The Gift That Faith Gives

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.
Mark 5:27-29 (NIV)

Twelve years is a long time to suffer from anything, let alone uncontrollable loss of blood. But the woman in Mark 5 endured those twelve years, draining her bank account on doctors and living distanced from everyone because of her perpetually unclean status. But then Jesus appeared on the scene, and she found the healing that she had hoped for.

This account demonstrates the discipline of faith—a faith that kept exercising hope in God’s ability to change human conditions and restore human lives. It’s the discipline of faith to believe God, not just to the breaking point, but to believe God beyond the breaking point. Faith takes us not just to a threshold, but enables us to believe God on the other side of a threshold. Faith causes you to never give up, to believe that no matter how far, how long, or how hard we have to hang in there, we’ll go down believing He can create change.

This discipline of faith gives us a gift: an indefatigable drive to be relentless. Tireless faith gives you the gift to stay energetic, even with a draining and debilitating illness, a burden, or a heavy weight in life. Faith gifts us with a mindset of hope.

Every one of us experiences things that wear us out. But when we have faith, someone might ask us “Why are you still here? Why are you still smiling? Why are you still optimistic? Why do you still pray? Why do you keep forgiving? Why do you keep laughing? Why do you keep giving your best?”

Your answer can be, “Because every day, faith pulls up to my doorstep and drops off relentless energy so that what I can’t do on my own, the Holy Spirit empowers me to do.”

If it wasn’t for the Holy Spirit, we’d have given up a long time ago, but thank God for an indefatigable Spirit, who gives us the gift of continuing on with hope.

The woman in this passage had been drained of everything in her life, including blood, bank, belonging, and the only thing that had not been completely drained was her faith, so that is what Jesus used to perform His miracle of healing.

Faith will give you the gift of relentless hope.