God Is Always Willing to Answer Our Cry

Chapter 5 of Mark introduces one of my favorite characters in all of Scripture: the woman who touched Jesus’ garment, also known as the woman with the issue of blood, and she reveals certain aspects of Jesus’ ministry that I believe it will be beneficial for us to focus on at this time.

You know the story; the Lord Jesus Christ is on His way, complying with the request made to Him by Jairus, a prominent man in society whose daughter has been very ill. And along the way, an anonymous woman of apparently no importance gets in His way, yet she elicits a response from Jesus that is very illuminating.

And let me begin with the passage. It says here: “As the Lord was going to Jairus’s house, a great crowd followed Him.” I am in verse 24 of Mark chapter 5, and the Word says that “they pressed in on Jesus. But a woman who had suffered from an issue of blood for twelve years, and had suffered greatly under many physicians and spent all she had, and had not gotten any better but instead had grown worse, when she heard about Jesus, came up behind Him in the crowd and touched His garment, because she said, ‘If I only touch His garment, I will be healed.’ And immediately the flow of her blood dried up, and she felt in her body that she was healed of that affliction.”

It is a memorable passage in which I see that one of the things revealed here is the ministry of Jesus. It is a ministry of power and also of mercy. This woman appears in the pages of Scripture in a completely unexpected, almost incidental way. And there is a powerful contrast between her and Jairus, because, first of all, she is a woman in a culture where women were not considered very important. Second, she is a poor woman; it says here that she has spent all her money, the little she had, on medical care that had done her no good.

Jairus is a man; he is a ruler of the synagogue. That is where the Lord’s attention is focused, that is where He is going; this woman is not on Jesus Christ’s agenda. But there is something that sets this woman apart: this woman has faith. She has heard about Jesus Christ and sets out in search of a healing touch from Him.

And I have always seen in this event something very important and of practical benefit to us, and that is that what distinguishes us before the Father is our capacity to believe Him. God is always willing to respond to our initiatives of faith. The Lord does not distinguish between important and unimportant people; to Him, all of us who are His children are equally important. The Lord is never too busy to attend to the need of someone who approaches Him with a needy heart.

I believe that what characterizes this woman is her intense sense of need. She is desperate; her illness is distressing, debilitating, and shameful, and it isolates her from her community. A woman who had this kind of illness was considered unclean by the religious society of her day. She is a woman who has reached the very limits of her humanity, and she has nowhere to go, so she turns to Jesus. It is her very need, her terrible condition, that brings her faith to a point of desperation.

And this is what gives her the strength to set aside all the obstacles that stand in the way of her appealing to Jesus Himself. And it is one of the things we must remember. When we come before the Lord, we must make sure that our faith, our trust in the Lord, is that clear. And we even have to ask the Lord for the faith to ask Him as we should.

Our indifferent, casual, incidental prayers will never have the same impact as an effective prayer. The Bible says that the effective prayer of a righteous person is very powerful. And it is that intense prayer, that prayer that rises from the very roots of our being, that prayer that has nothing to lose, like Esther’s prayer or declaration when she says, “If I perish, I perish,” because the situation of her people was so terribly desperate that there was no alternative but to go before the king.

And so we have to ask the Lord to come to our aid in moments of great desperation in our lives. In fact, I would say that it is a privilege sometimes to find ourselves in desperate situations, because it is in that place that our cry reaches the level of a shout, of a cry to God that rises from the depths of our being, and many times that is the prayer that God delights to answer.

And this woman exemplifies that: the need of a human being brought to the point of its greatest intensity, which unleashes the powerful movement of God. Let us ask the Lord to bring our faith, our love for Him, our surrender to Him, our trust in His ability to answer, to that level of intensity and certainty that makes Him, so to speak, rise from His throne and send His grace upon our lives.

Over the next few days, we are going to be meditating with you, and we will have a series of programs in which I will continue this meditation right away, but we will be presenting it through several programs about what this woman who touched Jesus’ garment represents. God bless you, and please stay tuned to us for the upcoming programs.

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