This transcript was generated by whisper.ai.

Welcome to day four of our look through Matthew chapter 9. We're going to be
looking at verses 18 to 26 today. And I've got some encouraging news that we're
going to look at together today.

God wants to heal our hurts. God doesn't always change our circumstances, but He
can and will always heal our inner hurts as we trust Him. Your finances, you may
have a hurt in the place of your finances, they may not be restored as you want
them to be restored, but God can heal you of the hurt of disappointment.

Your past can't be changed. The person who hurts you may never ask for
forgiveness, but God can heal the hurt of rejection or abuse in your life. You
can't undo the sin that you committed, but He can heal you of the hurt of
self-reproach of guilt.

In all of our lives, your hurts are either held or they're healed. They're
either held or they're healed. If you hold on to them, Satan uses them to make
you bitter.

If you trust Jesus with them, God will use them to make you and the people
around you better. So if you've been hurting for a long time, or you know
someone who's been hurting for a long time, these verses are for you. We're
going to look at the story of how Jesus healed a woman who'd been hurting for 12
years.

Let's begin there. While He was saying this, a ruler came up and knelt before
Him and said, "My daughter has just died, but come and put your hand on her and
she will live. " Jesus got up and went with Him, and so did His disciples.

Just then, a woman who had been subject to bleeding for 12 years came up behind
Him and touched the edge of His cloak. She said to Himself, "If I only touch His
cloak, I will be healed. " So here's this woman in the crowd.

No one is especially noticeable, and Jesus this day is going to help her to
break the grip of suffering in her life. So how can you and I learn from what
happened to her about how God heals our hurts? If you're hurting, if you know
someone who's hurting, this is where you start.

First thing you do is you have to face and break through the barriers to your
healing. There are barriers in your life. There are things that cause you to
feel like, "I have to live with this life of hurt.

" There are things that cause you to lose hope. This woman, in many ways, is a
case study of what makes us lose hope. Look at the barriers that she had to face
in just these two short verses.

This woman felt lost in the crowd. She felt like it's been too long. She felt
like it's not the right time.

First she felt, "I'm lost in the crowd. " There's this big crowd around Jesus,
and she is suffering in silence. When you suffer in silence, you feel especially
lost in the crowd.

Some of you, even at church, no one knows, you feel lost in the crowd. At the
end of this story, I want you to make sure you notice that Jesus notices her.
Jesus notices you.

Whatever the crowd has said or done or not done, Jesus notices you. But you have
to break through that barrier, feeling like, "Nobody cares because I'm lost in
the crowd. God cares about you.

" She also had to break through the barrier, feeling like it's been so long.
Twelve years she had suffered. The length of time that you've suffered is not a
guarantee that you're going to have to continue with that hurt the rest of your
life.

You may have to continue with the circumstance that's caused an inner hurt in
your life. No doubt about that. There are some circumstances that don't get
changed until we get to heaven, but that doesn't mean you have to live with
bitterness the rest of your life.

Now, the fact that it's gone on for so long, I will say it makes us feel like
we're going to have to live with it the rest of our lives. But the truth is,
just because you've suffered with a hurt for twelve years doesn't mean you're
going to have to suffer for thirteen. Everything can change in a moment.

In your heart, everything can change in a moment. You can have a different
heart, different attitude toward God about that circumstance, about that hurt,
about that pain, about that thing that you did to someone else or someone did to
you. There's one more barrier that this woman had to face that day.

In some ways, it's my personal favorite barrier or excuse when I'm hurting to
keep myself in a hurt, and that is it's not the right time. I know God's going
to heal me of this someday, but it's just not the right time. For her, here's
Jesus.

He's being hurried along in the crowd. He's going to heal someone else. It's a
little girl.

I mean, he needs to get to her. Why would this woman at all interrupt Jesus in
that moment? And many of us have these same feelings.

There's other people that are more important, or maybe God will do it someday,
but I can't see him doing it today. The truth of the matter is the right time to
deal with any hurt in your life is now. Now.

And this woman broke through those barriers that day when she reached out and
she touched the edge of Jesus' garment, his cloak. This woman broke through the
barriers that told her not to hope. So first, you've got to break through the
barriers.

You've got to realize I've built up some barriers in my mind. Other people have
built up barriers in my mind that have told me it's not okay to hope today. It's
not yet time to hope today.

Hope is for other people, not for me. None of that is true. So you break through
that.

You trust God's word and you trust Jesus to help you. First thing you do is you
break through the barriers. The second thing you do is you trust Jesus to help
you.

How do you do that? How do you and I do that? You can't go and meet Jesus in the
crowd, but you can do two things that this woman did.

Put in your mind these two words, the word thought and the word touch. This
woman thought something and then she touched Jesus. That's how you trust him to
help you.

It's in what you think and it's in what you touch. She thought if I just touch
him, the battle begins in your thoughts. You can focus your thoughts on
yourself, on all your faults, your failings, your fallacies.

You can focus your thoughts on other people, how they've let you down. You can
focus your thoughts on the past, how it's never happened, never will happen, or
you can focus your thoughts on God, on God's love, on his truly great desire to
love you and help you and to bring healing to your heart. When you recognize
that, he is there.

He is close. Jesus is walking by this woman. She doesn't know if she's ever
going to have another chance, but God's there in your life right now and you
think he's always going to be there, but if God's doing something in your heart
right now, if he's warming something in your heart about healing, about healing
some hurt that's been there a long time, now's the time to act.

We think we're always going to be willing to act. We aren't. Now is the time to
act.

You think if I just touch him, God can do it and then you touch. The moment you
do something about that hurt, you put your thoughts into action. That's the
moment of change.

So you do what she did. You get in touch with God and no one can force you to do
that. No one can force you to get in touch with God.

Even God doesn't force you to get in touch with God. Look at the life of Jesus,
the ministry of Jesus as he walked through the crowds. He healed a lot of
people, but he didn't walk around randomly healing people like zap, you're
healed and zap, you're healed and zap, you're healed.

No, he healed people who reached out to him in faith. A study of the people that
Jesus healed of their hurt show that they approached him first. They called,
they reached out.

There were a few exceptions. I mean, Lazarus, he was dead. He didn't call or
reach out.

I understand there were a few exceptions, but by and large, they reached out to
him. And in Lazarus' case, it was the faith of his family to trust in Jesus. If
you said it, it will happen.

Why did she touch Jesus? Because she trusted him to heal her hurt. She had
doubts about herself.

If I touch him, can I touch him? Am I willing to do this? But she didn't have
any doubts about Jesus.

I will be healed, she said. It's interesting here. It says she touched the edge
of the hem of his garment.

This is literally in that day, the tassel. A rabbi would wear a garment that had
tassels on the four corners, and these tassels represented the commandments of
God. They actually had knots tied in them to represent the hundreds of
commandments of God.

In Jesus' day, it was believed that when the Messiah came, that touching the
tassels on his garment would have healing power. So this is not just some kind
of a show magician kind of thing. No, this is a trust in the Messiah moment.

She's trusting Jesus for who he really is, God's promise of hope. Jesus heals
hurt places when we trust him for who he really is. She trusted him, and look
what happened because of her faith.

Verse 22, "Jesus turned and saw her. Take heart, daughter," he said, "your faith
has healed you. " And the woman was healed from that moment.

Now, it's interesting. This woman tried to do this silently, sneak up behind
Jesus, touch the hem of his garment, and then walk off. But Jesus proclaimed it
publicly.

In fact, in the other gospels, we're told that he asked her, "Who touched me? "
He asked her to speak out, to be part of proclaiming it publicly. When it comes
to healing, 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 the time amidst the pressure of the crowd, the pressure of the
events, to listen.

And Mark's account tells us that she told him the whole truth. Now, Jesus was
not trying to embarrass this woman. He was setting her free.

When I tell the truth about what's happened in my life, not only to God, but to
one other believer that I trust or a small group of believers that I trust, what
will happen? Will I be condemned by God? Absolutely not.

By those other believers? Most probably not. But even if you pick the worst
believer in the world to say it to, and they somehow condemn you, you find a
better group of believers, because I'm telling you, God is not a condemning God.

He wants to set you free. Now, wait a minute. What about that young girl, the
one that Jesus was on his way to heal?

Jesus did not forget about her. After this healing happens, in verses 23 to 26,
when Jesus entered the ruler's house, he saw the flute players and the noisy
crowd, and he said, "Go away. The girl is not dead, but asleep.

" But they laughed at him. After the crowd was put outside, he went in, and he
took the girl by the hand, and she got up. News of this spread throughout the
region.

I want you to notice, Jesus did not forget about this little girl. He hadn't
forgotten about you. He sees your hurt.

He wants to heal your hurt. What about hurts that take a long time to heal? Some
hurts that maybe won't even be healed until we get to heaven.

Some physical handicap that you're facing. Some event that happened in your life
that can't be changed. I want you to hear what some people have to say about
physical circumstances that can't be changed, and how God has worked to heal
them inside, even though they're struggling on the outside.

Some people in our church, and some people who are following Christ throughout
the world. In our own church, there's Jenny, who's suffering from polio, who
says, "God in his mercy allowed me to have this handicap because he uses it to
make me the person he wants me to be. " Or Tim, suffering from severe back
injury and pain, who says, "I finally came to the realization that if the Lord
could use this body better the way it is, then that's the way it should be.

" Or Tom, suffering with MS, who says, "I'm thankful for my handicap because
it's given me the opportunity to live life with more depth. It took me from
living a fast and easy lifestyle to being in touch with God. " Or Johnny,
Erickson Tata, who famously said, "I'd rather be in this wheelchair with God,
praising God, than on my feet without him.

" Or the Apostle Paul, who said about his sickness, "I pleaded to have it taken
away, but God said, 'My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made
perfect in your weakness. '" Jesus says, we pray, "Our Father, we need you to
heal the hurt places in our lives. " It's easy for us to get stuck on thinking
about what was done to us, or what didn't happen for us, or how it could have
been different.

And all those things are true, but none of those things can heal us. Lord, would
you come into our hearts, our lives right now, and begin the process of
miraculously healing us? We pray for ourselves, and we pray for friends that we
have.

Anyone who's suffering from bitterness, hurt in their lives, we pray that you
would bring us to places of healing, places of faith, places of focus on your
grace and eternity. Lord, we need you to do this. We can't do this on our own.

So would you heal the hurt places in our lives? We pray. In Jesus' name, Amen.