BRING LIFE | Healing Hands Worship Series, week 1
July 1, 2018

Bring Life (Mark 5:21-43)

Key words: Healing. Wholeness. Restoration.

Twelve years of living and dying. Twelve years of faithfulness. Twelve years of healing. Bringing new life to a dark world. Twelve years of new hope. What do twelve years mean to you now, and what is God calling you to do to bring new life into today?

Imagine being alive for just twelve years. In this Scripture, a female child has lived twelve years, and she dies suddenly. The other experience in this passage shares the story of a woman who has been suffering for twelve years. What does twelve years mean in your testimony of living, dying, healing, grieving, being faithful, and hoping for new life?

What is important about the twelve-year-old people in your family, your church, and your community? Is twelve years a long time or a short time? Is a new season coming because twelve years have already passed? Was the Scripture about living twelve years of life, dying for the last twelve years, or the importance of faith in both circumstances? If faith in God makes us whole, does it take twelve years for the people of God to see the fullness of Jesus’ powerful ability to bring forth life through the Holy Spirit? These questions touch our minds, awaken our spirits, and call us to reflect.

When thinking about what it means to be brought to life, I felt the presence of God expanding my heart to know grief in new ways. So many times, a Scripture comes to life because we know someone who is grieving the death of a child or a loved one. Maybe we have experienced a long-term illness that has caused us to give up on the possibilities of being healed at this present moment. Without having faith in Jesus Christ, despair and hopelessness can invade our hope. Bringing life can be overshadowed by pure disappointment that life didn’t live up to our expectations.

What drives humanity to seek God? Standing in the shoes of these women, can you imagine that healing can occur after living in pain for twelve years? Life can be restored by experiencing a touch of God’s healing hands and seeing life beyond moments of death.

Imagine being Jesus’ disciple in one of these crowded spaces. Do you feel trapped? If so, fear may cause you to separate from everything around you. Being trapped might cause you to run away. In these acts of distancing yourself from people, you protect yourself, Jesus, and your garments from the outside world.

What does Jesus do in the crowds? He investigates who has touched his garment, talks to people at Jairus’s house, and encourages people in the crowds to stop hiding. When Jesus was in the crowd, he felt a touch from someone who was seeking physical contact with the healer. Jesus asked for the person to identify herself. She could have hidden or ran away, but instead she identified herself and shared her needs. She spoke directly to the one who could bring new life to her body.

Are you willing to be identified as a person who needs healing? How about being seen as a person who needs help from strangers? Is your congregation willing to be a safe place for people who want to be restored from incarceration? Do you have a testimony that could invite a courageous faith conversation to begin in your small group? How can this text be an invitation to bring life into a dying world?

Consider reflecting upon these ideas:

Life being restored to our world and country.
Life being restored to children through safe schools.
Life being renewed in a woman who has lived in the shadows of shame, desperation, and heartache. Although the unacceptable pains of death are seen by many, only the touch of Jesus Christ changes and brings new life.
Life being offered to communities that have seen death of children; restoration and new hope for communities suffering from gun violence, drugs, and bullying.