talk to a sister or a brother.
Be baptized.
Pray.
Teach.
Go.
Feed somebody who is hungry.
-Faith with no effort is no faith at all. It took great efforts for this woman to get up, but she knew that for her to intersect the path of the Lord, she had to find Him.
-That is what she did. She had barely gotten out of the little lodge before she heard the noises of a huge crowd. Almost like a march, a parade. People were talking, dogs were barking. And then she looked up and saw the Man. He almost looked ordinary. Maybe she was mistaken about all that she had heard of him, maybe some of the stories had been taken and stretched.
-But she had done other things that were considered stupid. She remembered carrying the ostrich egg dust for well over two years. That was her little secret. . . . . now if this Jesus did not heal her it would just be another secret.
-So in the crowd she wades. Jostled and pushed out the way. She reaches and almost touches Him but just as her outstretched hand reaches some smelly shepherd brushes her hand aside. The little woman is doing her best to escape the attention of the crowd and of the Lord. She was an outcast, these people would throw her out if they only knew.
Augustine -- Flesh presses, faith touches.
-So she reaches out again to touch Him. This time she stumbles on some sandaled foot and begins to fall to the ground. But in her falling she reaches, totally extends her sick, weak body, and her hand barely brushes his robe before the ground explodes beneath her. Ears ringing and head bruised, dirt mixed in her hair. . . . . but. . . . but something is different. She feels different, she has been healed.
-Then, the Lord stops and asks who touched Him? In a sea of a million hands the Lord sees the one that is raised in faith, though it be imperfect and feeble.
-Your faith has healed you. . . . Not your touch.
-Sometimes all that faith can do is hang on at the midnight wrestling match. Not a lot of polish, not a lot of power but feeble faith is there.
lll. CONCLUSION -- THE IMPOSSIBLE DREAM
Only he who attempts the ridiculous may achieve the impossible.
The Impossible Dream -- Joe Darion
To dream the impossible dream,
To fight the unbeatable foe,
To bear with unbearable sorrow,
To run where the brave dare not go.
To reach the unreachable star!
This is my quest,
To follow that star,
No matter who hopeless,
No matter how far;
To fight for the right, the unrightable wrong
To love pure and chaste from afar,
To try when your arms are too weary,
To run where the brave dare not go.
To reach the unreachable star!
To dream the impossible dream!
-The lady with the issue of blood had the evidence of feeble faith. There was that desire there for healing and yet there was not that full trust that God could really do anything for her.
-God’s If -- The place somewhere between my desire and God’s action.
Noah had an “if” in his mind when the rain continued on for 39 days.
Joseph had an “if” in his heart when he was tossed into prison.
Hezekiah had an “if” in his life when the prophet told him that he was going to die.
Elijah had an “if” in his mind when he started to pray.
Daniel had an “if” in his heart when he was being lowered into the lion’s den.
Peter had an “if” in his life when he was placed in the jail cell.
Job had an “if” in his life before all was restored back to him.
Abraham had an “if” in his heart for 24 years and eleven months before Isaac was born.
-But there are numerous Scriptures that define the God whom we serve. My problem is that too many times I try to define God instead of letting the principles of Scripture define Him.
Psalm 112:4 -- “Unto the upright there ariseth light in the darkness: he is gracious, and full of compassion, and righteous.”
1 Peter 4:12 13 -- “Beloved, think it not strange concerning the fiery trial which is to try you, as though some strange thing happened unto you:” “But rejoice, inasmuch as ye are partakers of Christ’s sufferings; that, when his glory shall be revealed, ye may be glad also with exceeding joy.”
ll Samuel 22:28 -- God saves the afflicted.
Psalm 9:9 -- God is a refuge in the time of trouble.
Psalm 30:5 -- Weeping may endure for a night but joy comes in the morning.
Psalm 37:23 -- God orders the steps of a good man.
Psalm 62:2 -- God is a rock and our salvation. He is the defense against the devil.
Psalm 94:18 -- The slipping foot is upheld by his mercy.
-It is going to get better.
Philip Harrelson
