Why It’s Good to Be Possessed by God

A longtime reader wrote me recently after listening to one of my recent sermons. It dealt with Jesus’s piercing question to the disabled man at the pool of Bethesda in John 5: “Do you want to be healed?” In reflecting on why Jesus asked this profound question, I made the comment, “Jesus is not just coming for your health. He’s coming for your heart.”My friend acknowledged a persistent discomfort with that kind of language—the idea of being “owned” by anyone, even God. Yes, the