INSPIRATIONAL | ANDREW BROWN

This year will actually be my 20th Overflow. For some of you, 20 overflows sounds pretty great! So many opportunities to have a life changing encounter with God. Now, I would love to tell you that I have received something from God at every Overflow, but there have been years when I left and did not.  Does that mean God wasn’t there? Not at all. In fact one year I didn’t receive anything for myself, but God had radically healed other people in the room. So maybe God just forgot about me? I honestly thought that for a while, but then realized a harder truth. The problem wasn’t actually with God, the problem was me.

The problem wasn’t with the giver, but with the receiver.

John 5:2-9 Now there is in Jerusalem near the Sheep Gate a pool, which in Aramaic is called Bethesda and which is surrounded by five covered colonnades.  Here a great number of disabled people used to lie—the blind, the lame, the paralyzed. One 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?”“Sir,” the invalid replied, “I have no one to help me into the pool when the water is stirred. While I am trying to get in, someone else goes down ahead of me.”Then Jesus said to him, “Get up! Pick up your mat and walk.” At once the man was cured; he picked up his mat and walked.

Sometimes I think we can greatly complicate things when it comes to Jesus.  We get in our own head about how things should be, what kind of experience we should have, whether we’re worthy enough. We think so many other things as well like, are these jeans ripped enough or skinny enough? What is the appropriate ratio of denim to cotton to say I’m cool but not trying? If I’m not feeling the sweat of the worship leader on the stage can God still speak to me?

The man at the pool of Bethesda had a similar question. If I can’t feel the bubbles, can God still heal me?

Jesus also had a question. Jesus asks him, “Do you want to get well?” Jesus didn’t ask this because he didn’t know about the pool. In fact Jesus would have been deeply aware of this pool since his childhood from visiting Jerusalem every year. Jesus asked this question because this man needed to gain a new understanding of what it means to receive.

The problem wasn’t God, the problem was the man at the pool was allowing the experiences of others to validate his own experience. If only the people in the pool were healed and everyone else was not, then that is how it was to be. In other words, he was disqualifying what God was trying to give him because it did not look like what he thought it was supposed to be. 

I was doing the same thing, Overflow after Overflow, worship service after worship service.

But when the man got out of his own head about what God could or couldn’t do, the man at the side of the pool, was transformed.

Jesus didn’t do anything but ask the man a question and tell the man a command. The choice was the man’s. To either trust that other people’s experiences should look like his own, or to trust that God might have a new experience waiting for him to receive.

After 19 Overflows what I can definitely tell you is that God is waiting to give you a new experience. But the choice is yours. Will you allow God to decide how He will show up in your life and what it looks like. And if you do, will you choose to receive it?

Andrew Brown
Youth Pastor
Waterloo Pentecostal Assembly