“Some time later, Jesus went up to Jerusalem for one of the Jewish festivals. 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.” (John 5:1-8)

The person who got into the pool first received healing. That’s the way it worked. The odds were in your favor if you had friends or family ready to assist you. If you were alone and immobile . . . not so much.

The crowd waited for that stirring in the pool which heralded the healing power of God available for the first person to hit the water. The man approached by Jesus had probably waited too long for the odds to ever be in his favor, and might have given up hope of ever being healed.

Jesus changed the odds.

But not because Jesus picked up the man and helped him into the stirring pool, but rather by simply declaring him healed. It was a healing that was immeasurably more than the man ever expected.

Do you realize that the reason your church is involved in this capital campaign is because there are people who are waiting and wanting some kind of healing transformation in their life? For whatever reason, you haven’t connected with them yet. But now through a re-visioning of your ministry there just may be opportunity to connect with some of them in a new and powerful way.  

Here Jesus may change the odds, through your ministry, in the lives of more and more people in immeasurably more ways than before.