An Act of Desperate Faith
(This is Pips on his best behavior.)
I think my cat knows my routine better than I do. As soon as my feet hit the floor, he is chirping and rubbing on me, guiding me into the kitchen for his breakfast. If I happen to be trying to sleep in, he will jump on me and run zoomies across the bed. If that doesn’t work, he will make himself throw up in the hallway because that sound will always wake me. You’d think the poor guy was starved for how desperately he begs for food in the mornings.
It's easy to lose this kind of single-minded desperation in our spiritual life. Only when we are truly suffering does our need overwhelm our fear of the risks, and we become willing to do anything to find healing. If we were truly honest, we would be able to acknowledge our suffering, admit our desperate need for Jesus, and recklessly reach out for His healing. In Mark 5, we meet a woman who does just that. There’s a lot we can learn from her faith about the benefits of spiritual desperation.
“A large crowd followed and pressed around him. And a woman was there who had been subject to bleeding for twelve years. 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. When she heard about Jesus, she came up behind him in the crowd and touched his cloak, because she thought, “If I just touch his clothes, I will be healed.” Immediately her bleeding stopped and she felt in her body that she was freed from her suffering.
At once Jesus realized that power had gone out from him. He turned around in the crowd and asked, “Who touched my clothes?”
“You see the people crowding against you,” his disciples answered, “and yet you can ask, ‘Who touched me?’ ”
But Jesus kept looking around to see who had done it. Then the woman, knowing what had happened to her, came and fell at his feet and, trembling with fear, told him the whole truth. He said to her, “Daughter, your faith has healed you. Go in peace and be freed from your suffering.””
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This woman had been in pain for twelve years with some kind of menstrual bleeding. As if that physical pain was not enough, she experienced the social ostracization that came with being ritually unclean. According to the old covenant, she had to be separated from others until her bleeding stopped; otherwise, she would defile those with whom she came into contact (Leviticus 15:25-30). Can you imagine being separated from religious life and from any outward practice of faith because of a disease you couldn’t control?
While most of us don’t face suffering quite this extreme, we can relate to that feeling of isolation. It often feels like this disease, this problem, this addiction, etc. separates us from others and even from God. During one of my more intense struggles with mental health, other Christians tried to encourage me, but it never really felt like they understood what I was going through. So I stopped attending church for a long time; it was just too hard to face that obstacle to fellowship with other believers every week. In my personal relationship with God, I similarly felt that kind of distance. I blamed myself for this situation I couldn’t fix and grew resentful of God for not delivering me from it. I eventually found myself so isolated and discouraged that I set aside my self-blame and anger and asked for help. I think this emotional state led the Desperate Woman to apply her faith to one last desperate act of hope.
Here's the value of that kind of desperate faith: It acknowledges the full extent of our need for God’s intervention. Would we really seek out Jesus if we didn’t need His help so badly? Would we even appreciate all He has to offer if we weren’t so desperate for it? It is often the desperate needs born of intense suffering that teach us how to reach for Jesus.
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The Desperate Woman sought help from doctor after doctor, but her condition only worsened, and her finances had been depleted. When I am suffering, I usually try all the other avenues for help before I ask for God to intervene. I figure that if I have exhausted all my other options first, God will be more likely to realize the severity of my case. Maybe He will honor that I didn’t bother Him with something until I had done everything I could first. However, exhausting all the options usually leaves me worse off than before. I’m more tired, more discouraged, more isolated, and with less resources. But God does not require this exhaustion first. He urges us to cast our cares on Him (1 Peter 5:7) and to take His light burden over the heavy weight of our own problems (Matthew 11:29-30).
After the Desperate Woman exhausted all her options, she chose to believe “the things about Jesus.” She heard the reports about His miracles and believed that He could do the same for her. When we are suffering, sometimes the hardest thing to do is to hold onto hope that things will get better—to believe that God’s help could change our situation when all other avenues of healing have not.
Our hope is based in Christ’s power—His ability to accomplish healing—and in His faithfulness—His integrity to follow through on His promises. The firm foundation of Christ’s character is an anchor for our souls in suffering because we can trust in His word.
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Once the Desperate Woman chose to believe the reports about Jesus, she set out to touch Him. Though He was a holy man, clearly on another mission, she reached out to touch Him. She didn’t brush past Him and hope that that would do the trick. It was intentional not incidental contact. She knew that her life was not sustainable the way it was so she desperately reached for the new life only Jesus could supply. Jesus answered this woman’s act of desperate faith with freedom from her suffering. In her case, that meant that her bleeding immediately ceased. She received physical healing.
Although we believe in the certainty of God’s promises for our healing, we do not all experience the kind of physical healing that Jesus gave to the Desperate Woman. Just because God does not answer “yes” to our grasp for healing of our inescapable suffering, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t reach out in faith. The act of reaching out will change us. Like Paul learning humility when the thorn in his flesh was not removed (2 Corinthians 12:8-10), we somehow find that God’s grace gives us what we need to endure.
Desperate faith teaches us that casual contact with Jesus will never satisfy the earnest desires of our hearts, and it will never relieve the heavy weight of suffering. Only when we are desperate enough to grasp for deliverance will we see God’s power truly at work in our lives. There will be trials that we desperately beg God to get us out of, but our prayers seem to be denied. A desperate faith still reaches out to Jesus anyway. And by reaching, the desperate find freedom. Jesus blesses us with the peace born of a reconciliation of our will with God’s, and He commands us to “go…and be freed from [our] suffering.” Desperate faith teaches us that true freedom is a mindset that we can consciously choose, even in our hardships, if we keep reaching out to Jesus.
When was the last time you were desperate for God? What would an act of desperation look like in your situation of suffering today? What fears hold you back from taking that step to reach out intentionally for Jesus?
