Wednesday, June 6, 2018
Inside the
city, near the Sheep Gate, was the pool of Bethesda, with five covered porches.
Crowds of sick people—blind, lame, or
paralyzed—lay on the porches. One of the
men lying there had been sick for thirty-eight years. When Jesus saw him and knew he had been ill
for a long time, he asked him, “Would you like to get well?” “I can’t, sir,” the sick man said, “for I
have no one to put me into the pool when the water bubbles up. Someone else always gets there ahead of me.” Jesus told him, “Stand up, pick up your mat,
and walk!” Instantly, the man was
healed! He rolled up his sleeping mat
and began walking! But this miracle
happened on the Sabbath, so the Jewish leaders objected. They said to the man
who was cured, “You can’t work on the Sabbath! The law doesn’t allow you to
carry that sleeping mat!” But he
replied, “The man who healed me told me, ‘Pick up your mat and walk.’” “Who said such a thing as that?” they
demanded. The man didn’t know, for Jesus
had disappeared into the crowd. But
afterward Jesus found him in the Temple and told him, “Now you are well; so
stop sinning, or something even worse may happen to you.” Then the man went and told the Jewish leaders
that it was Jesus who had healed him. So
the Jewish leaders began harassing Jesus for breaking the Sabbath rules. But Jesus replied, “My Father is always
working, and so am I.” So the Jewish
leaders tried all the harder to find a way to kill him. For he not only broke the Sabbath, he called
God his Father, thereby making himself equal with God.
John 5:2-17(NLT)
John wrote to help us understand that
Jesus is the Lord God. The way he does
that in this incident is to re-tell the conflict Jesus had with the Jewish
religious leaders over rituals and traditions.
Jesus healed a man on the Sabbath; the traditionalists in the group didn’t
like the change. We have to admit, most of
us don’t like changes.
Mark Twain once said: The only person who likes change is a wet
baby.[2]
In fact most Americans won’t change
even if the results are good. According
to a survey sometime back, the percentage of Americans who:
· would change a bad habit if they
could: 45
· would change their wealth: 64
· would change their weight: 51
Change is not the devil. In fact God is into change – new! Consider all these scripture verses which
mention God’s view of “new”…
‘My glory is ever new with me,
Sing to Him a new
song;
Yet those who wait for the LORD will gain new strength;
Now I declare new
things;
And you will be called by a new name
“Moreover, I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you;
And in the same way He took the cup after they had eaten,
saying, “This cup which is poured out for you is the new covenant in My blood.
“A new
commandment I give to you, that you love one another, even as I have loved you,
that you also love one another.
Therefore if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creature; the old
things passed away; behold, new
things have come.
and put on the new
self, which in the likeness of God has been created in righteousness and
holiness of the truth.
Then I saw a new
heaven and a new
earth; for the first heaven and the first earth passed away, and there is no
longer any sea.
And He who sits on the throne said, “Behold, I am making all things
new.”
Now,
by contrast, see what God has said about never changing:
For the waywardness of the naive will kill them, and the complacency of fools will
destroy them. Proverbs 1:32(NASB)
For You Today
God says that the complacent attitude
that says, Let everything stay the way it is, don’t change anything, is
out of step with God, and it destroys you.
Go to VIDEO
[1] Title Image: Courtesy of Pixabay.com
[3] James
Patterson and Peter Kim in The Day America
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