2 "12's", faiths, females, focuses - Matthew 9:18-26

Mount Baldy (Craig) looking across Shadow Mountain Lake is changing along with the surface of the lake.  When we head to town Stephanie and I always look for the cross left of the summit made by the snow and crevices.  See if you can find it.  It is a "Where's Waldo" moment.  13 degrees this morning so I do believe winter is here.

Sometimes the highlight of my morning is not delivering the message from God's Word but the reaction of a person or a couple to the whole of the service.  Sometimes I become numb to what we do every Sunday until I meet someone who is new who has a reaction that I haven't had in a long time.  How I need to see that at times.  Everything was so new and encouraging that it just spilled out of them, not only through their lips but their whole facial expressions.  What I have become so accustomed to and what I work on each week for the following Sunday gathering was a brand new experience for them.   I just love that this encounter was preceded by the ministry of a small group experience offered by the church.

My goal this Sunday was to marry the healing of the paralytic to the healing of the woman with the issue of blood for 12 years.  In each situation Jesus calls them with a family tie title.  The paralytic is called "son" and the women with the issue of blood is called "daughter." In these situations there is more than just a physical healing going on and I think the family titles help us to see this.  Jesus is identifying them as part of His family.  He tells the paralytic before his physical healing, "Son, your sins are forgiven."  Jesus tells the woman, "Daughter, be of good cheer, your faith has made you well."  A little technical here but this phrase is in the perfect tense indicating something that has been completed in the past and the next phrase "and she was made well" is in the aorist tense indicating something just completed.  Two things different things are being referred to here.

It seems to me it is paralytic scene all over again.  First the spiritual healing is indicated, "your sins are forgiven", and then the physical healing is manifested in "arise, take up your mat and go home."  Now Jesus says that the woman's faith has interacted with something that has been completed in the past, a spiritual healing and then stating the fact that she had been physically healed in the moment.  I think we can think it was her faith that made her physically well but the tense doesn't allow us to go there.  Her faith interacted with what has been completed to make her part of the family.  The second statement of her being made well as a just now completed act is also in the passive voice meaning what happened to her physically was from another source, not herself, but from Jesus.  

Our faith doesn't heal us.  God heals us if He so choses.  Our faith is tied to a conviction of a truth and if that conviction of a truth is Jesus as the Christ, the Son of the living God who came and died and rose again, then we are spiritually healed and He calls us either His son or daughter.  So much in this passage that I went a little overtime.  God's word is so rich with content if you dig into it and it also points us to the right perspective to hold when it comes to our salvation.  It is a gift from God.  God's grace of sending His one and only Son is a gift; God's solution to our sin through Jesus' death on the cross and resurrection from the grave is a gift; and the faith we receive to see Jesus as the way, the truth, and the life is a gift.  It is not of ourselves as Ephesians 2:8-9 says.  A gift is a gift until we make it like we deserve it in some way.  It is all from God and we praise Him all the more because we realize that His love for us is so much more than our love for Him and it came before we ever loved Him.  

Our receiving the gift of salvation is our repentance, turning from the world to Him.  He came to save sinners and to call them to repentance.  Jesus even tells us how to receive the gift.  I could keep going on but I will leave it there for now.

Adam


A simple man serving a great God and the local pastor of Stillwater Community Chapel (stillwater-chapel.org). We are in our 38th year of full time ministry. God directed us to this local body of believers on the Western Range of the Rockies to grow with them in mission and mindedness of Christ.

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