Your faith has healed you

“Just then a woman who had been subject to bleeding for twelve years came up behind Him and touched the edge of His cloak. She said to herself, ‘If I only touch His cloak, I will be healed.’
“Jesus turned and saw her. ‘Take heart, daughter’, He said, ‘your faith has healed you.’ And the woman was healed from that moment.” Matthew 9:20-22
Today we read the account of the woman with the issue of blood, who pressed through the crowd to touch Jesus’ cloak as He was on His way to raise Jairus’ daughter from the dead. It’s easy to misunderstand what happened, because we usually only look at the external actions and fail to see what is happening in the woman’s heart.
Jesus tells us what healed her. It was her faith. But faith by itself is nothing; faith must be in something. What was her faith in? As we read this, we might think that her faith was in Jesus’ clothes, that somehow she thought they had magic powers. But if that were the case, she would not have been healed. No, her faith was in Jesus, that He had the power to heal her. Touching His garment provided a point of release for her faith, knowing she would be healed when she did it. A similar account of people being healed by touching someone’s clothing can be found in Acts 19:11-12, where items of clothing that Paul had touched were laid on sick people and they were healed. Again, these items provided a point of release for the sick person’s faith in God as their healer.
The same thing still happens today. This is why the Bible tells us to have the elders lay hands on the sick and anoint them with oil (James 5:14-15); it provides a point of release for their faith. The important thing is not to confuse the source of the healing. All healing comes from God, through faith in Him.