Do You Want to Be Made Well?

There is a man in John 5 easy to read past.

Thirty-eight years. Lying by a pool people called a place of healing. Waiting for the water to stir. Waiting for someone else to put him in.

When Jesus asked if he wanted to be made well, the man did not say yes. He told his story.

“Sir, I have no man to put me into the pool when the water is stirred up; but while I am coming, another steps down before me.”

John 5:7 (NKJV)

That sentence will sit with a person, if they let it.

He had a story. He had a system. Wait for the stirring. Depend on somebody else. Stay on the mat. He even had a kind of faith. Just not in the One standing in front of him.

Jesus did not help him into the pool. He did not explain thirty-eight years. He did not start with the past.

John 5:6 (NKJV)

“When Jesus saw him lying there, and knew that he already had been in that condition a long time, He said to him, ‘Do you want to be made well?’”

A lot of us have a mat.

Not a pallet by water. The kind a heart gets used to lying on. In a marriage. In a house. In the quiet places no one else sees.

The story that goes with it is almost always the same.

I have to protect myself.

I have to be right.

If I do not get out in front of this, I will be the one who gets hurt.

Then a system grows up around the story. Speak first. Correct first. Make the other person the unsteady one, so no one ever has to be lowered into the water of being seen.

And a kind of waiting that looks like faith, but is not. Waiting for the other heart to change. Waiting for the next hard talk to finally settle it. Waiting for some stirring that will fix what we will not look at in ourselves.

That is a long time to lie beside water and call it hope.

He did not use any of that.

John 5:8 (NKJV)

“Jesus said to him, ‘Rise, take up your bed and walk.’”

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Rise. Come clean. Receive what He is offering.

Take up the mat. Do not live there anymore. Carry what He healed as a reminder, not as a home. The mat can become an altar. It does not get to stay a bed.

Walk. Not later. Not when the feelings catch up. Step into the new way while the old way is still in the room. Slow to speak. Quick to hear. Gentle where the mouth used to be sharp. Laying a life down the way Christ laid His down.

It is easy to hear that and nod, then drift back toward the pool. The old paralysis knows the way home.

Jesus found the man later in the temple.

John 5:14 (NKJV)

“Afterward Jesus found him in the temple, and said to him, ‘See, you have been made well. Sin no more, lest a worse thing come upon you.’”

That is not a stick in the hand of God. That is a Healer who knows the mat will try to crawl back under a person if they let it.

The worse thing is not thunder from heaven. It is going back. Back to self-protection. Back to twisting the story. Back to the long wilderness of a heart that will not get up.

The thirty-eight years ended when He spoke.

The pool is behind.

The mat is in the hands now, not under the life.

And the One who asked the question is still here.