Best Year Ever | Part 2 · Rewind

Pastor Daniel Goulding · Jan 14, 2019 · 65 min watch · 3 min read

Best Year Ever | Part 2

Big Idea

If you want things in your life to change, you better be willing to change some things about you.

Drawing from Jesus's encounter with the lame man at the Pool of Bethesda in John 5, Pastor Daniel argues that experiencing your best year is not primarily about circumstances changing around you — it is about your willingness to stop making excuses, take personal responsibility, and obey what God is already asking of you. True transformation begins when we stop blaming others, invite Jesus into our most uncomfortable places, and trust that the same Spirit who raised Christ from the grave is at work making us genuinely new from the inside out.

Key points

1
1Jesus asks the lame man 'Do you want to get well?' — a question that forces honest self-examination about whether we truly want to change.
2
2The man's response — blaming others for why he hasn't been healed — mirrors exactly how we make excuses for staying stuck in our own lives.
3
3Jesus commands the man to stand up, pick up his mat, and walk — healing requires our active participation and willingness to leave old patterns behind.
4
4The religious leaders' anger over the healed man carrying his mat on the Sabbath exposes how man-made religion misses the point of who Jesus truly is.
5
5Jesus later finds the man and tells him to stop sinning, revealing that His deeper purpose was never just physical healing but the forgiveness and transformation of the soul.
6
6Salvation is a free gift, but discipleship — following Jesus daily, dying to yourself, and doing the hard things — will cost you more than you realize.
7
7The people and environments we surround ourselves with profoundly shape us, and changing those influences is often essential to experiencing what God has for us.

Application

Pastor Daniel closes with a direct, personal challenge: stop making excuses for why you are where you are, and start doing the things you already know God is asking of you. That might mean taking responsibility in a struggling marriage, addressing an addiction, changing the people you do life with, or simply being obedient to the last thing God told you to do. Salvation is a free gift, but following Jesus daily costs something — and the life on the other side of that obedience is the one you have always dreamed of. The question Jesus asked the lame man is the same one He is asking you right now: Do you actually want to be made well? If the answer is yes, stop waiting for your circumstances to change first, and take the step He is already inviting you to take.

Take it into your week

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Scripture in this message

From the transcript
“if you brought a Bible with you, open up to John chapter five. John five is where we will be this morning”
Paraphrase of the transcript
John five, it says, this is a story where Jesus heals a lame man. verse one, it says, afterward, Jesus returned to Jerusalem for one of the Jewish holy days.
From the transcript
“Verse three says, crowds of sick people who were blind, lame, or paralyzed lay on the porches”
From the transcript
“sitting by the pool. In verse four says, waiting a certain movement of the water. Verse four says, for an angel of the lord came from time to time and stirred up the water. The”
From the transcript
“Verse five says this, it says, the Jesus walking on in the scene, he says, one of the men lying there had been sick for thirty eight years”
From the transcript
“verse six says that when Jesus saw him, he knew that he'd been able for a long time and he asked him the dumb question”
From the transcript
“Verse seven, he says, I I I I can't, sir. For I have nobody to put me in the pool when the water bubbles up. Somebody else always gets there ahead of me”
From the transcript
“Verse eight, after the guy gives him all of his excuses. Verse eight, Jesus tells him, stand up, pick up your mat, and walk”
From the transcript
“He tells this guy to pick up his mat and walk. In verse nine, instantly, the guy's healed. He rolls up his sleeping mat and he begins to walk but this miracle happened on the Sabbath”
From the transcript
“but afterwards, verse 14, Jesus found the guy in the temple and he told him, now that you are well, stop sinning or something else may happen to you”

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7-day devotional

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The Pool of Bethesda was crowded with people who had been waiting a long time. Blind, lame, paralyzed — the text doesn't romanticize their condition. They were genuinely suffering, and many of them had been there for years. It's easy to read past that detail, but it matters. Waiting is hard. Chronic waiting — waiting that outlasts your hope — is harder still. Pastor Daniel opened here because most of us know something about this pool. We've been sitting at the edge of something we desperately want — a healed relationship, freedom from a habit that's got its hooks in us, a version of ourselves we've almost stopped believing we could become. The good news is that Jesus walked into that place. He didn't avoid it. He didn't sanitize it. He went to the exact spot where broken people had gathered and had been forgotten. That tells you something important about His character: He is not repelled by the places in your life that feel most hopeless. He walks toward them. Before the healing even happens in this story, we get a picture of a God who shows up in the hard places. That is where He tends to do His best work.

For reflection

What is the 'pool' in your own life right now — the place where you have been waiting the longest and hoping the hardest?

Pray

Pray for the courage to honestly name the place in your life where you most need Jesus to show up.

Made by Rewind AI from the sermon transcript. Always trust the sermon itself over anything here. How Rewind uses AI

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Best Year Ever

Week 2 · 3 messages

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Healing and Wholeness Obedience Overcoming Excuses Personal Responsibility Transformation in Christ

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