Sad but true, many people miss God habitually.  As a preacher, I can tell you that many times I get a message, and I recognize that there are certain people that it will really bless.  In certain cases, however, the persons are never there on these key occasions.  They always manage to miss church when God has something for them!

Why is this?

The answer is simple.  Whether God wants to bless you or correct you, there is always some accommodation you have to make.  We receive things by faith, and faith always involves a step of action.  It may involve breaking the loaves and starting to feed the multitude, or it may involve stepping out of the boat, but there is always a step of faith involved.

As human beings we are so fearfully and wonderfully made that we often do have a sort of sixth sense of what is about to come.  Part of this is because we sense much more than we can logically process.  Little things tell us that our health is failing or that we might be due for unexpected financial losses, but we cannot put our finger on exactly where our premonitions are coming from.

On top of this normal ability to intuit things, believers have the Spirit of God guiding them.  Even with believers who do not regularly get alone with God and seek His guidance, the Spirit of God is faithful to speak conviction, encouragement and warning. A given believer may not be actively receiving the Spirit’s words, but these words are present with us.  If the words of the Spirit are not purposefully apprehended and acted upon, however, the work that God is doing can be lost.

How important is the practice of deliberately apprehending and acting on what we receive from the Holy Spirit?

I believe that the Gospel of Mark illustrates this for us with the story of the woman with the issue of blood.  There are four steps involved in her healing, as is related to us in Mark 5:25-34.  First, the woman said to herself, “If I just touch his clothes, I will be healed” (5:28 NIV).  Secondly, she acted on what she had inwardly confessed, and actually forced her way through a thronging crowd in order to reach Jesus (verse 27).  Thirdly, she received her healing (verse 29).  Then, fourth and last of all, she told others that she had been healed (verse 33).

We usually think of step number three in this passage, receiving, as something that is passive.  However, there is an element of action to receiving. In football, good pass receivers do not wait for the ball to hit them in the chest and then just enfold their arms around it.  No, they might extend their hands out to guide it in, or they may run in the direction of the ball in order to be the first to touch it, or they may use their bodies to screen out would-be interceptors.  They take active and aggressive steps in order to receive.

Likewise, in the story of the woman with the issue of blood, we are told that the woman received when she “felt in her body that she was freed” (verse 29). This may not seem like something that involves activity.  However, the Greek word translated felt is a form of the verb ginosko (ghin-oce’-ko), which means to know, to understand, come to know or recognize.  The form used is the Greek aorist tense, indicating that the meaning is to know in the sense of realizing definitely.  Moreover, it is in the active voice, indicating that the woman in this passage came to know in a definite sense that she was healed and this action of coming to know was performed by the woman.

This passage thus indicates that there was something that the woman did that put her in a place to receive healing.   Obviously, something about Jesus had motivated her to seek Him out.  Perhaps it was just God’s grace.  Perhaps it was her constant meditation on the fact that God would somehow provide the healing.  Perhaps she had heard Jesus preach.  But no matter what the stimulus, she had been in a place to actively come to know the healing power of God – this is indicated by the Greek language used!

To return to our initial thought, I have often seen what a pity it is that some people miss their chance to receive from God.  They are somehow constantly distracted just when God is about to do something in their lives.  They lack that active, aggressive desire to pursue God.  Sensing that God is about to do something, they seem to retire from the situation rather than see what step of faith God will ask of them or motivate them to in order to receive their healing, their freedom, their solution or their key words of wisdom.  They feel some rumbling down inside that tells them God is about to touch a sensitive area, and they retreat rather than storm ahead as the woman in Mark Chapter 5 did.

What if the woman with the issue of blood had said, “If I touch him, I feel certain that he will sense something and say something to me”?  She may have thought, “I cannot handle that!”

If that had been her attitude, she would have missed her healing, her freedom, and her marvelous place in God’s redemption history recorded in the Bible.