by Dennis Gladden, By Green Pastures, ©2025
(Aug. 3, 2025) — I write personal essays, like my last one, with some reluctance because making bold claims about God giving you the strength to walk as He desires whets the scoffers who delight in your stumbles.
They chide, “You are a Christian, and you…” said or did or didn’t do this or that.
Sadly, they are right too often. Our shortcomings warrant the anger of critics in Black Lives Matter, DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion), and elsewhere.
Jesus said the righteous feed the hungry, take in strangers, clothe the naked, visit the sick, and remember the prisoner. Too many are still hungry, naked, alone, and forgotten.
Pinning my behavior on Jesus. Ouch.
So, yes, I have shied from proclaiming Christ’s power ever since I realized the significance of attaching His name to what I do.
Its significance dawned when I realized religion had dictated my childhood. I didn’t play cards because it was against my religion. It was against my religion to dance, to drink, to smoke, to go to the movies, or to do my paper route on Saturday.
Jesus changed that, and I began to ask, Why do I do, or not do, certain things? Is it my religion, or because I follow Jesus?
Pinning the name of Jesus on my behavior is humbling. Now, He is on the line and I don’t want to let Him down. Being a Christian means bearing witness to Christ, not to my religion.
It is an awesome responsibility.
Just like the responsibility of the man at the pool of Bethesda in John’s gospel. After languishing for 38 years, what was ahead once Jesus set him on his feet?
Jesus gave him an ultimatum. “You have been made well. Sin no more, lest a worse thing come upon you.”1
Our Christian life has two phases.
There is the moment—the crisis—when the past passes, followed by all the days thereafter. There is getting to your feet, then walking. It is coming to life, then living.
You have been made well. Sin no more.
Jesus likened this to our natural life. He told one of Israel’s prominent teachers, “You must be born again”2 and explained the necessity later when He told a crowd, “You are of your father the devil, and the desires of your father you want to do.”3 To change your behavior, change your father, and that requires being born again.
He also considered it a resurrection. “The one who hears My word and believes in Him who sent Me has everlasting life, and shall not come into judgment, but has passed from death into life” (emphasis mine).4 One moment you are dead, the next you’re alive.
You want to act differently? Change fathers. Be born again.
Starting this new life is one thing; how you live it is another.
This was the question before the man at Bethesda. Jesus stood him upright. Would he stand fast, or crumple to his mat and return to life as he knew it?
The theological term for this is sanctification. Simply, it is the process of becoming like Jesus. It is a lifelong journey, awash with potholes that jar our faith at times and prompt us to plead, “Please be patient, God isn’t finished with me yet.”
Besides the ruts are forks where one path tempts, “This is too hard; turn away,” and the other urges, “Press on.” Such a pivot occurs in John 6, where many disciples turned away because Jesus’s teaching became unbearable.
“How about you?” Jesus asked His Twelve. “Will you also go away?”
Stand, or turn back?
Jesus was clear: He wanted the man at Bethesda to stand fast. “Sin no more,” He said, as though instructing, “By my strength you stand. Now, walk in the strength that made you whole.”
Read the rest here.