Where is my Hope?

Jesus 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...." (John 5:6-7)

As I have been dwelling on this passage for some time now I too have been hearing Jesus say each day, “Do you wish to get well?” As I looked at this again today I heard Him saying something else in the way these verses are laid out above.

I have learned a great deal about what is sometimes called 'inner healing ministries' over the past few years. Most of what I have learned has been very helpful and my own journey had been greatly enhanced and advanced by new understandings of what is really going on inside my heart and mind. I have learned how much my past affects my present reactions to situations and how hidden lies play a pivotal role in skewing my perceptions of reality and relationships. These false ideas are almost always linked to events much earlier in my life and are often buried under years of subsequent experiences and repetitions of being triggered by similar circumstances that confuse me about what is going on.

But as many of these false assumptions and beliefs have been exposed through various trials designed to flush them into the open or times of focused ministry, and as I have been willing to accept responsibility for my own 'stuff' instead of blaming others, God has shown me that these times of feeling triggered can actually become vital opportunities to discover these inner land mines and allow His Spirit to deliver me from them by bringing truth to those deep and painful places in my soul.

But here is one of the most important aspects of being able to participate in that healing process that God is wanting to accomplish in my life. I have to give Him permission each time to access those places of deep pain, fear, shame etc. or else He cannot finish what He so wants to do effectively in my life to grow me up into greater maturity. If I cling to the idea that my problems are someone else's fault, then I am not taking enough responsibility for my own actions, feelings and choices to allow God to do what He longs to do to deliver me from these enslaving problems that control so much of my life.

This is where I see some of what Jesus was dealing with in this man's life. When Jesus saw that this man had been stuck in the trap of dealing with a sick body and mind for so long, He did not just come up and heal him without discussion. He was restrained by the rules of engagement that are in place in the supernatural realm which dictates that there are certain things that simply cannot be done without the permission of the human involved. God is fiercely protective of our right to choose who will be the supernatural power that is in charge of us and He respects that choice even when we make it against Him. But He longs to free us from the enslavement of Satan when our previous choices have put us into various chains that imprison us in one way or another so that we can have another chance to live the kind of life He wants for us.

Notice that at first this man was still in the mode of blaming others for his problems. He seemed to miss the main point of Jesus' question to him. And this is where many of us can get stuck if we are not careful. Blaming others is one of the most subtle but dangerous attitudes that can hinder so many of us from receiving the healing we desperately need. As long as we choose to believe that our problem is our spouse, our children, our neighbors, our enemies or our government, we can often block our own deliverance from the control of sin in our lives and hearts.

Blaming in effect hands someone else the key to our prison and then continues to accuse them of being the one keeping us in there.

If they didn't do that – act that way – say those things etc. then I wouldn't have all these problems.

If people would just be nice to me I wouldn't get so angry.

If others were more fair then I could be more honest.

If others would give me the good things that I deserve then I wouldn't have such problems.

If the government would just give me the money and services that are due to me then I wouldn't be so helpless.

On and on our excuses go but all of them circle around the same center of logic; the focal point of all our problems is somewhere else besides in my own heart.

As long as I make my healing and deliverance contingent on someone else's actions, choices or attitudes I am deferring my own recovery to depend on their choices instead of mine. But Jesus did not buy into that false logic even though this man was caught up in that way of thinking at first. He brushed right past that counterfeit way of seeing life and offered this man a direct invitation to take full responsibility for his own condition and choose to directly act in faith in the presence of the only One who could really save him.

But there is one more thing I am seeing here as well. This man was fixing his hopes on an assumed source of deliverance based on folklore and hearsay rather than on the one and only Source of life and healing and hope. He had based all of his dreams and hopes on trying to get to a pool of water that was popularly believed to actually bring healing to people even though the evidence of such power was anecdotal at best. So when Jesus brought up the subject of the potential of this man being healed, the man immediately reverted to thinking about what he assumed was the only way he might receive it – jumping into the pool before anyone else.

How many times have I latched onto some program, some person who has been rumored to have a powerful healing affect on those who have been there before. I am not saying that others have not really experienced healing through those avenues – God may well have used that to bring healing to many others or He may not have, that is not the issue for me. What I am saying is that if I put more hope in some agent that may have been used by God to heal and deliver others above trusting God to work in my life in possibly a very different way, then I have shifted my faith from trusting God's heart to work directly for me to putting faith in a lesser instrument that well may have some serious hidden faults I know nothing about.

Does that mean that people with secret faults cannot help others come to real healing? I wouldn't limit God so much as that. All of us have faults and many have secret sins that are unknown to most everyone else and yet still God works through their ministries in mighty ways in spite of what is going on behind the scenes. I believe it is dangerous to judge people and try to point out who is being used by God and who is not. It is true that if God reveals something important to us about a person's character that we might do well to be cautious about getting too involved with them. But at the same time we are too easily allured into judging others involved in healing ministries and then feel a bit smug in pointing fingers of blame and censure while at the same time overlooking serious faults of our own.

This can be a very confusing area of life for many of us. I have heard so many people judging others in ministry while promoting their own ways of doing things as if to create competition or discount the integrity of others. But those accusations or insinuations themselves can become a source of doubt for me at times as to the complete integrity of the person leveling those charges. There is a very fine line between analyzing the fruit of someone's spirit and judging others. Jesus made it very clear that it is very dangerous to judge for it exposes us to judgment which is not usually something we want to invite upon ourselves.

But the main point I see here is that whether or not someone else's ministry is legitimate or not or whether some particular method is from God or is a self-promotion of some person seeking control and influence over others is maybe not the main thing God wants us to focus on. I have seen God use all sorts of various people and situations that seemed clearly to be far less than holy or sanctified or devoted to the glory of God exclusively. God is not limited to working only through those who are perfect or totally submitted to His control in their hearts, and we should be extremely restrained in how we jump to judgment about the ministries of others. “Judge not that you be not judged.”

What we do need to pay attention to is that fact that Jesus may be showing up in a very different way than how we expect at times and it can be dangerous to spend our time fixated on some other method of deliverance than what Jesus is offering us right now in the present. He may appear as a very humble-looking, ordinary person with no compelling features to identify Him as our Savior and friend, but His Spirit will always draw us away from our excuses and compel us to face our own issues internally. If we miss this opportunity because we stay too focused on why we have not received help in the past we might just miss the greatest opportunity we have ever been given.

I want to get my mind more open to accepting the fact that God very well might come to me in a most unexpected way to accomplish my healing and deliverance. I don't want to create such limitations in my mind, such tight parameters believing that God cannot possibly work outside of them so that I refuse to recognize an offer of healing because it doesn't fit my expectations. If this sick man had insisted on getting Jesus to help him into the pool the next time the waters moved instead of acting in faith on the invitation of Jesus to immediate healing, who knows how sadly this story may have ended.

Obviously at some point here this man chose to turn away from his excuses and embraced Jesus' invitation for a whole new way of thinking and acting. He threw away his former reasoning and hopes and took a bold step in a direction he had never considered before. He broke out of his little box and allowed God to bring into his heart a new potential for believing and living that he had never known before. He chose to trust in the heart of the plain-looking man in front of him and take full responsibility for his own life and trusted in the words that spoke directly to his heart.

Do I want to be well? Do I want to walk and jump and dance and celebrate and be free of my past, my inhibitions, my fears, my pain, my timidity? Yes I do.

But it is not enough to just wish to be well. This man had wished to be well for a very long time, but he had to move beyond wishing and respond immediately in faith – faith in the heart of the One who was the only real source of hope and life for him. Then his faith motivated him to act on that faith by obeying the instructions of the One who was offering him the seemingly impossible. But as a result the impossible became not just reality but the source of immense joy in his life.