Road Blocks

Our Path

Last week - Jesus laid the pathway and gave us the means to travel it.

Today’s message introduces some of the impediments and how we can navigate around them as we walk our path.

Setting

The time of this passage is most likely the Feast of Weeks or Pentecost. One of the ascension feasts.

The location is a pool by the Sheep Gate. This pool is called the Pool of Bethesda. Meaning, “Place of Mercy” or “House of Mercy”

The demographic consisted of people who were sick, blind, lame and withered.

Definitions

Sick - Ill with a disease that makes you weak or incapacitates you.

Blind - Can’t see.

Lame - The lower limbs don’t function as intended.

Withered - shrunken hence an immobile part of the body.

Interpretation

Lots of people are in Jerusalem due to an ascension feast. The pool would be overcrowded.

People came to this place to get healed because there were no hospitals back then.

All of these illnesses were considered at this time as being a result of your or your parents sin.

The miraculous was rare in Israel at this time and hopelessness abounded.

Occasionally an angel was dispatched to this pool and a healing would occur, but it required a person getting themselves into the water.

A certain man was there and he exemplified the condition both physically and spiritually of the people of God at that time in salvation history.

This man has an illness.

He wasn’t lame as we have been taught. He had a sickness for 38 years. Remember a sickness made you weak or incapacitated! Not cripple!

So he could move…just not fast.

Spiritually he was apathetic and hopeless. He had the faith to get healed but not the hope to put it into fruition.

Jesus asks the man if he desired to get well. What he is asking in the Greek is, “Do you have the desire to have your whole being, (body, mind, soul, and spirit) to be in a permanent state of wholeness?”

Desire is the key here. it involves his mind will and emotions.

So the man’s answer is an excuse. He wants to be physically healed but remain in his same spiritual and psychological state.

Jesus sees the man is hopelessly stuck in a spiritual funk and instantly heals him.

After the healing Jesus commands the man to “Get up, pick up your bed and walk” The implication is the man is to go home.

Home at this point not only means his residence but his new state of spiritual wholeness.

Remember he was at the House of Mercy waiting to be healed now Jesus is telling him to go to his house. In other words, go to his life that he’s been appointed to live and live it whole. (Mind, body and Spirit). Get back on the Road!

Application

We have a multitude of events that occur in our lives that are caused by a multitude of sources......

These run us into the ditch on our path of life that has been preordained for us to travel.

Contrary events can and are intended to bring about apathy and hopelessness in our lives.

These are meant to keep us in the ditches of life.

Yet there are seasons in our lives when the Holy Spirit will say enough of this.....It’s time to get out of the ditch and get back on the path of life that you were created to walk!

yet we don’t have to wait for a special time.

We can get out of the ditch much quicker by activating our faith by our will to hope.

Finally when we are removed from the ditch we need like the ill man in John 5 to:

Get up on our Spiritual legs

Take our pallet (excuses) that we’ve been using to remain apathetic on

And walk our spiritual road map out that God has appointed us to travel.

Conclusion

So if you find yourself in the ditch on your pathway of life.........

Remember the man in John 5 who Jesus healed body, mind and Spirit.

Let this man who was stuck for 38 years be an inspiritation to you.

You don’t have to be stuck in the ditch.

Pray that God restores you

Keep your hope up.

See yourself on the road not in the ditch.