3/25/07 Troubled Waters Pt. 3

JOH 5:2-3, 5-9 Now there is in Jerusalem by the sheep gate a pool, which is called in Hebrew Bethesda, having five porticoes. In these lay a multitude of those who were sick, blind, lame, and withered; And a certain man was there, who had been thirty-eight years in his sickness. When Jesus saw him lying there, and knew that he had already been a long time in that condition, He said to him, "Do you wish to get well?" The sick man answered Him, "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." Jesus said to him, "Arise, take up your pallet, and walk." And immediately the man became well, and took up his pallet and began to walk. Now it was the Sabbath on that day.

For the past two weeks now

we have been moving into the 5^th chapter of the Gospel of John.

We spent one whole week

gaining some attitudes toward the passage

that will help us as we move through it,

and then last week we started looking

at Jesus’ encounter with a man He met

at the pool of Bethesda in Jerusalem,

a man who had been sick for 38 years,

a man who, prior to Jesus’ entrance into his life,

had no hope apart from what was perhaps nothing more than a superstition

about an illusive healing angel.

We spent most of last week

talking about why Jesus may have selected this man

for the work that He did in his life.

But we ran out of time before we could look at that question

that Jesus used to open His conversation with the man.

JOH 5:6 When Jesus saw him lying there, and knew that he had already been a long time in that condition, He said to him, "Do you wish to get well?"

“Do you wish to get well?”

Does that sound like a strange question to you?

Does it seem as if the answer

would be so obvious as to be absurd?

Well, I use think so,

but I don’t any more

because I’ve come to realize that health brings with it responsibilities,

and obligations,

and duties that being sick allows us to avoid altogether.

For 38 years this man’s sickness

had freed him from most of the duties of life.

He never had to go to work, ever.

He never had to deal with an unreasonable employer,

he never had to maintain a home

or face the endless daily duties that come with it.

He never ever had to become

a responsible member of society.

He was sick,

and because he was sick

he was automatically exempt from most of the things that irritate us in life.

Do you want to get well?

I really became aware of the significance of that question

when I saw it in a little different context.

During the past 40 years

I’ve worked with many, many people,

and often with kids in their teens.

And there have been numerous times

when I have asked a young person whose life is clearly not working well at all,

“Do you want to change?”

And the ones who are the most honest

don’t answer right away

because they know that change is always a risky thing

and it brings with it some loss.

I’ve seen young people

whose lives at every reasonable level

are disasters.

Their schooling is in shambles,

their relationship with their parents is a mess,

they’ve become hooked on significant physical and emotional addictions,

they’re facing major potentially devastating authority conflicts,

they have effectively written for themselves highly destructive life scripts,

and yet when I ask them if they want to change,

they’ll make it clear the answer is “no”

because to change would be to loose

what they believe to be their freedom and their control over their own life.

For the relatively few who have had the courage to take me up on my offer,

what I offer them first of all is a personal introduction to Jesus Christ -

His willingness to take over their life

and begin healing them, changing them from the inside out.

That’s where all true healing begins - with new management at the deepest possible level.

And then, if they are willing and my relationship with them makes it workable,

I sometimes offer them something else as well,

my personal oversight and involvement in their lives,

my willingness to guide them through the changing process

at whatever level they’ll allow me to do so.

But it’s never without cost,

and it never happens without significant trust and courage on their part

because they have to choose to put themselves under my authority at some level

and such choices are never easy.

In fact, in my experience, they rarely happen.

Do you want to get well?

Do you want to change?

Well... yes...sort of...in some ways, a little.

But more often than not what we really want, I think,

is simply to find some way

to avoid the negative consequences of our sickness,

or of all our wrong choices.

What we want is for the pain to stop.

But when we find out

that we can’t avoid the consequences

without going through significant personal change,

it’s not always an easy question.

And I know I’m wandering just a little off track here,

but I have noticed there is something else that complicates the healing/changing process in our lives as well.

There is a...well, let’s call it a trust thing

that has been built into nearly all of God’s dealings with us.

By that I mean that

the positive results of right choices in our lives

almost never happen instantaneously.

Rather there is, by design,

a gap that nearly always exists

between the right choices and the positive results,

a gap in which the only foundation we have

is our trust in the integrity of our God.

This is, of course,

one of Satan’s key trump cards

in his efforts to bring us into bondage and keep us there.

He always promises us instant reward,

instant gratification,

instant happiness,

instant feelings of fulfillment.

In fact in our society today

we are so trained to think in these terms

that if infiltrates every aspect of our lives.

You think you need more money?

Who doesn’t?

And we open our mailbox and discover

that we are already pre-approved for a $10,000.00 credit limit.

And those nice people

have even enclosed some pre-printed “checks” with my name on it,

checks I can write to anyone for anything.

The real problem comes

when our instant fix philosophy

bumps up against some of the far more difficult issues in our lives.

Are you feeling a little down?

Is there pain, or confusion, or turmoil you can’t get rid of?

Well, that’s no problem.

You don’t have to face any real issues in your life,

you can have those really good feelings back right now.

All you have to do is swallow,

or inhale,

or inject.

Are you feeling lonely,

or isolated,

or alone?

Well, don’t worry about taking the time,

and the significant effort it takes

to build truly healthy, strong relationships.

You can have those love feelings you’ve been craving right now.

All you have to do is to give yourself totally to that passion relationship right now

and forget about the consequences down the line.

It’s all lies, of course,

all smoke and mirrors.

The people we borrow from always want the money back again,

only they want lots more than they gave us in the first place,

and we become their financial slaves for years, or for a lifetime.

And those drugs that made us feel so good always wear off,

and the next time it takes more and more and more.

And the passion-driven relationships always ultimately end,

turning to ashes in our hands,

hollow, and empty.

But the real thing,

the quality of life we long for,

the true rewards we seek in human experience

always require a time of sowing,

a time of investment without visible returns,

a time of doing what is right for no other reason than because our God has told us it is right,

and because we’ve chosen to trust what He says.

It works that way with money.

About 25 years ago

when Sandee and I built our house,

at the end of the process the bank handed us a mortgage,

and a mortgage payment every month.

And almost from the beginning

every month along with our payment

we would write an additional check -

at least a hundred, sometimes more,

and mark it “for principle only”.

Doing so meant that there simply wasn’t much extra money for toys,

or for so many of those impulse purchases I always wanted to make.

But we kept it up, month after month, after month,

for a whole decade.

And then all of the sudden

the day came when the house payment ended forever.

It works that way with relationships, too.

What is it you’re really looking for,

what does your spirit hunger for?

You want to be loved, don’t you?

You want your wife to look back on her decision to marry you

and remember it as the best choice she ever made.

You want your husband’s eye’s to light up

when he catches a glimpse of you in the distance.

You want your son, your daughter to thank God

that He chose you for their parent.

But such relationships never just happen,

and such rewards never ever come instantly.

They come as the result of thousands and thousands of daily choices,

choices that at the time seem to have no positive impact at all,

choices to communicate when we feel like being silent,

choices to trust, to believe, to forgive, to show grace and compassion

when what we feel is irritation,

choices to take the tiny allotment of time given to us each day

and invest it in those entrusted into our care,

day after day after day.

I was in a conversation with a young man a short while ago,

a young man who’d made some terrible choices early in his life

and who’d made great progress rebuilding his foundation in recent years.

And in the course of our conversation

he said something that fascinated me.

He said that sometimes he finds himself looking back at the things he’d been into and thinking,

“What if no one would have cared?

What if no one would have cared about me back then,

about what I was doing and where I was headed?

“What would have happened to my life?

Where would I have ended up?

I’d probably be dead, or in jail.”

And then he said something that, for his age, surprised me.

He said, “I can see it now in the kids around me.

I can look at the kids who are now where I was back then,

and I can see it in their eyes.

I can see that no one cares.”

And when he said that

I thought to myself, “What a tragic statement!”

Every one of those kids has a father somewhere, and a mother.

When did it all go so wrong?

When did making money,

or having fun,

or meeting my needs become more important than loving, and nurturing, and protecting, and guarding the young lives briefly entrusted into our care?

The problem goes way, way back, of course.

I know that.

Why else would Malachi have ended his prophecy the way he did?

Speaking of the work God would accomplish at the arrival of the Messiah he said,

MAL 4:6 "And he will restore the hearts of the fathers to their children, and the hearts of the children to their fathers, lest I come and smite the land with a curse."

And yet with every generation

again and again and again

it’s just so easy to get distracted by something or someone

and forgot what really matters.

And then when it’s too late

we discover that somewhere along the way

we lost forever the very thing we hunger for the most.

We’ve lost one another.

I’m not idealistic in this stuff, folks,

nor am I naive.

After nearly 60 years of real life relationships

I couldn’t be.

But neither do I believe that we are all destined

to simply live out the flawed patterns handed to us by past generations.

We’ve talked a great deal at times

about the fact that there are certainly many things in Scripture

that our minds simply can’t figure out,

things too high for us,

too deep.

I take great comfort in knowing

that Peter himself had trouble understanding

some of the things he read in Paul’s writings.

But at the same time,

there are other things given to us by our God

that are extremely easy to see,

and they are the things

that have the power change our lives forever

and the ability to give us true hope for a life so much better,

so much different than we could ever have had any other way.

You want some examples?

God loves us...God loves us...God loves us.

It is that truth upon which all the rest are built.

It is that truth

that gives us the courage

to listen to everything else He says.

And then there are His countless promises

that He truly will intervene in our lives,

and change both us and our futures if we let Him in.

He begins with our own desperate need for healing,

with the turmoil within our own spirits.

MAT 11:28-29 "Come to Me, all who are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest. Take My yoke upon you, and learn from Me, for I am gentle and humble in heart; and you shall find rest for your souls.

But it doesn’t stop there.

From there He offers us the promise

that He can live through us in a way

that changes the lives of others for good.

And our actions toward others

truly do make a difference,

a huge difference in their lives.

I’ll be honest -

when that young man said to me,

“What if no one would have cared about me,

what would have happened to my life?

Where would I have ended up?”,

it made me so very grateful

that I’d done what I could

to reach out to him.

It helped so much

knowing it had made a difference.

There are no greater risks we will ever take,

nor are there choices we will make that require greater courage

than those that cause us to reach out for restoration,

or for healing,

or just for caring in the relationships in our lives.

But they are risks that are so very worth taking.

Sometimes they will require us to say words

that we would never ever say apart from the intervention of Jesus Christ in our lives,

words through which we express the honesty and the courage

to take ownership of our own sins against others.

“I was so very wrong in what I did. Please forgive me.”

Sometimes they are risks

that motivate us to speak words

that allow another person to see inside us

and to draw strength from what they see.

“I love you so very much, and I am so grateful that God brought you into my life.”

Sometimes they are risks

that bring hope and healing

through the reaffirmation of our commitment to another person.

“I just want you to know that I’m not going away, ever.

I’m not going to leave you,

I’m not going to reject you,

I’m not going to abandon you.

Whatever you go through, we go through together.”

Sometimes they are risks

that motivate us to affirm our confidence in the life of Christ in another person.

“I know you.

I know the good stuff your Lord is doing in your life.

I have seen the life of Christ within you,

and I know you both can and will find His way through this.”

There is a kind of twisted Christianity,

a kind of so-called relationship with Christ

that allows us to say “No thank you” to our Lord

when He asks us,

“Do you wish to get well?”

I’ve seen lots of it in my years.

It’s a nasty imitation of the truth,

one that never requires a person to take ownership of their own sins,

never requires them to reach out in compassion,

never requires them to love, or to feel another person’s pain.

It’s a pasted-on Christian facade

in which we speak all the right words,

and clothe ourselves in the external trappings of the life of faith

while leaving our own inner sewage untouched.

In the end it leads us into a life

in which no real healing takes place,

either in our own life

or in the lives of those around us.

But that isn’t the real thing,

not even remotely,

and it certainly isn’t the life our Lord died to offer us.

For, with the real thing

there always comes a time

when our King asks us the same question He asked that man at the pool.

“Do you wish to get well?”

And if we answer “Yes!”,

then there will be consequences,

and there will be risks.

The consequences will involve our acceptance of a call

to a much higher way of life,

one built upon both moral integrity and compassion.

MIC 6:8 He has told you, O man, what is good; And what does the Lord require of you But to do justice, to love kindness, And to walk humbly with your God?

And it will require us at times to take risks

that we would never have taken apart from the life of our Lord within us.

But in the end

the quality of life He brings us in return

is all that we’d hoped for and so much more.

JOH 5:6 ..."Do you wish to get well?"