John 5:5-6–One man was there who had been an invalid for thirty-eight years. 6 When Jesus saw him lying there and knew that he had already been there a long time, he said to him, “Do you want to be healed?”

Have you ever been challenged in a way that made you re-think your life?  Has a situation or person revealed to you that instead of living in a way that challenges complacency in your life, you have settled for it?

Like this paralyzed man we can assume that he has settled, because he has spent 38 years making the same effort, keeping the same expectations, that have gotten him nowhere.  Jesus implies this, knowing how long he has been sitting beside “a healing pool” waiting for someone to help him into it for 38 years!  Jesus then ask a question that many Christians like to assume about people living spiritually sick and lame, void of any faith, “Do you want to be healed?”

The longer I walk with Jesus there is a component that we sometimes ignore when we think of change as sinful people, and that is whether we have become comfortable with our dysfunction.  Being crippled and living only around people like him was all this man knew, so Jesus wanted to know if he really wanted to change!

What this man is dealing with physically we are dealing with spiritually, being crippled.  The challenge from Jesus is whether we have become comfortable and settled in our “crippled state”, or do we want to respond to Christ by faith daily that we walk in the newness of life?