When Jesus saw him lying there, and knew that he had been sick for a long time, he asked him, "Do you want to be made well?"

 (a) To be spiritually dead is to have stopped trying. It is to have come to look on all faults as ineradicable and all virtues as unattainable. But the Christian life cannot stand still; it must either go on or slip back; and to stop trying is therefore to slip back to death. 