Mark 5: Responding to God’s Love for Women
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God worked in the background to ready the world for His Son to make His appearance. Through angels, God announced the coming of His kingdom with Jesus as the king. Mark recorded Jesus making this same announcement about Himself. Such good news gave hope to a discouraged people as they looked to Jesus as their deliverer. We have seen these truths in our Mark blog series. In Mark chapters 3 and 4, we looked at the reality of troubles in this world and apply faith to any fear in our lives. In this article, we will look at how Jesus demonstrated God’s love for women and wants us to respond by relying on Him more than on ourselves.
Listen to this blog as a similar podcast from our Heartbreak to Hope Bible Study of Mark.
What We See in Mark 5
Get the picture. A huge crowd of people welcomes Jesus. They are pressing around Him, crushing Him so that He could hardly move or breathe. They can hardly wait to see what He would do next.
In the midst of this huge crowd pressing around Jesus is a woman with a desperate need. Her life is a living death. She used all her financial resources to seek out one doctor after another, yet she was worse. We don’t know her name. But I like to call her Dottie to make her seem more like a real person, not just words on a page. I’ll find out her real name when I get to heaven because she’ll be there.
Even worse than Dottie’s physical condition were the social and religious barriers she faced. The prevailing opinions of her day were that bad things don’t happen to good people. You got what you justly deserved. So, to be stricken with a chronic, incurable disease such as this was considered evidence of sinful behavior, like being immoral even if she wasn’t. Dottie could not enter the synagogue or the Temple. She couldn’t be invited to parties or weddings because having physical contact with her made them ceremonially unclean. She could touch no one, and no one could touch her. She was an outcast, lonely, and probably in a state of clinical depression. Dottie heard about Jesus, and hope flickered in her heart.
What makes me sad when I read Dottie’s story is that she didn’t have any friends bringing her to Jesus. She comes to Jesus on her own, acting on her small faith—mixed with some superstition about His garments. Dottie reached out and touched His cloak. Immediately, her bleeding stopped. She felt it. Dottie knew she was completely healed. It was a vivid moment of joy for her!
Jesus Is a Personal God Who Brings Hope
When you look at what happened, you see that Jesus stopped the whole procession to interact with this one woman who touched Him. I believe He knew what happened because He was always God. He laid aside His glory and did not use His attributes for Himself while on earth. But, He always knew what those around him were thinking before they spoke. He knew what happened. And He talked with Dottie as though she were the only one there. Don’t you love that?
Jesus wouldn’t allow Dottie to recede into the crowd without public assurance that she was permanently healed because of her faith. He let her know that He freely gave this healing to her rather than letting her think she took something secretively. There was no magic in His garments. She told her simple story of why she touched Him and how she had been instantly healed.
Jesus called her, “Daughter,” indicating Dottie had a new relationship with God plus so much more. She could go in peace. She just wanted healing. Now she could enjoy community with people again, and she received spiritual life as well. God always does more than we ask or think. Jesus satisfied Dottie’s heart with hope, healing, and love.
Dear listener, you are more than just a face in the crowd. You may feel that God isn’t noticing your pain. You pray, nothing happens. But, you are not unnoticed. He is sovereign, and He knows. If you read the first blog in this series, you heard that God is always working in the background. He’s doing that for your need as well.
Read “God Works in the Background of Life.”
Jesus demonstrated the value He places on every person. As He took time out from His busy schedule to minister to two women personally, including a 12-year-old girl, Jesus demonstrated God’s love for women so radically different from that of His culture.
Jesus Demonstrated God’s Love for Women
To fully appreciate Jesus’ approach to women, we need to step back in time into the shoes of the first century woman. It was tough to be a woman living around the rim of the Mediterranean Sea at that time. In both Greek and Roman cultures, women held a second-rate status with few legal rights.
Because of Old Testament teachings, Jewish women fared better than their Roman counterparts. Married women with children held a place of honor as wife and mother. But, even that position was tied to her ability to produce male children. In an agricultural society, fathers needed sons—and lots of them—to help them work the land. At the birth of a son, all celebrated. Not so much at the birth of a daughter.
The Lord Jesus demonstrated in His life on earth how much He loved and valued women. He taught them truth about God, forgave them for their sins, accepted them in His circle of followers, and gave new life to them after His resurrection. His care for them was so countercultural to what they had previously known. Women recognized that and responded with love for Him and a desire to serve Him. Jesus Christ entered into the midst of their lives, visibly representing God to them, loving them dearly, and changing their lives forever! He does the same for you and me today.
What you see in the Gospels is that Jesus never spoke condescendingly to women, never made derogatory jokes about them, nor did He ever humiliate them. Women who knew Him loved Him. They wanted to follow and serve Him!
You can see all this in my 2 New Testament Women Bible studies: Live Out His Love and Satisfied by His Love.
In the gospels, you see that Jesus treated women as no man had ever treated them before His time. His warmth, personal attention, tenderness, sound teaching, and compassion toward women were revolutionary. And why shouldn’t He be compassionate toward women? Jesus is fully God. He created us and is the one who understands women.
Jesus Is the One Who Understands Women
Jesus was there in the beginning when God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness…” (Genesis 1:26).
As Creator, He designed us with a mind to know God, emotions to love God, and a will to obey God.
That comes in the package we receive at birth.
So how do we take advantage of that package deal? Our female minds need to be filled with the knowledge of Him so that our hearts may respond with great love for Him, and our wills can choose to obey Him.
Jesus knows us backwards and forwards. He knows our emotional nature, our need for security and significance, and even our hormones! He understands our need to nurture and to be loved—both from those humans closest to us and from our Creator God. And even though His culture neglected to give women the worth they deserved, He could do no less than show that He loves men and women equally—for whom He would ultimately die. We experience His love and are privileged to live it out in our daily lives so that others can experience His love through us.
Here’s a key truth I want you to grasp. A relationship with Jesus satisfies every spiritual need that you have. Every single one of them. For every woman listening to me right now, you don’t need to go anywhere else to get those deep needs satisfied. As He satisfies those deep needs, Jesus will teach you to be a God-dependent woman who relies on Him more than on yourself.
Jesus Teaches Us to Be God-Dependent Women
God’s desire for us
Our God wants for us women to be God-dependent women. Not “independent except for when we need Him.” But we are to be God-dependent. All. The. Time. The same is true of men.
We, as believers in Christ, should live our lives dependent on Him all the time. In our strengths when we are using our gifts and skills and opportunities well. In our weaknesses that drive us to Him for help. And, everywhere in between.
But being God-dependent all the time is so radically different from what our western culture has taught us most of our lives. From the time we are girls, we have been told that women should not depend on anyone or anything for our success.
I realize that this compensates for poor teaching in the past that looked upon women as weak, unequal to men, and too emotional to be reliable. So from girlhood, we’ve been taught to “stand on your own two feet” and “that you don’t need anyone to be successful.” Self-reliance is the way to be a strong, effective woman. Right?
As the wise Jedi Yoda says in the Empire Strikes Back movie, “You must unlearn what you have learned.” That might involve turning away from some voices in social media, Netflix, books, and blogs that contribute to the illusion that you are a stronger woman if you are totally self-reliant. Let me say this, though. I am not equating self-reliance with being responsible. God wants us to be responsible for what we do with our lives, our finances, and our time.
What it means for us
So, how does this relying on God fit our lives as women today?
- Being God-dependent doesn’t mean we are supposed to stay like babies not doing anything for ourselves. We are supposed to grow and mature in our thinking and behavior.
- Being God-dependent doesn’t mean we are supposed to just lie back and let anything happen to us. The New Testament teaches Christians to be wise and proactive in our dealings with everyone—whether in the church or outside of it—for our own good as well as for the good of others.
- Being God-dependent doesn’t mean we are not supposed to use our skills, talents, advantages, and opportunities to be the best women we can be. Our God wants us to give back to Him all those skills, talents, advantages, and opportunities He has given to us and then use them for His glory. That involves following His leading and guidance. But, sometimes our strength can be our greatest hindrance. We tend to rely on that rather than on God. So, relying on God means submitting your strengths and your weaknesses to Him for His purposes in your life.
The key to being a God-dependent woman is what can be described as dependent living.
Dependent living
Human parents raise their children to be less dependent on them and more independent of them. But, God raises His children to be less independent of Him and more dependent on Him.
Whatever He brings into our lives that makes us more dependent upon Him is good for us. That’s how we learn dependent living.
Dependent living is not weakness. It is being stronger and having more influence, success, and satisfaction than you could ever have through your own efforts—as brilliant and self-sufficient as you think you are or as weak and messed up as you think you are or anywhere in-between.
Because you know He loves you, you can have confidence in what the Lord Jesus Christ will do in your life so that you will want to depend on Him more than on yourself. As you submit to Him, our God uses our dependence on Him to transform us into the likeness of Christ. God transforms your life by teaching you to live dependently on Him in weakness and in strength. You learn how to do this as you respond to God’s love for you, act in obedience to the Word of God, depend on Jesus Christ for the power to do that, and trust Him with the results.
Dependent living is hard. It is trusting God’s grace to be sufficient to handle anything in life. It is enduring a physical ailment that God chooses not to heal. It is being glad about weaknesses so Christ’s power shines in you instead of your own. It is trusting Him for strength all the time, not just when you can’t do something on your own. It is loving God so much that you want to live in dependence upon Him and be obedient to Him. That’s the example Jesus set for us. Becoming a God-dependent woman will make you stronger and more effective in life than you could ever be on your own.
Let Jesus satisfy your heart with hope, healing, and love as you get to know Him and trust Him more each day.
The above information is covered in our Heartbreak to Hope Bible Study of Mark.
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