The Healing Touch Of Faith

“The Healing Touch of Faith”

Scripture Reading: Mark 5:34

Text: Mark 5:21-34

Sermon Idea: Healing is at its best in hopeless and situations.

The scream of sirens pierced the warm air as what had promise to be a quiet summer night turned into a nightmare of flashing red lights, twisted metal, and whirring pain.

The driver of a small red sports car had lost control and crashed over a 30-foot embankment. The tiny baby riding on his mother’s lap had been thrown clear to land safely on a grassy knoll, but his mother was not as well off. Her legs were crushed and pinned the wreckage.

Rescue workers fought feverishly to free the woman. They knew she was in shock. Finally, after some 45 minutes of prying and cutting, they managed to slide a blood-spattered stretcher into a waiting ambulance that lunged into the muggy night, hospital bound with the woman on board.

Two hours later a nervous husband paced the floor outside the emergency room, praying to God that he would be able to see his wife alive again.

Suddenly, a Doctor appeared in the hall with a clipboard and pen. “Are you Mr. Johnson?” he asked. “Yes I am.” “Please step inside the waiting room with me for just a moment.”

The young husband steeled himself for what he was afraid he was going to hear.

“Sir, there is just too much damage to save your wife’s legs. We are going to have to amputate both of them. Your wife is unconscious. We need your permission to do the surgery. Will you sign the release that allows us to operate?”

Mark was writing about healing in a hopeless situation. Here we have a woman who was afflicted with bleeding that she had for 12 years. Medical science of her day had no cure for her. Medicine even today is not an exact science but it has made leaps and bounds from what this woman was probably subjected to. She is not even given a name in the Scriptures. She has no family waiting in the waiting room for her. There is no one to sign the release form. Herbert Lockyer gives her a bit of humanity other than a faceless and nameless woman. He gives her a name and a place where she could have come from. The name Lockyer gives her is “Veronica” and she came from either “Paneas or Caesarea Philippi.” Healing is at its best in hopeless situations. Where does healing happen? Healing happens in the crowd.

I. Healing happens in a crowd. (Vs. 24-29)

This unclean woman had spent everything she had on trying to obtain a cure for her problem. Herbert Lockyer shed some light on her condition which he stated was an “organic disease of the uterus and its appendages.” Veronica was “marginal to Jewish society.” Everything she touched was contaminated. She couldn’t openly seek Jesus for her healing so she had to do it under cover in the midst of a crowd. Leviticus 15:19-31 paints a clear picture of the seriousness with which the Jews handled a woman’s uncleanliness from a woman’s monthly “discharge” and beyond. (Read passage). People have done some remarkable things in hopeless situations.

Take for instance, Morgan Rowe. As a young boy he was sitting on a moving tractor at his father’s fence company in Georgia when he fell and was dragged under the machine. His left arm was ripped completely off in the accident and his right arm was badly mangled. Doctors were able to restore some of the use of the right arm, but the left one was lost. After three months in the hospital the boy was released with a medical bill totaling $30,000. (Remember. This incident took place nearly twenty years ago. Inflation has made that $30,000 look smaller to us than it was then.)

This story would probably have lost its newsworthiness right then and there had this been someone besides Morgan Rowe. You see, the boy set out to pay his own bill! As soon as he could walk without any help, he scoured the roadsides picking up cans and bottles. He collected and sold newspapers.

His mother said in an interview, “He has gathered hundreds of cans, thousands of can, I don’t know how many. He started out with Coke bottles. Then he read . . . about recycling cans. I thought he’d give up after awhile, but he’s kept it up. He’s still doing it.”

Morgan first paid off the $455 ambulance bill. Then he put $2500 down on the hospital bill. His family raised another $9000 toward the hospital bill.

Then in the month of July following the accident, someone mentioned him to the Bear Archery Company in Florida that makes aluminum arrows. Bear donated its scrap metal to help. As the boy’s story made headlines, contributions from 2,000 people began pouring in. Donations totaled $25,000, more than enough to pay the bill. The extra money was used to finance additional operations in an effort to restore more mobility to Morgan’s remaining arm and hand.