The Charisma of Jesus Christ

In this segment I’m going to focus mainly on the case of the woman with the flow of blood. As the Lord is on His way to Jairus’s house, we are told that, while He was going in that direction, “the crowd pressed against Him,” and it is important to pause over that detail, isn’t it?

The ministry of the Lord Jesus was a very popular ministry. He had a period of great popularity when people were constantly seeking Him out because He performed works of power, because He was a new and different prophet, because He fed the multitudes, because He was something of a radical prophet who challenged the prevailing systems. All this brought Him great popularity and attention, so the crowds followed Him. And this is an interesting point, isn’t it? Where there is a solid message, people will come.

The Pharisees and the Sadducees did not have the charisma that the Lord Jesus Christ had, because all they had was empty religiosity, ritual; they had the system, but they did not have the power of God. The multitudes followed Jesus Christ because He had the power to heal, to anoint, to declare the truth of God, and also to express God’s mercy and compassion toward the poor.

People will always seek manifestations of God. I see theologians and people who are highly educated in Christianity who are always complaining about the preachers and pastors who draw large crowds. Sometimes they accuse them, saying, “Oh, they’re very popular because they’re distorting the gospel and selling people lies about prosperity and blessing, and that’s why people follow them: because they’re charlatans, because they’re demagogues, because they exploit people’s emotions.” But I actually think that is an oversimplification of a much more complex reality.

The truth is that people, as a collective, know where the power of God is, where the life of the kingdom of God is, and they will go to those places. It is interesting that, very often, the most theologically developed and sophisticated ministries, and the pastorates that are—I don’t know, I would say—more subtle and more orderly, are often the ones least popular with the people. And that is not simply because people cannot tell good from evil.

Often it is simply because in those places where the unadorned power of God is—where perhaps there is not much sophistication, not much human wisdom—the power of God dwells there for some reason: because there is faith, because glory is given to the Lord, because there is prayer that pleases the Lord, because there is often humility and surrender to God, and because God, as we were saying, honors those who are humble and simple of heart.

Where there is an innocent mind open to the power of God, where people are seeking the move of God, there the power of God will flow and God will do extraordinary things. So popularity in ministry, although it is not necessarily, shall we say, a completely reliable indication of a ministry’s soundness and integrity, does often indicate a correlation, doesn’t it, between the power of God and that popularity, and the influx of people to those ministries.

In my own life, I always ask the Lord to keep me balanced, to allow me personally and my church to maintain a balance between seeking, declaring, and putting on display God’s healing and providing power, while also maintaining sound doctrine and adherence to the Word of God—a balance between sound teaching and theology, and an openness to the strange ways in which the power of God sometimes manifests itself. I believe that when we maintain that balance, we will see blessing, progress, growth, and God’s support for that kind of ministry.

But then we see here, don’t we, that the crowd pressing against Jesus—a sight we see many times throughout the Gospels—is an indication of the power that was in the Lord, and of the kind of effectiveness and closeness to the effective power of God that we, too, should seek to imitate in our ministries. God bless you; until our next meditation.