Get Up and Walk

John 5:1-15

Afterward Jesus returned to Jerusalem for one of the Jewish holy days.  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?”

·         Why would Jesus ask this?  He is God, and knows the hearts and motives of all humanity.

·         Everything Jesus said and did had spiritual meaning and application, and relevance to us today.

“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.”

·         “I can’t” & “I have no one” – Real or perceived internal & external barriers to hope -- feeling helpless, powerless, alone, fearful of change and unknown

·         Proverbs 13:12 - Hope deferred makes the heart sick...

·         Going through the motions / comfort in the familiar

Jesus told him, “Stand up, pick up your mat, and walk!”

·         Jesus' call to "stand up" contained the same power as His call to Lazarus to "come forth"

·         It is a picture not only of physical healing, but of life-changing transformational resurrection power.

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.

·         To “get up and walk” means to leave the conditions one was initially found in… yet, there is often an underlying desire to sometimes return to that place of bondage.

·         Carl Sandburg once said: "There is an eagle in me that wants to soar, and there is a hippopotamus in me that wants to wallow in the mud."