Do You Want to Get Well?

In this episode, we walk through John 5:1–9, the story of Jesus healing the invalid at the pool of Bethesda. We explore why Jesus asked “Do you want to be healed?” and what it reveals about our tendency to grow comfortable in brokenness rather than face the cost of change. We also see similarities through neverthirst’s field work, where communities without clean water are asked if they’re willing to sacrifice for transformation. The episode closes with a spotlight on the Mubi people of Chad and a prayer for laborers to reach them with clean water and the gospel.

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Connect with Spencer and the neverthirst team: neverthirstwater.org

Host: Spencer Sutton

To Learn More About neverthirst: neverthirstwater.org

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Production House: Flint Stone Media

Copyright of neverthirst 2025.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:03

Alright, everybody, welcome back to another episode of For the Kingdom, a Never Thirst Podcast. I am your host, Spencer Sutton, and it's great to be here with you. Alright. I just wanted to take a this is going to be relatively short podcast, I think, today, but I just want to share some thoughts. I have a friend, and he and I have been reading through the book of John. He's been meeting with me once a week. He's never read through the Bible before, and so we're just taking a chapter at a time. And we are just sitting, and usually I'll pick out, you know, maybe one story from the chapter to focus on, and we talk about it. He asks a lot of great questions and we just discuss it. And so this week we'll be sitting down and we'll be talking about John chapter five. And so I thought I would share this story that sticks out to me, and I'm going to make a connection to the work in the field that you so generously support. And I want to show you there are parallels here. So I'm just going to read the first few verses of John chapter five. Here it says, After this, there was a feast of the Jews, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. Now there is in Jerusalem by the sheep gate a pool in Aramaic called Betheda, which has five roofed colonnades. In these lay a multitude of invalids, blind, lame, and paralyzed. One man was there who had been an invalid for thirty eight years. When Jesus saw him lying there and knew that he had already been there a long time, he said to them, Do you want to be healed? The sick man answered him, Sir, I have no one to put me into the pool when the water stirred up, and while I'm going, another steps down before me. Jesus said to him, Get up, take your bed and walk. And at once the man was healed, and he took up his bed and walked. Now that day was the Sabbath. So there's a lot of things that we could talk about here, right? There's a lot of things that we could talk about, we could look at and apply to our lives. Just a couple that I wanted to point out here. It says there were a multitude of people here. It specifically points out this man who'd been lame for 38 years. And it's interesting that they were not looking for Jesus. Here, Jesus was walking there in the colonnade, and he sees them. He picked out this man. And so it's really interesting to know and understand that when Christ comes to a person, Christ calls that person. So he wasn't looking for Jesus. He was looking at the water. He had his eyes focused on the water. He wanted to say, hey, when the water stirred up, I'm going to hop in that water. And Christ comes to him and says, Do you want to be healed or do you want to get well? Another translation says. And so Jesus is looking for sinners to save. That's a beautiful, beautiful truth. Another truth is that we want to see here is, and I always have found it interesting. Why did Jesus ask this question? It says that he already knew he had been there a long time. I mean, surely Jesus easily could have known it had been 38 years. Right? He'd been an invalid for 38 years. It says Jesus knew that he had already been there a long time, and then he asked the question. And this is a sincere question. And I think as I was as I've been thinking about this, the truth is not everyone wants to be healed. Not everyone. And so you see the man didn't immediately say, Yes, yes, I want to be healed. He immediately did what he offered an excuse. Well, well, when I want to get down in the water, people jump in front of me, or I don't have anybody to pick me up and take me to the water. And that's not what Jesus was asking. Jesus was really asking, do you want to get well? And so many times, even in our lives, as believers, we can get so settled in our ways. Maybe we can become comfortable in our sin. And we stop thinking that that God wants to change us or that God can change us. And that's not the truth. The truth is God's word is living and active and sharper than any two-edged sword. And its point, the point of God's word is to transform us more and more into the image of Christ. God is preparing us to meet Christ face to face, and this is his process. It's his word, it is truth. And so every morning as we get up and we open our Bible to do our quiet time, God is asking, Do you want to get well? And instead of making excuses, we should, and it's all by his grace, we should say, God, I'm willing. I want to get well. Show me. Reveal yourself to me. Open my eyes that I may see beautiful things, wonderful things in your law, is what the psalmist says. So he says, Do you want to get healed? And eventually we know he does heal this man. And so I think it's just a beautiful picture of Christ coming to a person, and Jesus Christ, as the master psychologist, doesn't just say, pick up your mat and walk. He wants this person to face the reality. Do they really want to get well? And then the question for me as I'm thinking about this and journaling about this is am I comfortable in my sin? Am I comfortable in where I am in my walk with the Lord? Or am I seeking a deeper, closer walk with the Lord? Now you may be thinking, well, Spencer, how does this even relate to Neverthirst? How does this relate to work in the field? And so I just want to give you a little bit of insight as to some of the things that that go on in the field. And I'll take you back when I was, you know, when we were first starting the organization, I was traveling a whole bunch and was in the field, going from village to village. You know, we were essentially doing assessments, even though we didn't call them assessments back then. But we just, you know, we were just going and saying, hey, what is the need? And we were, we would walk with people to see where they got water. And we would always be like, hey, do you want to get water? And the more and more we started to learn in those early days about what does it take for true transformation to come to a community from a physical condition, right? It's you know, yes, clean water, but guess what? These water points can break at some point. And so what you really wanted before you went to all of the expense of drilling, drilling, drilling 200, 300 feet beneath the surface, installing a hand pump, you really wanted community buy-in. You really wanted the community to say, yes. Yes, we want access to clean water and we're willing to sacrifice to get it. Now, what does that mean? What does sacrifice mean? You may be saying, Spencer, these people don't have any money. In a lot of cases, they didn't. But what we discovered was that when people, when they were able to either contribute money, whatever little they had, they could sell crops, they could do all kinds of things, or they contributed labor. That was proof to us that they were willing to do whatever it took to maintain this hand pump, this well, which is what we were doing in the early days. Long after we were gone, they were saying, yes, we have a need, and we see the value of receiving access to clean water. And to prove it, we're willing to we're willing to sacrifice. And so these were the these were the types of communities we wanted to go into. And so you you imagine you can imagine it would amaze us when we go into a community that didn't have access to clean water. There was sickness, there was disease, there were there was a burden on women and children. We would say, Hey, do you all want access to clean water? And you know, what we're asking from you is you know, maybe contribute a little bit of money for a repair fund or or contribute labor into the construction of the of the of the well, and they s would say no. You can imagine our surprise. Because for us, especially here in the West, we would think, well, that doesn't make any sense. Of course they should, of course they would want clean water, but it wasn't always the case. And so often, you know, when you start thinking about this, the truth is their life would get harder before it would get better. And and many times this is the same way with us. When Christ confronts us with sin in our life, when Christ confronts us with something that needs to change in our life, a lot of times things are not going to get better immediately. They may get more difficult before they get better. It may mean I need to go and confess something to a friend. It may mean I need to do something that, you know what, I've just grown accustomed to doing. This has been my habit, this has been my routine. And if God calls us out of that or convicts us in some way, our life may get more difficult before it gets better. So this is this is how the story relates to us going into the field. And so when I think about it, I think there's a lot of work that goes into doing what? To having an entire community transformed. So we talk a lot about holistic transformation here at Never Thirst. And holistic transformation is yes, there's physical transformation because clean water, sanitation, hygiene, all of those things are extremely important. But holistic transformation also means like renewal in Christ, salvation, and across the different contexts where we work in these communities, many of whom have not heard of Christ before. They don't know the gospel. And so you can imagine this transformation is a long and laborious process. And so the pastors, the ministers who are working in these remote communities, a lot of the times they don't see transformation right away. It takes years to see it. And it's all by God's grace. Like we give God all of the glory for transformation that happens in the lives of people. Sometimes it happens soon. Sometimes by God's grace, a house church, a cell group will start pretty quickly. Other times it is a long process of a pastor going in and just coming to people, loving people, and then just asking, do you want to be healed? Do you want to get well? And the people wrestle with this. They wrestle with it. And so I would just ask if you're praying for an Everthirst, just pray, just pray that as pastors, as even as we as an organization, I mean, listen, we couldn't do this, this work would not be possible without your generosity, without you funding the work. But I just would ask you to pray that as our partners go into the field, as pastors go into the field, that when they go and meet with communities and say, you know, do you want clean water? Just just pray that you would ask that there would be they would be met with an eagerness, saying, Yes, we want access to clean water, and we're willing to to contribute to repair funds. We're we're willing to contribute labor because this many times is the beginning of a holistic transformation. And so this man at the pool of Betheda, yes, he was healed. We read it, we see that God healed him, but this was just the beginning of his transformation. He didn't even know who healed him, it says. He had to he had to go back and find he like Christ even came back and found him and said, Hey, go and sin no more. Like he didn't even know who saved him. And so so many times this transformation takes a long time. So pray for our partners, pray for perseverance, pray for the pastors, pray for perseverance. And then just another picture I have in my mind is I was in South Sudan in 2010 with Brandon, and we went and visited a drill site, and you know, saying yes and contributing money or contributing labor is one thing, but then there's a lot of work that has to be done, and part of this work is drilling down deep beneath the surface. And and I remember being there in 2010 in South Sudan, and the driller, our partner, had all of these samples of dirt laid up in a row. We actually still have a picture of this. And there was soft dirt, there was you know, clay, there was rock, there was gravel, there was all of these different layers of earth. These people had drilled down, these partners had drilled down 100, 200, 300 feet beneath the surface, and they were pulling out samples of dirt as they go. And isn't this what God does with us? Like the cleanest water in the world is just a couple of hundred feet beneath the surface. And so God drills down in our life. He doesn't let us sit comfortable in our sin. He doesn't let us sit comfortably in our sickness, he drills down and accesses the clean and living water deep beneath the surface, and then brings it up for us to enjoy. So that's just a picture I have of what God does in our hearts, just the same way He does through your generosity in the hearts of people in these communities, and then physically we just see this incredible picture of clean water flowing in aquifers, and it's really interesting because you you read in the Old Testament how this clean water followed Israel. And so when Moses spoke to the rock or struck the rock, clean water flowed. And so it's just a beautiful picture. So I want to say thank you so much for making this work possible. Thank you for giving people, giving our partners and these pastors just the opportunity to ask people, do you want to get well? Introducing them not only to what life looks like with clean water, but also what life looks like with the living water. So now, as we close this podcast, I do want to bring up a people group that I was reading about earlier. They're called the Mubi people Group, and they live in a country called Chad. They live in South, yes, kind of South Central Chad. Population's around 139,000, 0% Christian. Just think about that. 139,000 people, no Christians, no Bible or other resources translated into their language at all. And so just pray that the Lord leads believers. And and and as I was reading about this, I'm reading about it at the Joshua Project. As we're reading, it was like their number one need is clean water. They don't have any access to clean water, and they they do a lot of agriculture, they they have cattle, things like that. And so the prayer request here on Joshua Project is pray that the Bible and other resources are translated into the movie language, and pray that the Lord leads teams of Christians to drill wells for the movie. Ask the Lord to raise up a growing church planning movement among the movie people of Chad. So let's pray for them. Dear Heavenly Father, God, we just love you, we praise you. Just come to you believing that you care for every single person in the world, like you love them. For God, so love the world. We praise you, God, that you love the world and you love the movie people here in Chad. God, I pray that you would raise up laborers and send them out into the field. Pray that you would move in believers who live in the surrounding areas to commit their lives to sharing the gospel, to penetrating these communities, and begin developing relationships and then maybe asking, do you want to get well? And then, Lord, would you open up the opportunity for them to introduce about the living water of Jesus Christ? Yes, we see this man at the pool of Betheda who was healed. We also remember the woman at the well in John chapter 4. And so, God, I just pray that you would do your work, raise up labor, send them out, and God, may your spirit penetrate the hearts of the movie Living in Chad, and Lord, that you would save these people and that they would be represented as we see in Revelation when every people from every tribe and every tongue are worshiping and praising you, Father. So we pray for them. Lord, I'm so thankful for the people who are listening to this podcast. I'm thankful for supporters, thankful for just their generosity, how you move in people's hearts. And so, God, I just pray that you would bless them. Lord, as they are generous, Lord, I pray that you would continue to bless them with more and more resources to do your work. And so, God, also be with us as we work, be with our pastors, our partners that are working in really, really difficult circumstances and difficult and harsh conditions, honestly. So, Lord, just pray that you would be with them. Lord, we pray all of these things in the precious name of Jesus Christ. Amen. All right, everybody, that is it for this episode of For the Kingdom, and we'll be back in another couple weeks with a new episode. Have a good one.