Take Up Your Bed | Rev. Jeffrey O. Smith

The Lord told a paralyzed man to take up his bed and go to his house. With this command, the Lord is also telling us to not let our outward circumstances and habits get in the way of our relationship with Him. What aspects of your life are getting in the way of eternal happiness?

Readings: Judges 1-2, Matthew 9:1-8, Divine Love and Wisdom 396, Secrets of Heaven 6188.2

Minister: Rev. Jeffrey O. Smith

Delivered May 24th, 2026 at the Bryn Athyn Cathedral in Bryn Athyn, PA.

The Bryn Athyn Church is a congregation of the General Church of the New Jerusalem, located in Bryn Athyn, PA. We are committed to helping each other draw closer to the Lord God Jesus Christ through lives of love and useful service, guided by the Old and New Testaments and the Heavenly Doctrine for the New Church (contained in the theological works of Emanuel Swedenborg). Please join us for worship on Sunday mornings; services and times can be found at brynathynchurch.org.

Transcript

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Our first reading today is from Judges chapters 1 and 2, portions of those chapters. Manasseh did not drive out the inhabitants of Bethsheon and its villages. And it came to pass when Israel was strong that they put the Canaanites under tribute, but they did not completely drive them out. Nor did Ephraim, nor did Zebulun, nor did Asher, nor did Naphtali. Then the children of Israel did evil in the sight of the Lord and served the Baals. And they forsook the Lord God of their fathers, who had brought them out of the land of Egypt, and they followed other gods from among the gods of the people who were all around them, and they bowed down to them. So he delivered them into the hands of plunderers who despoiled them, and he sold them into the hands of their enemies all around, so that they could no longer stand before their enemies. Wherever they went out, the hand of the Lord was against them for calamity, as the Lord had said, and as the Lord had sworn to them. And they were greatly distressed. Reading further from the ninth chapter of the Gospel of Matthew. Then they brought to Jesus a paralytic lying on a bed. When Jesus saw their faith, he said to the paralytic, Son, be of good cheer, your sins are forgiven you. And at once some of the scribes said within themselves, This man blasphemes. But Jesus, knowing their thoughts, said, Why do you think evil in your hearts? For which is easier to say, Your sins are forgiven you, or to say, Arise and walk. But that you may know that the Son of Man has power on earth to forgive sins. Then he said to the paralytic, Arise, take up your bed, and go to your house. And he arose and departed to his house. Reading further from New Church teachings, first from the work Divine Love and Wisdom, number 396. Love for ourselves and love for the world are of service to our spiritual loves, the way foundations are of service to houses. It is love for ourselves and love for the world that prompt us to care about our bodies, to want nourishment, clothing and housing, to take care of our homes, to look for jobs in order to be useful, to be granted respect due to the worth of our responsibilities, so that people heed us and even to find delight and recreation in worldly pleasures. All of these activities, however, should be for the sake of usefulness. They bring us into a state of serving the Lord and the neighbor. In contrast, when there is no love for serving the Lord and the neighbor, when there is nothing but love for using the world to suit ourselves, then the love becomes hellish instead of heavenly. And finally, from New Church Teachings, the work Arcana Celestia number 10,236. Strictly speaking, the level of the senses forming the last and lowest of the natural degree is called the flesh. And it perishes when a person dies. Thus, that which has enabled a person to function in the world, namely the senses of sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch. It may be recognized that the senses exist on the ground level, so to speak, of a person's life. Also, an external aspect of the senses is the deposit in the human memory of impressions received from the world, consisting solely of worldly, bodily, and earthly images. Amen. Here end our readings: Blessed are those who hear the word of God and keep it. Amen. The first of our readings today was from the book of Judges. Now, at the end of that reading, at the end of that bit of the story that we read, it says the Israelites are greatly distressed. And it's they're distressed because they're being attacked by the people who are around them and living among them. What are some of the things that seem to make us sad or upset or like those Israelites greatly distressed? Well, often it's people, right? It's like the people that were bothering the Israelites. They made them greatly distressed, and people seem to make us sometimes greatly distressed. Sometimes it's the things that they say to us or the things that they do to us, or just the ideas that we think that they are thinking can greatly distress us. Also, we might see the world and think the Lord is the world is just so unfair, and also that greatly distresses us. At the beginning of our story, though, at the beginning of that story from Judges, we learn that there's a reason that there are people attacking them, and it's because the Israelites left those people there in the land. The Lord had instructed them to drive them all out, but they didn't. Either they thought it was too hard at the time, or maybe it's because they just thought they weren't all that bad, and so they left them there. Essentially, the Israelites created their own situation of suffering all around them by not doing what the Lord said to get rid of those enemies. Also, because they left those enemies in the land, they ended up worshiping some of the gods that the people around them were worshiping also. And so they abandoned Jehovah and they were worshiping Baal and Ashrath and these other gods. So they didn't follow the Lord, which is the path to happiness, and also they got rid of the Lord, who gives the happiness. They created that situation for themselves. Maybe you've heard an expression, if not, then you're gonna hear it now, that goes, you lie in the bed you made. You lie in the bed that you made. Now, in a simple way of understanding this, if if you wake up in the morning, you get right out of bed and you leave it all messy, and the blanket's on the floor, and the pillows, who know where the pillows are? And then you come home and you come late at night and you're really tired and you're ready to get into bed and the blanket's on the floor and you don't know where your pillow is, and you're so tired, and well, you're the one that left it that way. And so that's what you have to deal with. In another way, it's we can think of it as whatever situation you create for your life, that's the one you're going to have to deal with because you've created that situation. You lie in the bed that you made. Now, sometimes we do this for our lives in an external way, on the outside. Uh, for example, the friends that we keep. Now, if we have friends that encourage us to be mean and encourage us to make fun of other people, well then that's sort of the type of person we might start to become. Because we keep those friends around us. We lie in the bed that we made. And then those friends that encourage us to be mean, and then we treat people around us in a mean way, and we push away people who could otherwise be nice to us and support us being a good person. And then we find out that we don't really have good friends around us and we don't have nice people, but we lie in the bed that we've made. Now, tomorrow is Memorial Day, and we live in a country where people are willing to stand up for what's right, and people are willing to lay down their lives for this country. If we were to live in a country where that didn't happen, well, we would live in a place where anybody could come in and take over. But we live in a place where people are here to support the good things in this country. And I'm glad that we live here. And I'm glad that we have this bed that we get to lie in. So those are some of the external things on the outside, these situations that we create for ourselves. But there's also internal stuff. On one of our readings, we heard about things that can help us be useful. All the things of this world can help us love the neighbor and love the Lord. The trouble is, on the inside, if we start to make things more important than people, then that ultimately isn't going to make us happy, and it's just gonna make us more and more upset. So on the inside in our hearts, that's a kind of bed that we lie in, also. Now, speaking of beds, we had that story from Matthew. There was a man that was brought to the Lord. He was paralyzed, and he was brought to the Lord on a bed. He was paralyzed, it means he couldn't move. He couldn't get up and walk around and do what he wanted to do. Now, sometimes we could feel paralyzed in our lives. You might not be as aware of it when you're younger, but as you grow older, you might start to feel like, oh, I feel kind of stuck. Things just aren't going the way that I wish they would go. I would like to be here, but I'm back here and I can't get there. Well, spiritually speaking, being paralyzed means we're not really on our way to becoming an angel and not really on our way moving toward heaven. We're kind of stuck where we are. Well, and there are different things that can keep us there and sort of keep us stuck. Sometimes there are life situations that happen around us. Sometimes they're things that we experience, things that happen to us. And also sometimes it's fear, things we're afraid of. It might be things we're afraid of that people are thinking about us, or things that we're afraid will happen to our body, or different things that could just paralyze us. But also, sometimes it's just our ideas that are holding us back, paralyzing us. When we say, that's just the way I am, that's sort of a paralysis, because if you say that's just the way I am, it means, well, I can't be something else, meaning I can't change. But that's not true, is it? We say, I can't help it. It's kind of like that's just the way I am. I can't help it, meaning I can't change or do anything different. She started it, that means it's not my fault, it's that person's fault, and I don't have to do anything different. I'm paralyzed. How about I inherited my temper from my father? That's saying, this is just the way I am. It's true, we do inherit things from our parents, and it might be true that someone else started it. We have these reasons for things happening the way they happen. The trouble is sometimes reasons become excuses. See, excuses are when we use those reasons to stop us from going forward. When we use that, she started it to keep on being mean. Or if I use, I inherited my temper from my father to keep on being angry and lashing out and hurting people. Those are things that paralyze us. Excuses paralyze us. Well, in the story, the Lord comes on the scene and they bring that paralytic man to the Lord. The first thing that the Lord does, he doesn't first heal his paralysis. The first thing that he does is he forgives his sins. He doesn't do something on the outside first, he does something in the man's heart first. With our healing, there's something inside us that needs to happen first. The thing is, if we are happy with our excuses, if we're happy being where we are in life and we don't want to change and we blame it on everybody else and the world around us, we're just always going to be stuck. The thing is, we have to want to change. And we have to believe that we can. When we want it and we believe it, then the Lord can take care of us. So the Lord does something inside us, but we still have to agree to it. We still have to believe that the Lord can be there. Then the Lord says to him, so first it's on the inside. And then the Lord says to him, Arise, take up your bed, and go to your house. See, we have that stuff on the inside, but we have also stuff on the outside. And we talked about it a little bit with that story from the from judges, that we have things on the outside like friends and other situations that seem to sort of hold us back, situations that we create. But if we want to change in the long run, we have to be able to do something about that stuff on the outside. For example, if our friends are encouraging us to be mean or make fun of other people, we might consider finding other friends who don't do that. And you are allowed to do that. You can choose your friends. What if you spend time with your friends, and uh adults do this too, spending time with your friends on your phone. Well, you spend time with your on your on your phone and you're kind of with your friends, but not really, and then you find out later, oh, this thing happened to you? I didn't realize that. You weren't really there with your friends and learning about them and being there for each other because you were busy on your phone or on a device. So things like that can stop us from getting together and being close with other people and being able to care about them in the way that the Lord might like us to. So there are these things on the outside that we can change. And that's us taking up our bed and going to our house and walking. The Lord can do that for us also. The Lord's the one that helps us do it, but we also have to want to. That man, he could have said, Nope, I'll just stay here. Thanks, though. No, he did get up and he took up his bed and he went to his house. About having those friends. That's one of those things on the outside that's really important. Not having friends who encourage you to stay stuck. That paralytic man, he didn't have friends that said, You just stay right where you are, don't bother moving. I love you just the way you are. You don't need to go to the Lord. That's not really what the Lord would want, though, is it? See, he had friends that said, I think you can do better, and I think you can walk, and I know this guy who can help you. His name's Jesus. And they brought him to the Lord. You want friends like that in your life. Friends that will help you be a better person, a better version of yourself, a person that's on their way to heaven. And finally, the final note today is encouragement for you to be that friend. Be that friend that helps someone go to the Lord when they're feeling paralyzed. What are some things that we can do? Well, here's just some ideas, and there are lots of ways that you can help someone who might be feeling paralyzed. My first thought for you is be affirmative for them. You see, someone who's paralyzed probably feels like they can't do it, and they might be feeling a lack of hope. You can actually be hope for somebody. You can go to them and say, I know you can do it. Tomorrow can be a different day. The Lord can actually help you. Not just, I love you just the way you are, don't do anything about it and don't change. Be that hope for them. Another idea is to remind them that they aren't powerless. When someone's feeling paralyzed, they feel like they have no power in their body and they can't move anywhere. We aren't powerless when we have the Lord. Remember, in this story, the Lord is the one that did the healing. And the Lord is the one that does the healing in us. In the Lord, we have power. You could invite a person to church. Someone who's feeling paralyzed. Oh, it might be harder when you're a kid to go to one of your friends and say, hey, you want to go to church with me? But as an adult, you can do that. And there are kind of sneaky ways you could do it too. You don't do it for the sake of being sneaky, but you do it for the sake of helping. You might invite someone to coffee and say, hey, would you like to grab coffee after church? Either I can meet you after church, or else we go to go to church together and then just go out to coffee afterwards. It's a way to just help someone get to a place where there's some healthy learning going on and then have some nice coffee with them and help them through whatever they're going through. Finally, patience and listening. When someone is really paralyzed, it took them a long time to get there, probably. And it's not gonna take them just a few seconds to get out of it. It takes a lot of patience to be with someone who is paralyzed. Now, sometimes when you're with your friends, they might just be kind of paralyzed for a day, feeling really sad, and you can be there patient and listening for them. And along with that patience is the listening. They have a lot of hard things to share that they want to get off of their hearts. And there's a lot of listening, and also when you're listening, again, that patience that goes along with it. These are ways that we can help people, our friends around us, be a little bit less paralyzed and find their way to the Lord. Jesus said, Be of good cheer, your sins are forgiven you. Arise, take up your bed, and go to your house. Amen.