Red Letters – Reach Out & Touch Someone – April 19

RED LETTERS
April 19, 2021

Reach Out and Touch Someone

Luke 8:45-46, ‘Jesus suddenly stopped and said to His disciples, “Someone touched me. Who was it?” While they all denied it, Peter pointed out, “Master everyone is touching You, trying to get close to You. The crowds are so thick we can’t walk through all these people without being jostled. Jesus replied, “Yes, but I felt power surge through Me. Someone touched Me to be healed, and they received their healing.”’ (TPT)

I imagine this woman, small, shriveled, on the fringes of life. Maybe she wasn’t always this way, but her condition has now identified her after years of suffering with an issue of bleeding. It wasn’t even in those times that this issue made one considered unclean; it would be no different today. I conjure up the humility; the embarrassment that eventually I suspect locked her inside herself, far away from scrutiny and gossip, isolating her from friendship and relationship. I wonder about the courage it cost her on this day, when she fought through the crowds, pressing forward. “Perhaps if I can just get a glimpse,” her heart emboldened her. Life had been seeping out of her for twelve years, and for all those years, she had sought treatment and help, had spent her life’s savings seeking healing, watching it all day after day drain away.
This tells me a lot about the importance of pressing into Jesus, being desperate for just a touch, being so motivated by a monumental need to simply grasp a snatch of His hem. Like I have an audacious urgency to get close enough so I can touch HIM.
As she touched Him, the hem of His garment, a power coursed through Him into her. He felt it and so did she. She immediately knew because the healing traveled on a current of faith, plugged into a core belief which had moved her into the crowd to press into—not what but—Who had the source of power to heal her.
Power surges are mighty conductors. A power surge can wipe out electricity over an entire city and can also fry important electrical components. A power surge can also demolish trust, and essentially the success, of a group of people, a business, church, board, ministry, an organization. Anyplace where someone begins to think higher of himself or herself than the others who were once on the same path, working toward similar goals. You know what else a power surge can do? It can heal a little woman with a twelve-year issue of bleeding just by touching HIM.
He wants to know immediately who touched Him and His disciples think Jesus has lost His mind. “Com-on, Jesus; everyone is touching you!” But He knows specifically the touch of one woman changed Him and changed her. Meekly, she comes forward and confesses, “I was desperate for You, Jesus. I knew,” she said, (not I hoped, but I knew), “If I could even have just a touch of Your clothing, I would be healed.” How scandalous! Because He replied, “Beloved daughter, your faith in Me released your healing. You may now go with My peace.”
So many nuggets of truth, so much currency. She wouldn’t receive her healing without two things: herself and Him. She needed herself to have faith and she needed Jesus to have her faith in for the healing to be released. Incredulously, in a matter of a second, He heals not just her issue of bleeding, but think about all the other healing she received. She now can enter society again; her friendships can be healed. Her loneliness and isolation received healing. Her finances gain healing because she no longer is forced to spend all she has on doctors and treatments that aren’t working. And, I believe, faith and trust and belief are restored to life again. Because when we find Jesus faithful in one area of our lives, we know He will be faithful in all other areas of our lives as well. Yes! how scandalous!

I’ve been reading RED LETTERS all my life, but never with my heart.
During the month of April, let’s JOURNEY where JESUS journeyed,
and listen with our hearts to all He came to proclaim.