Could you be forgotten?

“One who was there had been an invalid for thirty-eight years. 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 5.5-6

This is a well-known (and slightly strange!) story from John’s Gospel, in which a man who has been waiting for healing for quite a time is found by Jesus. He is lying in a certain place where it was believed that when an angel came to stir up the waters, the first person to get in afterwards would be healed. Without commenting on what people thought about this tradition, Jesus brought healing to the man.

We are going to take a few days to look at this passage and find the hope that it offers us, because what is striking is how few issues counted as a barrier for this man’s healing.

Perhaps the first thing that did not seem to matter to Jesus is that the man had been an invalid for thirty-eight years. Many of us would have given up any hope of being healed by this time – but not him. He still went to the place of healing in the hope that he might be healed, even though he had been constantly frustrated on every occasion until now.

You may feel that you have been in a particular pit for a long time, but this is no barrier for God. You may wonder why he has not come to your help any earlier, and there is no satisfactory answer to this, but the one certainty is that you have never been forgotten or passed over. This man still believed that healing could happen to him, despite his long-term suffering. We cannot guarantee what will happen to us, but it is certainly never the case that God has forgotten us.

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