Do You Want To Get Well?

One Saturday morning I was at guitar lessons just like I have many Saturdays before. One thing that I really appreciate about my teacher is that to him music isn't just music. Yes it is really good to be able to play amazingly well, but it is also important to know about the lives of the people who wrote the music and what the song signifies. Music isn't just notes put together to make a song to listen to. Music is a way of communicating a thought, idea, or feeling. One thing I have noticed now that I have gotten older is that now my guitar teacher not only takes the time to talk about the non-musical part of music but, about about life and Christianity as well. 

Well this particular Saturday was no exception. My guitar teacher said something about a passage of Scripture that really made check myself and think deeply. My teacher was talking about the passage where Jesus goes to the pool and sees the invalid lying far away from the waters edge unable to get himself to the healing waters.

John 5:1-9

Some time later, 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?”

“Sir,” the invalid replied, “I have no one to help me into the pool when the water is stirred. While I am trying to get in, someone else goes down ahead of me.”

Then Jesus said to him, “Get up! Pick up your mat and walk.” At once the man was cured; he picked up his mat and walked.

It was amazing how Jesus told him to get up and the man did so even though the man had laid there lame for thirty-eight years. His bones where probably weak and his leg muscles where probably nonexistent, but instantly he walked. 

Now that is amazing, but what my guitar teacher picked out of the verses was that Jesus asked the man "Do you want to get well?". Do we want to get well? Do we want help? This man was willing to have a stranger pick him up and move him closer to the pool so that he could get in first and be healed, but Jesus gave him more He healed the man instantly and gave him the strength to walk. 

Do we want to get well? Or even before that question is do we know we are sick? Are we willing to let Jesus help us and heal us? He gives us more than just healing from our sins, He gives love, life, and so much more. We should ask the profoundly simple question, "Do you want to get well?" of ourselves because if we are not well do we really want to be? Are we tired of our sin?