Life’s Enlivening—the Need of the Impotent

Every human being has a need related to his or her condition. In his Gospel, John uses nine cases to represent the various conditions and needs of human beings in order to illustrate that Jesus Christ as life fully meets the need of man's every case. In this booklet taken from Life-study of John, Witness Lee focuses on the fourth of these nine cases, which exposes the vanity of religion and reveals that it is Christ as life who enlivens us. In this case we see a man who had been sick for thirty-eight years, who knew how he could be healed but could not get up and do what was required. He was impotent, unable to move, just as we all are unable to meet the requirements of religion. But then the Lord Jesus came to this man and spoke. The impotent man heard the enlivening word of the living, life-giving Lord, and he was healed. It is the same with us today. When we have Jesus, we have life’s enlivening.