This transcript was generated by whisper.ai.

I want to welcome you back to Mark 5 in Daily Drive Time Devotions, Day 3 verses
25 to 34 today. And today is a day of encouraging news. The encouraging news is
God wants to heal us of our hurts.

God does not always change our circumstances, but He can always heal us of our
inner hurts. Your finances may not be restored like you want them to, but He can
heal you of the hurt of disappointment. Your past can't be changed, and the
person who hurt you may never ask for forgiveness, but He can heal you of the
hurt of rejection or abuse.

You can't undo the sin that you committed, but He can heal you of the hurt of
self-reproach and guilt. You see, your hurts in life, they are either held or
they're healed. If you hold on to them, Satan uses them to make you bitter.

If you trust Jesus Christ to heal them, God will use them to make you and the
people around you better. If you've been hurting over something for a long time,
or know someone who's been hurting for a long time, what happens in this
experience in Jesus' life is for you. We're going to look at the story of how
Jesus healed a woman who'd been hurting for twelve years.

Just a woman in the crowd, no one especially noticeable, and Jesus helped her to
break the grip of suffering in her life. What can I learn about what happened to
her, about how God's heals our hurts, my hurts? If you're hurting, you know
someone who is hurting, here's where you start.

The place to start is you face and break through the barriers that are keeping
you in your pain. There are things that have kept you hurting in your life, and
at some point those become barriers in your mind, in your heart. Barriers are
the reasons that we feel we have to still live with a hurt in our lives.

Someone has told you something, some experience has happened, they are the
experiences that cause us to lose hope. And this woman, she is a case study in
what makes us lose hope. Look at the barriers to hope in her life in just these
two verses, Mark chapter 5 verses And a woman was there who had been subject to
bleeding for twelve years.

She had suffered a great deal under the care of many doctors and had spent all
she had. Yet instead of getting better, she grew worse. Let's just go through
the list, the barriers, the things that would have caused her to not have hope.

First, I'm lost in the crowd, that's the first barrier. This large crowd pressed
around Jesus. This woman was there and she was lost.

She thought Jesus won't even notice me. So you feel lost in the crowd. Nobody
knows about your hurt.

You're listening to this alone but you think nobody else knows, nobody else
cares. Well I want you to notice something in this story. Jesus knew.

Jesus noticed her. And Jesus notices you. He sees your hurt.

Another barrier to hope that this woman had to face is the feeling that it's
just been too long, twelve years. Now the length of time is no guarantee that
something is going to continue in your life but it certainly makes you feel like
that thing is going to continue in your life. Just because you've suffered for
twelve years doesn't mean you're going to suffer for thirteen but it makes you
feel like it is and you have to break through that barrier, realize that Jesus
Christ can change everything in a moment.

Jesus Christ can do something no one else can do. There's another barrier to
hope that this woman faced. I've been disappointed so many times.

She risen up with hope about maybe this is the answer. The Bible says she had
suffered under the care of many doctors. Doctor after doctor, disappointment
after disappointment.

In fact maybe even some tried to take advantage of her suffering. You pile up
enough disappointments and even the most positive of us become resigned to our
hurt. Jesus Christ says I want to do something different.

He did that day. He wants to do it in my life, in your life. Another barrier she
had to face.

I don't have the resources to deal with this. The Bible says she had spent all
she had. Put in there for resources, strength or energy or emotion or money,
whatever it is.

You just don't have the resources anymore. You've come to the end of your
resources. But you do have a resource that's still left.

You have the resource of God's love for you in Jesus Christ. And although as I
said at the beginning of today he may not change all the circumstances in your
life, he can change your heart. He can change your hope.

He can change your faith. There's a couple of other barriers in this woman's
life she had to break through. She had to break through the barrier of things
are getting worse, not better.

Instead of getting better, she grew worse, the Bible says. Now I have to say to
you that there is no one who is more exasperating as the guy who can always see
the bright side of your troubles. And that's not the way I'm going at this.

The truth is there are some of you listening to this right now, things are
getting worse and worse. And you don't see the light at the end of the tunnel.
You don't even see that it's a tunnel.

You don't see that there's any way out. I just want to remind you that God has
hope to offer even in the worst of circumstances. You may be waiting for
physical healing.

God may or may not heal you physically. It would be foolish for me to try to
explain why God heals some people physically and he doesn't others because I
don't know. That's in the hands of God.

But I do know this. He can heal the hurt in your heart. He can bring you to a
new place of hope.

How does that happen? How did this woman break through the barriers that told
her again and again and again and again you just can't hope? Here's how she
broke through.

You trust Jesus to help you. You want God's healing for the hurt in your life?
First you have to face and break through the barriers.

How do you do that? You trust Jesus to help you. I break through the barriers
when I'm ready to trust Jesus to make a difference with the hurts that are
tearing me up inside.

How do I do that? Here's what this woman did, verses 27 to 29. When she heard
about Jesus, she came up behind him in the crowd and touched his cloak because
she thought if I just touch his clothes I will be healed.

Immediately her bleeding stopped and she felt in her body that she'd been freed
from her suffering. You and I can't go to meet Jesus in a crowd. There's no
crowd to meet him in today.

He's not on earth anymore. But you and I can do the two things that this woman
did that day because Jesus is still alive. He's here right now.

What are the two things she did? It's all about the way that she thought and
it's all about her decision with faith to touch Jesus Christ. What she thought
and how she touched.

Thought. She thought if I just touch him. The battle for healing, the battle for
life, the battle for hope begins in your thoughts.

You can focus on yourself, on your faults, on your failings, on your fallacies.
You can get down on yourself, you can do that the rest of your life. Or you can
focus on God, on his truly great desire to love you and to help you.

And that's what she focused on that day. She could have focused on a lot of
things, the doctors that had never helped or the disappointment of the years.
She focused on Jesus Christ and she thought if I just touch him.

She saw in Jesus Christ a power to do something no one else could do. But it was
more than that. It was more than just a thought.

You may have had a thought like that. Maybe God could do something in my life.
But then she did something with that thought.

She reached out and she touched Jesus. This is the moment when you do something
about the hurt. When you put those thoughts into action and you do what she did.

You get in touch with God. And I'll remind you, no one can force you to get in
touch with God. And Jesus, when he was on this earth, didn't go around randomly
healing people.

Just zap, zap, zap, pointing at them across the crowd. No, he asked people,
"What do you want me to do for you? " And when they trusted him, then he healed
them.

You get in touch with him. When you see Jesus Christ for who he really is and
trust him for who he really is, you're getting in touch with his power in your
life. That's what happened with this woman that day.

Why did she want to touch his cloak? What was that all about? There's something
going on here.

She wanted to touch, one version of the gospel says, the hem of his garment, the
tassel. On the garment of a rabbi, a teacher like Jesus, there would usually be
four tassels that represented God's commands. And in Jesus' day, listen, this is
important.

It was believed that when the Messiah came, touching one of those tassels on the
coat of the Messiah would have healing powers. So when that woman reached out
and touched his cloak, she was saying, "Jesus, I am trusting you for who you
really are. You are the Messiah.

You're God's promise of hope. " Jesus heals hurt places when we trust him for
who he really is. And look at what happened because of her faith, verses 30 to
34.

At once, Jesus realized that power had gone out from him. He turned around in
the crowd and he asked, "Who touched my clothes? " "You see the people crowding
against you," the disciples answered, "and yet you ask who touched me?

" But Jesus kept looking to see who had done it. And then the woman, knowing
what had happened to her, came and fell at his feet and, trembling with fear,
told him the whole truth. He said to her, "Daughter, your faith has healed you.

Go in peace and be freed from your suffering. " Jesus let her tell her story.
Suffering must be spoken to be broken.

Hurts must be told to lose their hold. Revealing your feeling is the beginning
of healing. This woman had a story to tell and Jesus, knowing the importance of
that, took time amidst the pressure of that crowd that day and the pressure of
the events to listen.

And she told him the whole truth. Jesus wasn't trying to embarrass this woman.
He'd never do that.

He was setting her free. Now you think I could never do that. That would be so
embarrassing.

People would reject me if I tell the whole truth. If you tell the whole truth,
what will happen? Will you be condemned?

Not by Jesus. The first word he says to her after she tells the truth is,
"Daughter. " This is the only time in all of the gospels that Jesus calls
someone daughter.

He's got this tender heart towards someone who's told the whole truth. He feels
the family relationship because of her faith. If you tell the whole truth, what
do you think will happen in your relationship with God?

You'll feel the compassion and the tender heart of God's love towards you. Let's
talk to him together right now. Jesus Christ, we're afraid of our hurts many
times.

We're afraid to trust you to heal them because we're afraid it won't happen and
we'll be disappointed once again. And then we're even afraid once you've begun
to heal them to talk about it because we don't want others to think ill of us.
We don't want to be embarrassed.

Jesus, help us to give you praise. Help us to realize that we're all broken in
many ways. We all need healing in our lives.

And help us to be a community of people wherever we are that shares the hurts in
our lives and how you've healed. And that through that builds faith in one
another and praise towards you. We ask this Jesus together, in your name, amen.