Kingdom Woman: Embracing Your Purpose, Power, and Possibilities (11 page)

Ruth had a need: She was alone; perhaps she was even lonely. But rather than sit home and try to position herself in the best way she could to meet that need, she gave the very thing that she needed to someone else. As an elderly widow, Naomi had very little chance, if any at all, of ever marrying again. Naomi was in fact more alone than Ruth. Because of this reality, Ruth chose to meet Naomi’s relational need. And in giving “it” to Naomi, Ruth received “it” from God in the form of a new husband, Boaz.

In 1 Samuel we saw that Hannah had gone for years without a child because God had closed her womb. Yet Hannah’s situation changed when she
wept bitterly before the Lord and vowed to Him that she would give “it”—her child—to Him if He would give “it,” a child, to her. She gave up her son before God even gave her one.

When Hannah gave “it” (her need) to the service of God, God gave “it” back to her because He opened her womb so much that she went on to have five more children.

The widow of Zarephath needed food. God said to give “it” to the prophet. Even though it wasn’t practical to give the very thing she needed to the prophet, the widow did just that in faith. She gave her food, and in return, God gave “it” back. He gave her more than enough to eat until the famine ended, and she was able to once again grow her own food.

Faith isn’t simply tied to belief. It is tied to an action. Faith is tied to your feet. The power of faith comes when you are willing to give the very thing that you need to someone else so God can give “it” back to you. The reason why so many prayers go unanswered is simply because people are not willing to give God all they have. They are not willing to give the very thing that they are searching for and in need of. Give, and
it
will be given to you in this lifetime. Pressed down, shaken together, and running over.

To better understand what is meant by the last phrase we need to know that in biblical days, a woman would wear a robe that had a special fold sewn into it. This fold served much like an apron today. When a woman would go get grain, she would hold out the portion of her robe with the fold, and the grain would be poured into her lap, so to speak.

Because she wanted her robe to hold as much grain as possible, she would shake her apron to settle the grain into all the open spaces. Shaking created more room for more grain. Then she would press down the grain to flatten it some more so the robe could hold even more grain until it finally was running over.
[28]

What God is saying is that when you give according to the faith you have
in Him, He will raise up someone to give “it” back to you so much so that it will run over. You will receive back in abundance.

The power of faith is not just that God will answer your prayer; the power of faith in action is that God will give back to you “far more abundantly than all that we ask or think” (Ephesians 3:20,
ESV
).

Faith is not a principle to be analyzed. Living as a kingdom woman of faith is a principle to be experienced. Linda had heard the weather report like all of us. She could see the clouds. Yet Linda knew the power of God. She knew that the crusade was meant to bless the thousands in attendance and glorify God’s name. It wasn’t her crusade. It was for others to know the blessing of God. Because of that, Linda prayed in faith.

I’ll never forget when the gentleman sitting next to Linda on the stadium stage offered her his umbrella as the dark storm clouds rolled in. She turned and looked at him, smiled politely, and then put up her hand. “I don’t need it,” she said.

And she didn’t. Actually, none of us did.

6

One time I was battling a cold and couldn’t shake it. I called my doctor and told him my symptoms, and he told me I didn’t need to come in. He was going to call in a prescription for me. He told me what medicine he was prescribing and how to take it.

Now, a number of things went into motion. First, I had to believe that I was talking to the person I thought I had called, because I couldn’t see him. It was just a conversation over the phone. So I had to listen to his voice. I listened, and he told me how to fix my problem. I could have stayed in bed and meditated. I could have believed him but stayed in bed thinking about how good it was that I had a doctor who understood my problem and provided me with a solution. I could have lain there thinking how great it was that I had a solution. But all that lying around and thinking about the doctor’s words wouldn’t have made me better. It might have given me warm fuzzies because he personally talked to me, but I’d still have been just as sick as I was when I first called him. I had to get up, get in my car, drive to Walgreens, and ask the pharmacist, “Do you have a prescription with my name on it?”

While there are many kinds of medicine in the pharmacy, I needed something with my name on it. The doctor had told me it was there, and I acted on his word.

Beyond that, I could have just received the medicine and looked at it. I could have made sure that it looked acceptable to me. But I’d still have been just as sick. By following the doctor’s instructions, my belief was matching up with my works, and I began to feel much better.

A lot of us have spiritual colds, yet we come to God to hear what the Doctor has to prescribe, only to have nothing change. This is because many of us stop there. We think about how good it was to hear from Him or to talk to Him. Some of us turn to the Word of God and feel good about how wonderful the prescription sounds and all of the things that it is supposed to do, but we stay just as “sick” because we don’t ingest the “medicine” God gives us.

The pursuit of faith involves much more than simply seeking God and His Word. While those are definitely a part of it, true pursuit involves responding in such a way that our actions follow His instructions. Only when faith comes full circle will the full benefit be manifested in our lives. Full faith is an all-out, no-holds-barred approach to a life punctuated by actions of belief.

I realize that things happen that make it more of a challenge to live with actions that demonstrate faith. Perhaps you weren’t raised in an environment where the people around you taught you what a life of faith looked like. Perhaps your life revealed disappointments early on, or maybe you were hurt in some way and are a little “gun-shy” about taking chances. Maybe you think you have too much to lose by stepping out in a direction that you sense God is leading you. Whatever it is, people have different reasons why they shrink back from trusting and relying on God.

Scripture tells of a woman who also had challenges, but she was able to overcome those
because
of her faith. She didn’t allow anything to stand in the way of doing what she needed to do. In the King James Version, this woman’s primary problem was “an issue of blood”:

Bleeding, in particular, is a difficult issue to deal with because the loss of blood means the loss of life—zest, energy, and strength—because “the life of the flesh is in the blood” (Leviticus 17:11,
KJV
). I’m sure you’ve heard the phrase
bleeding out
, meaning that a person has lost so much blood that he or she dies. The body needs blood in order to live.

Blood is an important part of life. Whenever you go to the doctor because you are not well, often he or she will take a blood test. A doctor can discover a lot by looking at and examining your blood. Because within your blood is the essence of life itself.

This woman was hemorrhaging; her life had been ebbing away from her for twelve very long years. Yet not only was her physical life ebbing away because of this issue—undoubtedly making her weak and putting her organs in pain as they lacked the necessary oxygen to function properly—but her finances were being hit as well.

Some of you reading these words right now know what it is like to have ongoing doctor’s bills because a health issue continues to go unfixed for a prolonged period of time. As the doctors try this, that, and the other, the bills continue to tax and strain your finances.

Yet not only did this woman suffer from a physical and a financial problem; she also suffered from a spiritual problem. We know this because she was a Jewish woman living under the Old Testament law:

To be considered “unclean” in Israelite culture carried with it multiple ramifications. For one, she could not be touched. This meant that her physical problem also bled into a social problem because she was forced to live apart from the touch or warmth of humanity. Most likely, she couldn’t go out and take part in marketplace activities, since any other woman who might accidentally touch her could be considered unclean as well. She also couldn’t attend any religious ceremonies. She had probably also been prescribed a number of tonics to cure her hemorrhage, and those may have come with some side effects of their own. Most likely this woman lived a lonely, isolated, and painful existence. She definitely had “issues.”

Before we dive deeper into her story, though, I want to pause to ask if you can relate to this woman. Perhaps not on the entire scale of her story, but has something impacted you physically, socially, financially, or spiritually, and whatever you try to fix the problem, it just doesn’t work? You spend your money on medical help, psychological help, vitamins, herbs, and the latest cure-alls. Regardless of all of that, you are left with an empty purse and a heavy heart as you quietly carry your burden.

If that describes you in any way—aching, hurting, discouraged, despondent, disappointed—and it doesn’t seem like anyone can help—in fact, what help you do get tends to make things even worse—I want to ask you to learn from this woman.

After twelve years, there is no doubt that her situation appeared unfixable from a human point of view. In fact, it’s even doubtful that she felt like anyone even cared anymore. If things were going to get better, something beyond her and beyond everyone and everything else had to happen. She needed a supernatural touch. The faithful woman needed a supernatural healing. So she made her way to a position where she could get just that.

As we saw earlier in Luke 8, she made her way through the crowds and
came up behind Jesus to touch His cloak. Matthew 9:20 said she specifically reached for the hem of Christ’s garment. Why is that important? Because to go low enough to touch the hem, she needed to humble herself. She needed to relinquish all forms of pride, self-preservation, and human wisdom. She had to humble herself to open herself to being impacted by God’s Word—God’s viewpoint on her issue. She had to lean not on her own understanding (Proverbs 3:5) but lean down to gain God’s understanding. She had to stop looking at her situation through her own perspective and start looking for God’s solution. She believed that if she could just get hold of that hem, attached to Jesus Christ—the Son of God and the Word of God—she would be healed.

We know she was a woman of great faith: “She said to herself, ‘If I only touch his cloak, I will be healed’ ” (Matthew 9:21).

A kingdom woman is a woman who knows and believes that her solution is not found in money, human reasoning, or other people. Her solution is found in humbling herself before Jesus Christ and surrendering to the Word of God. Many times, God will let you try everything you think you need to try to fix your own issues. He will let you spend all of your money, waste all of your time, and simply become worn out and weary. He allows this because often it isn’t until someone has come to the end of herself and her own options that she looks to the only true option for lasting healing—God.

The important thing to note in this kingdom woman’s story is that she understood the power of connecting Jesus Christ with the Word of God. See, if you have the written Word yet no living Word, you have truth without life. If you have the living Word at the exclusion of the written Word, you have life without the full revelation of truth. But when you have the living Word while grabbing hold of the written Word, you have life and truth. In pursuing that combination in faith, the woman was healed immediately.

Chrystal’s Chronicles

Pine Cove, in Tyler, Texas, is a Christian camp that our family has attended every year for as long as I can remember. My dad is often a featured speaker at Pine Cove, so when he is, the rest of us tag along for a nice family vacation. A few years ago, however, our vacation took a scary turn.

One afternoon, the kids had finished their activities, and it was time for them to settle in for a nap. Our week together was coming to a close, and the women in our family decided to take a trip into town to shop while our little ones slept. We left them in the cabin with their granddad, whom they affectionately call “Poppy.” I remember that we left around 2:30
PM
. As I backed out of the driveway, I remember seeing my oldest son, Jesse, watching me through the window in the room where he was supposed to be lying down.

Around 4:00
PM
I got a call from my dad saying that the front door to the cabin was open and that three-year-old Jesse wasn’t in the house. My dad had checked everywhere and couldn’t find my son anywhere. At that moment, my heartbeat went into overdrive, and my lungs tightened. I could hardly take in air. If you have ever thought for a second that your child was lost, had disappeared, or might be in danger, then you know exactly what I’m talking about. I prayed the only words I could muster at the moment: “Lord Jesus . . . please help.”

I told myself that I needed to keep calm, trust in God, and do whatever I needed to find my son. We gathered the girls from our various locations in the shopping center and immediately rushed back to the camp to help out with the frantic search for my baby boy.

We were twenty minutes away from the camp. Those twenty minutes crept insanely slow. I wanted the phone to ring, and I wanted my dad to be on the other end of the line telling me that he found Jesse in another room or outside playing in the dirt. Instead, I got a call from him to tell me that camp personnel had been assembled to begin a search in the woods and around the lake that sits in the center of the campground.

In those moments, I must admit, my faith was not working. I tried. I wanted to believe. But a million images flashed through my mind, and the stories of other families that I’d watched play out on television came to my thoughts. Those long minutes were probably the most intense I have ever faced. My heart was tearing apart on the inside.

While we were still en route, and even before the search began, a phone call came from the police station. A police officer had found Jesse. He was safe, happy, and ready to come home.

From what we can piece together, Jesse must have run out of the room and out of the front door in an attempt to catch us as we left for our shopping trip. My dad
had been in his room with his door open so he could listen for the kids, but with the commotion of all of us women leaving the cabin, he hadn’t heard anything unusual when my son went out the door as well. Some time after Jesse left the cabin, the police picked him up from some people who had found him wandering alone.

Jesse had walked out of the cabin, off the campground, and onto the main road—a two-lane rural road on which vehicles typically travel between fifty and sixty miles per hour. He left the cabin wearing only a diaper—no socks and no shirt. A car passed by him, and he ran out into the road behind the car. It could have been that the car resembled our car. I’m not sure. Whatever the case, Jesse began pursuing the car on the road. The driver in the car saw in his rearview mirror the small, diaper-clad child running to catch him. He pulled over immediately. This unnamed driver picked him up and took him to the nearest house on the road. From there, the residents called the police, and the quest began to find out whose three-year-old, unclothed kid this was.

Before the police even arrived, a member of the Pine Cove staff heading to town noticed the commotion and stopped to find out what was going on. The staff member knew that the speaker for Pine Cove was my dad and that he had brought his entire family with him. The staff person suggested that my son might belong to the Evans family. When the police arrived, they brought Jesse back to the camp and tracked us down. By the time I arrived on the grounds, Jesse was dressed, playing with a stuffed animal the police officer had given him, and enjoying all the attention. I ran to Jesse and picked him up in my arms. I hoped I didn’t hurt him because I was squeezing him so hard. The first words out of my baby’s mouth were, “Mommy, I found you!”