How Bad Do You Want It?

By Grant Gaines

The top five most common greetings Americans use when meeting strangers are as follows:

1. Hi/hello.
2. What’s up?
3. How’s it going?
4. Good to see you!
5. Good morning/afternoon/evening.

Jesus, on the other hand, used none of those despite the fact that He was about to meet a stranger for the first time in John 5 as He came across a man who had been paralyzed for 38 years. The story picks up by saying,

“[A disabled man] 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, NIV).

Do you want to get well? Are you serious Jesus? Surely You’re joking! This man has been paralyzed for 38 straight years and You want to ask him the rhetorical question, “Do you want to get well?”

While the question sounds like such an easy answer – “of COURSE I want to get well!” – I believe Jesus asks the same question to us. We all have our different areas of life that we are currently struggling in and want to improve. However, if we don’t take a hard stand against those sins, do we really want to get well or are we simply giving lip service to the notion of improvement?

For example, maybe you’re struggling looking at porn on your computer and yet you still allow yourself to have unrestricted access to the internet and are walking around with a smart phone in your pocket – do you really want to get well? If you really wanted to get well, you would have filters on your computer, leave it in a public place, and downgrade to a phone that doesn’t have internet. It sounds radical, but Jesus seems to indicate that a radical stance towards sin is the only logical approach when He said in the Sermon on the Mount, “If your right eye causes you to sin, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your entire body to be thrown into hell. And if your right hand causes you to stumble, cut it off and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to go to hell” (Matthew 5:29-30, NIV).

This active stance towards change not only applies to sins, but to every area of our lives. If you’re struggling with weight issues and say you want to lose weight but don’t have a workout and eating plan and allow yourself to keep snacks and treats around the house – do you really want to get well? If you really wanted to lose weight, you would throw away all your junk food, commit yourself to a workout regiment, and have some people in your life hold you accountable to that exercise and diet plan.

The reason I am such a giant believer in this approach to change is not only because the Bible teaches it (which should be enough of a reason for all of us), but also because I’ve personally experienced many victories over different struggles through taking radical steps. One such example is with cleaning up my eating habits. I’ve always been a fairly healthy eater but over the past several years I developed an unquenchable hunger for cereal. Now obviously cereal isn’t the worst vice one could partake in, but I just couldn’t stop eating it! I would have 1-3 bowls every night before going to bed. I was obsessed!!

Fortunately, my desire for cereal leaned more towards the healthier “Special K” type cereals so I wasn’t really experiencing any health detriments for eating so much cereal. However, I still recognized that too much of a good thing was a bad thing. So I decided I wanted to limit my cereal eating to the weekends rather than having it every day.

I started out the first week with just a white-knuckle, “I-think-I-can” attitude and did great! No cereal week one…but the victory was short lived as I quickly reverted back into my cereal “addiction” the following week. This cycle of victories followed by defeats continued for several frustrating weeks until I finally made the decision that I needed to do something to really help me kick this habit.

So I got one of my accountability partners (I called him my “cereal killer”) and told him I wanted to wean myself off of cereal throughout the week. I then wrote a $100 check and gave it to him. I told him to ask me every week if I was eating cereal and if I had even a bite of cereal throughout the week, he could cash the check and enjoy a $100 gift on my behalf.

That may sound radical, but you know what? I never ate cereal for the rest of that semester. It took a real, hard action plan for me to finally get over my cereal craving.

If it took that big of a step for me to kick something as harmless as cereal, how can we expect to get victory over sins in our lives that are actually true addictions such as alcohol, porn, or an unhealthy body-image by taking any less of an extreme measure? Satan doesn’t care about me eating cereal, but he is actively seeking to cause us to fall into sin. There is a spiritual warfare being waged right now for your purity, your integrity, and your holiness. If we want to truly make the turn in our lives for the better, we must be willing to take some radical steps to achieve that change.

So in the words of Jesus, “Do you really want to get well?”