Going There

 

 

This is going to be about some female issues.  Most male teachers don’t go there, fully. 

Jesus did. 

Men should. 

It’s about all of us.

Isaiah 64:5-9  NIV 

5 You come to the help of those who gladly do right,

who remember your ways.

But when we continued to sin against them,

you were angry.

How then can we be saved?

6 All of us have become like one who is unclean,

and all our righteous acts are like filthy rags;

we all shrivel up like a leaf,

and like the wind our sins sweep us away.

7 No one calls on your name

or strives to lay hold of you;

for you have hidden your face from us

and have given us over to our sins.

8 Yet you, Lord, are our Father.

We are the clay, you are the potter;

we are all the work of your hand.

9 Do not be angry beyond measure, Lord;

do not remember our sins forever.

Oh, look on us, we pray,

for we are all your people.

 

This was a cry for help and acknowledgment of their plight.  They became like one who is unclean and that their righteous acts were like filthy rags.

 The word in Hebrew that was used for filthy is עִדִּים 

It is a noun feminine in Strong’s Concordance 5708 and is the root word which is עִדָּה noun feminine meaning: menstruation.

He is saying that their righteousness is like menstruation garments.  This is what is being translated in English as "filthy."

Blood is the life of our earthly existence.  A woman’s menstruation signified that life did not take place and the woman was considered unclean according to Leviticus 15, when she was having the flux of menstruation.  All who touched her, any of her garments or places she had been while she was in this time were considered also unclean and that which/who came in contact with her needed to be washed.

What a pain!  What a sense of humility and heaviness of soul to be called unclean.  Isaiah was writing that their righteous acts, in all their own efforts, were not only worthless, but unclean in the way of the flux of menstruation on garments.

Women know the inconvenience, the frequent pain associated, the tiredness, the ruined clothes, and the times of embarrassment.  My husband brought himself to purchase supplies for me for the first time at 28 years of marriage. It was embarrassing for him, too, but he did it out of love and compassion for me.

In walks Jesus. 

A woman, having an issue of blood for twelve years, hears that Jesus is in town. She’s heard about Him and the things He has done: raising the dead, healing the sick, freeing people of demons.

 She’s been considered unclean for 12 years. 

Years of embarrassment, feeling sick, tired, and chronic blood loss; she was desperate. She would have had to live mostly isolated.  She had sought help from physicians and in Mark 5:26 says, “and who had suffered much under many physicians, and had spent all that she had, and was no better but rather grew worse.”

One can scarcely comprehend what kinds of atrocities they were in those days that were done to her when it says she had suffered much under the attempts of many physicians. Her complete desperation brought her to Jesus.

Mark 5:26-27 She had heard the reports about Jesus and came up behind him in the crowd and touched his garment. 28For she said, “If I touch even his garments, I will be made well.”

If she touched just his clothes, His garments, she knew she would be made well.  In her unclean status, while wearing her unclean garments, she knew and believed the power of Jesus by touching just His garments.  She would strive to lay hold of Him.

Mark 5:29 And immediately the flow of blood dried up, and she felt in her body that she was healed of her disease. 30 And Jesus, perceiving in himself that power had gone out from him, immediately turned about in the crowd and said, “Who touched my garments?” 31 And his disciples said to him, “You see the crowd pressing around you, and yet you say, ‘Who touched me?’” 32 And he looked around to see who had done it. 33 But the woman, knowing what had happened to her, came in fear and trembling and fell down before him and told him the whole truth.

She confessed all of it.  All of what she had, in its embarrassment, and all of what she did.  Beyond the healing, she had touched Him in her “unclean” state.  She touched Jesus, who is pure and Holy, a Jew that fulfilled the Law, and in His power and purity she was healed by just His garments.  By His robe, she was made clean and healed.  He did not condemn her being unclean, or for touching Him and taking His power, but He responded toward her faith.

34 “And he said to her, “Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace, and be healed of your disease.”

“Go in peace,” He says to her.  No condemnation, no fear for what she had done, no more disease.  Jesus poured out His grace on top of His healing power.  He does this for us all.  Male and female.  He did not go and cleanse Himself, but immediately went to raise a dead child to life. 

Just as Isaiah wrote in that time that, “all of our righteous deeds are like filthy rags,”

 Jesus displays His time of grace in faith, revealing that our filthy rags are not held against us, but it is about Who He is and who we are to Him.

 Isaiah pleads in prayer in Isaiah 64:9

Do not be angry beyond measure, Lord;

do not remember our sins forever.

Oh, look on us, we pray,

for we are all your people.

As Jesus looked on the woman, He was not angry. He thought nothing of what she had done in her unclean state to touch His garments and receive His power. 

He wanted to know “Who.”

She received. She was healed. She was told to, “go in peace,” because of His grace.  Because of her faith, she received His healing power.

 Who she was, mattered to Him.

 

 



The Blessing of Bathsheba



She was bathing. She was doing what was required by the Law.  It was a ritual cleansing that women did that was required following menstruation.  When David’s men inquired of her on behalf of David’s lusty heart, she acknowledged she was the wife of Uriah.  She then went with them and she would sleep with David.

How often have we done what we are supposed to do, go through the motions of communion, or sprinkle a little holy water, a baptism, confessions… only to get up and go do what is unholy.  Sometimes it is not even thought of, other times it is so woefully shameful one may believe there is no hope of restoration with God.

When God is in pursuit of you, He will reveal how you stepped out.  And, He offers restoration.

Bathsheba became pregnant.  There was no hiding what she did.  David tried to sweep it under the rug by trying to get Bathsheba’s husband to have sex with her so that the possibility of the child could be Uriah’s and he wouldn't think differently.  Uriah’s nobility, commitment and honor to whom he was serving, the fighting men, would not allow himself pleasure over his army colleagues.

The thing he was denying himself was what David did not deny himself.  David chose to hang back instead of join the men in battle as a King was to be in battle with them in this particular time. He chose his own comfort and from there the desire of his pleasure increased all the more to the point of desiring Bathsheba.

Uriah would not step into the cover-up David attempted.  So, David set Uriah up to have him killed by placing him on the front lines and then have the soldiers fall back, leaving Uriah unprotected. Uriah was killed.  This kept David’s secret.  He was free to take Bathsheba as his wife, legitimizing the child and Bathsheba.

Here is where we start to see God make His move.  David was clueless to the truth of what he did.  The LORD once spoke to me saying, “Sin is deceptive until it’s reflected.” God told Nathan, the prophet, to go to David. 

 Nathan began telling a story about a rich man that had many sheep and a poor man that had only one.  The "ewe" (female sheep)  that the poor man had, he loved dearly and cared for and held to himself.  Nathan goes on to say a traveler came and needed to eat so the rich man took the one lamb of the poor man and killed it instead of one of his own.  David was outraged and said that the rich man “deserves to die!”  David saw death was deserving of such a crime.  Nathan said to him, “That rich man is you.”

David finally saw what he had done in taking Uriah’s wife and having Uriah killed.  When I read the story that Nathan told, I interpret the “traveler” that he prepared a meal for as a spirit of lust.  David satisfied it by taking another man’s wife instead of his own.  In the recognition of knowing now what he had done and where he was and the words that Nathan shared that were God’s upcoming punishment. In 2 Samuel 12:13-14 David cries out that he has sinned against The LORD. Nathan responds and says, “The LORD has taken away your sin. You are not going to die.”  David knew in his heart that the act deserved death, but God in His mercy to David and in keeping with His promise that Christ would come from the house of David, God forgave him and would not have him die.  But, in verse 14, in God’s Holy and sovereign place against sin and prior to the full redemption of sin through Christ’s death for us, Nathan goes on in the message. “But because by doing this you have made the enemies of the LORD show utter contempt, the son born to you will die.”  It goes on to say that, “The LORD struck the child that Uriah’s wife had borne to David, and he became ill.

Bathsheba was not referenced in her name in this scripture.  She was referenced as Uriah’s wife with the child of David’s.  This reference was the part that had been the place of sin, but the child was innocent.  There was to come a day when God’s own innocent son would be the one to die for the sins of others.

As David prayed, humbled in the position before God lying on the floor and fasting and refusing drink for the seven days of the child’s illness in hopes that God may spare the child, God did not.  The child died and David knew that God did as He was going to do.  David had come back to the heart of God in humility and knowing that God is Holy.  David then went into the House of the LORD and worshiped.  He had come back to the place of God’s Holy presence and released himself into God’s will.

We don’t hear about what was happening in Bathsheba’s heart except that she was mourning.  Knowing all she knew, she would have mourned for the unholy place she had gone to and the suffering of her child.  She had known the LORD’s will because she had been following the Law in the way of cleansing, but she had not followed Him in fullness of heart.  Now she was stricken with the greatest grief; the death of her child.

2 Samuel 12:24  “Then David comforted his wife Bathsheba, and he went to her and lay with her.  She gave birth to a son, and they named him Solomon.  The LORD loved him,” See God’s blessing here. David comforted her.  The Word now calls her by name again and calls her, “David’s wife.”

The grace and forgiveness that God did with full redemption of now being David’s wife is here.  Beyond it is the fullness of this blessing of grace.

She conceives that night, a new life, and bears a son. 

This son, Solomon, is the son that continues the line of David where Jesus comes from. 

 It is a conception of grace. 

 A blessing on a woman that who on her own, was unholy, but in God, she is made holy again.  God didn’t choose any other of David’s wives, he chose the one with the most baggage, the one that received and needed His graces.

Are Bathsheba and David instantly perfected? No. Here is how we know as it goes on to speak of the baby, “and because the LORD loved him (the baby), he sent word through Nathan the prophet to name him Jedidiah.”  Jedidiah means, beloved by God.  David and Bathsheba did not name him Jedidiah, but Solomon.  But, God’s grace and blessing continued and His love continued in the name He Himself held for Solomon.

Jedidiah. 

Beloved of God.

The blessing of Bathsheba is grace, love, and in the holiness of God, she was a mother in the line of Jesus.

On our own we are unholy, but in God we are made holy.  Be in Him and know that He redeems through His forgiveness, love and grace.  Conviction is His desire to draw us back to Him.  No one is too far gone and what He can make of us is miraculous in love and life.

Psalm 86:15 ESV But you, O Lord, are a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness.

Ephesians 2:4-7 But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, 5 made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions—it is by grace you have been saved. 6 And God raised us up with Christ and seated us with him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus, 7 in order that in the coming ages he might show the incomparable riches of his grace, expressed in his kindness to us in Christ Jesus.

 

A Well of Grace

 

 

“You don’t have anything to draw with.” This is what the Bible said about Jesus.  I was caught up in that thought of how Jesus didn’t have something; something He needed.

 

Jesus was tired and seated at Jacob’s well when the Samaritan woman came to draw water.  He depended on someone else to give him a drink. Or did He? He told her to give him a drink.  She answered him, “How is it that you, a Jew, ask for a drink from me, a woman of Samaria?” A remarkable conversation started and part way through came her remark, “Sir, you don’t have anything to draw with.”

I invite you to listen to my message on this portion of John 4:1-38 and let’s go deeper into this well.

Click here for the message.

 ~ If He who in Himself can lack nothing, chooses to need us, it is because we need to be needed. ~ C.S. Lewis

 

 

 

 

 



Kiss

 

Let the thought of a kiss come to mind.  Think of giving one.  Think of receiving one. Think of someone that gave you a safe place or you gave a safe place in a kiss. As a child, as a parent, as a friend, as a family member, and to one you love; it happens in relationship.

 When you approach someone to kiss them, you are letting go of anything between you.  You come so close that you are vulnerable.  You trust in a relationship that will receive a gesture so near that you can breathe them in.  You probably remember the fragrance of those you love and care for because of how near you have been to them.   Producing a kiss to give to another is a pouring out of yourself.  It can be an expression of caring or protection, affection, comfort, assurance and a seal of how you feel about them or honor them.  You care.  You are there…and they matter.  

 When you receive a kiss you have allowed someone to draw near and offer themselves to you.  You allow yourself to be vulnerable to them as they have become vulnerable to you.  You allow them to connect to you; the breath and fragrance of their life near your own.

 A handshake is a connection literally at arms-length.

 But, the kiss is a place of great trust, vulnerability, relationship and grace. 

 It is a place of refuge…a place of peace.

 

Psalm 2 is filled with words that speak in advance about Jesus, the Son, and at the end of the chapter, a kiss.

 Psalm 2:12 ESV  Kiss the Son, lest he be angry, and you perish in the way,

for his wrath is quickly kindled. Blessed are all who take refuge in him.

 In the near relationship of the Son is the place of safety and peace.  The LORD is saying to “Kiss the Son.”

 

There is blessing there! In the nearness of a kiss there is refuge.  We are given permission in a direction to approach Him and to bring ourselves in such vulnerability to place a kiss upon Him.  We are not harmed in kissing Him, but instead given security and acceptance as we come near enough in affection to offer a kiss.  It is a place of love.

 When we distance ourselves from Him we are in the places of our own making or way that fails.  We perish in the way. We aren’t at peace no matter what we have tried.  When we finally realize this, that is when most of us turn to Him.  He always receives us.  He always makes Himself open for a kiss.  That is grace.  That is love.

The deepest betrayal to Jesus came by way of Judas.  Judas is described as, “one of the Twelve.”  These were those who were closest to Jesus.  They traveled with Him, ate with Him, slept near Him and served with Him.  They were the most privileged of all and He was nearest to them.  

 

Luke 2:47-48 NIV  While he was still speaking a crowd came up, and the man who was called Judas, one of the Twelve, was leading them. He approached Jesus to kiss him, 48but Jesus asked him, “Judas, are you betraying the Son of Man with a kiss?”

 Let that verse reach the fullness of understanding of the betrayal.  This was the way that Judas revealed who Jesus was to the high priests who were taking Him away to be crucified.

Judas was taking what God had given as a command for refuge and security, grace and peace to be used against the very One Who provides it.  It is staggering.  

 
Luke 22:49 NIV When Jesus’ followers saw what was going to happen, they said, “Lord, should we strike with our swords?” 50And one of them struck the servant of the high priest, cutting off his right ear.

 
51But Jesus answered, “No more of this!” And he touched the man’s ear and healed him.

52Then Jesus said to the chief priests, the officers of the temple guard, and the elders, who had come for him, “Am I leading a rebellion, that you have come with swords and clubs? 53Every day I was with you in the temple courts, and you did not lay a hand on me. But this is your hour—when darkness reigns.”

In that time the others wanted to defend Jesus, but being Who He is, the place of refuge, He healed the one that was injured and said, “No more of this!”  He spoke against the place of fighting, betrayal, lies and animosity and He placed the wickedness to when, who and where they belong to …

  “when darkness reigns.”
 
Notice Jesus.  Notice His healing.  Notice His refuge.  Notice His grace.  Notice His Truth. Notice His peace.  Notice His love and forgiveness.
 
Yes, kiss the Son.  Kiss Him for all that He is for you.

God speaks about the ones that did not kiss Baal.  Baal is a pagan god and the name is also used in way of an idol.

 1 Kings 19:18  Yet I will leave seven thousand in Israel --all whose knees have not bowed down to Baal and whose mouths have not kissed him."

These seven thousand were kept well and remained in Israel. These are the ones that have not gone so far as to find their security someplace else in an idol, or given their affection  or made themselves vulnerable. By not bowing their knees, they stayed strong standing up against Baal.  The kiss means a lot.

 We aren’t done kissing. 

As Christians, the Bible says to, “greet each other with a holy kiss.”   This is a gesture that does not allow anything to come between each other.  There is vulnerability, trust, caring, security, and peace. Forgiveness and grace are present.

In fact, it says it in MANY places to greet each other in Christ with a holy kiss.

•   Romans 16:16
• 1 Corinthians 16:20
• 2 Corinthians 13:12

A kiss that is holy is holy in Christ.

It is the purity of love, forgiveness and grace.

It is the heart of the message of grace.

Animosity aside is the peace within for a brother.

This is the message of the kiss.

 1 Peter 5:14  Greet one another with a kiss of love. Peace be to you all who are in Christ.