4.―Feeling

Oh, say you, I should like to feel saved. You will never feel, until you have touched. Then you will feel, ―feel liberty, feel joy, feel peace with God. It is first faith, then feeling. Put feelings in their right place, and they are all right. They must come after the faith that trusts Christ, never before. If you have simple faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, feeling will come after. The Holy Ghost gives beautiful experiences; not that your feelings, or your experiences, are in any way the ground on which you rest.
The moment the woman touched, that moment a change took place. “She felt that she was healed.” Mark, it was “immediately,” there was no delay in the blessing when faith touched the Saviour, nor is there ever.
But the Lord always knows when faith touches Him. So we read, “And Jesus, immediately knowing in himself that virtue had gone out of him, turned him about in the press, and said, Who touched my clothes?” He does not do this out of curiosity, but He wants to give her an opportunity of confessing Him, and also the divine assurance that she was healed, and could never again relapse into that state in which she was before. “Somebody hath touched me: for I perceive that virtue is gone out of me,” He says, for He feels the touch of faith. Does He look down from heaven today, and see you touching Him, my dear reader? If so, the Lord does not like you to be in anything but the full enjoyment of His love, and what His salvation is; and wishes to assure you, that you can never get back into the state in which you were before you touched Him.
This query of Christ at length brings the woman out of the crowd; in fact, detaches her from the unbelievers around. “And when the woman saw that she was not hid, she came trembling, and, falling down before him, she declared unto him before all the people for what cause she had touched him, and how she was healed immediately.” There is always trembling at first. The soul trembles, not knowing fully Christ’s grace, and lest also it should lose what it has got. But, though trembling, she declares everything to Him before all. Here then we get.