"Wilt Thou Be Made Whole?" Why the answer matters
Wilt thou be made whole? Do you want to be healed?
I believe this is the most important question Jesus asks humanity.
Let’s reel it in a bit.
It’s the most important question He is asking you. And me.
Do you want to be healed?
It’s the most important question because the answer determines the course of our earthly life as preparation for our eternal one. Healing and salvation are synonymous, or have lots of overlap at least. Healing from, and moving past, the traumas, distorted thinking, bad habits, and addictions that keep us in a state of sickness and dysfunction is the practical application of working out of our salvation with fear and trembling. We don’t do it to be saved, but it’s what accepting salvation looks like in practical terms.
Healing and salvation are a lifestyle, not isolated one-time events, in the practical sense. Yes, when you accept Jesus as your Savior, you are justified through faith. That is instantaneous, but living them out on a daily basis is the process by which sanctification plays out in our lives, and they encompass every area of our lives.
It can look as basic as:
Cutting up credit cards vs. taking out new ones
Eating an apple vs. a candy bar
Saving or wise investment vs. frivolous spending
Saying I’m sorry vs. doubling down
Going for a walk or to the gym vs. binging Netflix
Choosing singleness vs. dysfunctional or superficial relationships
You see where this is going. You don’t even have to be particularly religious to see which choices breed freedom and health and which ones breed sickness and bondage. A lifestyle of healing and salvation is about living with intention and purpose. It’s about choosing to be proactive rather than reactive. It’s about choosing light over darkness, truth over falsehood, day in and day out in every area of our lives.
“…fear the Lord and shun evil. This will bring health to your body and nourishment to your bones.” Proverbs 3:7b-8.
Fear the Lord is the spiritual principle. Shunning evil is the practical application of the spiritual principle. Combined, they breed health and vitality, spiritually and physically. We cannot separate the spiritual from the practical and expect to have a complete faith experience.
Yet that’s exactly what we’ve done. We have compartmentalized our lives so much and treat them all differently, as if they were unrelated and unaffected by one another. There’s physical me, work me, financial me, relational me, and of course the most important: spiritual me. Spiritual me is the one that’s going to get me to heaven, so it’s the only one that matters.
It doesn’t matter that my relationships are dysfunctional, my finances a hot mess, have horrific health and lifestyle habits, or in any kind of vicious cycle of dysfunction or addiction. All of that will all be fixed when Jesus comes back, right? Jesus will fix me in the blink of an eye, right? Worse still, not only have we come to accept chronic dysfunction and sickness as normal, we even call it “God’s will,” or believe that it somehow makes us holier to live in constant struggle.
We’ve relegated the spiritual to our heads only without allowing it to flow out into our hands and feet. We forget that the spiritual means absolutely nothing if it’s isolated in a vacuum. We’ve over spiritualized the spiritual that we forget that the very purpose of the spiritual is that we bear fruit outwardly.
Do you want to be healed?
Do you actually want to get healthy? Do you really want to move on from point A to point B? Do you really want to improve your finances? Do you really want to heal from trauma to move past it rather than wallowing in it? Do you really want to make fundamentally better choices? Do you really want healthy relationships? Do you want to get out of vicious cycles or addictions? Do you actually want these things more than you want the familiarity and ease of going through life on crutches? Perhaps the crutches offer some kind of “benefit” like attention, pity, or validation. Perhaps the crutches provide an excuse for bad behavior.
Do you even care? I don’t think it’s too much of stretch to say that’s another way of asking, “do you want to be healed?” Do you even care? If the answer is yes, you can and will be healed. It’s a process of humility and surrender. It requires a lot of letting go.
None of this is to say that the process is easy (spoiler: it’s HARD), that life becomes perfect, or that problems and pain magically go away. They don’t. Life is really hard. You cannot unring the bell of many past mistakes no matter how sincere your repentance or your consistent efforts to do things differently. There is no magic pill for pain. Ask me how I know. Full redemption, full healing, permanent joy and forever peace will happen only in heaven.
It’s also true that in this sin sick world we will have tribulation, as Jesus said. We will have pain, loss, sorrow and disappointment. We may have chronic or unexpected physical conditions beyond our control. No human being is immune from any of it, no matter how proactive they are. There are never any guarantees, and no one has life all figured out 100%. I am writing this from trenches of my own painful battles. But…
the tribulation shouldn’t be coming from our own stubbornness, pride, or refusal to change.
Please read that again. We should not be the cause or perpetrator of our own sickness and dysfunction. We need to adjust our attitudes, priorities, and behaviors within the context of our present knowledge and abilities as to do the best that we can with what we have. If or when we can do more or better, we do so. I can’t reiterate strongly enough that the overarching message here isn’t about the conditions themselves, but rather that our chronic conditions should not come from our own refusal to learn and change.
But when you say, “Yes, I want to be healed” and you humbly surrender to the process, you are embracing the salvation that Jesus died on the cross to give you, despite any circumstance or factor beyond your control. You embrace the abundant life He promises in spite of whatever struggles you may face going forward. Embracing a lifestyle of healing and salvation honors and glorifies God because it accurately reflects His character, it showcases the real world benefits of embracing Biblical principles and powerfully testifies of His power to fundamentally transform lives.
“Even so, let your light shine before men; that they may see your good works, and. glorify your Father who is in heaven.” Matthew 15:15.
And the opposite is also true. To consciously and willfully cling to sickness and dysfunction as a way of life out of pride, laziness, or willful ignorance, is to reject the very salvation Jesus died to give you. And it paints a distorted picture of Him to others. It tells others that there is no power in your “religion” or that the Bible doesn’t “work.”
Long before I could fully piece together the tug on my heart for something better, what I did fully understand is that I wanted something better. Though I could not articulate it, I began to intuitively (aka: the Holy Spirit) “get” that at some point an outward confession of faith and it’s associated practices meant little if chronic dysfunction or sickness was a way of life.
What I can clearly see and articulate now is exactly what I’ve been saying in this post:
Saying yes to Jesus’ question, “Do you want to be healed?” is where the rubber meets the road between who we are and who Jesus calls us to be.
It’s where faith and works intertwine. It’s where the spiritual stuff in our head flows out onto our hands and feet. When you accept the free gift of salvation, your healing journey begins. And as you heal, you experience and appreciate His salvation more and more fully. That’s the only kind of cycle I want to be caught in. Forever.
“Heal me, Lord, and I will be healed; save me and I will be saved...” Jeremiah 17:14.
The healing and salvation Jesus offers are thorough and permanent. They begin in this earthly life, and culminate in eternity. But we have to want it.
So again He asks…
Do you want to be healed?
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