When Jesus encountered the man, his question was surprisingly frank: "Do you want to get well?" (John 5: 1-10).
Well, do we? Do we really want to get well? Do we want to live lives that are full of wholeness and health? Do we want to live as long as our bodies will let us? Do we want to have relationships that not only spend our lives, but also enrich them? Do we want to reach our full potential as people? Do we want to have a faith that both challenges us, as well as, strengthens and fulfills us? Do we really want to be saved? Do we want to be whole---a whole person?
You would think so. But amazingly, if we are honest, there are many times that we carry on our lives in ways that not as healthy as they should or could be. We all do things we shouldn't. We pick up habits we can't break. We relate to others in ways that hurt them and us. We can get caught in varying kinds of addictive behavior that is both harmful and destructive to ourselves and to those we claim to love. We might even choose religious behavior that brain washes us into social or spiritual complacency and human ignorance. We might ironically settle down to live at the very edge of the stirring waters that might help us, restore us, or make us stronger and better people, but we fail to make the simplest effort to admit our weaknesses and ask for the help we desperately need.
Several years ago, an alcoholic came to a church where I was serving, seeking to find help with his drinking problem. After hearing about his desire to change, I agreed to pray and work with him as much as I could. I visited him regularly after his AA sessions, even going with him on occasions. After a while, however, and after seeing that he had stopped coming to church and had dropped out of AA, I went to his home for a visit. Upon arrival, I entered his house to find what I feared most---that he had returned to the bottle. What I did then as a caring pastor, is to go over to the refrigerator, pull out all of his booze and then I proceeded to pour them out into the sink.
The poor fellow never forgave me for tying to help him. I later realized I wasn't helping him, because he was the one who needed to take the action of getting rid of his drink, not me. But he couldn't break the spell upon himself. Even though he was seeking and crying out for help, he did not want the help I gave---or at least, he couldn't yet receive it. It was one of my first pastoral lessons on the difficulty of helping hurting people, especially people who were addicted and struggling within themselves. It is the kind of struggle any of us could have at certain periods of our lives for all kinds of other reasons in many other ways. For whatever reason, we come to the edge of the healing water, but we do not make the final effort to get well.
In my upcoming series of messages, I'm going to talk about some of the most important healing habits and virtues of the Christian faith which can help, over time, with much prayer, patience and practice, to help break to the most powerful dysfunctions in our lives---especially the emotional, spiritual and relational dysfunctions we all often succumb to. These healing virtues are Christan virtues, but not exclusively so. You might might find them to be part of a good counseling practice, part of an AA meeting, or you might also encounter many of them them in other major religious traditions or spiritual values.
What is distinctively Christian in these virtues, however, is how they are fully realized in the life and teachings of Jesus who preached a message of wholeness as the very salvation that God has uniquely made available to the world through by grace through faith. Jesus himself was not just a preacher nor only a teacher, but he was also was a healer---a faith healer and miracle worker. Some have even observed, in light of the recently new development of modern psychology, Jesus to be one of the most gifted counselors of all time. His methods of wisdom in knowing what to confront or when to give comfort are unsurpassed. Through his healing approach, Jesus not only helps us find the way to heaven, but he helps to enable freedom for living our lives more abundantly here and now.
If you go into popular book stores today, some of the greatest selling books are in the category of self-help and spirituality. While there is certainly a lot of misleading and even false information out there, the increasing sale of these kinds of books point to a growing hunger or desire to find higher levels of emotional health to improve the meaning and value of our lives.
Giving such excessive attention to personal growth is unique to our culture and our spiritual poverty. Never has so much human energy been given to solve the threat to self experienced in today's world. One wonders the reason. Is the need for self-help due to our neglect of the self or is the need for help due to our obsession with ourselves? Good for the publishers, but bad for us is that the more that is written about how to help ourselves, the less content or settled people seem to become. Could it be that the focus on self is well-intentioned, but wrongly aimed? Could it be that the key to healing is not so much in the continued discovery or journey into self, but it is the very denial of self that is most needed.
This way of self-denial which Jesus advised, is not self-negating, but a refocusing which leds us own a radical spiritual journey toward life-lifting, divinely given virtues which can help us rise above ourselves in ways that we go beyond our personal pursuits and move toward the deepest levels of health and healing found by living a fuller, more consistent life with God?
In the messages of the next several weeks we are going to look certain of these virtues, both biblical and christian, but also moral and classic, which have proven to be life challenging and life changing to many people who admit their own demons and struggles and face them with courage and hope. Most of them are probably basic to you, well-known and even regularly practiced by many of us in certain moments of our lives. But they are sometimes forgotten or overlooked in the heat of living or in the stress of our failure to measure up to our own best intentions and expectations.
I hope you will bring your Bible, your family or a friend as we explore these healing virtues together. I hope you will say to yourself, for the sake of your own health and healing, "I do want to get better, be a whole person, but I need someone to help me!" It is just that kind of readiness and willinginess that can help you hear the words of our Lord spoken directly to you: "Stand up. Take up your mat, and walk!"
Hope to see you at church,
Pastor Joey
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