3. (John 5:1-9) – Do You Want to be Healed?

John 5:6 – “When Jesus saw him lying there and knew that he had already been there a long time, he said to him, ‘Do you want to be healed?’”

Does it bother you that Jesus asked him this question? What sense does it make to ask a crippled man if he’d like not to be crippled? It doesn’t really seem to make much sense at all. Of course he wants to be healed……………or does he?

Think for a moment what is actually going to happen if he is healed. The life he has known for thirty-eight years will change completely. He’ll have no need to sit at this pool any more. He’ll have to find something else to do with his time. And what about the relationships with the people at the pool. He won’t be hanging out with them anymore. He will lose all of what he is familiar with, and he will no longer have the comfortable life he has known.

What if God had said to the Israelites before freeing them from slavery in Egypt, “Do you want to be free?” They would have said, “Of course we want to be free! What kind of a question is that?” But after the Exodus you see them over and over again practically begging to be taken back to Egypt. Once they journeyed into the unfamiliar faith-based life of dependence upon God, it was a new world that was uncomfortable to them. They didn’t know what would happen next. At least in Egypt they understood how everything worked, they might not have liked it necessarily, but they were familiar with it.

Leaving the familiar life, regardless of the ailments therein, is not easy on us. We don’t like being uncomfortable, and we especially don’t like feeling out of control. In the familiar, we have some control because we know what is going to happen. We’re used to the ‘cause and effect’ in that familiar world. Journeying into the unfamiliar world of faith and trust in God is a different story. We don’t understand all of the ‘cause and effect’ in the new world. And probably the biggest problem is that we try to function in the way we’re used to functioning, and that doesn’t work in the new world.

I refer to the movie the Matrix often because it is such a good illustration of how God frees us from our wrong understanding of reality. In many ways believers are just like Neo in the Matrix who is rescued from what he thought was the real world, coming to find it was all an illusion. Once he knew what was reality, he had to go back into his former world and try to operate in a new way. It was quite hard on him. He took great effort to learn how to operate under a new set of laws that went against the common ones with which he was familiar (i.e. gravity).

If this crippled man gets healed and starts to hate the new world because he is so unfamiliar with it, how crazy would it look if he went back to the pool to hang out with his old buddies—sitting at the pool everyday. It would almost make no difference that he would have been healed because who needs to be able to walk if you’re just going to spend your life laying back down in the old world.

Jesus asked an appropriate question, and I think it is appropriate for us today. Are you sure you want God to free you from your comfortable and familiar life and take you into the unknown new world? Do you really want a life that will require total dependence upon Him? Maybe you should think hard before you answer.