JOHN 5:6
Jesus
saw him lying there, and he knew that the man had been sick for such a
long time; so he asked him, “Do you want to get well?”
He can’t
walk, the pool isn’t easily accessible, and there are no motorized lifts. Then
Jesus comes along and asks this man who’d been incapacitated for 38years, ‘Do
you want to be made well?’ What a question! Now, Jesus didn’t ask it because He
didn’t know the answer; He did it to correct the man’s (and our) thinking along
the right lines. He could just as easily asked:
be free indeed
‘Are you ready to assume
responsibility for your life? Do you really want that promotion, or is it
easier to just gripe about money? Are you ready for marriage, for somebody
who’ll share your life and make you reconsider your self-centered ways?’
Answers to our prayers come with a price. For example, the family of an addict
sometimes spend years praying for change, then when it happens they experience
their own crises. Because their lives have centered around drama and
dysfunction, they’ve never learned how to live any other way. At that point
they have a choice to make: to keep blaming their problems on somebody else, or
to accept that they have their own issues to work on. ‘Do you want to be made
well?’ learn the lesson
Like it or not, asking God for solutions
often means new challenges. A child might solve his need for pocket money by
delivering newspapers, but when he grows up, hopefully he’ll be solving bigger
ones, like how to provide for his family. But the good news is, solving bigger
problems bring bigger rewards. So ask God to stretch you today by helping you
‘take up your bed and walk’ (John 5:8), burn your bridges of dependency and
‘learned helplessness,’ and move on to greater things. In other words, ‘choose
to live!’put off your pride
More Reading: Nehemiah 1-4, John 19:30-42
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