Do You Want to be Healed?

Jesus wants our wholeness—He came to heal the whole person. He came to bring total restoration of our souls and our bodies. Think of the healing of the paralyzed man in Matthew 9: 

“Which is easier to say: ‘Your sins are forgiven’ or to say ‘Get up and walk?’” 

For Jesus, the answer is both. He offers us healing of our spiritual infirmities and our physical illnesses. He does not want us to suffer.

And yet we do; we experience suffering rather consistently. I’ve been sober from my sexual compulsions and addictions for close to 5 years now and am still healing from residual side effects not even related to sexual tendencies. There are still wounds and deep places of hurt I am going to the Lord with and,  let me tell you, it hurts. It hurts to go to those places. 

To find out I still experience unnecessary deep shame for liking a boy. 

To find out I put up walls to block out my sexuality in certain areas of my life. 

To find out I’m not perfectly healed and don’t have it all together. 

And sometimes I forget that’s the point: My ugly thought patterns and wounds are the point. My “sickness” is the point. Jesus said it Himself: “Healthy people don’t need a doctor, sick people do,” (Mark 2:17). The fact I’m sick means I need a doctor. Not just any doctor: the Divine Physician. The Divine Physician who has a deep longing and love for me and is so desperately aching to heal me. He wants to love me so deeply that His love actually heals me. Jesus wants to heal me.

And here is where we find ourselves today: John 5, the Healing at the Pool of Bethesda.

Jesus went up to Jerusalem for one of the Jewish festivals. Now there is in Jerusalem near the Sheep Gate a pool, which in Aramaic is called Bethesda and which is surrounded by five covered colonnades. Here a great number of disabled people used to lie—the blind, the lame, the paralyzed. One who was there had been an invalid for thirty-eight years. When Jesus saw him lying there and learned that he had been in this condition for a long time, he asked him, “Do you want to get well?” 

—John 5:1-6

What a scene. A pool surrounded by hundreds of sick people. The heart of the Divine Physician must have been ripping out of His chest to see the aches of His children. And yet His sights were on one man. The man who had been sick for thirty-eight years. 

Maybe some of you have experienced a bad cold for a number of weeks. Maybe a broken a bone with treatment lasting a number of years.  But for 38 years—half of a lifetime—this man was unable to walk. And what does Jesus do? He asks him a question:

“Do you want to get well?”

This would be like walking up to a mother of three beautiful children who has been diagnosed with stage-four cancer and saying, “do you want your cancer to go away?” It almost seems insensitive; like it’s trying to poke at this man’s deepest wound. 

Immediately the man responds with defensiveness and excuses: “Sir, I have no one to help me into the pool when the water is stirred. When I am trying to get in, someone else goes down ahead of me.” (John 5:7).

Every time I read this passage I can feel the deep heartache of this man. Can’t you feel it too? Let me rephrase it for you, maybe it will sound familiar.

“Jesus, I’ve tried so many times before and it hasn’t gotten better.”

“Everyone else has already gotten past this! Why am I still dealing with it?”

“If only I had *insert this program, this relationship, this medication, this dollar amount, this ideal circumstance*, then everything would be better.”

It’s in this place, this ache, that Jesus heals. “’Pick up your mat and walk.’ At once the man was cured; he picked up his mat and walked,” (John 5:8-9). 

Dear friends, I mean it when I ask, what is causing your ache? Because today He is asking us the same question: “Do you want to be healed?”

I don’t know about you, but I am prone to respond just like the man: with my own lists of excuses, defenses, and frustration. Like Jesus, hello??! Can’t you see I’ve been trying!?!

Trying to work toward my own healing without the Divine Physician is like going to the doctor with a broken leg, and before the doctor can explain the surgery that wound heal it, telling him “I’ve still been trying to run on it everyday and it hasn’t been helping—in fact it’s gotten worse.”

When Jesus asks us if we want to be healed, there are no loopholes in His questioning; No hidden motives; No strings attached; No hidden fee. He just wants to know how we feel. 

What is it you desire? What is it you want?

I challenge you today to go to prayer and allow yourself to be sick before the Lord. Allow yourself to ache. 

Allow yourself to hurt. 

Allow yourself to be fed up, frustrated, tired, confused, depressed, anxious, and broken. Because it’s in these places He asks us, “do you want to be healed?” And it’s in this ache He heals.