“Do you want to be healed?” (John 5:6).
Jesus didn’t ask the man beside the pool of Bethesda, “Do you need to be healed?” But “Do you want to be healed?” There was no preliminary introduction or social niceties or even casual conversation, just a Stranger asking a question that would seem to have had a very obvious answer. Surely, without question, anyone who was a paralytic would want to be able to walk.
But Jesus knew that it’s easy for physical weakness and mental depression and a lifetime of hopelessness to rob a man of his willingness to do anything about it. It would be less demanding in many ways for the man to be carried about by others. His paralysis absolved him from taking responsibility in life.
Jesus knows one of the greatest barriers to our faith is often our unwillingness to be made whole—our unwillingness to live without excuse for our spiritual smallness and immaturity. And so the question He asked was very relevant then and still is today: “Do you want to be healed?” {eoa}
Anne Graham Lotz, the second child of Billy and Ruth Graham, is an acclaimed Bible teacher and the founder of AnGeL Ministries. She also is the author of books, including The Glorious Dawn of God’s Story and The Vision of His Glory, both from Word Publishing.
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