Sermon: "Gracious Healing" by Genevieve Koh

Pastoral Welcome: Calvin Thomsen

Children’s Feature: Calvin Thomsen

Scripture Reading: John 5:1–9, TNIV Daniel Rood

INTRODUCTION TO THE SERMON

Have you ever seen a left handed person write?  It is not the way a majority of the population writes.  Currently, about 5%-15% of the population is left handed.  There are specialty items that are specifically for left handed people:  scissors, baseball mitts, guitars, golf clubs, mouse for computer with trackball, even knives, just to name a few.  There have been cultures who forbade their children to use their left hand as the dominant hand, forcing them to only use their right hand and to do anything with the left hand was unacceptable.  Being left handed was and still is out of the ordinary.  Enter Jesus.

Have you ever encountered a problem where you thought there was only one solution?  And when you tried the solution, it didn’t work, yet anything outside of that one solution just didn’t fit the bill to solve the problem.  Hence, it still existed.  In order to solve this problem another solution must present itself.  Often times we are stuck in the way we perceive life’s difficulties.  We may think there is no solution or that we’ll have to grin and bear it, confining us to our own perceptions.  This binds us from the array of possible solutions. Enter Jesus.

In this week’s story Jesus demonstrates a way of problem solving that is out of the ordinary and unique to anything that has been done before.  He amazes the paralyzed, while simultaneously offends the Jewish leaders.  He heals a man who had been paralyzed for 38 years.  The man didn’t ask for healing.  The man didn’t know who Jesus was.  As the Taco Bell slogan says, “Think outside the bun,” Jesus acts outside of Jerusalem’s norms and heals a paralytic man who never answered his question, “Do you want to be made well?”

Genevieve Koh
Associate Pastor for Junior High

MEDITATION

 "People think I have the 'perfect' life.  I wear the right clothes, I hang with the 'cool crowd,' my family has money.  But the funny thing is, they don't know that I cry myself to sleep every night because my dad's expectations are impossible.  I struggle with keeping up with school work.  I come from a divorced home.  They never see the real me.  I have put on a mask.  I deal with the struggles of beer and alcohol.  They don't know."  -- by high school student, from the book titled HURT by Chap Clark

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