Mark No.10 Twelve years

I lift my eyes to the quiet here. In a dusty place my strength and stay. Through the darkest night my shepherd will guard his sheep.

Father, we thank you that your praise is glorious. That means to say that you deserve all the honor and the worship that we can bring. For without you we are nothing.

But by your grace you have made us to be a strange and a unique people. A royal priesthood. A holy nation.

We thank you that you have purposes for each one of us here. There is none despised by you. Each one of us counts.

We bless you that this is because of your grace and your favor and your love. We lift our eyes to the silent hills. And they become not so silent.

As we listen very carefully to the voice of God through the created world. And realize that that speaks of the majesty and the eternal purposes of the Lord. And we thank you that your promises are firm and sure.

And in our beloved Lord Jesus you have made provision for our immediate and our eternal well-being. As we look into his life may we be charmed again. By what we read.

By what we hear him saying. And by the application of your word to our own experience. By the enabling of your spirit.

For the savior's sake. Amen. To Mark's gospel in chapter 5. If you're not regularly with us here at the tab we're particularly glad to have your company.

It's our practice to make our way. Generally though not always the case. There's no set liturgy.

But we usually make our way through a book of Scripture. Old Testament or New Testament. And allow the Scripture itself to dictate the passage that we're looking at.

That we're studying. Well this morning you've had many hints as to where we're at. So here is the second address.

Mark chapter 5. And setting the context from verse 18. Do share a Bible with the person alongside you. If you've not got one they'll be glad to loan you a side of theirs.

As Jesus was getting into the boat. The man who had been demon possessed begged to go with him. Jesus did not let him go but said.

Go home to your family and tell them how much the Lord has done for you. And how he had mercy on you. So the man went away and began to tell in the Decapolis.

How much Jesus had done for him. And all the people were amazed. When Jesus had again crossed over by boat to the other side of the lake.

A large crowd gathered around him. While he was by the lake. Then one of the synagogue rulers named Jairus came there.

Seeing Jesus he fell at his feet. And pleaded earnestly with him. My little daughter is dying.

Please come and put your hands on her so that she will be healed and live. So Jesus went with him. A large crowd followed and pressed around him.

And a woman was there who had been subject to bleeding for 12 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. 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 was freed from her suffering.

Once Jesus realized that power had gone out from him. He turned around in the crowd and asked. Who touched my clothes? You see the people crowding against you.

His disciples answered. And yet you can ask who touched me? But Jesus kept looking around to see who had done it. 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.

While Jesus was still preaching, was still speaking. Some men came from the house of Jairus the synagogue ruler. Your daughter is dead they said.

Why bother the teacher anymore? Ignoring what they said Jesus told the synagogue ruler don't be afraid just believe. He did not let anyone follow him except Peter James and John the brother of James. When they came to the home of the synagogue ruler Jesus saw commotion.

With people crying and wailing loudly. He went in and said to them why all this commotion and wailing? The child is not dead but asleep. But they laughed at him.

After he put them all out. He took the child's father and mother. And the disciples who were with him.

And went in where the child was. He took her by the hand and said to her Talitha Kum. Which means little girl.

I say to you get up. Immediately the girl stood up and walked around. She was 12 years old.

At this they were completely astonished. He gave strict orders not to let anyone know about this. And told them to give her something to eat.

I've really only got two major things, major emphases to make this morning. They came to me when I too was doing last minute preparation earlier on. Jesus understands you.

Nobody knows the trouble I've seen. Nobody knows but Jesus. Sometimes I'm up.

Sometimes I'm down. Sometimes I'm always in the ground. I'm almost in the ground.

Nobody knows the trouble I've seen. Nobody knows but Jesus. The Negro spiritual gets it right.

Jesus understands you. Secondly and perhaps more shockingly in the way that I express it. You are not repugnant to Jesus.

You are not repugnant to the Lord Jesus. You'll see the reason why I bring these things I dare to suggest from the mind of God to you right now in a moment or so. In this incident in fact you've got the binding together of two incidents.

A couple of people feature. One is a middle aged maybe elderly woman. The other a young girl.

One has been sick for 12 years. The other has lived just for 12 years. The former has been ostracized by her family.

The latter is idolized by her family. And they have this in common. That in a period of 8 hours both of them affected the ministry of Jesus.

And in a more wonderful fashion perhaps by way of application. His ministry affected both of them. Of all the narratives that is all the incidents that tell of the doings of the Lord Jesus recorded in this gospel.

There are I suggest to you none that are more moving and more attractive for us to read than these. We enter into the trauma of this girl. And this more mature woman.

We are their successors. Their pain, our pain, their sense of despair, our sense of despair. The measures that they took are the measures that we take.

And their relief becomes by God's grace, by anticipation, our own assurance. Now just to set the context. Here is our beloved Lord and He has been across the Sea of Galilee to a place called Gadara.

And there remarkable things have happened of which you heard last week. It is incredible to me that anyone should not want the company of the Lord Jesus. But that was the case in those days and it is the case today.

The people who had seen a remarkable exorcism pleaded with Jesus to leave. And He did. He went back to His own more familiar territory on the other side of the Sea of Galilee.

And there a large crowd comes around Him and jostles Him. And He knows that He is in for another very busy time of teaching and praying for those who are in great need. Now with Him are His disciples.

They have, as I pointed out to you at the beginning of our studies from Mark's Gospel, they are always in His entourage because basically what Jesus is doing during these three years, more than preaching to anyone else, is teaching His followers, His immediate twelve, who when He corporeally, that means bodily, has been moved from this earth, they will continue to do the ministry that He commenced. And they will do it with His authority, with His power, and with His success. So here are the disciples close to Jesus.

And there's a larger crowd that's gathered. And we're in the territory of Capernaum. A man comes along.

The man who came to Jesus publicly, his name is Jairus. And he shows the Lord Jesus his heartache when immediately on confronting the Savior, he makes reference to the sunshine in his life. My little daughter, dying.

Twelve years she's brought warmth and happiness to that household. But now the sunset is about, or the sun is about to set. The music that she brought into the family circle is to be stilled.

And this man has left his own wife looking after his child in this terminally ill condition. And he seeks out Jesus. Jairus, my little daughter is dying.

The words, they say it all. There's a cloud over the house. And this man does not want to go on.

He cannot contemplate the future without his daughter. And so doubtless with the encouragement of his wife, he makes his way to the Lord Jesus Christ. To get there, he has to lose certain things.

To come to the Lord Jesus, some of you will have to lose certain things. Notice he's the ruler of the synagogue. He is the man who says who preaches.

Not a preacher himself, but the controlling influence amongst the worship patterns in the synagogue at Capernaum. A leading Jew? If he comes to the Lord Jesus, then he will have to lose his pride. For the Lord Jesus is the most unorthodox rabbi.

And the general consensus of opinion amongst those who are in the know theologically is that Jesus is to be shunned. This man loses his pride as he comes to the Lord Jesus and lays bare his heart. There might well be a sense in which he feels when he first set off to encounter the Lord Jesus that along with his pride would go his dignity.

That he, such a man, should be seeking the company of this questionable preacher from Nazareth of all places. And in losing his dignity, he might even lose his friends. For will not his accomplices be those who too exert influence in the synagogue when they hear what he has been doing? Will they not question his reason and want to distance themselves from him? But you know when the man is at the end of his tether, when the sun in his life is about to set, he will use any means to get help.

The disciples one day, for remember they are witnessing the scene, will be driven into the same corner. When people have left the Lord Jesus Christ because they cannot tolerate the strength of his teaching, he will say to his disciples as the crowds leave, will you also go away? And they will respond, Lord to whom shall we go? And that nails it. When you're desperate, there is no other person to go to.

When your darling little daughter is to be taken from you. When the sunshine of your life, when the music in your home is about to be silenced and you cannot contemplate the future. There is only one source to which you can with any hope go and that is to the blessed Lord Jesus.

Prejudice, pride, dignity, associations tossed on one side, he comes and speaks to Jesus. Put your hand on her Lord Jesus, come to my home. And he finds that the Savior is prepared to comply with his request.

Now of course, the man who came publicly to Jesus, as you know, is followed in the narrative by the spotlight shifting to the woman who came privately. Who she is, we don't know. Christian tradition often spins its own information in the years that are to come and references being made to someone called Veronica or Bernice or what have you.

But there is a sense in which we're glad we don't know who she was. For we can identify ourselves, if not with Jairus, then possibly with her. She had been weakened as the years had passed.

As Steve reminded us so graphically, her money had been spent on the medical men. The outflow of finance was not balanced by the inflow of health. And as a result, her situation deteriorated.

Ostracized by the family, you say, that's reading too much in not a bit. You see, according to the Mosaic law, a woman with this condition couldn't go to the synagogue. She couldn't go to the temple.

Contact with her meant that you, in some degree, became afflicted with her uncleanness. So she comes, anonymous though she be, into the crowd and she moves towards the Lord Jesus. And she will touch the hem of his garment as Jairus touches the center of his emotions, his heart.

It would be wrong to think of this as just a slight action, a feeble stretching out of nervous shaking fingers. This is a woman clutching, like someone about to drown. The only last conceivable bit of help to prevent one from going right under.

The disciples. How insensitive these men sometimes are. And yet you cannot really criticize them for the insensitivity of the disciples.

I see reflected in myself a thousand and one times. Maybe they're on Jairus' side. You see, Jairus has got a problem that you and I sometimes have also in respect to Jesus.

And that is his impossible delays. You tell him and you expect him to almost be frog-marched to the situation to which you direct him in order that he can bring the assistance that you require. But now he's interrupted.

And this woman who's stopped Jesus from taking those precious moments and moving quickly towards the household where this twelve-year-old girl is terminally ill. Jesus not only speaks to this woman, or rather is not only ministering to this woman. He stops and he puts up the impossible question, who touched me? And the disciples showing an impatience that you've seen earlier in this gospel and will see in other gospels.

They say, look, it's a nonsense question. There's all this crowd, they're jostling you. You don't really need to waste time asking who touched you.

But you see, there was something different about this woman and her touch. It was the touch of semi-faith mixed with maybe a little bit of superstition. But this woman was very sincere.

She was clutching at something which was her final hope. And Jesus knows that power has gone from his body into her. And what is more, Jesus knows that Jairus requires a further test, a further demonstration to buttress his own faith.

For Jesus is at either end of every situation and in the middle. He knows about the mother. He knows about the girl.

He knows about the impatience in the heart of Jairus. He knows also that his disciples feel that he's pussyfooting around. But he didn't.

And he doesn't. He's got every situation in control. And so he speaks to this woman.

And despite the impatience of the disciples, he ministers to her. We come back to that in a moment. He then indicates to Jairus that he has reason to exercise even greater faith.

Even though Jairus has received from his home by way of communication from his servants that the situation has deteriorated even more. Your daughter is dead. Why bother the teacher? But Jesus ignores them and speaks to the synagogue ruler.

Don't be afraid. You've seen at least in some measure that this woman has been affected by what I have had to do and say. May the little faith you have, Jairus, become a big faith so that together we will see spectacular things done in your home as we make our way there.

Are you sometimes put off by the fact that Jesus answers prayer for other people before he answers prayer for you? Do you sometimes have the same degree of impatience as the disciples had on this occasion towards Jesus? Our blessed Christ, how merciful and compassionate you are to people like ourselves who lose patience with you. Who sometimes accuse you of being insensitive, putting other things and resolving other situations before dealing with us. Forgive us that sometimes we draw our conclusions too quickly and do not understand that at the beginning and in the middle and in the end of our circumstances there you are.

You never leave us. You never forsake us. You have everything in your control.

So what does the Savior do when he arrives at the household of Jairus? Well, he gets rid of the people who are contributing an unnecessary noise. You see, in those days when someone dies, you had, even if you were poor, to have at least two people who would play a flute and one who was a professional mourner. Presumably Jairus was worth a shekel or two, so it seems as though he got the local orchestra making some sort of contribution.

Jesus saw a commotion, verse 38, with people crying and wailing loudly. He went in and said, why the noise? And then he uttered one of the most sublime things that ever fell from his lips. The child is not dead, but asleep.

Why is that sublime? He will say exactly the same outside Lazarus' tomb. From the perspective of God, men and women do not die. They may look dead because you see their corpse and there is no way in which they can sustain life within that body.

But when the great God and Father looks upon our loved ones and ourselves at the time of death, he sees us as asleep. Moving consciously from our life here on this earth into his immediate presence, he does not use the harsh terminology of death which indicates or suggests the cessation of being. Do you know something? Jesus did not go to Jairus' household because of that 12-year-old girl who had died.

Jesus does not show sympathy towards the dead. Our Lord shows sympathy towards the living. You see, if you understand death from the perspective of God, then it means you move immediately into his presence.

Absent from the body, present with the Lord. That's why in this church we never pray for the dead. Why pray for someone who doesn't need your prayers? Why pray for someone who is basking in the fullness of joy at the Father's right hand? You see, the people who need your sympathy are people akin to this woman who is continually hemorrhaging and as a result is ostracized.

She feels dirty. She feels unclean. She feels unkempt.

She feels that she has lacked her dignity. If Jesus has got a ministry this side of heaven, then certainly it has to be to a woman like her and to the bleeding, breaking heart of Jairus and his wife. So Jesus gets rid of these professional mourners who soon shift the emotion of weeping when he makes the comment that this girl is not dead but asleep and they start to laugh at him.

A fig for emotions that shift so quickly as that. And the beloved Lord takes into the sanctuary where the girl is in the home, into the bedroom, his three intimate disciples Peter, James, John and Jairus and with a touch that only the Lord Jesus always sustains, he takes mum too. Do you notice? You see, you think about Jairus' daughter.

Our Lord knows that if Jairus has got a daughter, he's got a wife. If there is a daughter, there is a mother. Jesus speaks to the totality of the situation.

So he goes into the home accompanied by these two, husband and wife, who need his help more than the daughter will ever need his help. And then he speaks, Talitha kum, or Talitha kumai, daughter arise. Or if you'd like a more literalistic translation, little lamb, get up.

Isn't that lovely? The great shepherd of the sheep disturbing one of his little lambs. And returning her, not for her benefit, but for mum and dad's benefit, to this side of glory. Dead she was, but not consigned to the department of the dead.

Jesus would bring her back into a further experience of life here. And she will know sorrow, and she will know pain, and she will know the years go by until that moment when again she will be carried through the corridor of death and into the immediate presence of her God and maker. Let's try a summary rerun in terms of final application.

Then we come around the table of our Lord. Who touched me? Jesus always asks that question. You see, the world is split into two categories.

There are those who've touched Jesus, and there are those who've pressed onto his flesh. He's jostled by the crowd, but the pressing of the flesh makes no impact on him. But when a woman reaches out with a nervous faltering face and moves towards him, he registers and says, who touched me? And if you've ever heard Jesus say that of you, it's an indication that he's identified you as one of those people who he has come to help, not the righteous, not the righteous.

Sinners, Jesus came to call, let not conscience make you linger, nor a fitness fondly dream. All the fitness he requires is for you to feel your need of him, because nobody is repugnant to Jesus. I watched a man in Romania.

There were three cripples. Something told me to try to help them. I was near the place where some of the foodstuff that you send out happens to be collected.

And I asked a Romanian friend to go and get some of the stuff and give it to these men. One man sat down on the grass. He rolled up his trouser leg.

He pulled out his sock. And he started to show, as his trouser leg came up to his thigh, a condition of grand green which I have never seen the like of in my life before. It was repulsive.

I felt so helpless. A translator said to this man that I was a priest, so to speak. He asked for prayer.

I placed my hands on him and pleaded with the Lord that he would be made whole. He concluded with a ten-minute lamentation before God that I don't suppose I will ever forget this side of heaven, as he pleaded with the Lord that he might retain his leg and that the gangrenous condition would not spread to his arms because then he would not be able to feed himself. I wish I could tell you that there was an obvious improvement in his condition, but what I will tell you this is, he represents men and women today, and Jesus is prepared to have dealings with such men and women.

You see, there is what theologians call, within the character of Christ, his impeccability. You say, what does it mean? It means this, that your sin does not in any sense have such a contagiousness that it affects him. He will touch the woman who has known the hemorrhaging for 12 years, and he will be in no way made unclean.

The vilest sinner, the most reprobate person, the man who is filled with the sin of gangrene, can come to this Lord Jesus, and this man is not repugnant in the sight of Jesus, for it was for such men and women that he came to seek and to save out the lost. So, the woman who came privately is received by Jesus as much as the man who came publicly. And there were memorable words which fell from the lips of Jesus, which were never forgotten in the memory of Peter.

So that in the second part of the incident, in that most exciting day in the ministry of Jesus, when Peter reflected upon what the Savior did, he could still hear that Aramaic term, talithakum, talithakumai. Jesus, who directs his interest and his love to an elderly woman, has exactly the same interest and the same love for a young 12-year-old girl. That's the measure of the ministry of Jesus Christ, directed towards all conditions, all categories of people.

Jesus said to the woman with hemorrhage, daughter, and he never used that term, at least it's not recorded, on any other occasion as a means of conversation from our Lord to another person. He called daughter the one they kicked out of the synagogue. He called little lamb and used the language within the family of a girl who had died, showing how he identifies with the agony of parents and with the intimacy of home life.

Do you know this, Jesus? Do you know this, Lord and Savior? Have you confessed him as your own? Have you embraced his gospel? Do you realize he understands you? He knows all about you. You are not repugnant to him. Let's pray.

It was not compassion for the little girl that drove our Lord Jesus, it was compassion for her parents and that same compassion he has for each one of us. And around this table, as we take bread and wine, we remember that the compassion and the mercy he shows and the salvation that he offers comes as a result of a tremendous cost. He bled and died to take away the condition of spiritual hemorrhaging.

He bled and died to take away the gangrene from the veins of men and women like us. Aye, but I will not touch the issue. He also bled and died so that within his sovereignty he could address the literal needs, the physical needs and disabilities of people.

Little kids in one orphanage, one with no arms, others with AIDS, children, men and women in Rwanda, he died for them too. Lord God, we come to you and we thank you for the Saviour. As in a moment or two we take bread and wine, help us to realize afresh the personal benefits of his death.

He loved me and gave himself for me. Wretched though I am, he loves me and dignifies me. Father, there is no one else to whom we can go but to the beloved Christ.

As we come and feed on him again and drink of the blessings of Calvary, help us intelligently to take these emblems and with love in our hearts to express our worship to you. In his name, amen. As we prepare to come around the table of our Lord, the hymn that Jenny, who prepared this order for me while I've been away, this order of service, suggests we sing is 797.

Your love is to me like an overflowing stream. Let's hear it played through as we prepare for taking these emblems together. We'll sing it in a moment or two after we've heard it.

You may not all know this, but it's a lovely song. Let's try singing it together as we commence to bring these emblems to you. 797.

Your love is to me like an overflowing stream. Your love is to me like an overflowing stream. 797.