Faith and Hope Picturing faith using New Testament examples part 2

Episode 122: In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God, and the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. Spending time in the Word of God is the best way to spend time with God. Welcome to No Doubt, No Fear, Only Believe podcast, where we will encourage, inspire, and empower you to live your best life in Christ. Here's Greg.

Welcome to episode 122. Grace to you and peace from God the Father and our Lord Jesus Christ. I want to continue on giving examples in the New Testament on what faith looks like, and we left off in Mark, and I didn't read the scripture, but I want to read it now. And it's— it was based— it was before the, the leader of the synagogue found out about the daughter dying, and it's the woman with the issue of blood. And we pick it up in Mark 5:25. Now a certain woman had a flow of blood for 12 years and had suffered many things from many physicians. She had spent all that she had and was no better, but rather grew worse. When she heard about Jesus, she came behind him in the crowd and touched his garment, for she said, 'If only I may touch his clothes, I shall be made well.' 43:5 Immediately the fountain of her blood was dried up, and she felt in her body that she was healed of the affliction. 43:6 And Jesus, immediately knowing in himself that power had gone out of him, turned around in the crowd, and said, Who touched my clothes? 43:7 But his disciples said to him, You see the multitude thronging you, and you say, Who touched me? 43:8 And he looked around to see her who had done this thing: but the woman, fearing and trembling, Knowing what had happened to her, came and fell down before him and told him the whole truth. And he said to her, Daughter, your faith has made you well. Go in peace and be healed of your affliction. And then it goes into, while he was still speaking, some came from the ruler of the synagogue's home who said, Your daughter is dead. Why trouble the teacher any further? But I want to talk about the lady with the issue of blood, and I want to talk about what faith looks like in her world. She had used the faith of the world. She was told, and I'm sure by well-meaning people, she was told and had heard, "Look, you need to go see this doctor. Look, you need to go see this person. Look, you need to go to this person. This person, I think, has had similar experience and they've done a good job healing my cousin's nephew's niece," or whatever. She was doing everything she knew to do And it says that she grew worse. She did everything and she was out of money. She— her back was against the wall. If you can think about it, I'm kind of trying to put myself— now I'm not a woman, but I'm putting myself in this position to where, look, I've tried everything. I've got something going on in my body. I've tried everything that I know to do. I'm out of money. I'm out of answers. And I'm not— again, now hear me straight— I'm not against doctors. I've said kind of tongue-in-cheek before that I'm going to go to doctors when they get in the game, when they stop practicing. You know, it's a medical practice, it's, it's just a practice. And I, you know, I know we need to get in the game. We need to have a little more skin in the game. Like, if they're going to give me a shot, give me a needle and let me shoot something in their arm, that kind of thing. I mean, I, you know, a little tit for tat. And I know that some of you, and probably all of you, have gone to doctors for ailments. I have. And so I'm not against doctors. And really, I, I am just, you kind of my distorted sense of humor. I mean, I really honestly, if you got to go, if you're sick and need to go to the doctor, go to the doctor. I'm not telling you, oh no, stand on this word. And because if you don't have the faith, if faith is exercised, you got to get— you probably got a lot of unbelief in you. You probably got— maybe you got that mustard seed of faith, but maybe it's still just a mustard seed and you need a tree to be healed of this ailment. You know, there's a couple of ways you can go at this. You can go get somebody who's a big old tree and got the faith, and can you can use their faith and use get the healing, or you can go to the doctor and get healed. And I'm, you know, I'm not against either one, but I think the best answer would be to grow your own faith. You become a tree in these truths, but it takes time. Again, I want to go back to Abram back in Genesis 16:16 to 17:1. There was 13 years where God just went— the word of God just went silent. And there's multiple areas in the Bible where they skip, you know, decades maybe from when God spoke to man. There's a lot of life that goes on in a day, much less 13 years. And it— you've got to have faith, you've got to stand on something, and you've got to have some kind of answer for when something comes against you that you're going to stand on. And I'm just standing on the word of God, and I'm not doing this perfectly. I'm telling you, I don't have all this stuff figured out. I'm just getting— I, I'm just getting out there and trying. I hadn't really counted up my successes and failures to prayer and all that stuff, but I probably, you know, being honest, I've probably had a lot more prayers go on. And I— you can't really say that your prayers have gone unanswered but maybe my faith, maybe my unbelief was so huge that God's power couldn't work through me. I don't know how it all works. I just know that when I've prayed for people, they've gotten well, and then I've prayed for people and they haven't gotten well. And so I don't know the answer. I think some of it may be me, some of it may be the person I'm praying for, some of it may be the situation. I'm not trying to make excuses. I know the one thing that I know for certain is the Word of God is the truth, and the Word of God is not the problem. So I would think, just knowing Greg the way I know Greg, I would say— I would start off thinking that Greg's the problem. And I, you know, there's some comfort in that. And I've told you multiple times that whenever I walk into a room with 3 or more people, I'm pretty confident I'm not the smartest person in the room, and I'm fine with that. So I'm all right with understanding that I'm not the smartest person in the room, and I'm also okay with telling you that I haven't got this Bible all figured out. I mean, there's a lot to dig into here, and there's a lot of moving parts that go in this world. And we've got the punk who's very good at what he does, we've got the world system, and we're listening to all the garbage that comes in, all this unbelief. You know, faith comes by hearing and hearing by the word of God. Unbelief is probably coming from your TV or your radio or just stupid stuff that you're looking at on either billboards or advertisements or magazines, anything on the Facebooks, anything you can see, and you can pick up some unbelief. And then how do you know that it's not there? You know, you can't— can you feel unbelief? I mean, that's another thing that I guess we need to talk about. How do you know what belief and unbelief even feels like? When you read the Word of God, to stand on what you read, it's tough to do. And I made the example before when I made up my mind, you know, I bowed my back, I'm gonna believe everything in this Bible. And then I went to 2 Samuel 2:23-8, and I'm just gonna butcher these names. And you know, since I have those superior reading skills, but I'm going to give it a go. It says, the names of these mighty men who David had: Joshua Bashiboth the Tekhnomite, chief among the captains. He was called Adino the Eznite because he killed 800 men at one time. And I read that, and I'm telling you, I set my Bible down because I had just made that declaration. And if you have heard this before, I, I'm, I'm repeating it because I— this was where I was when I made up, made the declaration that I was going to believe everything in the Bible. This is where God showed me you've got belief and unbelief, because I set my Bible down because I had just, I mean, I had just nicely made that declaration out loud because I was like, you know, I'm sick of all this. I, you know, and I'm trying to figure all this stuff out, and this is just me and God talking, and I'm sick of all this unbelief. And I said, you know, I'm going to believe everything I read. The Bible bingo where I just opened up my Bible and it was on David's Mighty Men on 2 Samuel 23:8, and I started reading that verse and it stopped me in my tracks. And then I started imagining what it would be like back then in the day with probably just a sword or a spear to kill 800 men at one time. That is incredible. And I thought to myself, Self, that's kind of hard to believe. And once I said that to myself and I stopped, I knew I had unbelief. If you believed every single thing in the Word of God, you would be walking in the same power and the same authority that Jesus walked in. Jesus walked in incredible power and authority. In fact, he had all power and all authority. And he believed— he was the Word of God. So he's walking, and I don't understand it all, you know, the Trinity where you have Father God and you have Jesus and you have the Holy Spirit, and they're all three together and they're all working together and they're all three one God. It's over my head and it's a whole lot over my pay grade, but Jesus was walking in all this power and all this authority and he walked perfectly through life, and demons trembled, and they just jumped out of people. Jesus also, in Matthew 10, gave his disciples the power and authority. And if you and I are a disciple of Jesus, I believe you can read Matthew 10 as a disciple. And it says, heal the sick, cleanse the lepers, raise the dead. Freely you've received, freely give. He didn't say, you know, there may be some times when you need to put somebody on a prayer list. I don't see a prayer list in the Bible. I honestly don't ever see where Jesus put someone on a prayer list. And I know that I'm probably stepping on some toes right now, but I'm just got to tell you, I don't see a— you know, there's a lot of things that we do in the church, and I think that's in Mark 7 where Jesus says the traditions and doctrines of men have made the word of God of no effect. There's some things that we do as believers thinking we're doing good, and we're getting in the way of the word of God because we kind of have a tradition, and we— this is how we've always done things, and this is how— and it kind of gets in our way. And if we could just put that aside and read the Bible kind of like a brand new, like a little child, like Jesus says, if you come to me as a little child just read the Bible every day as a little kid and just believe everything you read to where you don't have to figure it out. You know, you don't have to figure all this stuff out. You just got to believe it. And that's where you just kind of got to turn that part of your brain off that has to have all the answers. And you don't have to have all the answers. You know, Jesus is the answer. So if you, if you can just turn that part off and say, look, the word of God is true, I believe it. And so just kind of like this woman, that's kind of why I want to talk about this woman with the issue of blood. She made up her mind and she said with her own mouth, "If I but touch the hem of his garment, I shall be made whole." And when she touched that hem of his garment, just like she had said, power came out, she was healed. It stopped God in his tracks and he said, "Whoa, wait a minute, somebody touched me." And then his disciples said, "Master, everybody's touching you." 'Are you kidding me? Look at all this crowd. They're thronging you.' And thronging, I think, means pushing and shoving, and everybody's wanting to be close to Jesus. And he stopped and said, 'Whoa, wait, somebody touched me.' And it was a touch that pulled the power out. And God knew, 'Hey, someone just exercised faith.' And this lady was trembling because she knew what happened, and she knew— hey, you know, I think maybe she was going to just zip in there, get her healing, and zip out. Because she was going to just get— because she wasn't supposed to. I'm told that if you were a woman with issue of blood or whatever, and you had to call yourself unclean, kind of like a leper, that you had to separate yourself from— in Jewish tradition, you had to separate yourself from other people, or they— I think they could stone you. So they could kill you for being around them and, quote, getting them sick. So she was taking her life into her own hands, made up her mind, and she's probably thinking, well, I'm dead anyway. I, you know, I'm not feeling any better, I'm out of money, the heck with this, I'm going and I'm gonna touch that garment. And that's the kind of faith that you and I need. That's that unwavering Abraham faith that just believed the word of God and just did not, did not waver with unbelief. And he just, just did not waver at the promise of God, and he just was convinced. He was— she was fully convinced that if I touch his garment, I'm going to be made well. Well, that's enough. Let's pray. God, I thank you so much for this person listening to this episode. And God, I thank you that your word is true. And God, I thank you that we can just dig in. Holy Spirit, I thank you that you would never leave us nor forsake us. Holy Spirit, you are just right here with us. And I pray in Jesus' name that you would lead us into all truth. Help us to know what you want us to know about faith, and help us to see the examples in the Bible as we read some other descriptions of what Jesus demanded from his disciples, that they acted in faith. Lord, let us see it and let us believe it. Lord, we thank you, we love you, we ask it all in Jesus' name. Amen. Well, thank you for being a part of this, and I look forward to visiting with you on the next episode.

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