Desperate For JesusSample

The woman from yesterday was healed by humbly touching the fringes of Jesus’s cloak (Luke 8:44). 

Luke conveyed to the reader that the woman came up behind Jesus and touched the fringe of His cloak, and immediately her hemorrhage stopped (Luke 8:44). Jesus was on His way to the house of the synagogue leader Jairus when a crowd had begun to surround Him (Luke 8:42). Mark’s Gospel added that in the midst of this swarming crowd, the woman made a decision: “If I just touch His garments, I will get well,” (Mark 5:28). 

The woman was accustomed to no one paying attention to her—even ignoring her because of her impurity—so in humility and faith she decided to touch Jesus’s garment and disappear into the crowd. The difference between the crowd and the woman was that the crowd was standing and pressing, jostling for position near Jesus, whereas the woman was humbly, anonymously stooping to touch Jesus. The woman’s affliction and desperate circumstances brought her to a place of humility and child-like, simple faith—one that Jesus, in a different context, would characterize as the posture of all true disciples: “Whoever then humbles himself as this child, he is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 18:4). 

Have your seasons of affliction and desperate circumstances driven you to a posture of humility and trust before Jesus?