Biography
Dr. Benjamin F. Reaves has had a distinguished career in theological education and the ministry, holding positions at several Seventh Day Adventist universities and seminaries. He is a world traveler, having lectured throughout the Caribbean, Europe and South Africa, as well as the United States. He is also widely published and a member of the Academy of Homiletics. [Biographical information is correct as of the broadcast date noted above.]

"The Other Side of Impossibility" 
It really wasn't a sarcastic question, and yet it sounded like one. Like the kind of question you might hear if you were stalled in five o'clock traffic, hood up, head down, frantically trying to unlock the mystery of a dead engine. Then you hear the question, "Would you like some help?" A withering answer leaps to your lips as you look up at the backed-up traffic. It all seems so obvious but you hold it back. Well, that's the kind of question Jesus asked years ago and miles away beside a pool called, in the Hebrew tongue, Bethesda.

The fifth chapter of the Gospel of John describes the pool as a regular gathering place for people suffering with various physical handicaps. People in need. People who believed a supernatural power would come down and stir the waters and the first person in the water would be healed. Even though many had died on the edges of the pool, still hundreds of sufferers crowded the place in the vain hope of healing in the waters, prisoners of a superstitious belief.

It should be no surprise that in the pathetic crowd of broken humanity, we find Jesus there among those whose plight is desperate, whose courage is lost. There among the helpless and the hopeless we find Jesus.....and out of this encounter by the pool comes vital truths for our hearts and lives.

As it was then, so it is now. God comes and He finds us crippled, by the pool. Oh, not the pool of Bethesda, but by the pool of our deepest longings, our heartfelt desires. Crippled in many different ways -- in body, mind, personality, circumstances, spiritual life, family life. In so many ways God finds us crippled by the pool, as Jesus found the certain man and asked that question.

Verse 6 - "So he said to him, do you want to get well?"

Do you want to be healed? Now against the backdrop of the suffering multitude with all their agonizing pain and crushing despair, Jesus' question seems curiously callous, almost cruel. The man had been crippled for thirty-eight years, imprisoned in a living death for thirty-eight years.

"Would he like to be healed?"

You could almost expect the man to retort, "No, I'm getting a thirty-eight year-old sun tan." But he didn't say it. Probably because he felt the wish to be healed was too obvious for response.

"Do you want to get well?"

This was no idle, careless, unthinking question. This was a pointedly perceptive, penetrating question. Had living with crippledness worn away his resolve? Was he in some perverse way comforted by his helplessness? Was his heart withered as well as his limbs, was there a paralysis of body and will?

One thing we can count on, God always asks the disturbing, disquieting question. To us with our crippled bodies, withered limbs, blinded eyes, stunted lives, unfulfilled aspirations -- "Do you want to get well?" He probes to assess if we have given up and settled in to the comfort of what seems impossible.

His question, like a razor-edged scalpel slices through the flesh and fat of our excuses, alibis, rationalizations down to who we really are and what we really want. He knows that we hear his promises and our flabby faith races out to meet and claim them, but quickly that flabby faith runs out of breath and leaves us exhausted -- bedded down with our infirmities -- our dishonesty, pride, self-hate, lust, spiritual and psychological invalids crippled by the pool of life.

He knows we are prisoners of our own despair. He knows and so the question persists,

"Do you want to get well?"

You see God not only finds us crippled by the pool of life. God invites us to the other side of impossibility. That's what Jesus did for the cripple. Remember in response to His question, "Do you want to get well?"

In verse 7 the sick man answered, "Sir, I don't have any one here to put me in the pool." I don't have anyone. That's why I've been like this for thirty-eight years.

And in spite of that Jesus says, in verse 8, "Get up, pick up your mat, and walk."

But I have no one to lift me...Get up!!

But I've been like this for thirty-eight years...Get up!!

But you don't understand my...Get up!!

But that's what he couldn't do...IT WAS IMPOSSIBLE.

And yet Jesus not only questions, "Do you want to get well?"
Jesus commands, "Get up, pick up your mat and walk."
This was an invitation, to the other side of impossibility!!

This man's walking was not just improbable, not just psychosomatic, his walking was impossible. Thirty-eight years as a cripple clearly showed the reality of his situation. It was impossible.


By the pool of life, however crippled we may be, however long it has been, God invites us to the other side of impossibility.

To a helpless cripple...get up!!
To a man with a withered hand...stretch out your arm.
To failing fishermen...let down your nets for a catch.
To a buried dead man...Lazarus come forth!!

This is the invitation of omnipotence and the command of divine enabling, and it is true in every aspect of life.
God finds us crippled by the pool of life.
God invites us to the other side of impossibility.
God takes impossibilities and creates new possibilities.

Verse 9, "Immediately the man got well; he picked up his mat and walked."

Bear in mind however, God's invitation is not always welcome or convenient. And the new possibilities He creates may not be what we planned on, or would dictate. Sometimes the new possibility is a change in our circumstance; sometimes it is a change in our attitude toward our circumstances. "But all things work together for good to them that love the Lord."

To them who will work on His plan, God empowers new possibilities.

As E. G. White says, "With the enabling command of Christ, he received power to do what a moment earlier had been quite beyond his capacity. The man's faith took hold of Jesus' word."

Friend of mine, there is POWER IN THE WORD OF GOD!!

When men hear and believe the word of God, on the other side of impossibility, new possibilities are born. In His hands impossibilities are clay from which He molds new possibilities. It is so because the word creates faith, and faith can move mountains.

Trusting in God and His word we can do what we have always failed to do, be what we could never be, master what has consistently baffled us, reach, hold and grip what has been utterly beyond us.

I know you have every reason to believe you are at a dead end...in your body, in your marriage, in your family, in your life.

"Do you want to get well?"

And the God who presses the question is...

The God who finds you crippled by the pool
The God who right now, invites you to the other side of impossibility
The God who out of impossibilities creates new possibilities.

Have you any rivers, you think are uncrossable?
Have you any mountains you can't tunnel through?
God specializes in things thought impossible

HE CAN DO WHAT NO OTHER POWER CAN DO!

Interview with Benjamin Reaves
Interviewed by Floyd Brown

Floyd Brown: Ben, thank you so much for the uplifting and challenging message that you brought to us today. I have a question for you. How do you get the kind of faith where you just open up and say, "Lord, this is what I need," and get it. It just doesn't happen as if by magic.

Benjamin Reaves: You are quite right, but the marvelous thing about it is this: faith comes from God and the faith that I spoke of today comes as a gift that God is waiting to give us. Our only action is to choose to receive it. If we will make that choice, God is extending that kind of faith to us as a gift. It is not something that we can work up; it is not something that we can generate of ourselves; it is a gift from God.

Brown: What a wonderful answer. I have another quick question I must ask you as head of a college, a theologian, and a teacher. A friend of mine, an economist, was talking to us recently. He said that in the world today there are great opportunities in the job world for young people if they get into computer-related things but more importantly, if they know a foreign language. It also applies to religion, I think. I see what is happening over in the Middle East today. Are you teaching people about other religions? Do you think it is a challenge for us to know more of these things?

Reaves: Absolutely. Our globe is shrinking. It is now the size of an orange in many ways. Because of that reality, at Oakwood College we do teach comparative religions. We are so happy that we have an international student body that comes together and we nurture each other in respect and in affirmation of diversity.

Brown: Thanks again for coming. We always enjoy having you here.