Do You Want to Be Well?

Do You Want to Be Well?

“Many of our churches are sick and dying because they are pretending to be the church. Worse, many of us are invested in our dysfunction. We do not really want to be well; we just want to feel better. We want the problem to go away, but we do not want to pay the price. Our identity has been formed around our pathologies.”

 – Jim Van Yperen, Making Peace

Everyone one of has issues and dysfunction in our lives, and some of it has been around for decades. Why do we never end up completing the extraordinarily difficult process of confronting and moving beyond our dysfunction. Part of it is obvious, because it is difficult! But in many cases, like so many areas of our lives, we have grown comfortable in our dysfunction. We have made some (often half-hearted) efforts to change our plight, but when they failed, the results reassured us that it was of no use and so we accept and even adopt our condition as part of our identity that we will no longer change.

In John 5, Jesus approached a man who had been paralyzed for decades:

“When Jesus saw him lying there, and knew that he already had been in that condition a long time, He said to him, “Do you want to be made well?’”

The man began to make all kinds of reasons why he was not well, when Jesus simply commands him to “Rise, take up your bed and walk.” Jesus later sees the man in the temple and gives him some instruction “See, you have been made well. Sin no more, lest a worse thing come upon you” (John 5:14).

Jesus is the one who has the power to relieve us from difficulties and more importantly sin. He wants us to get off of our infirmity beds and walk, and we’ll only do that when we obey His words!