Jesus and the Hopeless

Father, we ask that your Holy Spirit would come, continue to come with might and power and deep conviction upon us. As we continue to think about your, read your word and think about it, puzzle over it, as we pray to you, as we sing your praises, as we gather around the Lord's table to remember Jesus' death.

Father, we ask that the Holy Spirit would continue to fall with might and power and deep conviction. And we ask, Father, we give you permission to have for you yourself to speak into our heart and rule in our heart through your word.

And this we ask in the name of Jesus, your Son and our Savior. Amen. Please be seated. So the text that we're going to be looking at today talks about sickness and death.

And I have to say that some things have developed in my life over the last two days, two and a half days, that makes this actually far more personal.

And so if I get emotional during the sermon, there's a reason for it. And when I tell you this, by the way, I am not equating a dog's life with a human's life.

But some of you know that we have had this beautiful big German shepherd, 115, 120-pound gentle giant of a dog, for over seven years. Anyway, on Friday it had to be taken to the vet.

And on Saturday we had to say that nothing else would be done and that we were bringing the dog home to die. I didn't think I'd get emotional.

But I warned you. I wanted to just warn you. I mean, I'm not making a comment at all that the death of a dog is like the death of a human being. But, you know, dogs, especially a big gentle giant, 115, 120-pound gentle German shepherd, that does become part of the family for seven-plus years.

So, I mean, obviously the vets don't know. It might be that he will live for a couple of weeks, but it's quite possible that by the time we gather again next week, we will have dealt with Rocky's remains.

And the text today, obviously not about a dog, but it is about death and it is about sickness. And it is a text which has lots of challenges in it, things which puzzle people and distract us from the fundamental point, but it is a profound text to meditate upon, how Christians are to approach sickness and how they are to approach death.

It's a very profound text, a text that is well worth meditating upon and contemplating upon for those of you who are in Jesus. And if you are here and you're not sure where you are with Jesus and Christianity, or if you're watching online, this gives you a bit of a window into how it is that Christians are invited to think about such very, very serious matters.

The fact of the matter is, is that we all know that we will die, but really fundamentally we all know other people will die. We don't really believe that we will die.

Although for some of you here or those online, you might have gotten a very bad prognosis this week, where a loved one has had a bad prognosis. So this is a deeply personal text, and let's turn to it and see what it is that was said.

It's Mark chapter 5, beginning at verse 21. And as you've been warned, if I get a bit emotional during the sermon, it is because it's obvious, obvious, now that you know that thing about Rocky.

So Mark chapter 5, verse 21, and just before we read it, what's just happened? We preach through books of the Bible. Basically, Mark was written as one book to be read. And so we study it that way as a book.

And what we just looked at last week was Jesus had gone to the other side of the Sea of Galilee, to the pagan side of the Sea of Galilee. And he'd come across, or he'd been met by a man who was demonized by a legion of demons.

And Jesus delivers the man from the demons. And as a result of that, the people in the region want Jesus to leave.

And so that's now where the story takes up. Jesus leaves. If people don't want Jesus, he leaves. And he leaves, and he goes back to the Jewish side of the lake. And that's where this story now takes up.

And when Jesus had crossed again in the boat to the other side, a great crowd gathered about him, and he was beside the sea. Then came one of the rulers of the synagogue, Jairus by name.

And seeing Jesus, he fell at Jesus' feet and implored him earnestly, saying, My little daughter is at the point of death. Come and lay your hands on her so that she may be made well and live.

I have a bit of emotion still in my voice. Some of you who have very good imaginations can just very well imagine the tears that would have been in his voice as he asks for his precious daughter.

And Jesus went with him. 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 doctors and had spent all that she had and was no better, but had grown worse.

Now just sort of pause here for a second. Why this story? One of the things, if you read the different, the four ancient biographies of Jesus, if you read them, all of them, one of the things you'll notice is that they have all of these little asides.

Mark does it all the time. Oh yeah, Jesus spent a whole pile of time healing people and casting out demons, and then he did this. Or he spent the day doing this, healing people, casting out demons, and then he did this.

And several of the writers mention right in the book that if they actually were to record everything that Jesus did, it would be too many books. Because he did lots of miracles.

So you have to ask yourself a little bit, why this story? Like why did they tell this story rather than the thousands of other stories of healings that they could potentially have told? And I think one of the reasons is you have to remember every time you read the Bible is on one level, the world is very different than today.

I mean, on the other level, it's very same. We still wrestle with the death of loved ones. And all of us will die unless Jesus comes first. Like that's all very deeply personal.

And people back then were very smart. But one of the things which was different between now and then is even though obviously many people read, but books were expensive and very rare. And so it was fundamentally an oral culture.

And it was an oral culture where people actually remembered things because they weren't constantly distracted by text messages, emails, phone calls, Twitter, Facebook, all of that type of stuff.

You know, I told my wife the other day that often I turn off the sound with my phone during the day. I try to remember to leave it up so I can see.

And that's just because the text messages can be really irritating. And if you're at all like me, there's something compelling as if you have to look at the stupid text. Well, you don't really, right? But you feel like you do. And it gives you several other irritating dings to make you think you have to look at it.

Anyway, in their world, they wouldn't have had those types of distractions. And they were an oral culture. So often, one of the reasons they probably chose this story is not only the putting together, juxtaposition, which is a big word that just means putting together of these two very...

They would have looked at it and said, you know, you remember that time when this happened and it was immediately followed by this and it was really striking. And the other thing, and this would help with memory, is that the woman has been suffering for 12 years and the girl is 12 years old.

And, you know, that's one of the things to help you remember things, right? The number, that connection of the 12 helps you to remember them and even helps to see, remember that the two things were connected because sometimes they might have said, gosh, he healed so many people.

Was it that woman he healed? No, no, you know, they might even have... But this one would have really stuck out partially just because they happened right after each other and partly the 12. Helps them to remember. And the other thing, by the way, is that everything in this text, even the using of his name, is once again, part of what Mark is doing is to say this actually happened.

This is historical. The fact that he gives the name of an important person and the fact that he mentions that lots of people were around. This is all the way that if Paul, not Paul, Mark is writing this and he's writing it at the time that many of these eye and ear witnesses were still alive and he's really constantly inviting people to say, listen, if you have any questions about this, get on a boat, go to this area.

It's going to be in and around Capernaum, maybe even Capernaum and just look for Jairus. He's still around and talk to him about it. Like it's part of the way that Mark is writing it to help us to remember that this actually happened.

So I'm not going to give an apologetic about miracles in this sermon once again just because of time constraints. But in a very, very real sense, if this is an historical account written at a time when many of the eyewitnesses were still alive, this in and of itself is something that should make an open-minded person say, maybe we don't live in a closed universe.

Maybe there is a God that does exist. Maybe there is a personal God. Because Mark is trying to drive home that this is something that actually happened.

So, the next little bit has actually caused Christians a lot of trouble. And it's, in fact, it's sometimes I've come across Jehovah Witnesses who occasionally have mentioned this as an example of why Jesus isn't God.

It's caused trouble to Christians as well. It's a very puzzling thing that happens over the next few verses. And in some ways what happens is these little puzzles that deflect us from the really big thing that's going on in the text.

But we have to look at them. Well, look what goes on. Verse 27, right? So, the woman has suffered. Verse 27, she had heard the reports about Jesus and came up behind him in the crowd and touched his garment.

And in the original language, you might see, if you ever go to Israel, you'll see that more orthodox, devout Jews, they'll often have these tassels, certain colors on their garments.

And basically, she just touches one of the tassels of the garment. For she said, verse 28, 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. And Jesus, perceiving in himself that power had gone out from him, immediately turned about in the crowd and said, who touched my garments?

And his disciples said to him, you see the crowd pressing around you and yet you say, who touched me? And I tried to bring out in my way of reading it is the original language they rebuked Jesus.

They're putting him down. Like he's asking a stupid question. Duh. If we were maybe trying to put it in more modern Canadian. Duh.

Like all sorts of people are touching you. So like, you look at this and you go, like what's going on? Like I thought Jesus was God. How come he didn't know who's touched him? And come on, like what's going on?

Is he like a walking horseshoe? Is he like a walking rabbit's foot? A walking, you know, lucky charm and you touch it and something happens? Like this is, like what?

Like what's going on in this text? It just seems sort of not right. So this is one of many texts. It's one of the things in the text that it's a very, very interesting thing to meditate upon and to contemplate because it's a really good window into something that we could begin to understand but not really understand because it's talking about how it is that Jesus can be fully God and fully human but one person and at the same time.

So like, here's the first thing. If Jesus never asked a question, he wouldn't be human. If Jesus never asked a question, he wouldn't be human.

I mean, there's a couple of babies here. I mean, you can ask, you know, that family over there. If their baby, as soon as they learn the first words, just starts lecturing them on the Einstein's theory of relativity or, you know, if you ask them what's the, you know, if a number with, you know, 11 digits is a prime number or not and they can tell you, you know, like that would just, that wouldn't be a human baby.

Like you'd, I don't know what you'd think. It's some type of, I don't know what you'd think. It's not human. So if Jesus never asked a question, he wouldn't be human. And it's interesting, we have a problem asking this, like how come Jesus asked the question?

Isn't he supposed to be God? But none of the, none of the disciples ask that question. It's not as if they go, whoa, Jesus just asked a question. What's going on? No, they would have been used to him asking questions all the time because human beings ask questions.

And actually this is in a very, very small way. One of the things that we just sort of take for granted in our Western culture, in our Western culture, we take it for granted that it's a smart thing and a wise thing to ask questions.

But that's actually partly how we've been formed at a very deep level by the Christian faith. It's not obvious in Islamic or Eastern cultures that it's a virtue to ask questions.

In those questions, it's a virtue to accept, to just accept. And so Jesus is actually grounding at a very deep level the importance of questions.

And he is human. Now, the second thing is, and this is where the text is a bit of a mirror to help us look at ourselves, is that part of the reason we have a hard time wondering how it is that Jesus could ask a question if he's supposed to be God is because if we were God, we would only tell people what to do.

I mean, we already, many of us already think we're gods and we're always right, but dang it all if I'm God, not only would I tell you all the time, you want to know the right view on what Trudeau should be doing?

I'm going to tell you. You're not interested? You should be interested. I'm God. Like, that's what I would do all the time. That's what you would do. Right? And so part of this is, so part of the problem is it shows, in a sense, the humility of God.

we want to be like God and are proud. And if we had the power, we would be forcing people to shut up and listen to us. And so what the Bible is revealing here is that God, the Son of God, that it's part of the big story, that God, the Son of God, sets aside His glory, His prerogatives, His appearance as God, His power as God, but still maintaining the fact in nature that He is God, but He willingly sets that all aside to enter into our human world and to take into Himself our human nature.

And so what that means is that, and you can't figure out the psychology of that, but what's constantly revealed then in the Scriptures is that in a sense, unlike us, Jesus lived, part of His constant temptation is would He continue to just trust that the Father would reveal to Him and give Him the things He needs as He needs them?

I mean, that's partly what's going on with the temptation by the devil, which isn't recorded in Mark, but it's recorded in Matthew and Luke, is that would Jesus just actually be content to trust His Father? If His Father wants Him to know something, He'll know something.

But does He want to know? Does He want to grasp back that power? And we're all familiar with the fact of curtailing our power to be with. like if you have young children, the Sunday school teachers out there, I mean, if you're visiting your nephew and your niece and you play or you maybe even wrestle a little bit with your two-year-old, one of my children, no, I won't tell you the story.

I try not to tell stories that might embarrass my children and then you'll all wonder which one. But, you know, if we were playing with your nephew and niece, a little two-year-old, well, you don't beat them because you're way stronger than them.

You curtail your power. To beat them is called child abuse, right? The right type of thing is you let them wrestle you to the ground or her wrestle you to the ground and tackle you and all of that type.

You're just having fun, right? So we all understand what it means to curtail the power and that's what you're getting on here with Jesus. For this particular reason, the Father didn't want Him to know. So now you see something that He did all the time. He asked a question because He's human.

He doesn't know. And He wants to find out for a variety of reasons. And then the other thing, this weird, weird thing is that why is it that Jesus, why is it that Jesus, she just touched Him and now the text is very clear.

It sounds as if if you read it not very closely, it sounds as if somehow her faith is if faith is some type of internal power that you unleash and if you unleash this internal power then you're healing, you get healed and you can do this and you can do, no, no, no, no.

The text is very clear that the power comes from Jesus. The woman purely receives. She doesn't add anything to it. All she's done is put herself in a place where she can receive and it all comes from Jesus.

But what this also is showing is it's showing who Jesus is in His very nature. It's showing who God is in His very nature. Give you an example. Imagine that maybe one of you folks we become very, very good friends and I happen to discover as we become friends that you're very, very, very generous but you're especially generous towards your friends.

Just very open-handed. Not clutching at all. Just very, very open-handed. And maybe it's something like I'm going to go to an area and there's no parking and I know that you live in a certain house and I'm with one of you other folks and I just pull into the driveway and park.

And the person beside me would go, you can't park in somebody's driveway. And I go and I knock on the door to see if they're there and they're not there and the person beside me would say, no, you just can't go park in their driveway.

Like, what? But I'd say, no, no, no, no, no. I know what they're like and they're really, really generous and they're very generous towards me and I know that I can park in their driveway even if they're not home. There'll be no problem.

Just trust me. There's no problem. Because you know what they're like. And that's what you're seeing here about Jesus. That's what he's like. He heals. That's his nature. And this, by the way, is very, very mind-blowing because just you have to keep remembering that if you study the gods and goddesses of the day, the gods and the gods of the gods and goddesses of the day, they lied, they cheated, they raped, they hurt.

They were completely, they were thin-skinned and you never knew if you did something to offend them and if you offended them they would make your life miserable. And that's what the gods and goddesses are like.

And what you're seeing here is the real God and this real God is radically different than the other gods. And it's still even true today where one of the major religions of the world, fundamentally, that major religion is a religion of a warrior, triumph, militaristic God.

And the other fundamental option is a God that at the end of the day says there's no difference between sickness and health because you're just going to die and get reborn and you're just going to die and get reborn. And in the face of such alternatives you have this radical picture of a God whose fundamental nature is to give you health.

To come into contact with him is to come into contact with health. To come into contact with him is to come into contact with life. To poke this God is to poke health.

Just constant, self-giving, generous, open-handed. Like there's that song The Reckless Love of God. Just reckless health.

That's who he is and that's what's being revealed here in this story. And her tiniest, tiniest, tiniest sliver of faith and maybe it's mixed with some superstition, who knows what, she can't pass a theology test, she can't, she's never taken, you know, theology one and the nature of God.

She just knows that if she can just touch him, she suspects, she's heard the stories and she believes it and she trusts that he's this type of person and he can do it and she does it and he does all the rest even if he's not conscious of it.

Now, the next bit, you see, here's one of the things about the Bible that we don't often take it for granted. we just look at and we take it for granted that he's going to act a certain way. Partially that's because the stories like this have formed how our culture thinks even if we reject it but it's formed how we think.

But the fact of the matter is that every single one of us, some of us more than others, we are used to put downs. We are used to being denigrated. We are used to being dismissed. It's interesting if you watch Raising, I think it's called Raising Dion.

It's this thing on Netflix about an eight-year-old who develops superpowers. It's sort of a funny type of thing. But one of the main characters is a very interesting thing on Netflix because one of the main characters is a severely handicapped young woman, young girl.

It's very, very unusual to have a very severely handicapped young girl as one of the stars of a thing. And one of the things which is very interesting about her when they're trying to describe what her superpower is, she says she's invisible.

Well, why is she invisible? Because handicapped people are invisible. And many of us are familiar with what it's like to be invisible. And so if you just think about that for a second, you'll understand the drama that's going on here in the text.

Look again what happens. Look at verse 32. He looked around to see who had done it, but the woman, knowing what had happened to her, she'd been hiding, right?

Came in fear and trembling and fell down before him and told him the whole truth. Well, why is she so worried? She's an invisible woman. The last 12 years of her life have been 12 years where she's constantly denigrated, put down, kicked to the sideline.

That's the real world for her. And if you're here and that's your real world, this story's for you. So he tells him the old truth.

She's hiding and hiding and hiding. She's terrified that when she comes forward, he's going to say, well, I didn't mean to heal you. I'm going to take it back. You know, really, you?

I thought it would have been somebody better looking, hipper, cooler, younger, has a big Instagram following, like, I don't know, influencer. What does he say, verse 34?

This is why Jesus is so radical and so powerful. Look at verse 34. And he said to her daughter, daughter, that means, that's affection. That's affection.

Daughter, not invisible woman, not person I don't care, not a loser in our culture, but daughter. Your faith has made you well. And that can also be equally translated as your faith has saved you.

Go in peace and be healed of your disease. Now, this next part, my guess is, I don't know if this room would be 50-50 on this, but there's definitely divide.

And we all know who we are. I would be the type, and I'm not boasting about this, this is something you need to pray that I get over. I would be the type, if it was my daughter, I'd be saying, Jesus, like, don't stop.

Like, my daughter's sick. Like, don't stop. Like, I'd be the guy wanting to grab him, you know, by his tassels, not to be healed, but to say, listen, you know, that woman, she just don't care about that.

You don't need to know that. You don't need to know who touched. I'd be pulling him. That's the type of person I am. Some of you type might be saying, really? There's people like that in the world? Like, that's like my annoying dad or my annoying mom or sister.

Because some of you would just be very, very content, just trusting. I'm just telling you, for those of you who are very, very, and maybe that's what Jairus is like, that he was just very, very calm. But for, so there's two sort of emotional ways of understanding what's just happened.

But for those of you who are more like me, who wants to move them along, get with the program, Jesus. That's what I'm thinking. Don't stop. You need to go and you need to get to my place, right?

And so now he's going to move on. But while Jesus is still speaking, we don't get told all the other things that Jesus says, but he speaks for a while about this woman. Verse 35, while he was still speaking, there came from the ruler's house some who said, and in the original language, the implication is they sort of take the Jairus aside and they sort of whisper into his ear, your daughter is dead.

And it'd probably be tears, like me telling you about Rocky. Your daughter's dead. Why trouble a teacher any further? But Jesus overhears.

He overhears. But overhearing what they said, Jesus said to the ruler of the synagogue, do not fear, only believe. Now one of the things which is very interesting in the story here is that we don't wait to actually see whether the Jairus has actually any faith.

Because believe and faith are sort of the same way of translating the same basic word. I mean, I'll be honest, if I was Jairus, I'd say, yeah, yeah, yeah, Jesus, I have faith, but I don't have any faith.

I have no faith. And here you actually get a very, very powerful window into what it is. Remember, faith is connecting. That's ultimately what it is.

It's a power to connect. And so he actually probably has absolutely zero, all he's done, he stays connected to Jesus.

That's the bottom line about faith. He stays connected to Jesus. He stays connected to Jesus. verse 37.

See that, and Jesus allows no one to follow him. The crowd is put away except Peter and James and John, the brother of James. And they came to the house of the ruler of the synagogue.

So there's now just Jairus, Peter, James, and John. They came to the house of the ruler of the synagogue and Jesus saw a commotion, people weeping and wailing loudly. And by the way, this isn't a bad sign, that's just how they grieve.

People from that time, if they came to one of our funerals, they'd go, did they even like that person? Like, they're all just quiet. Right? Like, we'd look at a funeral and we'd be saying, are they all mentally ill?

Like, what's the problem with that? But they'd be looking at us and saying, did they even like the person? Just the way they grieve, that's all. So they're weeping and wailing loudly. Verse 39, And when Jesus had entered, he said to them, Why are you making a commotion and weeping?

The child is not dead, but sleeping. Now, just sort of pause here. This has caused lots of debate in commentaries in other circles. And just to emphasize that if you could go back in a time machine and you had a doctor with you, and you could go back in a time machine and also get the ability to understand Aramaic or Hebrew or Greek or whatever they're speaking, the doctor would pronounce the girl dead.

So Jesus isn't saying, no, no, no, no, she's just in a coma. He's not saying that. What he's doing is he's speaking to the disciples, he's speaking down the years, he's speaking to you and me, and he's giving us one of the images.

This whole story is giving us one of the images, not all of them, but one of the images for us to understand our own death in Jesus. And one of the fundamental ways, one of the fundamental ways to understand your death in Jesus if you are in Christ is that when it comes time for me to death, to die in Christ, I am falling asleep in Christ.

And I can look forward to the day when just as Jesus is about to do to the young girl, he's going to say to me, he's going to say to me, wake up.

Wake up. And arise. That is the Christian hope. That in the far side of death, one day, I am asleep in Christ, and he will appear, and he will say, George, wake up.

Arise and walk. And in that new heaven and in that new earth with a resurrected body, I will arise, and I will walk in that new heaven and that new earth, and I will eat in that new heaven and that new earth, because I will be at home in that new heaven and that new earth, not because of anything in me, but because of Christ.

Christ. And that is your destiny in Christ. In Christ, love is stronger than death. In Christ, death does not have the final word.

In Christ, life has the final word. Christ has the final word. And that final word is the first word of the new beginning, because I will walk in that new world and eat and dwell and be at home in that new world with my Savior.

So he doesn't say sleeping because he thinks she's asleep. He says sleeping so that you and I can have a powerful and wonderful image, one image, of what it means to die in Christ. Verse 40, and they laughed at him, made fun of him.

He put them all outside and took the child's father and mother and those who were with him and went in where the child was and taking her by the hand. He said to her, Talitha Kumi, which is Aramaic, a language which doesn't exist fundamentally anymore, which means, little girl, I say to you, arise.

And immediately, the girl got up and began walking, for she was 12 years of age and they were immediately overcome with amazement and he strictly charged them that no one should know this and told them to give her something to eat.

Just sort of in closing about this, just a couple of things. I'm going to talk about this a little bit more next week because the next text which immediately comes after this is a case where Jesus goes to his hometown and they look down their nose at him and they have no faith and he heals very few people.

So I'm going to talk about this a little bit more next week, God willing. But one of the things just to say about this as I'm sort of wrapping it up is that this gives us Christians, so first of all, this is why Christians invented hospitals because we're about healing.

We should be. Now I know we have all sorts of, you know, and we're about healing and we should be praying that people come up with better medicines and we should pray for the sick and we should pray in faith.

And if you pray in faith as a Christian, there's three basic outcomes. The first outcome is this, that God, that Christ might heal the person you're praying for miraculously and instantaneously and probably many of us have stories of that actually happening.

The second thing is sometimes he heals slowly, a combination maybe of providence and of things like medicine. And the third thing is, and this is the most important, is that in Christ he will heal finally in the resurrection.

The loved one that you have whose body is racked with Parkinson's or cancer and seems to be but a shadow or a husk or a grotesque-looking being far from what you had known and loved in Christ will walk.

The healing is final and eternal. The second thing is that I think all human beings have an intuition.

I mean, it's very, very funny. I'm not recommending you watch this, but if you watch Ricky Gervais' Three Seasons of Afterlife, which sometimes is very wise, sometimes is very funny, sometimes is just grossly disgusting, sometimes is filled with hatred of human beings.

But Ricky Gervais, who's been an atheist almost his entire life, is a very public atheist. You can really see him wrestling with the fact because the whole thing is about a man who loves his wife who dies of cancer and considers suicide.

And you see there, he has no categories to deal with it, but there's this fundamental intuition that love should be stronger than death and that death can't really be the end.

And one of the things that we see in this story is that that intuition actually became fact and walked about in history. health, life, walked among us and his name is Jesus.

And the second thing that you can see in this story, and this shows you the importance of the cross, one of the images that you'll see it towards the end of the Gospel of Mark is just before Jesus goes to the cross and I've talked about this before and I love this image and hopefully some of you love this image as well, is that Jesus is wrestling with the fact that when he's dying upon the cross that what he's actually doing is he's taking the cup from the Father.

And the cup is this Old Testament image. And as I've shared with you before, what you can picture is that in a sense everything about me that's shameful, everything about me that's bad, everything about me that is wrong.

And if you could just imagine an evil wizard or something like that, but in this case it's God who somehow or another could take all of that evil, all of that shame and it would become this foul, foul, disgusting looking liquid that drips out and all comes into a cup and at the end of it it's almost as if God would ring me to make sure that every single bit in me that is proud and lustful and envious and greedy and hateful and prejudiced and everything in me from the moment of my conception to the moment of my death, it's wrung out of me and it becomes like a cup and what you're to understand when Jesus dies upon the cross is in his death upon the cross what you see is Jesus drinking your cup.

because he's man he can drink it for human beings and because he is God he can drink it for every person it's as if he looks around the room and he sees you he took the sip he sees you he drank the cup he sees you he drank the cup and when you see Jesus dying upon the cross you see him drinking that cup and you see this is a very very wonderful thing because in this new heaven and in this new earth and this salvation that you get in Christ is that young girl she died but she she enters the realm of death but at the Jesus calls her back from the realm of the dead to this side of the grave but she will one day die Jesus drinks your cup and mine and the cup of every human being that he enters into all there is to taste of death and at the end of the day on the third day he rises on the far side of death having drunk your cup and that means that in his death and resurrection every single bit of evil and shame that you have ever done or ever will do he is drunk for you and when you put your faith and trust in him you are putting your faith and trust in the one who is on that far side of death and has drunk your cup and it means there is nothing that is ever going to come up that will so shock him and make him repulsive and dismiss you that he will turn away from you the health and the life that you have in Christ is eternal you don't have to worry that something that something will come out that will make him change his mind it isn't as if you know in those movies where you think you've killed the bad guy and then you see the little finger twitch a tiny bit and you realize the monster hasn't been killed when you receive the health from Christ when you die in Christ in a sensory in him there's no twitch of your old man it's all consumed all dealt with in the cross and you share in his resurrection brothers and sisters that's my hope that is a Christian hope

I am by nature a marsh wiggle if I had a patron saint whose name would be Puddle Glum I am not a natural optimist but that is the Christian hope that is my hope and my prayer is that that will be more and more your hope please stand if you're here if you're watching I just want to say to you the story about what Jesus did to that woman there is nobody so bad or so dismissed or so invisible that Jesus doesn't see you and he didn't die for you as well nobody and all you have to do is just say Jesus be my savior and my lord be my health and my healing and thank you that you will never let me go and he will hear your call and your prayer and he will make you his let's bow our heads in prayer father thank you so much that Jesus loved us so much thank you father that he in humility and in love was willing to set aside his prerogatives and his glory and his power as God to come amongst us to be Emmanuel to be God with us to be with us in our mess only without sin thank you thank you that he knows us so perfectly and loves us so perfectly and so deeply and thank you father that you don't weigh our merits that you know every single one of our offenses and that when we put our faith and trust in Jesus that every one of those offenses is gone and that you clothe us father in Jesus' perfect life that you clothe us in his health in his life in his light in his goodness in his mercy in his justice that that's how you clothe us and it's all father an act of grace which is so remarkable and so deep and so wide and so thick that we desperately need to come together once a week to be reminded of it because it so easily flits from our mind it is so big and yet so real and we thank you that you offer it to people like us and father we ask that you fan into flame with us an ever deeper hope in Jesus as our hope of glory our hope of life our hope of health that he is our hope and help us to bear witness to that in a culture which has closed its ears but you still have those father who want that you know you are calling to yourself and help us father to bear witness to Jesus and we ask this in the name of Jesus your son and our savior amen