Your Faith Has Made You Well

[00:00:01] Grace, mercy and peace be to you from God our father and from our Lord and savior, Jesus Christ. Amen. [00:00:11] The collect for the day, the prayer of the day. [00:00:17] We said this by the healing medicine of the word and sacraments pour into our hearts such love toward you that we may live eternally. [00:00:28] Now, why would we say that? [00:00:31] Why does it require love toward God in order to live eternally? [00:00:37] Right? As Lutherans like, we're pretty aware that, well, we don't have to do anything for salvation. Jesus has done it all on the cross. It's his love, not our love, right? His love is what has saved us. He showed his love for us in this while we were still sinners. Christ died for us. I didn't have any love, and Christ died for me and showed me his love. [00:01:02] So why then do we pray? [00:01:05] Pour into our hearts such love toward you that we may live eternally. [00:01:15] Love is sort of something we do, right? When you love somebody, it's not like you're disconnected from that experience. [00:01:22] It's not like you can see that you're loving somebody, but you don't really know what's going on. It's like, oh, I guess I'm. No, you know, you're right in there. You're loving somebody. [00:01:34] So it's something we do. [00:01:37] Why would we connect that to living eternally? And I'll just take this moment to note that it's not like I write these prayers, right? Not like, so why did I say that? [00:01:47] These are handed down to us, and so it's perfect because it might not be what we expect. Like, that's the beautiful thing. I love it. [00:01:56] We come to this prayer and it's like, huh? Why does it say that? Right? And then we can grow, we can come to understand it and then maybe find something that we weren't expecting or have it kind of fine tune our thinking and our faith. Our thinking in faith. [00:02:12] And maybe this is just a puzzle that doesn't, you know, doesn't apply to you. Maybe it's just obvious, but here we go. So I'm going to say it's because love is an attractional force. [00:02:28] It's not like you're just drawn to the things you hate. [00:02:32] It's the opposite. [00:02:34] You're pushed away from the things you hate, not because you really choose to. It's just a reaction without thinking about it. [00:02:42] Get me away from that. That's why we're. To, you know, love what is good, you know, cling to what is good, hate what is evil. [00:02:52] It's helpful, it's important. [00:02:55] God, make me love what's good. Make me love you. Make me love Jesus Christ. Pour into my heart such love toward you that I may live eternally. Why? Because. Well, because loving God and being drawn by that love to God, I'm not drawn to all the other things I might love, that I might make idols of. See, we love things, right? One thing or another. [00:03:21] We want to love the right things, and that's a gift. That's why we say, pour into our hearts such love toward you that we may live eternally. Pour into my heart such love toward you that I'll never abandon you for something else. [00:03:37] That's what we're praying. [00:03:39] Pretty important. [00:03:40] That's like the struggle of the christian faith, right? As we daily are tempted to look elsewhere, to. To fulfill our desires or to allay our fears, to rescue us from whatever situation we find ourselves in. That's the struggle, is to look to God and nothing else. That's what Luther says is the meaning of the first commandment. You shall have no other gods. That you look to God for every good thing. That you look to him in every situation where you might. Well, I mean, that's every commandment, you know, where you might, like, swear because you're afraid. [00:04:18] Like, the alternative to swearing would be like calling on God's name. [00:04:22] We want to be drawn to God. We want our attention drawn to God by love. And, of course, that love is initiated by his own pouring out of love for us. We love because he first loved us. [00:04:39] Love. So we just sang this hymn, Lord, thee I love with all my heart. And it's. I think it's beautiful. I think it could feel kind of long. The verses are sort of long. It's like you have to get to go through this long verse, and then it ends, and you're like, oh, yeah, that was a verse. We're starting over. [00:04:58] I think that's kind of neat, too. It's like the. Just the fact that the verses are drawn out a little bit kind of feels like love, you know? It's like love. Love hangs on love. Love attends. Love pays attention. If you want to love your spouse or your children or somebody else, pay attention to them. [00:05:19] That's the easiest way to show somebody love, to pay attention to them. Like, ask questions about them, right? [00:05:29] Just paying attention, just sustaining your attention on them. It's like, it demonstrates that you're drawn to them. You want to know more about them, you want to dive deeper. You're drawn. [00:05:43] That's what love is. [00:05:46] All right, so what does this have to do with anything in the readings? [00:05:51] Well, quite a bit. First of all, I just want to note in the epistle reading, paul's saying that the church should be loving this other church if they've got an abundance and the other church has a need and they're not filling that need. [00:06:07] Love is dried up. Well, okay, that's good and practical. And he says for the sake of fairness, like, well, yeah, things should be fair, you know, but why does that matter? Like, why does Paul care so much? He cares about their faith. And if love is dried up, everything we were just talking about doesn't apply, right? Like, they're not drawn. It's like love, this, this being drawn to Christ, toward God, right? [00:06:35] It needs to be, needs to be sustained and that's, that's a gift from God. Right. But you can lose that gift. Bye. Looking elsewhere. [00:06:46] Alright, that's all for the epistle reading. Okay, but I'm gonna focus on the gospel reading. [00:06:51] And this woman touching Jesus clothes, how interesting. [00:06:58] You see that she is drawn to Jesus so powerfully. [00:07:06] She has this discharge of blood that's been plaguing her for twelve years and it says she's suffered much under many physicians and had spent all she had and was no better, but rather grew worse. [00:07:24] This woman is at the end of her options. [00:07:28] All the other options have not panned out. [00:07:32] And now she finds Jesus and she knows if I just touch his clothes, I'm going to be made well. [00:07:38] So she gets up, you know, gets up close to him and touches him. And she must be a little bit afraid because when Jesus looks for her and says, come here, she comes in fear and trembling, you see, even though she was afraid to do it, even though she felt like she was kind of stealing or something, right? Like doing this without permission, she's drawn, she's drawn by her desire to touch his clothes and be made well. Lord, give us this kind of, well, attractional force, you know, draw us to yourself this powerfully, that we would feel our sin, that we would feel our need for healing and want nothing more than to just, you know, come close to Jesus. Like this is what church is about. You know, God comes to us in his word. Jesus comes to us, his body and blood, and we touch him with our lips and take him into our, you know, in through our mouths to our body and he incorporates us into his own body. [00:08:50] You know, we, we come here to touch him and to have him come and, and fill us and renew us and heal us. [00:09:01] This is not the only thing I think about all the time, you know, it's not like, ah, I just gotta get back to church, right. But thanks be to God, you're all here. You know, something has drawn you here. Something draws you here all the time. [00:09:19] May God continue to give us his spirit and faith to be drawn to him. [00:09:27] We could also describe faith as this touching Jesus, you could say, like just looking to Jesus right from moment to moment. It's not just like coming and being with the people in whom he dwells. I mean, that's, that's pretty crazy that we get to do that, right? And so that's, I mean, that's a, that's, that's getting pretty close to Jesus and then having his word come into you. [00:09:54] And the sacrament, boy, that's close to Jesus, right? [00:09:58] But the word is close to you in your heart, right? Christ is in your heart. And so on a day to day basis, can you touch Jesus for healing? Yeah, it's like last week, wake Jesus up. He's in the boat with you. [00:10:14] Don't forget, he's there. He's there to be touched. [00:10:18] And when you pay attention to him, then he works in you. We'll talk about that a little more in Bible class in John today. [00:10:26] When we look to Jesus, he heals us. [00:10:31] It's beautiful. [00:10:33] It's pretty simple, you know, just remember Jesus. Just look to him. [00:10:39] I want to talk just a tiny bit about, about our cultural situation here, because I think this woman who has suffered and suffered, you know, she has this, this discharge of blood, and it's like, well, if you think about what blood is in the Old Testament, especially like, blood is life, okay? It's like the life of an animal is its blood, right? Okay, so, so I'm just, I'm just thinking, well, you know, she's got this, this discharge of blood, and it's kind of like her life is just constantly escaping her, constantly sort of ebbing away, and she can't hang onto it. And I think this might have kind of a spiritual application. And so I'm just going to jump to the application here. [00:11:22] I think in our society today, we've come to a place where science and medicine and technology have done so much and promised to do a whole lot more. [00:11:37] You know, it's gonna be crazy that it's exponential, the, the way things are progressing, right? But boy, you want power to fix the problems you feel most. [00:11:51] You got some things on the horizon, like, well, don't even worry. You've got AI, you know, you've got increasing, you know, medical capabilities to cure your diseases. People are really hoping to live forever. I mean, really today, people are looking at that exponential curve and thinking, okay, like, maybe not everybody's thinking this, right? Like, maybe. Maybe I live in the era where mortality will be taken care of. There's a whole group of people who are hoping that. [00:12:26] So, okay, so we've come to this place where science has shown itself so trustworthy, right? Like, it delivers results. Science is what saved me from cancer, not me, you know? But, like, you know what I mean, that we've kind of started to accept the materialistic worldview that comes with, let's say, scientism. You know, if you're just focused on science, well, science only studies what can be measured and evaluated, observed. Like, that's the definition of science, and those things are material. I mean, you've got less exact sciences, like psychology and things like that. That, too, is just observation. [00:13:15] So we've kind of forgotten about, well, spirituality. And so in the last, like, three decades ago or something like that, the new atheism came about where suddenly it was really popular to think, you know, Christianity is so silly, and. And all religions are the same, and. And all of this nonsense, you know, in the church, then it's like, then you watch Ken ham, and. And you're like, no, you know, this is true. And you just kind of try and hang on, but they think we're so silly, but that's okay. We're just gonna believe. And anyway, it looks like that's kind of. That era is ending in some ways. [00:13:59] More and more intellectuals are coming to the place of this woman where it's like, there's no healing for my depression and the void that I feel like, not just like a God shaped hole in my heart, you know, but really, like. So the most recent one I heard was a woman named Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who teaches at Stanford. She's this brilliant intellectual who started off Muslim and then came to the United States and loved freedom and this sort of free thinking thing and became an atheist. And she just recently converted to Christianity. But she describes. She describes her journey to Christianity. Like, she went to every doctor. She went to brain surgeons here. She's a professor at Stanford. And so she probably has some connections, too. She learned a lot about the brain and went to psychologists and the experts to try and fix her difficulties with addiction and depression and all of this. And just nothing was working until somebody told her, you just have a spiritual void. Like, your problem is meaninglessness. And she became Christian. [00:15:20] This is happening all the time. [00:15:22] I don't know about you, but that's not what I grew up expecting would ever happen again. [00:15:27] Anybody. [00:15:29] That there would be a turnaround where suddenly intellectuals would be saying, yeah, it's not true, this materialistic worldview. [00:15:37] It's not all there is, you know, matter, what can be observed. [00:15:42] Anyway, I find it really exciting, but also like a challenge because we in the church, we in the church can adopt a materialistic mindset. Like, we can. We can go to other physicians, right, to medicate, like, or diagnose spiritual maladies as something physical all the time, look to the doctors as the experts, and then go to church, because that's what I've always done, and that's where my friends are. [00:16:11] This is kind of a call for us. You know, we want to be this woman. We don't want to like, well, I was this woman, and I needed healing from Jesus, and now it's just sort of normal, right? [00:16:29] We want this. This earnest desire for Jesus and the healing that he offers. Not just. Not just healing when I'm down, not just to feel better, but true life, eternal life, which is to know God and the one he sent. [00:16:49] Jesus has life for us anyway. [00:16:54] We're in this culture, this moment in history, where lots of people are starting to feel the meaninglessness of life apart from God. And we have the opportunity to, well, you know, strap in and really practice and live our christian faith, to really turn to Jesus in prayer, to have him transform our lives, and then to be able to say to our friends and neighbors, I think this is a spiritual issue, you know, or like, maybe you should talk to a pastor about this or come on to church with me or just share about Jesus, right? We have the opportunity to live our christian faith not embarrassed and even excited that we have something to share with others that we know a guy who can heal them. In Jesus name, amen.