"Surprise! You Belong" - Preaching at Harderwyk - Mark 5:21-43 - January 17, 2021

Resources For "Surprise! You Belong!" Series From Each Harderwyk Preacher 

Pastor Bill Lindner - Celebration & Fusion Preacher

As preparation for our prayer time in Celebration this morning, I mentioned two events that are associated with this particular Sunday each January: Sanctity of Life Sunday and the Martin Luther King holiday.

Sanctity of Life Sunday - I am thankful for the "Beginning-to-Ending" all-of-life commitment that Harderwyk Ministries lives out in our life together.  We could do a "Sanctity of Life Month"!  For more information on organizations I could only mention in passing, CLICK HERE to learn more about Lakeshore Pregnancy Services and CLICK HERE for Young Lives, CLICK HERE for Kid's Hope and CLICK HERE for Harderwyk GriefShare.

Martin Luther King Holiday - CLICK HERE for my personal blog post "Marching With Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr." which includes all ten commitments from the Commitment Card signed by every person that participated in the 1963 "Birmingham Campaign."  His book - Why We Can't Wait - where this is recorded, is a Christian classic in my mind.  CLICK HERE for last year's post "Thank You Dr. King - Reflection on his Letter from a Birmingham Jail."

Pastor Aaron VanderVeen - WaterShed Preacher

NT Wright from “Mark For Everyone”

Healing by touch, not least when the healer wasn’t expecting it, is such a strange phenomenon that we probably can’t probe much further about how such things work. But they highlight for us the intimate nature of the contact between the individual and Jesus that Mark expects and hopes his readers to develop for themselves. When life crowds in with all its pressures, there is still room for us to creep up behind Jesus—if that’s all we feel we can do—and reach out to touch him, in that odd mixture of fear and faith that characterizes so much Christian discipleship. 

Then the other odd thing: was it Jesus’ power that rescued the woman, or her own faith? Clearly it was Jesus’ power; but he says, ‘Your faith has rescued you.’ The answer must be that faith, though itself powerless, is the channel through which Jesus’ power can work (compare 6:5). He is not a magician, doing conjuring tricks by some secret power for an amazed but uninvolved audience. He is (though the onlookers don’t yet realize this) God’s son, the one through whom the living God is remaking Israel, humans, the world. And faith, however much fear and trembling may accompany it, is the first sign of that remaking, that renewal, that new life.