Two Years Of Going Forward

He has been to the front every time for two years.

Not out of habit, and not for show, because there is nobody left in that building to show anything to. He goes because he means it. He has meant it every single time, and that is exactly what makes the drive home what it is.

The drive home is always about twenty minutes.

He knows the whole route in the dark. There is a stretch after the roundabout where nothing much happens on either side of the road and no one is about, and it is on that stretch, at about the eleven minute mark, that the sentence arrives.

It has arrived perhaps sixty times now.

Nothing again.

And then, immediately behind it, before he has even had time to be sad about the first one, the second sentence. The one that is actually doing the damage.

What is wrong with me?

He has run the diagnostics. Of course he has. He has examined his motives and confessed everything he could think of and forgiven everybody he could name. He has read the books. He has stopped and started three different disciplines. He has, twice, gone up to somebody afterwards and asked directly what he might be doing wrong, and both times they were kind and neither of them had an answer.

Two years of walking to the front and eleven minutes of the same question.

So let me ask you.

How many times have you walked to the front and driven home unchanged?

Jesus did not ask him what he had done wrong

There is a man lying beside a pool in Jerusalem and John gives us one detail about him before anything happens, and the detail is a number.

Thirty-eight years.

Not thirty-eight years ill. Thirty-eight years there, at the place where the thing was supposed to happen, close enough to see it happen to other people, and never once first into the water.

Now watch what Jesus does, because it is the whole message and it is what He does not do that matters.

When Jesus saw him lying there and learned that he had been in this condition for a long time, He asked him, Do you want to get well?John 5:6

Read the question He actually asks, and then look for the one He does not ask. You have never been under investigation, and the Holy Spirit did not spend two years in that car with you in order to open one.

He does not ask what is wrong with him.

He does not audit thirty-eight years. He does not ask what sin is blocking it, or whether he has been coming with the right attitude, or why he thinks the others keep getting there first. There is no diagnostic anywhere in that conversation, and the man is not asked to produce one.

And then look at what the man says back, because it is the most human line in the chapter.

Sir, I have no one to help me into the pool when the water is stirred. While I am trying to get in, someone else goes down ahead of me.

That is not a theological answer. That is a man explaining his own long record of not receiving in the most practical terms he has, and there is not one word of blame in what Jesus says next.

Now hear where you are standing tonight.

You are not a man with a fault that nobody can find. Scripture puts Jesus in front of a thirty-eight year wait and He does not open an investigation, and the Spirit has never made a person's receiving depend on passing an inspection.

And I want to say the thing that I actually most want to say to you, and I am going to say it as somebody who carries a burden for people who go home from meetings.

The eleven minute sentence is not from God.

I cannot tell you why nothing has happened yet. I genuinely do not know, and anybody who tells you they do know is telling you something they made up. But I can tell you what that voice is doing, because it has a shape, and the shape gives it away: it takes an absence and turns it into an accusation, and it aims the accusation at the one person in the story who is already hurting.

That is not how God speaks to His children. Look at the pool. He had thirty-eight years of material to work with and He asked the man what he wanted.

The word says He asked do you want to get well, and the Spirit He poured out has never spoken to anybody in the voice that arrives after the roundabout.