"Wouldst thou be made whole?"

John 5:1-6

   "After this there was a feast of the Jews; and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. Now there is at Jerusalem by the sheep market a pool, which is called in the Hebrew tongue Bethesda, having five porches. In these lay a great multitude of impotent folk, of blind, halt, withered, waiting for the moving of the water. For an angel went down at a certain season into the pool, and troubled the water: whosoever then first after the troubling of the water stepped in was made whole of whatsoever disease he had. And a certain man was there, which had an infirmity thirty and eight years. When Jesus saw him lie, and knew that he had been now a long time in that case, he saith unto him, Wilt thou be made whole?"

  Is it just me or does that also seem to you like an odd question for an all-knowing GOD to ask? Why would the LORD ask a man who had been crippled for thirty eight years, who was at the pool where healing takes place, who was obviously waiting for the stirring of its' waters, if he wanted to be healed? It seems pretty obvious doesn't it? Or does it? What if one of the keys to healing, whether physical, spiritual or emotional is much more tied up in our willingness to obey God's WORD, then we think? What if you have been emotionally crippled most of your life by unforgiveness, bitterness and resentment, and then one day you discover that your LORD said; "Forgive and you will be forgiven."? Do you think you would instantly see the connection between obeying the words of scripture and healing? And, what if, when you did see the connection, the lights came on and you understood that you did indeed need to unconditionally forgive everyone you have been holding hostage, AND that the key to your healing was tied to your willingness to forgive, would you do it? Would you do it regardless of how unfair it felt to let go, if you felt you were letting people get off scott-free who had genuinely hurt you? It is at this point that the question Jesus asks suddenly becomes as clear as Waterford Crystal, doesn't it? I can't help at this point but think of a scripture in Romans 10. "But what saith it? The word is nigh thee, in thy mouth and in thy heart; that is, the word of faith, which we preach:" Romans 10:8 ASV   How often we plead with the LORD to heal us of this thing or that. We have a sense of being unwell, crippled, even paralyzed when it comes to certain things. We want to love as God commands us, but we feel incapable. We want to let go of something from the past, but hands clenched with anger or greed make letting go impossible. Can we hear the probing question of our LORD, the One Who knows all, all about us, asking "So, do you really, really want to be healed?"

   What is GOD saying that you are refusing to hear? What have the scriptures said that you are unwilling to comply with? It is impossible to think that you and I, for years, could have been laying by the pool, waiting for the miraculous to happen, when all the time God's words of healing are as near us as our confession of what He has said, and our compliance with it? Again, we hear the voice of the One Who loves us, even in our crippled conditions asking: "Wouldst thou be made whole?" How often we want to blame our painful, chronic dis-eases, and decades of continued brokenness, on the Devil or something or person we know, when the truth might very well be that it is our unwillingness to say "No!" to sin and self, but "Yes" to God and the scriptures, that is keeping us from the inner healing that comes from simple obedience. So, "Wouldst thou be made whole?" It is very possible that, "The word is nigh thee, in thy mouth and in thy heart; that is, the word of faith, which we preach."

    

  



That I May Not Sin Against Thee.

There is a tendency to only think of sin as some predetermined evil, murder, robbery, lying, and the like. A cultural wrong was been committed and discovered, and the wrong is called sin. From a biblical perspective to sin means to fall short. An archer takes aim at a target, releases the arrow, but it falls short of what he was shooting at. He missed the target, his arrow fell short of what he was shorting for. The archer sinned. Every society has to establish moral and ethic targets to shoot for, and though no society can ever hit them perfectly that should not stop them from establishing targets, shooting at them, and holding people accountable who deliberately ignore the targets. But there may be something that is profoundly worse than those within a society that choose to ignore its moral and ethical targets, and that is those who set up targets and then for their own satisfaction, manipulate the unsuspecting person, of any age, who looks to them for help. At least those who choose to ignore the targets are easy to identify. But what does a society do when it wakes up one morning to the frightening awareness that someone stole the targets its' culture was founded on and has been replaceing them with targets, that even if hit dead-center are insufficient to sustain it going forward. This may be exactly where America is today. We have been replacing targets for so long that we know no longer know what a right target looks like, let alone the right height and distance to set them at. The targets we aim at today seem to be those that are much lower to ground and no more than 3 feet away. Like the basketball backboard in my backyard attached to a mechanism which allows it be to drop it from the official height to one  that pratically anyone one can dunk in, the moral and ethical targets in the America of today have been lowered dramatically from those in prior generations. The targets we take aim at today are shocking lower than what our father's fathers knew. Someday we will have to come to terms with this reality that sin is intrinscially evil because whether by commission or omission it always is against people, and we sin because we have fallen short of the hit targets God has set, and one of them is to love our neighbor as ourselves.       

Blessed Is The One Who Falls Through (Part 2)

   The more and more threadbare the moral fabric of the nation, the less that fabric is able to cover up. Is it just me or does it seem that there is an awful lot of indecent exposure in the nation these days? There appears to be less and less care about national modesty and humility. Instead it seems we have opted to strip down in full view of our gawking neighbors to expose those parts that a modest nation would prefer not to reveal. In a nation where it has become voguish to toss out a spouse in order to pickup a partner, it is not that far a stretch to find that foreign relations, designed to deal with matters of state, have been supplanted by torrid, overseas affairs, driven by lust for personal power. That said, there could be something more behind all that is being exposed, than just the exposure itself. What if the shame, the exposure, the national humbling and embarassment we are experiencing, could actually be for our own good?  

   Perhaps there is a Soverign Providence behind what has now become an unending parade of indecent motives, corrupt associations and immoral behaviors, things that for years have been hidden. Could it be that what we have been thinking was a national moral fabric is instead a blanket thrown over the beds we have been sleeping on so as to cloak what is really happening between the covers? It is entirely impossible to imagine that a holy, sovereign God, who has set a date to return to the world He allowed us to be stewards of, would prefer to let own national nakedness be exposed now, hoping that public shame would turn us around, rather than to find us shamelessly flaunting ourselves before a watching world. But, have we passed the point of being shameable as a nation? Have our hemlines been creeping up and our neckline down for so long that the skimpy strip that now barely covers the nation's backside is actually fashionable? Pride and shame are much nearer cousins than this generation may think, and a healthy amount of each is indispensable for any people who gather together under the banners and flag whose words and colors actually stand for something. Something once gained, once cherished, but now treated more like the nation's trash than its national treasure.             

Blessed Is The One Who Falls Through

Over the last two days, as I have listened to the stories and allegations surrounding Republican presidential candidate Cain, and now one of the football coaches at Penn State, I have but one thought. The more and more threadbare the moral fabric of our nation becomes the less and less it will be able to hold. There seems to be a increasing amount of people and situations that are ripping through and falling out the bottom. That's my thought. Now, here is my question. When you do fall through what are you going to land on? More to come...

(TODAY)

   Today is a day of God's absolute grace, a time when a perfectly matched pair of facing parentheses offers a door into the kingdom of heaven, which His love holds open wide. By a single, comprehensive, incomparable and incomprehensible decision of divine compassion, the door once slammed shut by the demands of peerless justice, stands open still, and the space between the parentheses is taken up by  the beautiful word "today". "Today if you hear His voice, do not harden your hearts as in the rebellion." God gives us today because sin tempts us to trifle with His grace, daring us to test the limits of divine love that even now holds back the fierceness of His justice. Like a mighty seawall that limits the destructive powers of an epic storm, the grace of God holds back His justice, restraining it from breaching the divine space determined and set in the eons of eternity past, when the sacred secret of salvation was whispered by the Father into the ear of the pre- incarnated Son.
   For now sin continues in its rebellion, rebellion as of the sin of witchcraft, that convinces its informed and uninformed practitioners that the powers they summon-up are strong enough to stand against the fury of God's pent up justice, justice that impatiently waits like ten thousand steeds, bred, anxious and fully dressed for battle. But sin deceives itself and its hosts because it has no power against the wrath of Almighty God. In fact it borrows its time and steals its freedom in this world within the invisible parentheses of grace, from the sacred space itself, where the love of God holds out His grace and holds back His justice until the last soul that can enter through the door of salvation, has.
   The day is fast approaching when the door into the kingdom heaven will be shut and taken up into the heavenlies. At a moment unknown to all but God, the anxious, pounding and restrained storm of His wrath against sin will burst through the gates of heaven and spill down upon an unrepentant world. A world that rejected a thousand today's, and placed all its hopes on tomorrow. For them there can be no more today's, and the tomorrow's they bet on, they will be an endless stream of regret and eternal from God.
   “Today” is a day of salvation, for "today" is that beautiful word whose letters take-up the space between the divine parentheses provided by the love of God, wherein no space is wasted. Do not think that it is sin with its power that holds back the love of God. It is the love of God that holds sin in check and His own justice back. "Today if you hear His voice, do not harden your hearts as in the rebellion” Today is a day of grace. Today God's justice is still restrained by His love for you. Leave your sin, all of it, and enter into the kingdom of heaven.

Love, Faith and Hope...

   Love must hang all its hopes on GOD, by laying a hold on His promises, otherwise love will stop loving. Only the promises of God offer us the sure hope that every act of love will be eternally rewarded. We dare to love and to keep loving because He who is love and can not lie, has promised to reward us. Some of our best attempts to love will either fall short of what we had hoped to give or what someone else had hoped to receive, that is the nature of things in this world where fallen & flawed people interact with each other. If you set your hopes on my reponse to your acts of love, you will be disappointed. If I pin my hopes in this life on the fact that you will receive with tears of joy and gratitude my every attempt to love you, and that none of my motives will ever be misunderstood or questioned, I will be quickly and terribly discouraged. In short, if our motivations and decisions to love and keep loving are based on the reactions and responses of the objects of our love, that love will be as short lived as our disappointment will be prolonged. I will fail you, and you will fail me, but God will eventually and eternally fulfill every promise He has ever spoken.

   If we are to love as God calls us to, if the church is to be that light that illuminates the greatness, glory and faithfulness of God, then we simply have to set our hopes on something that has never fallen and is unflawed, perfect in all its ways; and that something is the very Person of God. 

   But, how do we do that? How, in every day ways, do we go about setting our hope and placing our faith in God, Whom we have never seen? It is done by taking ahold of His promises in scripture and acting on them. Our faith in Him as a perfect Father, enables us to have faith in every word He has ever spoken. Simply put, we believe God's every word because we believe in the perfect, flawless character of God. So, if we are ever to love, and keep loving the way God commands, and as Jesus demonstrated and taught with his loving, sacrificial life and death, we will have to do it on the basis of being confident (faith is really confidence) that one day He will eternally reward us for our steadfast obedience and continued faith in Him. 

   In this world, loving acts will forever be misunderstand, questioned and rejected. We do not need to look any further than the life and death of Christ to realize this. But loving acts done by faith on the solid foundation of God's promises will never fail to eventually provide the reward that God's Word hold out to us. This is why the Bible speaks of God's promises as being "exceedingly great and precious...". Go ahead and love, and keep loving. Will you be hurt? Yes! Misunderstand? Constantly! Rejected? Occasionally! But look beyond them, and look unto God instead, for He Himself is your exceeding, great reward.      

Love Must Be Tested

   True love without authentic faith is impossible, and without biblical faith, biblical love is impossible to sustain. Absent the power of faith, love is left to depend on its' own strength, and self-sustaining love will collapse every time when the world, the flesh and the devil lay a siege upon it. This, I think, it was happen to Peter in those pre-dawn hours, when he was standing among strangers in the temple courtyards, the night Jesus was arrested.
   Up to that point Peter's love for Jesus was a moral and religious one that had always worked for him in the past. But Jesus knew that the kind of love Peter would need was radically different than what he had. If we are going to be used by God we are going to have to surrender that love that has always worked for us, for that love that works for God. And love that works for God, that is approved by God, is love that must be established on absolute confidence in God. During the dark and confusing early morning hours when Jesus was arrested, Peter would be shown the truth about his own love claims, something each of us must go through if we truly want to know and follow Christ. Peter's love failed because his faith failed, and who of us hasn't been there?
   In those moments when I deny my associate with Jesus it is usually because I am not confident that if I am seen standing on biblical claims, God will support me. And it is in those moments that we discover about us what God already knows...that our love is much more about us than it is about God. Sooner or later all claims to love will be tested, because they must be tested. Everything that claims a strength has to be tested before it can be put to use. No reputable contractor is going to work with steel to erect a multi-story building unless he is confident that the steel has the strength to support the structural requirements of the design. God does not test our love so he can discover what it is made from, he does so in order that we can know. God wants us to know about ourselves what he already does and always has.
   If our love is faulty and we manage to get into a place of service that requires more strength of love than we currently have, what will happen? The failure of love has the potential to bring down more than just our own faith. The faith that some have in God can be terribly damaged or even destroyed by the collapse of the faith of a single person's that they have been looking up to. The LORD knew about Peter what Peter didn't know about himself...he wasn't ready yet to step into that place God had prepared for him, and often neither are we.
   I remember when one of my daughter's was learning to drive. After several weeks of practice she starting talking about scheduling her road test, and since I had been through this with four other kids, I knew where this was headed. Every parent knows there is a fine line between encouragement and discouragement, and in many situations, the truth is not what our children are ready to hear. I knew about my daughter's driving skills what she did not. She honestly thought she would ace the test, I knew, at least I hoped, she wouldn't. She was not ready, but was not willing to hear that from me, it would take a qualified "professional" to "explain" it. As I had secretly hoped and feared, the qualified professional did indeed "explain" it to her differently than I had. I thought he would because I knew she wasn't ready, and I feared he would because I knew she would cried all the way home. I had tried to save her from the embarrassment and disappointment of the moment, from having to return texts to friends excitedly asking if she passed, but she was not ready - she had to be tested, she had to fail. She simply wasn't ready for the open road, an often and predictably dangerous and hostile environment.
   Sooner or later all claims to love will be tested because they have to be. Everything that claims a strength has to be tested before it can be put to use. To put love into a place that puts more weight on it than it can bear, does not demonstrate love on the part of the One in charge of the project, especially when the project involves the hearts and eternal souls of people. It is much better to fail a test, knowing that it can be rescheduled, than to be killed or to kill another or to seriously injure ourselves or others in a collision that experience could have trained us avoid.
   The LORD loved Peter, so he allowed him to fail, but after Peter's failure Jesus gently and wonderfully restored and strengthened him just as He had promised He would. In the end Peter grew to love Christ more and his love was founded in a confidence that his LORD knew from the beginning what was best for him. After the dark and dismal misery of a complete failure of love, came the dawn of the truth that lite up the rest of Peter's life. He who has called us is faithful.