The Road To Salvation

911 Call - “Yeah, my wife was attacked by a wart hog and she’s hurt pretty bad.”

“Sir, can you tell us where you live?”

“1275 Eucalyptus Drive.”

“Sir, can you spell that for me?”

Long pause. “Yeah, maybe I’ll just drag her over to Oak Street and you can pick her up there.”

Some things just seem too hard to do. Like spelling the name of the street where you live. Dragging your wife over a block may be easier. If only spelling was our biggest problem. Among the biggest challenges we face in life, spelling probably falls farther down the list. Breaking the power of sin in our lives and seeing real change in our selves probably comes toward the top of the list.

The first step in real healing is to believe that it is possible. And frankly, some people are deficient in the believing department. Some people have a bent toward skepticism. Sometimes this skepticism serves them well- they gather information; they weigh the evidence; they are not easily fooled. But the skeptic says, “I would rather stand on the sidelines and look like an intelligent observer than risk trusting. I will forgo all that might come with that trust.”

And sometimes this skepticism puts them at a distinct disadvantage. The story is told of three men who lived in the time of the French Revolution, during the “Reign of Terror.” People were being executed right and left. Three men were waiting to be executed. The first one was a priest. As he was brought to the guillotine, he was asked, “Do you have any last words?” He answered, “I believe God is going to save me.” He put his head into place, the blade came down, and it stopped two inches from his neck. The executioners said, “This is a miracle, “ and they let him go.

The next man came up. He, too, was a priest. The executioners asked him, “Do you have any last words?” “I believe God is going to save me, “ he said. They put him in the block, the blade came down, and it stopped two inches from his neck. They said, “This is a miracle, “ and they let him go.

The third man came up. He was a skeptic and an atheist. He did not want to be associated with believers. The executioners asked him, “Do you have any last words?” Looking at the guillotine, he said, “Well, I think I see your problem. There’s something jammed in the gear mechanisms.”

Skeptics would rather, even at their own expense, appear to be right than take the risk of trusting.


The first step on the road to healing and salvation is a step of trust. Our gospel story in John 5 tells about a special pool in Jerusalem called Bethesda. This pool was fairly large, certainly big enough to swim in. There’s a little discrepancy about the exact name in the ancient manuscripts. Some refer to Bethzatha or Bethsaida, which literally means “house of fish.” I like Bethesda – house of mercy – better. It seems to fit. Around the pool of Bethesda are gathering many people who suffer – the lame, the blind, the paralyzed. These people gathered at the pool because at times, the water in the pool would bubble up and swirl. The rumor was that an angel would come and do this. And when that happened the first one into the waters would be healed. This crowd of people waited by the water all day, day after day, waiting for the chance to be healed.


Now, when you think about this, a skeptic would say, well the water is stirred by an underground spring, or by some water authority engineer in Jerusalem, etc. It is certainly not “stirred by an angel.”

Curiously, the skeptic may be right. I say that because this rumor does not really have a biblical ring to it. God heals lots of people in the Bible. But not this way. We don’t hear about angels being agents of healing. When God heals, we know “God healed.” This urban legend does not fit into the Christian way of understanding things. But there is little doubt that the people of Jerusalem believed this urban legend.

Among their number was a man who had been lame for thirty-eight years. Jesus came to the pool one day and he saw the man lying there on his pallet. Jesus approaches the man and asks, “Do you want to be made well?” This may seem to be an odd question, even an insensitive one, like saying, “Hey, you’re in a wheel chair!”

Why wouldn’t the man want to be made well? There are reasons. As debilitating as his condition is for the man, it’s still his life. He’s grown used to it over all the years. He understands it. He knows what tomorrow will bring. He knows how to get by. If he were to be healed, really healed, all this would change. Life would be scary. Who knows what tomorrow might bring? What would he do for a living? What would people expect of him? Now, he knows who he is – he a is a disabled man. But without the disability, who would he be?

William Barclay says that the first requisite for receiving the power of Jesus is to intensely desire it.

So Jesus asks, “Do you want my healing power?” The man begins to explain about the pool and the water and how he can never get in first because no one will help him. . .but Jesus never comments on the pool or the story about the angel. He seems uninterested in that – doesn’t even glance over at the water. He looks intently at the man. The water is calm but the man is agitated, and maybe others around him that overhear the conversation as well. Jesus stirs things up here. He does this to bring this man to a point of crisis.

We think of crisis as always trouble to be avoided. But crisis is also opportunity. Anyone who would break the power of sin in their life must come to this point of crisis and trust that God will put them on the road to healing and salvation.

Newsweek tells the story of Ellin Klor who was saved by a freak accident in which a knitting needle pierced her heart. Klor was on her way to her knitting group one evening, her arms full of books and yarn and needles. She was going up the steps of her friend’s house in Palo Alto, Calif. When she trip on the step and fell down face first on the sack of unfinished knitting. She wasn’t surprised that she had fallen. She always was a bit of klutz. But when she stood up her chest hurt. She looked down at her sweater and lifted it up. She saw a jagged splinter of a wooden knitting needle nearly four inches long jutting from her chest. It had clearly broken in half, piercing her clothing and lodging in the middle of her breastbone. “Oh my God,” she whispered. Her friends urgently tried to weigh the options. Should they pull it out? Klor said no don’t touch it. It was pure instinct. Doctors would later say that this was the first decision that helped saver her life. Plucking the spike would have been like pulling a plug or uncorking a bottle and she might have bled to death in the living room.

Klor instructed her friends to call 911 rather than trying to rush her to the hospital themselves. This would turn out to be another good decision.

The ER team found that the needle had penetrated her sternum and grazed her heart. They had never seen anything like it. It was unprecedented. They needed to operate as soon as possible. They performed the operation and removed the needle. But by chance, or by design, the knitting needle would save her life all over again.

Klor had been home a week, just twelve days after the surgery, when she woke up on a Saturday morning with excruciating pain in her chest and back. They rushed her to the hospital and ran chest scans. The doctors came back puzzled. Everything looked good – her lungs were clear and her heart was healing fine. They explained it away as some kind of fleeting discomfort from surgery, gave her more painkillers, and sent her home.

The next day Klor received a phone call from a radiologist at Stanford who had detected a mass under her armpit during one of the tests done at the ER. Klor had breast cancer. She underwent treatment for a year, supported by family and friends. She is doing well.

The knitting needle through her heart had actually saved her life her doctors said. If she hadn’t gone to the ER and been screened by all those machines, the tumor probably would not have been detected until it had grown and spread. Klor believes she is one of the luckiest people in the world. I didn’t die from the knitting needle, she remembers thinking, so I’m not going to die from cancer.

Crisis can be a good thing. It can be a lucky thing. Or, even a God-given thing – an opportunity.

My father begin to take steps on the road to healing after we had done an intervention with him and a counselor. An intervention is simply a group effort at bringing someone to a crisis point. It’s holding up a mirror to show the reality of the sickness, and then it’s asking the question, “Do you want to be well?”

Crisis is not fun. But it is often necessary. Sometimes we have to be shown that to keep on going the way we are going simply leads to more decay and death. Scott Peck calls alcoholism the “sacred disease” because of how the crisis of alcoholism can shed light on the inner spiritual lostness in a person. Remember the ache within? Is it not the longing of a broken heart that can only be restored by God?

Jesus instructed the lame man to take up his bedding and walk. He didn’t need the bedding anymore. No longer did it carry him through the day; he carried it. The cure, in this case, was immediate. This man had been waiting thirty-eight years for an angel, or a chance, or luck to change his situation. But Jesus ended that with a question and an invitation. We often talk about the answers Jesus gives us. What question is Jesus asking you today?