GRACE AT THE END

Grace at the End

Daughter, your faith has healed you. Go in peace and be freed from your suffering.

Mark 5:34

READ MARK 5:25–34

Artist Doug Merkey’s masterful sculpture Ruthless Trust features a bronze human figure clinging desperately to a cross made of walnut wood. He writes, “It’s a very simple expression of our constant and appropriate posture for life—total, unfettered intimacy with and dependency upon Christ and the gospel.”

That’s the kind of trust we see expressed in the actions and words of the unnamed woman in Mark 5:25-34. For twelve years her life had been in shambles (v. 25). “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” (v. 26). But having heard about Jesus, she made her way to Him, touched Him, and was “freed from her suffering” (vv. 27-29).

Have you come to the end of yourself? Have you depleted all your resources? Anxious, hopeless, lost, distressed people need not despair. The Lord Jesus still responds to desperate faith—the kind displayed by this suffering woman and depicted in Merkey’s sculpture. This faith is expressed in the words of hymn writer Charles Wesley: “Father, I stretch my hands to Thee; no other help I know.” Don’t have that kind of faith? Ask God to help you trust Him. Wesley’s hymn concludes with this prayer: “Author of faith, to Thee I lift my weary, longing eyes; O may I now receive that gift! My soul, without it, dies.”

By Arthur Jackson

REFLECT & PRAY

Father, thank You for Your power to rescue me. Help me to trust You to meet all my needs.

When have you desperately clung to Christ? How did God meet your need?

SCRIPTURE INSIGHT

The woman in Mark 5:25-34 “who had been subject to bleeding for twelve years” took a risk by reaching out to touch Jesus. According to Jewish law, bleeding made a person unclean. This woman had likely lived as an outcast from society because those who came in contact with her would have become unclean themselves. The truth of the woman’s great faith is enhanced when we realize that many would have viewed her act of touching Jesus as making Him unclean rather than Him making her clean.

However, once the woman admitted to touching Jesus, He declared, “your faith has healed you” (vv. 33-34). The word translated “healed” (sozo) indicates physical healing as well as the restoring of a relationship with God. The woman’s faith healed her both physically and eternally. Julie Schwab