"When Jesus saw her, he called her forward and said to her, “Woman, you are set free from your infirmity" (Luke 13:12)
The renowned charismatic Televangelist preacher, TD Jakes, has sung a captivating song, "Woman Though art loosed", based on an incident where one day a tortured woman who had been paralysed with an infirmity came up to Jesus and he healed her. This woman's physical infirmity was quite obvious to everyone. For she "had been crippled by a spirit for eighteen years. She was bent over and could not straighten up at all" ( Luke 13:11).
Her story is important for us to reflect on because any of us may suffer from physically limiting conditions, perhaps clear to every one but also those not as obvious. And just as we see there was a spirit binding her, any person even in the present age could be bound by a spirit of some wicked and devastating form.
There are spirits of anger that control certain people often causing them to act in the most senseless manner, destroying relations. Some people are bound by spirits that crave for alcohol, locking them into crippling poverty, as they exhaust all their earnings in booze. There are spirits of sexual addictions that end up ruining lives and families. Spirits of infirmity are not just those that press us in wheelchairs. They do exist all over and we need to be discerning of them.
In this crippled woman's case there are two things that must catch our attention. First, this woman was bound for a good solid 18 years! This shows just how nakedly evil and brutal Satan can be once he gets hold of a target. When we are warned to get "stay away from all evil" (1 Thessalonians 5:22), it is for our good to keep far from the evil one, seeking to "steal, kill and destroy" (John 10:10).
Secondly, we notice this woman came to a conscious realisation that there was a spirit crippling her, and the answer to her tribulation was to take the matter to Jesus. Sometimes we can suffer needlessly with cancers binding us, and we imagine there is no escape, yet there is a way out by bringing whatever is pressing us down to Jesus. To come to that point one must concede there is a problem first. And then go to the Lord Jesus who is waiting to say, "Stand up, though art loosed!"
Prayer today: Lord Father God of Abraham, maker of heaven and earth, just as the crippled woman came to Jesus who touched her with his healing hand, today I come and surrender my life to you and anything that might be pressing me down, for your complete deliverance, this I pray in Jesus's name.