Stop Seeing People As Their Problems

How often do you look at someone struggling and only see their problem, not the person?

In just a few minutes, Dallas walks through Mark 5 and the woman with the issue of blood, a woman who was seen as her sickness for 12 years, until Jesus called her something different: daughter. That one word is the whole message. Your identity in Christ comes before your healing, not after.

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Blog Version

How often do you look at somebody who’s struggling and instead of seeing who they are, you see their issues?

It’s an uncomfortable question. But it’s worth sitting with for a minute.

In Mark chapter 5, we come across a woman who has been dealing with a bleeding issue for twelve years. Twelve years. And in that time, she hasn’t just suffered physically, she’s been completely cut off from the people around her. We’re talking about real, social, religious isolation. The book of Leviticus, specifically chapter 15, lays it out plainly: a woman bleeding like this was considered unclean. Everything she touched became unclean. Anyone who touched her became unclean. She wasn’t just sick. To the community around her, she had become her sickness.

She wasn’t the woman with a name and a story. She was the woman with the issue of blood.

So when she hears that Jesus is passing through, she pushes into the crowd to find him. And here’s the thing, that took guts. If anyone in that crowd recognized her, there would have been an immediate problem. People would have been furious. But she pushes forward anyway, reaches out, and grabs the hem of his garment.

And Jesus stops.

He tells his disciples that he felt something leave him, that power had gone out from him. His disciples are looking around going, Jesus, there are a thousand people here, everyone is touching you. But Jesus knows this was different. Someone had reached out to him specifically. And when he turns and sees her, here’s what he says in verse 34:

“Daughter, your faith has made you well. Go in peace and be healed of your disease.”

That first word. Daughter.

He didn’t call her the woman with the issue of blood. He didn’t address her condition at all. He saw her, her identity, who God made her to be, and he spoke to that first. The healing flowed out of the identity, not the other way around.

That’s a big deal.

In life, we run into people who have become their struggles. Some of it is their own doing, sure. But sometimes, like this woman, life just happens to them, and it starts to define them. They become “the alcoholic.” They become “the addict.” They become the person who can’t get it together. And the longer that goes on, the more they start to live inside that identity themselves. It separates them. It isolates them. And what they need more than anything is for someone to see past the issue and see the person.

That’s what Jesus modeled here.

When we grab hold of our true identity in Christ, not our sin, not our past, not the thing we can’t shake, something begins to shift. That’s what Jesus was doing when he spoke the word daughter before anything else. He established who she was first. And from that foundation, he spoke peace and healing over her life.

I’m not saying it’s a simple fix. I’m not saying everything falls into place automatically. But there is something that changes when a person can stand in the truth of who they are in Christ rather than in the weight of what they’ve been through or what they’ve done.

Maybe you’re reading this, and you feel like you’ve lost your identity somewhere along the way. Maybe the struggle has gone on so long that it’s started to feel like who you are.

Jesus sees you as a son. He sees you as a daughter. Not your sin, not your addiction, not your past.

Walk in that. Find the peace that comes from that foundation. And then watch what begins to shift.