Too Physical To Be Faith

She has a rule and she made it herself and she has never once written it down.

The rule is that the real thing happens on the inside.

So when something rises in her to do a physical thing, she stops it. Not roughly. She simply lets it pass, the way you let a thought about biscuits pass, and afterward she feels she has behaved sensibly.

Kneel down, in her own front room, on her own. Let it pass.

Put a hand on the doorframe of her son's room on the way past. Let it pass.

Go and stand in a particular place because something happened there once. Let it pass.

Take the cup of water she is already holding and hold it differently for a minute. Let it pass.

Every one of those has risen in her more than once. She has done none of them, in about nine years, and she could give you her reason in one sentence, and the sentence sounds like maturity.

That is not where faith lives.

Beloved, listen. She is not shallow and she is not superstitious and she has more of God in her than she gives herself credit for. She has simply built a fence down the middle of herself and put God on one side of it.

So let me ask you.

What did you stop yourself doing because it felt too physical to be real?

He called it faith out loud in front of everybody

There is a woman in Mark who has had a condition for twelve years and has spent everything she had, and what she does about it is entirely physical.

She does not pray about it from a distance. She does not decide something in her heart and wait.

She gets into a crowd, which for her is not permitted, and she works her way through it on her feet and probably on her hands, and she reaches out and gets hold of a piece of cloth.

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.Mark 5:27 and 28

Read what she thought, because Mark writes it down without one word of correction.

If I just touch His clothes.

Mark 5 records that reasoning without embarrassment and then has Him stopping the whole crowd to say the word faith about it out loud, and the Spirit who was on Him without measure did not treat the reaching as a lesser thing, so nobody has ever had to leave their body to believe properly. You are believing with the whole of yourself already.

And notice what He says. He does not say your theology has healed you and He does not say your feelings have. He says your faith, and He says it about a woman whose entire act was hands, cloth and a crowd.

Now I am going to be careful here, because this is exactly where people stretch, and I will not.

I am not telling you that objects do things. I am not going to rule on that, in any direction, about anything anybody has ever argued over, and if that is what you came for, it is not what this is.

What I am telling you is narrower and it is enough.

Mark 5 has a woman reaching with her hands and Jesus naming it faith in front of a crowd, and the Spirit was in the reaching, which means the fence you built down the middle of yourself was never in the text. You are one person, and you have been one person the entire time.

You have been letting things pass for nine years and calling it maturity, and what it actually is, beloved, is a rule you invented.