Healing the Paralytic: BELIEVE – Part 4
Springcreek Church | Senior Pastor Keith Stewart
Sunday, October 17, 2021
This weekend, Pastor Keith explores the third sign in the gospel of John – the healing of the paralytic. This miracle is unique in a couple of ways. First and foremost, the recipient is restored to full mobility but is, in every other way, unchanged by the miracle. And secondly, the reaction of those who witness the physically transformed man marks the beginning of the full-scale rejection of Jesus Christ. Sometimes even miracles don’t produce faith. Sometimes our patterns are so ingrained that we slip back into old self-defeating behaviors. Which reminds us all, more important than supernatural deliverance is personally knowing the Deliverer Himself.
SERIES: BELIEVE
There is always more to miracles than what meets the eye. They weren’t intended to make us Oooh and Aaah. They’re intended to remind us of Who Jesus is. This is especially true when it comes to the Gospel of John. When John tells the story of Jesus, he intentionally selects 7 miracles – what he calls “signs” – because of the message behind these supernatural events. John wants us to see Jesus as we never have before so that we might BELIEVE and by believing, we might have LIFE in His name.
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS:
1. The miracle of the healing of the paralytic has broad application to our own lives especially as it relates to how we deal with long-term problem attitudes and behaviors. When Jesus asked the man if he wanted to get well, Pastor Keith underscored how important that question actually was because what the man was doing was practically guaranteed to never work (He was too severely mobility impaired to get into the water at the time when a healing might occur because more able-bodied people always got in first). Have you ever done the same thing over and over again expecting a different result? On the job? With a co-worker? In your marriage? With your children? Describe what that was like. What finally made you realize what you were doing would never work? What did you do differently to address the problem? What advice would you have for others who are stuck in the same way of thinking?
2. People prefer predictable misery over the uncertainty of happiness. Where have you seen this principle played out in the Bible? In others? In yourself? There is always fear when you’re in unfamiliar circumstances so we often default to what we are most familiar with and what we’ve already learned to cope with. We see this in emotionally or physically abusive relationships. But we also see this pattern when it comes to friendship, dating, and marriage where our default tends to be people who are unhealthy or don’t have our best interests at heart. What advice would you have for someone stuck in such repetitive circumstances?
3. Legalism – being more concerned about our rules than the people impacted by our rules – strangles the spiritual life. There’s no question, a major part of what prompted opposition to Christ was the various things he chose to do on the Sabbath day (healing, plucking grain to eat as he passed through a field, or like in this miracle, telling the man to pick up his bed and walk). What Jesus did was not a violation of the Sabbath but it was a violation of all the rules they had added to the Sabbath. Have you ever been in a legalistic church or known legalistic Christians? What rules did they emphasize? Did you ever notice glaring inconsistencies in their life?
4. As Pastor Keith spent some time drawing parallels between this story and that of the Exodus of God’s people especially as it related to their time in the wilderness. John’s gospel is rich with Old Testament analogies and this story is another example of how John weaves the two narratives tog
