Trusting God's Timing: Faith In Jesus' Healing Power

Ross Sawyers: [00:00:03] We love today that we can gather in confidence around Jesus Christ, who is our living hope. One of the things that you may or may not know, I've shared it at different times, but you've all come at different times. But I have a research team that helps me each week from our church. And years ago, I thought it would be really helpful if I had different perspectives from different seasons of life on the particular passage of Scripture that we'll be speaking of. So I've done this for years now, and it's been really helpful just to hear where people are and how they process what we're talking about. And this week we're thinking about Jesus and faith in him as the one who has power over sickness and death, and one lady shared three different stories that I thought might resonate with us in different experiences that we might have had around sickness and death.

Ross Sawyers: [00:01:00] The first one revolves around someone who is in West Texas that they knew, the child was born with a hole in his heart and immediately he had to be transported from West Texas by helicopter to this area. As soon as the baby arrived, they did another scan, just to see and make sure they were exactly right where they would be going in surgically for the hole in the heart, only to discover in the scan that there was no hole, and God had completely healed the heart of that baby in transport, with no medical means necessary.

Ross Sawyers: [00:01:43] Then she went on to tell a second story about her dad, who had ALS and died from ALS, he was never healed this side of heaven. And she said that one I'll never understand, but God does not owe me an explanation, and I know that my dad is strolling with Jesus, his parents, and others in heaven. And we really do grieve with hope as Christians.

Ross Sawyers: [00:02:11] And then she described a third story of some friends who also had a child, a baby that at three months old had a heart condition that proved fatal. That particular family had asked people to pray, they prayed, and they fasted, they asked their church to pray and to fast, and God chose for that child to not be able to live on earth with his parents. The mom said, if we were disappointed with God's answer, our hope was in the outcome, not in God himself. So with healing, our hope has to remain an anchor for our souls, and the only way it can do that is if it's anchored in God Himself and not the healing.

Ross Sawyers: [00:03:04] If you turn in your Bibles to Mark chapter 5, we're going to linger in verses 21 through 43. And as you're finding your way there, and they'll also be on the screen in a moment, you'll be able to track that way. But I just want to go back and say thank you for Serve Week, we talked about that for quite a bit coming up to it, and you just did an amazing job serving in the community, serving the vulnerable, serving our cities around us, and serving the schools. There were about 2000 people that actually served in 2800 slots, meaning some people served multiple times, so it's just incredible work that was done. Forty-nine different projects were completed, and it was just a beautiful picture of the body of Christ coming together and serving well. That's a way for me to quantify it, but at the end of the day, what our hope is, is that people in the community will see that we're more than just people up here saying, this is what you're not supposed to do. Because that's oftentimes what people think about the church, that we're just telling people what to do and what not to do, not doing anything about it. And hopefully by seeing that kind of convergence in the community so that people who are skeptical or indifferent or maybe have had struggles with the church, will see the hands and feet of Jesus actively serving in the community. So thank you for being a part.

Ross Sawyers: [00:04:43] And then Monday night we had our 25th-anniversary service, and I will say 25 years here, that will go down as probably one of my favorite moments ever gathered in worship. It was absolutely an amazing night on Monday, and we're so grateful for God's faithfulness and to be able to worship him and celebrate him for it. I'm not going to make some cheesy comment like what God's going to do in the next 25 years. I don't know if God will give us another day, and I want to be true to the scriptures in knowing that we're not guaranteed another minute, candidly. But I am confident in who God is, and my hope is whatever days, months, weeks, or years he gives us, that he will just continue, and I know he will, in his faithfulness, and that we'll see life change in people all through our community and then across the world from the impact we're having on the nations. So thank you for being a part, and we look forward to the days ahead.

Ross Sawyers: [00:05:48] We've been working our way through Mark, and we're thinking about Jesus as the real Jesus. And we framed it that way because I'm afraid people have these caricatures of Jesus, they have these ideas of Jesus that aren't really who Jesus is. And by working our way through Mark systematically, we can look at the character and the attributes of who Jesus is, what he was about, who he was, and how we're to respond to that. We've seen, and what we see throughout Mark, which is a key theme, is that Jesus is God, He is King, He's authority, and He is power, that is who he is. We've seen his power over sin. We see his power over the demonic. We see his power over nature. And in this chapter 5, and throughout Mark, we see his power over sickness and death.

Ross Sawyers: [00:06:41] Now, there's no doubt in my mind that you have had questions, as I have over the years, of how does this work with sickness and death, with faith in Jesus who can heal, who can raise from the dead? What does this really look like today? And I've had several people in my family and friends that have died in the past few years, and if you've been here for a while, you're aware of that, you've walked that with us. And some of those, to me, candidly, were untimely deaths in my human perspective. We've also all walked through all kinds of sicknesses, diseases, illnesses with each other, with family, with friends, people we work with. So there's no question that all of us are in the midst of that, and you may be in the middle of some hard things at this very moment. I hope you'll be encouraged by this part of Scripture. So I've themed the message today, Faith in the One who has Power over Sickness and Death. It's too long of a title, but I wanted every word to matter, the faith matters, the One matters, power matters. sickness matters, and death matters, and I don't want us to miss Jesus's power over those and that he's the one with authority today where we can have our hope and our confidence.

Ross Sawyers: [00:08:04] So three things I want to highlight in the story itself, and then I want to come back at the end and just kind of make some comments around sickness and death and how we kind of function with that today in the hope that we have in Jesus. So the first thing I would say is to have faith in Jesus when desperate. In verses 21 through 24, faith in Jesus when we're desperate, "When Jesus had crossed over again in the boat to the other side, a large crowd gathered around Him; and so He stayed by the seashore." Jesus has been going back and forth around the Sea of Galilee, in Israel, into different villages and towns around it. So he's back again, he gets off the boat and there's a large crowd. Jesus has different seasons, he has a season of obscurity, he has a season of popularity, and he has a season where they're not liking him at all. And in this particular season, it's a popular season for him, things are going well. Think about a football team that's 3 and 0 or 4 and 0 right now, everybody loves them, everybody's crowded around them, and things are going well at this moment. So Jesus is healing people. He's removing demons. He's teaching like they've never heard before. So crowds continued to gather around him, "One of the synagogue officials named Jairus came up, and on seeing Him, fell at His feet." A synagogue official would be someone who is in charge of and who would do the teaching and preaching at the local Jewish synagogue, this person would have the authority to be deciding is everything being taught accurately or not. So it was an authoritative position in the synagogue, and that's important because this is a man who understands authority, but he sees Jesus. And when we read Scripture and hang out it for a while, oftentimes we can see things that connect us to stories. And in Mark chapter 5, we've already seen that Jesus casts demons out of a man who lives in the tombs. And what we found in verse 6, in chapter 5, in that story, is that the demons who had a grip on this man, when they saw Jesus, they came running to him, and they fell at his feet and bowed to him. The demons know that Jesus is God and that he has authority, and they bow before him.

Ross Sawyers: [00:10:38] This is a man, a leader in the synagogue with authority. He sees Jesus, and he recognizes that Jesus has authority and power, that he's God, and this man who has authority bows down at the feet of Jesus. "And he implored him (in verse 23) earnestly." He's begging him, saying, “My little daughter is at the point of death; please come and lay Your hands on her, so that she will get well and live.” That's desperate when your child is dying, and he believes Jesus can come, and if he'll just lay his hands on her, then she'll be okay. "So he went off with him; and a large crowd was pressing in on him." He promptly goes with this man who requested him to go. There's this big crowd pressing in, the idea is that they're suffocating him they're in so close, and so there's a large number and they're headed off. This is a desperate man, as any of us are, who have had children sick, and we don't know what to do.

Ross Sawyers: [00:12:10] I've mentioned multiple times that, over the years, I go to a counselor, and in the last few years, I've gone more routinely whether I think I need to get anything or if I need any help or not. And it's stunning because every time I go, even if I think I don't need help, I end up with about 3 or 4 things I need help on. But I went this past week to my counselor, and I had 2 or 3 things I wanted to talk to him about. And as I was talking out loud, and this is good counsel, right, they just kind of let you talk. And you wonder, why do I pay you? I'm doing all the talking. And so I'm talking and I'm listening to myself, and I'm thinking, I know what he's going to tell me because he tells me the same thing every time. And I said that to him. I said you tell me the same thing every time. Why can I not remember it in the moment when I need it? And this is one thing he'll tell me every time, this is free for y'all, by the way, that's like cheering for you, you get free counseling; have you invited Jesus into it with you? No, I didn't think of that. For the last three years, I've not thought of that until you tell me that I need to invite Jesus into it. That's all this man did, is he just invited Jesus into his pain and into his desperation, and he's asking Jesus to help him. But when we're desperate, we can have faith in the power of Jesus and the authority of Jesus and invite him into whatever the thing is that we're walking through. And he will meet us in our pain, in our hurt, and in our desperation. It's simply an invite into it, that's what this man did.

Ross Sawyers: [00:14:26] There's a second thing in this story that's helpful to me, and it's to have faith in Jesus when we're discouraged. I think all of us can find times when we're discouraged, and I can't imagine anyone being more discouraged than in verse 25, and the narrative sort of changes here, "A woman who had had had a hemorrhage for 12 years." So this one for 12 years, that would be discouraging to have some kind of malady, some kind of illness going on, some kind of problem for 12 years straight. And this woman was hemorrhaging, and when we look at the Old Testament law in Leviticus chapter 15, it says that a woman who is discharging blood is considered unclean, and she is to keep herself at a distance from everybody else. Anything or anyone she touches also becomes unclean in that ceremonial law of Leviticus 15. So for 12 years, this woman has had to carry the weight of being unclean and having to keep her distance and not touch anyone and imagine the shame and how distraught and discouraging that would be for this woman. "And yet she'd endured much (in verse 26) at the hands of many physicians." She had she had tried, she went to the doctors, multiple doctors, to see if they could come up with a solution and something for her healing. "And then she spent all that she had." And so she was busted from all the money that she spent on her medical bills with the physicians. "And then she wasn't helped at all, but instead she grew worse. She was trying to get help from those who could help her, and she only got worse.

Ross Sawyers: [00:16:22] Now, I don't know if Mark had some kind of beef with doctors, but Luke, who wrote the third gospel that we have in our Bibles, so it's Matthew, Mark, and Luke, and he was a doctor and he tells this same story not quite the same way. In chapter 8, verse 43 of Luke, he just simply says in one phrase, "She could not be healed by anyone." But no doubt discouraged because she had done everything she knew to do and gone to the people that she knew could be a help for her, and they were unable to help, it actually was now worse. Verse 27, "After hearing about Jesus, she came up in the crowd behind Him and touched His cloak." And so she had heard about Jesus, and she'd heard about all the healings going on, and so she made her way into the crowd, and she touched his cloak, "For she thought, “If I just touch His garments, I will get well." Imagine the kind of faith that says, if I can just touch what he's wearing, then I'll be okay, "Immediately (verse 29) the flow of her blood was dried up, and she felt in her body that she was healed of her affliction." The New Testament is written primarily in Greek, and the Greek verbs here indicate that she was healed permanently, she had a permanent cure, and she knew it immediately that she was permanently cured.

Ross Sawyers: [00:17:56] And then "Jesus, (in verse 30) perceiving in Himself that the power proceeding from Him had gone forth, turned around in the crowd and said, “Who touched My garments?” Here's this massive crowd pressing, let's just say it's this crowd right here, and everybody's pressing around Jesus trying to get him close, wanting to hear him, and wanting to be near him. And he says, "Who touched my garment?" because he felt the power go out of him. This is the first time in Mark we see that word power, and it's the Greek word dunamis, which gives us our word dynamite. It was an explosive power that went out of Jesus to bring healing to this lady. "And he said, “Who touched My garments?” 31And His disciples said to Him, “You see the crowd pressing in on You, and You say, ‘Who touched Me?’” 32And He looked around to see the woman who had done this." The word looked around means that he just kind of a swivel on his neck, and he's just looking around, trying to find who it was, and where the power had gone out. "But the woman fearing and trembling (in verse 33) aware of what had happened to her, came and fell down before Him and told Him the whole truth." Why would she have been fearing and trembling? Perhaps, she knew she was not supposed to be in the crowd that day, she was unclean, and every person she touched in that pressed-in crowd was unclean now; and Jesus, who she touched, is now unclean according to the law. Maybe she was afraid of what was about to happen because she had ventured out the way she did. What did she do? She did the same thing the demons did. She did the same thing the man with authority over the Jewish synagogue did. And this woman, who for 12 years had this malady, this affliction, she now falls at the feet of Jesus. She knew that he was God, she knew the power that he had, and she knew the authority. She fell at his feet, and then she told him the whole truth. Now I have no idea, in the midst of that crowd, this permanent healing just takes place. And here she is, and she starts telling him everything. So I don't know if this took a five-minute version, or if it was a half hour version, or if she started describing the last 12 years and her emotions behind those 12 years and what she was thinking during those years, and what her motivations were for wanting to be healed and her thoughts if she ever was. I don't know what her whole truth was or her whole story was, but I do imagine that Jairus was getting a little bit impatient because his daughter was dying, and that's where they were headed so that his daughter could be made well. But Jesus paused and he takes care of this woman. Verse 34 is so loaded, And He said to her, “Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace and be healed of your affliction.” This woman who had been shamed and, on the outside, Jesus, who is God, who is King, called her daughter. Daughter, he was just validating her as a person, as a woman. And then he validates her faith, her faith had something to do with this, "Your faith has made you well; go in peace." As Timothy Keller says in his book The King's Cross about Mark, he said, "Oftentimes, Jesus gives us far more than we ask." She was just asking for the hemorrhage to stop, he gives her a holistic healing, and she's made well. "Go in peace and be healed of your affliction." It's done, and she's restored. 12 years is a long time, but we learn from this to have faith in Jesus when we're discouraged, and things may take longer than we anticipate.

Ross Sawyers: [00:23:20] And we find, in the third part of this story, that God has his own timetable for things. So we have faith in Jesus when we're delayed. Faith in Jesus when delayed. We have faith in Jesus when we're discouraged; we have faith in Jesus when we're desperate; we have faith in Jesus when we're delayed, and we're trusting his timetable. Verse 35 is a stark contrast in daughters, "While He was still speaking, they came from the house of the synagogue official, saying, “Your daughter has died; why trouble the Teacher anymore?" Jairus is getting the worst possible news he could get in the delay of coming with Jesus, then his daughter dies, this is the word he gets. So in verse 34, we have the woman who is hemorrhaging, and she's a daughter that's now made well, and then we have the contrast in verse 35 the daughter he was actually moving towards to heal has died, "But Jesus, overhearing what was being spoken, said to the synagogue official, “Do not be afraid any longer, only believe.” And this would have been good news coming from Jesus, to hear that, I don't know how Jairus heard that, I don't know, we're not really told how he heard it. But I'm sure he's thinking, I don't know how not to be afraid, I mean I've just got news that my daughter died. But Jesus says, be believing, be believing, only believe.

Ross Sawyers: [00:23:20] "He allowed no one to accompany Him, (in verse 37) except Peter and James and John the brother of James." So Jesus is narrowing down now who will actually be a part of what he's going to do, and these three were the closest in to Jesus. And just a little side note about discipling, one of the things I love that Jesus did that oftentimes we're unable to do, that's frustrating to me, is Jesus had his disciples with him in every kind of possible scenario. So it wasn't just they sat down once a week and did a discipleship book together, and there's value in that, but there's far greater value if I could be in your home and watch how you interact over a period of days as husband and wife; there's value when you see their Christ in the church, and I can just see, oh, this is what it looks like in a home. Or there's value if I could be in a home and see, oh, this is how you discipline a child well so that it's actually a redeeming kind of discipline. Or if I could have you at work, or I could be at work with you all day and watch how you treat other employees or as an employee, how you treat others. Man, those are real-life scenarios that you can speak the word into, and that's some awesome discipling. So we do the best we can, wherever we can do with me. We ought to figure out how to do that and have people with us.

Ross Sawyers: [00:26:31] In this case, Jesus is taking three, his inner three, to be with him to experience what's about to happen. "They came to the house of the synagogue official; and He saw a commotion, and people loudly weeping and wailing. 39And entering in, He said to them, “Why make a commotion and weep? The child has not died, but is asleep.” 40They began laughing at Him. But putting them all out." He put those out of there that were laughing, "He took along the child’s father and mother and His own companions." So it seems like it's mom and dad, Peter, James, John, and Jesus. "They entered the room where the child was. 41Taking the child by the hand, He said to her, “Talitha kum!” (which translated means, “Little girl, I say to you, get up!”). I say to you, get up." Dads with daughters, you know, I assume you can relate to this really well. The sense behind what Jesus is doing here is of a dad coming in the room with a strong hand and gently awakening his daughter, and then tenderly taking her hand and helping her get up, that's what Jesus does here. "Immediately the girl got up and began to walk, for she was twelve years old." He had a woman who was hemorrhaging for 12 years, and you've got a young girl, 12 years old, and everybody, immediately, they were completely astounded because they thought she was dead, and now he's raised her up. "And He gave them strict orders that no one should know about this, and He said that something should be given her to eat." I love the practical side of Jesus, she hadn't been feeling well, let's get up and walk, and now let's get something to eat, let's start restoring the strength here.

Ross Sawyers: [00:28:49] Jesus has power and Jesus has authority. Jesus himself is God. We can have faith in him when we're desperate, we can have faith in him when we're discouraged, and we can have faith in him when things are delayed and they're not on our timetable. So what are some thoughts around this that we can consider? And I'll give you a couple of tension points that I continue to wrestle through; I have for years, and every time I come across these things, I wrestle afresh. One of those is when I read Mark, I read through, we're choosing sample stories of Mark, so I'm not going to do every healing story in Mark in this series, but I went ahead and just read through Mark looking for every story of healing. And it's interesting to me that in the gospel, if I just contain it to the gospel of Mark, that every time someone comes to Jesus to be healed, they are. That has just not been my personal experience, that every time I've brought in prayer to Jesus and asked somebody to be healed, that every time they've been healed, and yet that's what I see in Mark. It is worth wrestling with a bit.

Ross Sawyers: [00:30:17] But what are other things that we see? I'm taking a shot at this for the first time, we actually practiced this week, and this wasn't like I decided to try it today. That was much easier than last time. Thanks, Cam. That's Cam, by the way, he does an awesome job on our staff. Yeah. All right, so just some observations. God does things his way. So when I looked at all these healings and Mark, this is what I see. Simon's mother-in-law has a fever, Jesus lays his hand on her and the fever is gone, he touches her. We have some broad statements that he healed various diseases, I mean, there are all kinds of diseases that he healed. We see him coming to a leper, and his emotion is described, he's actually moved with compassion to heal this leper, and he touches him and the leprosy is gone.

Ross Sawyers: [00:31:41] Now for fun, if you go into the Book of Acts, Paul also is healing people. And there's one instance where he's actually annoyed with this girl who has an evil spirit, and he casts the spirit out because he's annoyed, not because he's compassionate, not because he wants her freedom, he's tired of this girl bugging him, and so he cast the spirit out. But Jesus moved with compassion and touches the leper. And then in chapter 2, we see Jesus simply spoke. So sometimes he touched someone and healed them, sometimes he just spoke and told them to get up and walk, and they did. And then on the Sabbath day in chapter three, a man had a withered hand, and Jesus said, stretch your hand out. He doesn't touch it, he just says stretch your hand out and the withered hand is healed. There's a variety of ways, and people touch him, as we've seen in this story.

Ross Sawyers: [00:32:45] And then we're told in chapter 6 that people come from all over the countryside carrying pallets of people who are unable to get to him just so they could touch his cloak and be healed. So touch is involved often, sometimes just speech. And then one man comes to him, and I think he had picked up a pattern and said, it looks like if Jesus will just touch this friend of mine, he'll be healed, it might have been a family member. It was someone that was deaf and mute, deaf and mute. And Jesus didn't do it the way the guy asked, instead, he takes his fingers and puts them in the man's ears, and then he spits in his hand and takes the saliva and places it on the man's tongue. He then looks to heaven and said, be opened, and then the man speak and can hear. Jesus does things his way. In chapter 10, Bartimaeus, a blind man, encounters Jesus and Jesus just asks him a question. He said, what do you want me to do for you? And he said I want to regain my sight. Your faith has made you well and he could see. So we see again and again these kinds of healings, we see them in Jesus's way.

Ross Sawyers: [00:34:09] If we go outside of Mark and look in other parts of Scripture, if we went into Second Kings, Hezekiah was the king, he was about to die, and he just asked, God, could I have some more years? And God gave him 15 more years. There was a man named Naaman, he was in the country of Aram, they had defeated Israel, taken some people as prisoners, and there was a little girl in the mix from Israel. Naaman had leprosy, the little girl said, you should talk to the prophet back in Israel. Well, it was Elisha. Naaman works his way back there and gets to Elisha. Elisha says, go dip in the Jordan River seven times and you'll be healed. And in his pride, he said, I'm not doing that. I thought you would just, like, touch me, and then I would be healed. His servants had to talk him into doing what the prophet said. So he goes into the river Jordan, dips seven times and he's healed. God does things in unusual ways. So when we think about one observation, we just know that God does things his way.

Ross Sawyers: [00:35:31] Now we live in a remarkable time, don't we? Sometimes we can get frustrated with doctors. We can get frustrated with costs. We don't get everything we want, and it doesn't work exactly how we want it to work. But there are a good many of us today who are able to walk, who are living today because of all the miracles that happen through doctors and the changes in medicine. My grandfather died when he was in his mid-30s, if he lived in this era of time, he would have had a day surgery, been home, and been about his business. We live in a fascinating time and God chooses to heal through medical means. He also chooses to heal as many of you are doing through really natural kinds of ways. You've figured out ways that there are things I've been doing that are harming my body or somebody in my family, and when we do things naturally. There's healing that takes place, and God does that. God heals through counseling. We have mental health kinds of ways that we can be helped through counselors.

Ross Sawyers: [00:36:35] But there are other things that we would know when we think about healing. And one thing two people said on the same day to me that I wanted to note, in this story and throughout the Gospels, that it's faith over formula. We're not looking for a way to put God in some kind of a formula, it's faith, and it's faith in him. And then it's a faith that is developed in the quiet spaces. For our faith to be strong and to grow, it will call for us to get into the quiet spaces alone with God. And I'm grateful for devotions, the little five-minute devotions, and so forth, and I think anything is better than nothing. But if we're actually really going to grow strong in our faith, it's going to call for us to get into the secluded, quiet spaces, immerse ourselves in the Word of God, and let His Word take hold of us, capture our hearts, capture our minds, and inform everything in our lives, and that calls for getting in those quiet spaces. When we're in that quiet space, it can be a place of prayer, and we can come just like Jairus did, and we can invite Jesus into whatever is going on in our own world or in those that we know, and we are leaning into him in prayer. And I would say, based on the way God works, I think a really simple thing to do is just ask Jesus for help. I don't know how you're going to do it, I don't know what you're going to do, but I know you have the power and authority to do it, and I'm just asking you for help. I don't know what your time frame will be. I don't know if it'll be delayed. I don't know what discouragement I'll have to fight. I don't know how desperate I'll get. But my faith is in you, and I'm not going to be afraid to ask.

Ross Sawyers: [00:38:40] I went through a long period of time where I thought, I feel bad asking God because if he doesn't answer yes and there's a healing right here, then somehow God's name is dishonored. I'm not afraid of that anymore, I'm just going to come to God in faith, ask him in Jesus' name to bring healing, and then trust him to do whatever he's going to do, and he will work that out in a way that brings honor and glory to him. So in prayer, I'm actually learning how to trust him and to be guided by him and even what to pray. And as I pray and trust, what I'm recognizing is that God is a sovereign God, and I can trust him because he has control over everything, and he's working things for his purposes and his good. As I grow in that trust, in that sovereignty, I recognize the world I'm living in is a broken world. It's because of sin in this world that we even have sickness and illness and disease and death. It's because we live in a sin-filled world. But the good news is that Jesus went to the cross to take care of all that sin and brokenness. "So He Himself (in First Peter 2:24) bore our sins in His body on the cross, so that we might die to sin and live to righteousness; for by His wounds you were healed." Our healing comes at the cross with Jesus Christ.

Ross Sawyers: [00:40:11] And not only did Jesus take our sins at the cross off of us, but he became the resurrected one on the third day. And in John chapter 11, verses 25 and 26, "Jesus said, I am the resurrection and the life." And he actually says, "Those who believe in Me never die." That's the term we use, all we're doing, if we're in Christ is transferring to a different place. Jesus said, if you're in me, you never die. He was resurrected. He resurrects us. And the good news is, whatever it is that he chooses, this is all good news, by the way, whatever he chooses to do in this life with our bodies, in First Corinthians 15, we're told that we'll be given new bodies. And where will those new bodies come? In the new heavens and the new earth described in Revelation 21. So whether God chooses to heal now or not, there is a day when we'll all be given perfectly healthy bodies in the new heavens and the new earth. That's where our hope lies.

Ross Sawyers: [00:41:42] In the meantime, God is either going to heal our different scenarios, or he's going to leave them for us, and we can know with confidence that he is using that to shape and conform us to his image. And it's for his purposes, even though I might not know what they are, and it's for his glory. And we would want to chime in with Paul in Second Corinthians 12:9, and he said he'd asked already three times for this thorn in the flesh to be removed. And he said, Jesus responded to him and said, "My grace is sufficient for you, for power is perfected in weakness." And Paul said, "Most gladly, therefore, I would rather boast about my weakness, so that the power of Christ might be known through me."

Ross Sawyers: [00:42:51] When I was in my mid-20s, I started having back issues. When I was 31, I had surgery and my thorn in the flesh is L5-S1, it is right in the hinge of the back. And my life has been an adventure ever since, I don't know what a day is going to hold. A week ago Thursday, I was at Great Fest, and we were getting ready, and we were out there and I sat down on a curb for 20 minutes. I stuck a t-shirt in my back pocket, and it was a mistake, I could barely get up and I thought, I can't believe what I just did in front of the biggest weekend that we have at our church. And I kind of laid low for the next 24 hours, and God gave me enough relief to be able to do the weekend. But my wife said, and rightly so, this is a paraphrase, I wonder if God did this just as a reminder that this is his deal and not ours. And you know what? God has kept me humble with this for my whole life, and I'm glad because I'm already prideful enough, and I can't imagine how much more so I would be minus that hinge that keeps me completely dependent on him day in and day out. For you, it's probably something different, but God's grace is sufficient, and his power gets made known in that weakness.

Ross Sawyers: [00:44:31] And I'll close with this story that came from one of those doing research with me. I had a friend fighting cancer in 2019, a strong believer, but the person instructed his friends how to pray. And he said, please don't pray for healing, please pray if more people come to Christ through my healing that God heals me, but if more people come to Christ through my death, then please pray that he takes me. In all things. we magnify, treasure, and glorify Jesus.

Ross Sawyers: [00:45:18] So, Father, thank you for our time this morning. I pray we're encouraged by who you are. We know that you have the power and the authority to remove sickness and health issues. We also know that you extend life and that you've done multiple healings for us if we're just really thoughtful about it for a few minutes. And we tend to think of just big things, and yet, God, how many times have you healed our bodies? Time and time again over the years. And so we just want to say thank you for that. and God, we trust you, and we trust you have the power and authority to heal, and so we just want to ask today, in Jesus' name, for people that are sick and ill and hurting, that you would bring healing to them just like you did this woman that was hemorrhaging for 12 years. And then, God, we trust you for endurance in the midst of any delays that there might be. But, God, we trust you, and we are grateful for the ways you work. I thank you for so many people who have been through illness and hurt and pain that you've brought them to yourself because they had nowhere else to go. And so thank you, Jesus, for that kind of salvation and rescue. And then, God, I know these very same things cause people to turn away from you and say, forget it, if this is what happens, I'm out. But I pray, God, that there would just be a turning in the hearts of people towards you and a gratitude for you and for what your help and your power is today. Thank you for your compassion towards us, and we just invite you in today, to whatever our hurts and pains are, and trust you to meet us and walk with us in them. And I pray in Jesus' name.

Ross Sawyers: [00:47:07] So if we could take just a brief moment to be still before the Lord, and then Jordan will wrap us up here in a minute. But whatever it is that he's speaking to you, let it be a time of gratitude, praise, asking, and just praising Jesus for who he is.



Recorded in Grapevine, Texas.