Peace

You are listening to a message from Thrive Community Church, a church located in Southwest Florida. For more info, visit us at thrive-fl.org Those of you that maybe I have not yet met, my name is Todd, as James said, and I think this is the third time I've been up here and it's a privilege and an honor to be back, to be invited back, to fill in for John while he's away, and to give him a break. And before I get started, I just want to say again, thank you to all of you here at Thrive for embracing Jennifer and I during a kind of a tough time in our lives as she's been going through treatment at Moffitt, and you have wrapped your arms around us, you have shown us Jesus' love in ways that we would have never expected. And so thank you, well done you, and we are thrilled to be a part of it, and I'm thrilled to be able to share something with you this morning. And I hope to do more teaching today than preaching, because what I want to share with you is one of those episodes in Jesus' life that I think we very easily move past and go on to the next one without really stopping and seeing what's going on if you know the background. So we're going to be in Mark chapter 5 this morning, and the context of this before we read it is that Jesus has just returned from the Gentile region across the Sea of Galilee. He's returned from the Gentile region over back into the Jewish land of Galilee, and he is on his way to the house of a synagogue ruler named Jarius, and Jarius' daughter is about to die. And so he's gone to Jesus and said, you've got to come to my house. On the way, this is what happens. And we'll see how Jesus deals with interruptions as he's on his way somewhere. Mark chapter 5, starting at verse 24, to be on the screen. And a great crowd followed him and thronged about him. And there was a woman who had had a discharge of blood for 12 years, and who had suffered much under many physicians, and had spent all that she had, and was no better, but rather grew worse. She had heard the reports about Jesus, and came up behind him in the crowd, and touched his garments. For she said, if I touch even his garments, I will be made well. And immediately the flow of blood dried up, and she felt in her body that she was healed of her disease. Now as I said, it would be easy for us to maybe read this as you're going through your daily Bible reading, and then just go on to the next story, and what happened with Jarius's daughter, and all of that, and kind of just skip over this. But we have to remember that Jesus was a Jewish rabbi. He was living in a Jewish region with Jewish people, calling people back to a Jewish God. And we can either skim over this, or sometimes we grab a few lines of this and this, and drop them into our culture, without first stepping into theirs. And that's what I want to do this morning, is I want to step into their culture, so that maybe these words actually become a little more alive. Let's go back to verse 25. And there was a woman who had had a discharge of blood for 12 years. Ladies, can you imagine? I mean, just physically, can you imagine the torment that she's gone through? But you also have to understand what that meant for her socially and culturally. Let me read for you what that meant. This is from Leviticus chapter 15. This is God speaking through Moses to tell the children of Israel what to do and how to live. And this is what he says. If a woman has a discharge of blood for many days, not at the time of her menstrual impurity, or if she has a discharge beyond the time of her impurity, all the days of the discharge she shall continue in uncleanness. As in the days of her impurity, she shall be unclean. Every bed on which she lies all the days of her discharge shall be to her as the bed of her impurity. And everything on which she sits shall be unclean, as in the uncleanness of her menstrual impurity. And whoever touches these things shall be unclean and shall wash his clothes and bathe himself in water and be unclean until the evening. But if she is cleansed of her discharge, she shall count for herself seven days, and after that she shall be clean. And on the eighth day she shall take two turtle doves or two pigeons and bring them to the priest to the entrance of the tent of meeting. And the priest shall use one for a sin offering and the other for a burnt offering. And the priest shall make atonement for her before the Lord for her unclean discharge. Let's just go through what this means for this poor woman. So first of all, she's considered unclean. She could touch no one, and no one could touch her. So she's totally isolated. And everything that she touched became what? Unclean. So therefore that meant that she was unable to worship in the synagogue. She couldn't shop. She couldn't go to the well for water. She was then completely dependent on other people. And in some circles it is said that a woman in this situation would have had to announce publicly everywhere she went, unclea...