Do you want to be well?

“Do you want to be well?”

On the surface, it’s an odd question for Jesus to be asking there in John 5 (v1-9). Here was a man who had been sitting at the well for 35 years. He was waiting for healing from the crippling disease. And he said so: “I’ve been here all this time, but every time the angel troubles the water, someone jumps ahead of me and steals the blessing, and so I go back to waiting.”

But that wasn’t the question Jesus asked. Rather, He asked if the man truly wanted to be well, or was the man content to rest on excuses. In your church, Jesus isn’t asking why you aren’t healthy. He wants to know if your ‘want to’ still wants what your words say you want. Jesus was offering a new thing. Not to help the man cut in line, to be first according to the old rules, but to be well in a new way.

Like the prophet Ezekiel. In chapter 37 of that prophet’s book to us, he tells of when the Lord took him to a desert filled with bones of people long dead, bones dried in the sun and wind. God asks the rhetorical question, “Can these bones live?” Ezekiel wisely answers, “Only you know, Lord.” So God told him to prophesy over the bones. To prophesy is to speak the words of God, to create an effect. The prophesy held the power of God in it, and the bones gathered themselves together, grew flesh and skin and became whole. But still there was no life in them. Again Ezekiel prophesied, and the Spirit breathed life into a mighty army.

Dean N Kelley ("Why Conservative Churches are Growing", NY: Harper & Row, 1972, page x) said that “having once succumbed to debility, a church is unlikely to recover, not because measures leading to recovery could not be prescribed and instituted … but because the persons who now occupy positions of leadership and 'followership' in the church will not find them congenial and will not want to institute them. They prefer a church which is not too strenuous or demanding – a church, in fact, which is dying.”

Alcoholics Anonymous says the first step is to admit there is a problem. Sociologist Gary Farley says that churches must reinvent themselves every generation, or they probably won't survive past the deaths of the founders. Many such once-thriving churches litter our denominational rolls with only a handful of members each, unwilling to move forward, resting in the past.

In the 6th chapter of Mark, Scripture says “Jesus could do no miracle there except that he laid his hands upon a few sick people and healed them.” Nothing? The all powerful son of the Lord Most High, who had just raised a 12-year-old girl from the dead (Mark 5:41-42), was limited? Verse 6 gives the answer: “He wondered at their unbelief.”
And again Jesus asks if you - each of us - are you going to just sit and complain and be miserable? Or are you willing to believe you can be and do different than you've done before? You must "admit, believe, confess" - be willing to be healed, like the withered arm in Luke 6:6-11, to stretch forth and be transformed by the renewing of our minds and hearts and spirits, for the glory of God.

Do you want to be well?

(copyright Mike Mitchell, 2005)