Although the healed man seems to have had little interest in Christ, Christ kept His eye upon him. Finding him in the Temple, where he had gone to give thanks for his recovery, or to see a place he had so long been excluded from, or merely because it was a place of public resort, our Lord addressed him in the emphatic words, “Sin no more, lest a worse thing come upon thee.” The natural inference from these words is that his disease had been brought on by sin in early life—another instance of the lifelong misery a man may incur by almost his earliest responsible acts, of the difficulties and shame with which a lad or a boy may unwittingly fill his life, but an instance also of the willingness with which Christ delivers us even from miseries we have rashly brought upon ourselves. Further still, it is an instance of the vitality of sin. This man’s lifelong punishment had not broken the power of sin within him. He knew why he was diseased and shattered. Every pain he felt, every desire which through weakness he could not gratify, every vexing thought of what he might have made of life, made him hate his sin as the cause of all his wretchedness; and yet at the end of these thirty-eight years of punishment Christ recognised in him, even in the first days of restored health, a liability to return to his sin. But every day we see the same; every day we see men keeping themselves down, and gathering all kinds of misery round them by persisting in sin. We say of this man and that, “How is it possible he can still cleave to his sin, no better, no wiser for all he has come through? One would have thought former lessons sufficient.” But no amount of mere suffering purifies from sin. One has sometimes a kind of satisfaction in reaping the consequences of sin, as if that would deter from future sin; but if this will not hold us back, what will? Partly the perception that already God forgives us, and partly the belief that when Christ commands us to sin no more He can give us strength to sin no more. Who believes with a deep and abiding conviction that Christ’s will can raise him from all spiritual impotence and uselessness? He, and he only, can hope to conquer sin. To rely upon Christ’s word, “Sin no more,” with the same confident faith with which this man acted on His word, “Rise, take up thy bed”—this alone gives victory over sin. If our own will is too weak, Christ’s will is always mighty. Identify your will with Christ’s, and you have His strength.