Skin in the Game

Posted on April 28, 2015 by Graeme Wilson in Victory Call

Recently, I was listening to a testimony from a dear sister and she spoke at length of all the ways the Lord has been working in her life – spirit, soul and body. He was making radical changes, which hadn’t come quickly or easily. In fact, as she began to experience victory after victory, physical healing as well as deliverance from emotional and mental hindrances, she questioned God.

Her question was, “Why now, Lord? I’ve been crying out to You for years and You would not answer me. I felt like You forgot about me. So, why now?”

His clear answer to her mind and spirit was, “I didn’t forget about your healing. I just wanted you to participate in your healing. I wanted you to have skin in the game.”

It made me think about the lame man that was healed by the pool called Bethesda. In John 5 it is written:
“Now there is in Jerusalem by the Sheep Gate a pool, which is called in Hebrew, Bethesda, having five porches. In these lay a great multitude of sick people, blind, lame, paralyzed, waiting for the moving of the water. For an angel went down at a certain time into the pool and stirred up the water; then whoever stepped in first, after the stirring of the water, was made well of whatever disease he had.

Now a certain man was there who had an infirmity thirty-eight years. When Jesus saw him lying there, and knew that he already had been in that condition a long time, He said to him, “Do you want to be made well?”

The sick man answered Him, “Sir, I have no man to put me into the pool when the water is stirred up; but while I am coming, another steps down before me.”

Jesus said to him, “Rise, take up your bed and walk.” And immediately the man was made well, took up his bed, and walked.”

Did you catch that? Before his healing took place the man with the 38-year infirmity had to get skin in the game.

Please don’t misunderstand what I’m sharing with you today, sisters. I am not saying that our healing is dependent on us getting “skin in the game”. Nope. Not at all.

What I am saying is, in the case of my friend and in this account of healing in John’s gospel, there was something required before the healing came, and that was, participation.

Sometimes the Lord asks us to, “Rise. Take up our beds and walk.”

Stephanie Dale

Stephanie Paul serves as part of the Addiction Recovery Team at America’s Keswick as Director of Women of Character. She has been married for over 30 years to Sesky Paul who is a graduate of the Colony of Mercy. They have two grown children.
Her single focus in ministry at Keswick is to image Christ in grace and truth to wounded and hurting women, encouraging them to make Jesus the truest Lover of their soul and the One in whom all hope lies.