Luke8:
43 A woman in the crowd had suffered for twelve years with constant bleeding, and she could find no cure. 44 Coming up behind Jesus, she touched the fringe of his robe. Immediately, the bleeding stopped.
45 “Who touched me?” Jesus asked.
Everyone denied it, and Peter said, “Master, this whole crowd is pressing up against you.”
46 But Jesus said, “Someone deliberately touched me, for I felt healing power go out from me.”47 When the woman realized that she could not stay hidden, she began to tremble and fell to her knees in front of him. The whole crowd heard her explain why she had touched him and that she had been immediately healed.
Have you ever read the story of the woman with the issue of blood? I mean, what would provoke a woman in her condition to go out in the crowd like this to touch a man’s garment fringe? Let me paint the picture of this woman’s case. It’s not like it was just her ‘time of the month’ (sorry guys). Her issue of blood was a prolonged one. Most of you know that when you bleed…from any part of your body, you lose mass and energy and therefore you become very weak. If you lose blood over a few days, its bad enough. But she was losing blood for 12 YEARS!!!! I won’t get into the science of it, but that’s a lot of blood. On top of all that, she had gone to every doctor in town (another account given by one of the other disciples), and spent all of her money. So not only was she sick and weak, but she was also broke! More than that, in her time, as long as you had such an ‘issue’, you were isolated from everyone else. You were not allowed to be around anyone because you were deemed ‘unclean’. So she was sick, weak, broke, and alienated!
When she made a decision to see Jesus, she had to break all of the rules. Rules that were keeping her in bondage.
1. She had to break the physiological rule that said she was sick
2. She had to break the mental rule that said she was too weak to go anywhere.
3. She had to break the financial rule that said she didn’t have money to take a donkey into town.
4. She had to break the social rules that said she was not fit to see this Man.
That’s what I call Crazy Faith. See, all she had was one idea: “If I touch this guy, I’m gonna be fixed for good!”. And she ran with it. She believed with all of her heart, with whatever strength she had left and crawled to touch just the bottom of His clothes. She put aside her pride, how she smelled, the filth of her clothes, what everyone else was saying, what her mind was telling her, what her pocketbook said, and she PRESSED into her Lord with one word that she believed.
Who is it that’s telling you that you can’t be made whole, that God cannot fix it, that you can’t get a job?
Have you been challenged by what your bank account says, or what the economy is saying right now?
Is your body, or mind, or heart telling you that you’re not going to make it?
It’s time for crazy faith. The more the negative comes to attack, you need to muster up all of your energy and say that “God says it is well”.
One thing I am learning is that faith always gets God attention. When she touched Him, no matter how weak she was, she managed to pull virtue out of Him. Enough for Him to say “who touched me?”
You may be facing a situation where all hope seems lost. It couldn’t possibly get any worse than where you are. You cannot afford to listen to the ‘nay-sayers’ in your situation. Press into God. He is moved by your faith.
