John chapter 5, and let's read
the first nine verses together. After this there was a feast
of the Jews, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. Now there is in
Jerusalem by the Sheep Gate a pool in Aramaic called Bethesda, which
has five-roofed colonnades. In these lay a multitude of individuals,
blind, lame, and paralyzed. One man was there who had been
an invalid for 38 years. When Jesus saw him lying there
and knew that he had already been there a long time, he said
to him, Do you want to be healed? The sick man answered him, Sir,
I have no one to put me into the pool when the water is stirred
up, and while I'm going another one steps down before me. Jesus
said to him, Get up, take up your bed, and walk. And at once
the man was healed and he took up his bed and walked. Now that
day was the Sabbath. There we go. How many of your
Bibles start a new paragraph in the middle of verse 9? Okay,
that's because it's supposed to be a new paragraph. But it
is verse 9. Here in this narrative we're
not going to go beyond that today because there is two things at
play here. There is this picture that we see of Jesus. And when
I say picture, it's the historical record of what Jesus is doing
here in Jerusalem. And then we see the issue that
is caused by what Jesus did in Jerusalem. Because see, isn't
this what happens when Jesus goes somewhere, he teaches and
it causes an issue. He does a miracle and it causes
an issue. He goes someplace else, he teaches,
it causes an issue. He does a miracle and it causes
an issue. This is the point of Jesus' ministry, to stir up division. Now we like to, as the New Testament
church and as Christians in our day, go, oh no, we're not to
be divisive. Someone said to me just yesterday
that doctrine is man's attempt at being right in his own ego
and it's causing division amongst the people of God. Well, that's
a big misunderstanding of what doctrine means. Let's use the
word doctrine as it's actually supposed to be used. Teaching
someone about the Bible causes division because it only feeds
the ego of man. Now, where is that true? Can
teaching of the Bible feed the ego of man? Absolutely. I mean,
we see the Pharisees, they fed their own ego through what they
thought the Bible taught time and time again. But, friends,
if we aren't learning what the Bible is teaching, doctrine,
then we're not learning Christ. If we haven't learned doctrine,
we haven't learned the gospel. If we haven't learned the gospel,
we don't know God. If we don't know God, there is no eternal
life. While, yes, doctrine divides,
teaching divides, does not all teaching divide. I mean, if we
stood at the precipice of time, I'm sure, and looked out over
all the toddlers in the world that ever existed, I'm sure we
could find some toddlers who counted like this. 3, 11, 12,
65, 300. You know? Yeah, Jesse's raising his hand
back there. I count like that now, he says. But you know, and I
mean, you hear children when they're learning to count, when
they're a year and a half, two years old, and they're doing
some nonsense. And we think it's cute, but if
they do that in their 11th grade math class, they're not gonna
go very far. And so the teacher will say,
no, no, no, no, sweet child, that is wrong. Let me teach you,
let me indoctrinate you on true counting. It starts with one,
then two, and guess what? It divides that child. It divides
that child from the ignorance of yesterday into the knowledge
of today. That's what teaching does. And
if this child loves the crazy, if he thinks five is 300 and
wants to stand on that so that he can be very, very rich when
he gets $205 bills and thinks he's a millionaire, but he won't
go very far in reality. Just because someone believes
in something doctrinally doesn't make it right. And if people
want to hold on to their doctrinal stands, and their doctrinal beliefs,
but yet the truth of Scripture violates that. It causes division. It causes division internally
with us as we learn new things. I mean, imagine the doctrines
of grace being taught to us for the very first time. Imagine
that first person, or remember, not imagine, you've experienced
it. Remember the first time someone tried to tell you that God was
sovereign, but you had grown up with an evangelical God who
is at the whim, who works at the whims of creatures. Remember
that? You think, well that's not the
God I worship. Of course not, because the God that we worshiped
at that particular time was a caricature, not necessarily the true God
of the Bible. And it wasn't that we, some of us were lost, some
of us were not lost, but we were ignorant. So that doctrine that
we learned, the teaching of who God really is, that He's sovereign
and He rules over all things, divided our own minds. And that's
where we see that we should not be double-minded. We should land
on what is true and stand in it and not be tossed to and fro
by every wind of what? Doctrine that comes about. Because
if we're learning wrongly and we hear the right thing, it's
going to divide us. Not only does it divide us internally,
it divides us relationally with each other. I mean, if I believe
the sky is blue and you believe the sky is red, either something's
wrong with our eyes or the knowledge of color. Or either we're colorblind
or we're just making stuff up. Or sometimes people just like
to be contrarian. They just like to cause problems. Just on the
stance of principle in their own minds, they want to be the
guy who plays, quote, the devil's advocate and just likes to stir
division. Well, we see what Paul says about
those types of people in the church. Warn them once. Warn
them twice. And then what? Have nothing else
to do with them. Why? Because the spirit of wanting
to be divisive is not the spirit of Christ. It's the spirit of
the flesh. And so when those people who are divisive, they
repent of that and they come back and say, you know, I'm sorry.
Then we can hang out with them because there's nothing worse
than being around somebody who everything they say, there's
always a contradictory statement. So division happens in doctrine. And so when we learn the gospel
of Jesus Christ, it divides with each other sometimes. And it's
a sad thing. I wish everybody could get along
all the time. But in true unity, we don't have
unity because we are all doing the same thing. We don't have
unity because we all dress in the same clothes. I mean, you
know, the clothes of the future, the spacesuits that we're all
going to wear in, you know, 20 or 30 years, and we're all going
to dress alike. We don't have unity because we
all comb our hair a certain way, or dye it a certain color, or
have certain color contact lens on, or carry the same kind of
Bible, same color shoes, etc. We don't have unity because of
that. We have unity because we believe the same truth. We have
unity because we have the same Spirit within us. We have one
Spirit, one faith, one Lord, one baptism. It is the Spirit
of Christ. It is God the Holy Spirit who indwells His people.
And so we have a, what I like to call, a spontaneous. What
does that mean? Instant. Supernatural, what does
that mean? It's not of this world, it's
of God, it's divine? Affection for one another that
just supersedes the affection that we have with relationships
in the world. So that when we have this in unity and what we
know and who we know more specifically, when someone else comes along
that differs with us, it's difficult. It's difficult. Now, some of
these things that we might disagree on are what we would call peripheral. They're on the outside. They're
out here. They're non-essential. They're
important, but non-essential to salvation. We don't differ
on who Jesus is, on who God is, on who we are, on what sin is
and what salvation is. We don't differ on the fact that we can't
differ on knowing that it is sovereign grace, it is election,
it is faith alone, it is through Christ alone, that the Word of
God is the authority of all things for the church and over the church
and over the lost even. We can't disagree on those and
call ourselves unity. But we can disagree on certain
other points and still be in unity in the Spirit. But these
things do not divide us relationally. But when Jesus came on the scene,
he divided people terribly. As a matter of fact, the other
gospel accounts say that Jesus says, I did not come to bring
priests, but to bring a sword. He uses the example. He says,
I came to pit father against daughter, and mother against
son, and that your enemies will be those of your own households.
Now, I don't want you to raise your hand, but I'm pretty sure
that some of us in this room have dealt with enemies in our
own household because of the truth of the gospel. And it may
not be those that live under our roof, but it may be our blood
relatives, our fathers, mothers, grandparents, siblings, children,
and the like. And all them cousins and stuff.
I mean, you know, we got all... I mean, there's a lot of relationships
that could go sour. And those of you who know the
history of Grace Truth Church from the very beginning, I mean, we
were caught off guard, and Brother Luke was caught off guard, and
there's a lot of us caught off guard by the accusations and
the things. Why? Where is this coming from?
What's happening? And then you never could get
the answer, but it all boiled down to what we believed about
who God is, and what we believed about who man is, and what we
believed about who Jesus is, and what we believed about the
difference that makes when it comes to eternity. And so, let's
get out of our mind that division is of the devil. Now, does the
devil cause division? Absolutely. He can cause it right
in the midst of us. He can cause it right in the
midst of our own minds. He can cause it in the midst of everything.
But, the devil is not the one at work. when doctrine and truth
divide people. The Lord is the one at work.
And even in those wicked areas where the devil is dividing,
guess what? He is working under the sovereign rule of God so
that we as the church do not fear, though we may grieve, and
we do not worry and fret and have anxiety about tomorrow,
like I was talking about in the beginning of the service today, but we
rest in the sufficiency of Jesus Christ. Sometimes all we can
do is go, I don't, I can't do this. That might be the depth
of our faith in some issues. I can't do this, God, it's yours.
And it's not, you know, sometimes we think when I say these things,
I believe sometimes you all think that, I mean, it's got to be
this deep spiritual piety of walking with our hands folded
and not a worry on our, we're trusting in the Lord, let watch
him work. You think that's the way the Israelites looked in
Exodus? No, they were a little scared. Is that the way it works
in the face of cancer? Is that the way it works in the
face of relational strife? Is that the way it works in uncertainty?
No. We feel the emotion and the gravity of that, but at the same
time we have a resolve that we can't explain. We have a peace
that surpasses the knowledge of humanity, the logic and the
rationale of this world. We have a certainty that cannot
be touched, but a certainty that is eternal. And so we get to
this part here in chapter 5. Chapter 5 and chapter 6 and chapter
7 of John's Gospel, things go from inquiry to hatred. People aren't just trying to
figure out who Jesus is and just aggravated by Him. They hate
Him. Especially the religious leaders of His day, the Pharisees
and the Sadducees. You start seeing this uptick
of hostility toward Jesus Christ. Why is that? Why is that? Well, number one, He's back in
Jerusalem. You see, this is just a narrative. After this, there
was a feast of the Jews. How long was he in Galilee? He
was in Galilee a long time. That's why we know that this is not
one of the main feasts. It's not Passover, it's not this,
it's not that, it's some other obscure feast. There's a lot
of people who have idea, but I mean, he was in Galilee a long
time, and so he did not just go to Galilee for a couple of
days and then come up here a couple of months and then come back.
This is not a Passover feast because it's not named. It's
not necessary to name it. Why is it important? Because
Jesus went to Jerusalem. That's why it's important. This
history is to show us that Jesus went back to the very place that
just rejected Him. Jesus went to the very place
that people hated Him. Jesus went to the very location
of the very people that were going to eventually, because
of their bitterness and because of their frustration, hang them
on a cross. But Jesus was not bitter. Jesus was not fearful. Jesus was not sad because of
his rejection. Jesus was on mission. Just like
when he left Jerusalem the first time and he went to Samaria.
Then he went to Samaria and then went back to Galilee. And he
left Galilee and went back to Jerusalem. Every time he goes to Jerusalem,
he's rejected and he's hated, but he continues to go back.
Why? Because it is the sovereign command of God the Father. It
is the ministry that Jesus was given to proclaim the gospel
to the world. So he goes to the world. He goes
to the world and he goes out and he preaches the truth and
he proves that he is God by the miracles that he performs. And
every time he gives more evidence of who he says he is, they hate
Him even more and they have more and more unbelief. Every time
the grace of God is given through the proclamation of the gospel
and through the evidences of supernatural miracles, they hate
Him even more because their heart is hardened. Just like God hardened
the heart of Pharaoh by taking away the plagues and taking away
the suffering, it is the grace of God that hardens the natural
man. And it is only by a miracle that God through the Holy Spirit
can take a man's heart and turn him into a believer, turn him
into someone who wants to hear and see and understand and comprehend
and embrace and believe. It is the work of God through
the hearing of the gospel. This is about the grace of God
through Jesus Christ continuing to go back to the very people
who could not see Him, who would not see Him, and who hated the
very essence of His being. What would we do? I mean, isn't
it easy just to disappear and just move out of town when things
go bad? Isn't it just easy just to find
another job, to find another spouse, to find another family,
to find another landlord, to find another this, to find another... That's the MO of our culture.
And sadly, it's no different in the construction and the confines
of the congregations of our culture. People in the church divorce
and leave and do all sorts of things equally as people who
are not in the church in our day, in our country. But Jesus
returns to Jerusalem because He wasn't bitter, He wasn't fearful.
He had a task and in the end this ultimate task was His grace
and mercy and truth would land Him on the cross and cause Him
to be killed because that is the reason He came. See, what
do we see? Later on in John, you'll see
this. Jesus is saying, we've got to go to Jerusalem. What
does Peter and the rest of them say? No, no, no, no, we don't
have to go there. They're looking for you. They're looking for
you. Let's just chill out. We've got a good ministry going
on. These people love us down here. Let's go where God is working.
And you'll see in John 5 where Jesus talks about God is working.
He is working in Jerusalem. Let's go where God is working.
We know God is working there because look at what's happening.
People love us. But God is working where people hate us. God is
working where people don't want the gospel and He's working where
people do want the gospel. The question is, where is God
working? Everywhere. When is He working? All the time.
And for whose sake is He working? Trick question. His own glory.
His own glory for the good of His people. But it's for His
own glory because God is glorified when His people, when His people
Celebrate him and worship him for his glorious grace. God is
glorified when God brings judgment upon wickedness God is glorified
when people come to faith and God is glorified when people
reject it reject the truth of Christ. That's difficult But
God is glorified. God is not grieved when his plans
come to pass He he is glad He is glad and that's a whole nother
sermon because then we're talking about some things known as the
impassibility of God And we don't really want to get in that this
morning But Jesus goes back to Jerusalem and we should learn
from this. Paul would even tell us that everywhere he went he
had no idea what to expect except one thing, imprisonment and suffering.
Remember that? No matter what, Paul says, I
don't know what's going to happen, I don't know what kind of ministry
we're going to see, I don't know what kind of fruitfulness we're going
to see, but we know that we're going to see suffering. So we can take
comfort in that, that Jesus, when Paul says, I suffer as Christ
suffered, when Paul teaches us that we and our sufferings fill
up what is lacking in the suffering of Christ for the sake of the
elect, for the sake of the church. Friends, when are we most encouraged? Are we most encouraged if I set
up a microphone and say, it's testimony time, we should do
this in our church in California, on like the Sunday evening services,
like the third or fourth Sunday every month, we'd have a time
of 15 minutes where people come up and just tell the church what
the Lord's been doing. And the first few months that
we did that, or they had been doing it for years, but the first
few months that I got there, it was always, you know, well, I'm
so glad God gave me a new job. All right, praise God. I mean,
does God not give all good things? The Bible says all good things.
And then, I'm so glad God healed my mother. Wow, praise the Lord
for that. I'm not making light of those things. But that's all
it was. God gave me a car. You know, God gave me a new wardrobe.
Just somebody drove up with a whole truck full of clothes. I'm so
thankful for it. You know, but nobody ever praised God for anything
bad. Nobody ever prays God for any
suffering. Nobody ever prays God for the gospel. And so I
got up one of those weeks and I said, here's how we want this
testimony time to go. And I just began to tell the
testimony of what God had been doing in my life. And tell the
testimony of how God was continuing to hold me in a place of joy,
though I was right there on the edge of depression almost every
day. And then I began, and then it
transformed. People felt the freedom, and then all of a sudden
it was like, wait a minute, we said 15 minutes. You know, because people get
up and just start testing. But that's the issue. Sometimes we
believe that the greatest work of God is that which brings the
most temporal happiness. But sometimes the greatest work
of God is that which causes the most grievous pain. evidenced
by the very thing that God did for the sake of His church, is
to put His Son on the cross and kill Him, that He might suffer
the wrath of judgment that belonged to us, who is the righteous one,
then we get His righteousness. because he satisfied our sin
debt. That's not happy. The disciples
were not joyful. Mary was not excited. Well, look
at my son up there bleeding to death. How awesome is that? John
was the only disciple at the cross. And he was not happy. Peter was
so distraught, he went out and denied Jesus three times. And
went back to fishing with Andrew and the rest of them. It was
a terrible thing, but yet it was the most glorious act of
love that the world will ever see, has ever seen, or will ever
know. It is the most divinely orchestrated
point of suffering that is unjust in the context of our humanity,
but is the most righteous thing that ever took place in this
world because God had forgiven sinners before the day of the
first light. of this creation, so that God
could be the just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus
Christ. And Jesus goes to Jerusalem so that He could be the Lamb
of God that takes away the sin of the world. Because as He preached
and saw salvation come to others, and some Jews came to faith. God saved Paul. God saved others. God saved ultimately, possibly
Nicodemus. God saved some Jews, but as a
whole, the Jewish community rejected the very Messiah that they knew
without a doubt was theirs. And he went back there so that
the world could see it was not in the covenant of works ever
from any time in history that man could be justified before
God, but it was only in the righteous obedience of Jesus and the righteous
death of Jesus and the powerful resurrection of Jesus by faith
alone. That's verse 1. Verse two, it says, now there
in Jerusalem is a sheep gate. And by the sheep gate is a pool
called Bethesda. Some of your Bibles might say
Bethsaida, or some may say Bethsaida, or other variations. It's all
different words and different pools. But archeologists have
come to agree that either way it is the gate into the livestock
area of the marketplace outside the Temple Mount. and is where
the animals would come in, where they could trade them, where
they could sell them for the sacrifices, etc. And outside
of this was a pool. Now, when we think of pool, we're
thinking of some leisurely type thing, right? And this pool is
not what you're thinking. It's not a place where people
are bathing for comfort. It's a natural spring that the
people of that day, they welded up and created it. And you can
see this pool in archaeological pictures. You can see it. They
discovered it. And we see historical writings the third and fourth
century of people talking about this particular pool. And so
springs out of the ground would well up and they built around
them these colonnades. And if you want to know what
a colonnade is, it's like a shelter with columns. And so all these
colonnades, and I don't understand why it says five, but maybe they
had not built any more than five, but the ones they found have
more than that. But either way, this is a place where hundreds
and hundreds and hundreds of people could just sort of sit
on the steps under the shelter of the sun around this water
that would pull up. But because it was a natural
spring, see, I'll go ahead and give you the inside scoop of
what this man is talking about here before we get to it. Because
it was a natural spring, when surges of water would come through
the spring, it would move the water in a great way. This is
one pool and so big that a thousand people could stand around it.
And when they would see the water move in certain areas, the myth
of Israel was, the myth of Jerusalem was, that that was an angel who
had touched his wings down there to get some water or something.
And that if the first person in the pool after the water stirred
would be healed of their infirmities. So all of these sick people. Now these were not sick people.
These were broken people. These were damaged people. These
were people who weren't just suffering from disease. These
were people who were suffering from physical abnormalities.
People who did not have the ability to walk. People who did not have
the ability to see. People who did not have the ability
to move. And there was this pool. And
there they were, and this is where Jesus went. You notice
that this is the purpose for which Jesus went to Jerusalem.
To this pool, and as we'll see, to this man. To this man. Here, in verse 3 it says, "...in these
colonnades lay a multitude of invalids." And he names what
they are, blind, lame, and paralyzed. Now let's look at that for a
second. Here, I want you to see the vast number of people in
need. I'm gonna say 1,000 or less.
If there were 400 people in here, it'd be bad. It'd be rough. I mean, y'all be sitting in each
other's lap, you'd be laid on the floor. Front row would just
sit on the stage. I mean, you know, we'd be tight.
We'd be tight in here. If there were 200 people in here,
it'd be real tight. When there is 100 people in here, it's very
tight. And the plastic chairs are out. and it's very, very
uncomfortable. So just to say that there's three
or four hundred people, if I walked up in a crowd this size and did
something really amazing for someone sitting up here, don't
you think you'd notice it? Imagine the crowd looking at
Jesus. He walks into the pool of Bethesda. and he begins to talk to this
man. The numbers that were in need. This is true not only for
just this place, but this is indicative of all of humanity.
Friends, every human being in this world is in need. And we
may not know it, and some of us don't realize it, and some
of us are in more need than others in a temporal place, but friends,
we're all in need in a spiritual place. And the greatest need
of this multitude had nothing to do with their infirmities,
had nothing to do with their disabilities, had nothing to
do with their paralyzation or their blindness, had everything
to do with their need of grace, their need of salvation, the
need for Jesus to walk in there and do something miraculous for
them that had nothing to do with their body, but had everything
to do with their soul. Now there are a lot of people
throughout the world, and even today, who think that it is the
call that they've been given to heal the sick. The Bible teaches
us that we can pray for God to heal the sick. The Bible teaches
that those who are sick to call the elders, and the elders will
come, lay hands on them, and pray for God to heal them. That
is a command. That is a right that we have
as the church for each other to pray for one another that
God would heal us. But we pray in the manner that Jesus taught
us, and He says, Thou wilt be done. on earth as it is in heaven. Whatever your will may be, Father,
if you heal me, great. If I die, I'm healed perfectly.
You see, that's the trouble. We don't look at death as the
ultimate prize. We look at death as an enemy.
Death is not the enemy of a Christian because we are victorious over
death. I die and I get rid of this body. You know what the
biggest pain and suffering in the context of my internal mind
when I think about my death is what my family will go through.
But even in that I have to trust in the sovereign mercy and love
and affection of God my Father. But here are these numbers, they're
multitudes of invalids. The blind, they lay there. That's their existence. They
lay there. They do not move. Why can't a
blind man move? It didn't say he was lame. Who's
going to lead him? If nobody's there to guide the
blind, they don't see. and they fall and they do other
things. These blind or unable to see, the lame, they're greatly
restricted or disabled in some way. Maybe they don't have an
arm. Maybe they don't have ears. Maybe
something's going on in such a way, but they're greatly restricted
in their abilities. And then the paralyzed, these
are the ones who have no ability to move whatsoever. They can't
move for themselves. They can't walk. They can't crawl. They can't roll around. But here
are these people, and this is a very big, it's not a metaphor,
it's literally what happened, but it's so metaphorical too.
all of humanity. None of us, if we were really
honest, can see spiritually. None of us can move and we have
disability in our will, in our depravity spiritually. None of
us can do anything to advance toward God or to come to faith
or to do anything on our behalf eternally or spiritually. Nothing. And that's what Jesus is showing
here. That's why this is recorded this
way. And it's not just the crowd,
he goes to one. Like I said a minute ago, many think that their gift
is healing. Well friends, let me tell you
something, their gift is not healing. There's not one verifiable,
I'm not lying, there is millions of dollars in escrow for any
person, for any evangelical healer who can prove medically that
they've healed somebody. And no one's accepted it. No one's accepted it. All the
major healers throughout my lifetime, they've all been exposed and
then they disappear for 10 or 12 years and they come back.
They've all been exposed. They have inside scoop, they
get people to fill out cards, they have wires in their ears
and people calling things out like they got a knowledge from
the Lord and they call the address. It's all been, but people forget
very quickly the truth of the defraud. No one in this world
has the gift of healing. If they did, they'd stand, like
I said last week, they'd stand at a hospital door and put it
out of business. If I had the gift of healing, you all would
never miss church. We would never pray for anybody
in their cancer treatments. We would never go to the funeral
of someone who was not a hundred years old. Ever. You would have no addictions,
you would have no depression, you would have no fear, because
I'd slap y'all every time you came in here. I was like, what
happened? I gotta go get slapped. Well,
that's a mean person. No, he heals me when he does it. See, that'd
be my M.O. I'd be like... But you probably wouldn't have
me up here. Because if I could touch somebody's body and heal
them from disease, I wouldn't stop. I wouldn't stop. Because I could
heal myself, so I wouldn't have to sleep or eat. Jesus didn't
go there so that he could provide comfort and healing. Because
if that were his mission, why did he ignore the mass and just
speak to the one? There's hope in that for you,
beloved. Jesus isn't saving His church en masse. He's saving
His church one by one by one. We aren't going to be able to
stand with each other and say, yeah man, I've been in the right
company. It doesn't matter if you're in the right company.
I pray that you are. It matters if you believe by faith in Jesus
Christ as your only hope for salvation. Here's the one. Look at the need of the one.
Just like me and just like you. One man, verse 5, was there who
had been an invalid for 38 years. You know what I think? He was
38 years old. That's what I think. But here's
this man who had been in this place unable to move for 38 years,
not at the pool now. He wasn't just sitting out there
for 38 years going, hey! I mean, somebody was feeding
him and taking care of him. But in some sense, I believe,
and this is an assumption on my part, just trying to get a
picture as I read archaeology and as I read historians, I think
that their parents got up every day, got him ready, and dropped
him off at the pool and went and did their business. And they
let him just sit there under this colonnade. knowing that
if anything bad really happened, somebody would yell for help.
And they just pawned him off on this mystical, hopeless, mysterious,
healing opportunity, and they could be looked at in the community
as people who cared for their son. Oh, well, they put him there
to get healed every day, but they don't stay with him to help
him. They're gone. Nobody's there. Nobody cares for this man. Nobody
loves him. He's a burden. He's in the way. Why? Because 125 pounds of dead
weight is a big baby. And friends, all of us may be
that dead weight for somebody one day. And all of us may be
called upon to care for somebody in that position one day. Spiritually,
without the grace of God, we would stay in that position forever. This man and his condition, it
reveals the nature of his need. He is desperate. It's like Brother
Mike and I were talking before service. He's desperate. But
what he's desperate for in his flesh is just like the woman
from Sychar, desperate for water that she never had to leave the
house for. for like this magic water pitcher that never went
dry. That's what I want. I want to be satisfied in my
soul to know I don't have to face my accusers and those who
turn their nose up at me anymore about the person that I am. But
I'm religious, see. I'm religious, Jesus. So I don't
know why they frown their nose at me. I don't know why the Jews
hate me. Because we're sort of the same. And this man had a need. And
he was desperate. The nature of this man's illness
and its severity is depicted here. He wasn't sore. He wasn't
tired. He wasn't dealing with a disease
that he was just sort of falling weak. He was in desperate. 38 years of desperation. 38 years of hopelessness. 38
years of being subject to the care of someone else. That's why it's written here. Grace is required for this man
to live. Grace is required for something
to happen. Somebody has got to give mercy to this man who is
paralyzed because without someone else in his life, he was powerless. Verse 6, when Jesus saw him lying
there, And I pray that your Bible doesn't say, and he learned.
Because if he did, that's a mistranslation. The Greek doesn't say learned.
The Bible says that he knew. Just like he knew in John 1 in
the recap, in the outline, he knows by the will of God who
will be born. Just like in John 2, Jesus knew. what to do. Jesus knew the heart
of men. Jesus knew Nicodemus. Jesus knew
what was in man. Jesus knew, what, Nathanael. Jesus knew the woman at Sychar. Jesus knew this man. Because
when he left Galilee, he went to see this man. He didn't happen
upon him. It wasn't on my journey. Here's
a good project. Here's a missions project. It's
not how God operates. God doesn't operate on man's
schedule. God doesn't operate on future plans. God operates
on eternal decrees. And He eternally decreed that
He would go back to Jerusalem, the place where He would eventually
be His death, and He would speak to this one man out of hundreds.
And He asked this man one of the craziest questions, because
why were they there? Why were they there? For healing.
The only reason they were there is for healing. This is not a
leisurely place. This is like a nursing home by
the pool. It's terrible, but there are no nurses. I mean,
other people probably had some people with them, and they would
feel the water stirred. You know, the crazy thing is
there's no recorded evidence of any of the history that anybody
was ever healed. It was just a myth. And when
someone would see the water stirred because it was such a big place,
and they weren't healed, and they got in there, they just
assumed someone else beat them to it. And I'm sure there's a couple
of charlatans like, hey, I used to be blind. Woo-hoo, let me
tell my story. Take up a collection. Happens today, why not then?
But Jesus asked him, saw him lying there, saw him lying there
and knew that he had already been there
a long time. He asked him, he says to him, do you want to be
healed? I love creative commentators.
because they find, in my week sometimes, they give me, during
the seasons of ministry, comic relief. And some people will
say, and I pray that nothing you read is going to be like
discombobulated after I say this, but some people say, see Jesus
was testing him. Jesus was seeing if he really
wanted to be healed, what he was really there. That man is
laid there by his parents and left. Of course he wants to be
healed. Somebody said, well, Jesus was
just trying to see, he didn't really know. Yes, he did. He knows. How did he know? All right, let's
go through the only three possibilities that could possibly happen. Somebody
went up to Jesus on his way into Jerusalem and said, hey, there's
a guy there, his name's Bob, and Bob is an invalid, and he's
laying over there amongst all those people, and this is what's
happening to him. Somebody told him that. You really
think that's what happened? No, no. It's not what happened because that's
not part of the course of Jesus' ministry. So the only other two
options is that God the Father revealed it to him or the divine
nature of Jesus informed the human nature of Jesus. What? Yeah, blow your mind, doesn't
it? Jesus is one person, two natures. Jesus' humanity is not
divine. Jesus' divinity is divine and
his humanity is human. It's crazy. Now here's Jesus. He knows this man. He knows everything
about him. He knows that he's been coming
there for months, weeks, or years even, trying to be healed. And
he asked him, do you want to be healed? Why did he do that? He asked the question not because
he needed to know or to test this man's desire or to even
try to offer him the opportunity to exercise faith. Because as
you see by verse 7, the man had no faith. But He revealed to this man,
and more importantly here, this, He reveals to us, the readers
of the Word, the impossibility of this man's will to heal himself. Not only did his will not have
the ability to heal itself, but his desire to be healed was not
even effectual for his healing. It had nothing to do with the
outcome of his situation. His will and his desire had nothing
to do with the outcome of his situation. I know a lot of people
in my life who want to be healed from their infirmities. Who want
to be free from their bondage of things in this life. But their
desire and the freedom of their will cannot affect that change. Brothers and sisters, we in our
lives cannot affect simple things. He was talking to a brother this
week, and he was talking about the free will issue that continually,
for years, since Paul's day, was continually being a problem
that convoluted and covered up the gospel of grace. And this person was arguing about
free will, and this person said this, and I said, well let me
ask you this. I said, let's just say I do have the will or the
desire to do something, but because I'm older, my body won't let
me. What do I do about it? Well,
that's different. If my body is restricted by its
biology, and by its depravity, and by the curse of sin and agedness,
then by all means, is not my spirit more restrained? What is free will? Nothing. Go ahead, choose to do something.
Now do it! But I can choose it. I can pull
out my wallet and I can say like these Word of Faith people, you
big fat rich wallet you and it's not gonna grow. I can will myself to be 35 again
with no back pain and no shoulder pain and no arthritis. I can
want it. I can will myself to be about
five inches taller and about 400 pounds more muscular. to
get my clothes made at a tent company. It's not going to make a difference.
Because I am confined to the body, and to the environment,
and to the circumstances, physiologically, emotionally, psychologically,
and most importantly, spiritually, to the place where I am. And
spiritually, beloved, we are paralyzed. And this man is paralyzed
to even do anything about his physical body. How much more
paralyzed is he to do anything about his spiritual body? And that's the reason Jesus asked
him that question. Do you want to be healed? Now see, I would
think if it were me, I'd be like, oh please, my parents have left
me here, my friends, all these other people, can you just get
me closer to the water? Can you stay here with me just
for a few hours and just in case, can you throw me in there and
let me drown? I'll come up, because I'm going to be healed. But he
doesn't. He makes an excuse. Yeah, I want
to be healed, but look at verse 7, the man answered, Sir, I have
no one to put me in the pool when the water is stirred up.
While I'm going, another steps down before me. What's happening
here? When whatever type of mobility
this man had, whatever happens in the context of somebody else
either dragging him in there or in any kind of effort he tries
to put forward, he can never get into the pool before someone
else. What's happening here? He gives an excuse. I cannot
be healed. I have no one to help me. I cannot
do this. I cannot be healed. Do you want
to be healed? I can't be healed. That's what he's saying. Do you
want to live? I can't live. He's desperately unable. He's
desperately hopeless. He's desperate. In this myth,
in this folklore, he put his faith in the myth of being healed. He put his faith in mysticism. He put his faith in false prophecies,
in false truth, in a false gospel. He's basically saying, it's hopeless,
I'm stuck, I give up. I'll just lay here. Now, that's
a bad place to be, but it's also a good place to be. It's a bad
place to be because you never want to hear of anybody just
giving up hope. But it's a good place to be when we, in a spiritual
sense, understand that there is no hope if somebody does not
act on our behalf. We know that there is no hope
if something doesn't happen. The great thing is, is that the
only one who could do anything for this man, both physically
and spiritually, was standing there inquiring of him, do you
want to be healed? Just like he asked the woman
in Sychar when he says, could I have a drink? And she says,
why would you ask me, a woman from Samaria, to give you a drink? He said, if you knew the gift
of God and who it was asking you for a drink, you would ask
Him for a drink and He would give you living water. The same
way Jesus is now telling this man here, do you want to go and be healed? And this man is hopeless, but
Jesus is his answer. And what does Jesus do? You know
what Jesus doesn't do? Jesus doesn't start with Moses
and say, well, let me remind you of the days of Moses. Let
me tell you that in the beginning was God. who created the heavens
and the earth. He didn't walk him through the
prophets. He didn't walk him through Abraham. He didn't walk
him through David. He didn't walk him through all
that stuff. He didn't walk him through the apostolic authority.
He didn't walk him through the future things to come. He didn't
even walk him through his own ministry. He didn't say a thing
about any of that. He just with his mouth commands
the man to stand up. Something to be learned there. Jesus' ministry is authoritative
because He is the Living Word of God. And if we want to see
people stand up spiritually, we need to teach the Bible, not
debate them. If we want to see people stand
and live, we need to teach them the truth of Christ. We need
to let them hear the words of Christ, Romans 10, 17, that through
hearing they may be given hearing and have eternal life. We need
to command them by the words of Jesus to live and to believe. And then that which we command
them to do, they have no possible way of doing. This man had no
possible way of standing up. This man had no possible way
of picking up his mat, which probably only weighed about three
pounds. It's just straw, sewn together. You roll it up, carry
it like a dish drainer. This man had no ability to do
any of that stuff. But Jesus said, get up. Take
up your bed and walk. Now, the irony is that we imagine
this going something like this, don't we? This man going, but
I can't walk. Don't we? He didn't say that. How do you know? This man's been
an invalid for 38 years. His legs haven't worked. What
is he supposed to do? For the first time ever, he felt
them. And he didn't even need rehab. He didn't need physical
therapy to overcome the atrophy of legs that never worked. He
didn't need to be helped to the ability of his feet and stand
there. Oh, now get your breath. Oh,
this is wonderful. Oh my goodness. Healing is not
progressive. Eternal life is not progressive. You know, you're not almost saved
and a little more saved. You're born again just like that.
Women, as long as labor can be, don't walk around nine months
in delivery. Well, you're almost born. I remember
when you were halfway born. You were so cute. That's a little
macabre to think about. But I mean, sorry, forget I said
that. But in that same silliness, Healing that God does is not
this feeble, worthless, mamby-pamby, sorry, hope you get better type
stuff. It is miraculous. It is creative. Because God who said, let there
be, says get up and walk, and He got up and walked. And if
God has the power to create in that man leg muscle and the ability
for his spine to work and his nerves to come back together,
which in our day that not even medical science can do, and an
amazing thing that God has permitted us to do, a lot of stuff, they
can't do that. If God can speak to legs and
he gets up and walks, God can speak to a dead man's heart and
he can believe. You see, you want your family to believe,
command them by the words of Christ. Get off the moral high
road of wanting them to walk in a way that manipulates their
behavior more than you want them to have eternity. So many parents
that come to me with older children who have moved on, I'll just
pray, can you talk to my son? And I automatically, I don't
show that in my face, I automatically think, what's going to come out
of your mouth next, you know? Because what they want is for
me to talk sense into their children. Would you talk to my son and
tell him he's headed down a wrong path?" And I'm thinking, he knows
that. That's what I tell people now,
he knows that. That's why he's left home. That's why he's in
trouble. That's why he's not calling you
back. He's ashamed to talk to you. Just like Adam and Eve hid
from God, that's why we hide from each other when we're ashamed.
I can't talk sense into your son, but I can give him the gospel.
Let me give it to you. Here, take this and read it to
him. Here, read this and read this and read this. No, no, no,
no, no. I need somebody that's really going to make a difference. And then years ago, I could make
a difference. I could bring that son into my life and we'd shoot
pool together. We'd go to the range together.
And boy, that guy would have loved me to death. Loved my wife.
We had a pool table in our house. We had so many young men in our
house. But only the ones that received
the Word of God stayed in faith. Only the ones that God commanded
to be alive are alive today. Most of them, listen to me church,
most of them are apostate. So hanging out with the preacher
doesn't mean eternity. Don't put your faith in the fact
they're hanging out with pastors. Don't put faith in the fact that
your children are in church that they're okay with Christ. Teach
them the Word of God. Put them under the hearing of
Scripture. That's why your children are sitting in here today and
not in another part of the building playing games. Because they need
to hear the Scripture. Why? Because even when you think
they're doing nothing but picking their nose, God's Spirit's letting
them hear the Word. Even when you can't. Parents,
I know what it's like. Thankfully I get to stand up
here and don't have to fight it anymore. but my poor wife has for 21 years." And our children have heard what
God wants them to hear. This man heard the Word of God.
And this is an illustration in the physical that has spiritual
implications. He says, stand up, get up, take
up your bed and walk. And this command healed this
man. See, Jesus doesn't have to do like Merlin. and do some
incantation. He doesn't have to put hands
on people. We already saw that last week, right? He doesn't have
to be there. We don't need Jesus in proximity for His ministry. We just need His Word. Jesus
commanded, He told the man, go home, your son will live. He
commanded that his son would live by telling the man his son
would live because the promises of God are yes and amen. They
do not fail. They cannot fail. And God has promised us eternal
life through Jesus Christ the Son. Do you believe in Christ
today? Nothing else you do will let
you stand before God justified except by trusting in the finished
work of Jesus Christ the Son. And that is the gospel of grace,
and it is all of God, and it is all of His work, and there
is nothing that we do in our paralysis or our blindness or
our lameness that can affect anything or change the heart
of God in any way. We must trust fully in every
aspect of our being in the person of Jesus, and even the smallest
way, like a mustard seed or less, Believing on Jesus is sufficient
for eternal life. And you say, well, how can I
believe? You cannot believe unless you hear with ears that hear.
And you hear because God's Word has been told to you and commanded
to you. Repent and believe the Gospel.
Change the way you think and believe in the finished work
of Jesus Christ. Because this is where we see
the power of God. Verse 8 is the power of God. In spite of
this man's desire, in spite of this man's ability, in spite
of this man's faith, he had no faith that he could be healed.
Jesus healed him. He healed him. Thirty-eight years
it took him to come to this place and in three-tenths of a second
he got up. No matter how much depravity
has boiled over in the pot of your existence, It's just a second
God can regenerate you and make you whole. You might think, well, God, it's
going to take a long time for me to clean this stuff off of
me. There's a lot of stains on this stove. It's my pot analogy. I visualize that. It don't matter. Those stains were put on Jesus
2,000 years ago and they've already been taken care of. You hear
that? That's why we don't work to please
God for our salvation. We please God by faith in the
good and the bad. We please God by striving to
honor Him because we love Him for what He did by taking our
sins and putting them on Christ. Get up and walk. And at once,
verse 9, the man was healed and he took up his bed and walked. See, this could have been a different
story. This man could have argued with Jesus, but you don't understand.
I have not stood in my entire life. My legs don't work. I have no movement. I am paralyzed. And what happened? He did not
hesitate. He did not deliberate. He did
not contemplate. How many more eights can I give
you? He got up. Because God commanded him to
walk. God commanded him to stand, and
therefore he did. When God commands you to live,
effectually you live. When God commands you to believe,
you will believe. Do you believe today in Christ? He's telling you to. That is
how one comes to faith. It's not through coercion, it's
through conversion. It's a big difference. And then it says, now that day
was the Sabbath. And I'll give you a little preview. As we close
this out, this is why Jesus went there. Jesus went there so that
we could see not only his authority over the impossibility of man's
salvation, and to see the picture of man's physical inability as
it relates to his spiritual inability, and the authority of Christ to
command and create and see it fruitful, but he did it on the
Sabbath because it was against the law to do so. And Jesus wasn't
a rebel, Jesus is the Lord of the Sabbath, so he knows what
is right and what is wrong, and so when Jesus says things and
teaches things and does things, and it contradicts, remember
what I talked about when we first started, how division is caused
through right teaching? Jesus' teaching and actions cause
division in the entire culture of Jerusalem. Because as you'll
see this next Sunday, the Pharisees, when they saw this man 38 years
and invalid walking in with his bed, they noticed this little
straw mat of no significance. And the first thing they asked
him is, who told you to pick that bed up? Because it was a
sin to pick up your bed on the Sabbath. Because it's a work. We see the glory of God a lot
of times, but we peck so hard on the sins that we call sins
that are not sins. Jesus did this on purpose. And it was illegal, it was wrong,
it was sinful according to man. And this is the purpose of this
miracle. As I said in the beginning that these chapters 5, 6, and
7 change the course of Jesus' ministry. It changes from observation
and inquiry to hatred. because he begins to say and
do things that violate the law of the Pharisees. He begins to
say and do things by claiming to be the Son of God. He begins
to teach that he is the bread that comes down from heaven,
that his body and his flesh is the way to eternal life. He begins
to do some things and people follow him, feeding 5,000, and
other things that he did in Galilee and people follow him. And then
when he teaches them after they are like, wow, look at this great
master teacher. Then when he teaches them the
gospel, they go, I don't care how much he gives me or how much
he heals me, I'm done. They walk away as you'll see
in John 6. They hate him. They hate him. They hate him.
And the authorities now have reason and desire to see Jesus
arrested so that his ministry could come to an end. And that
is the purpose that Jesus went to Jerusalem that day, so that
He might heal this one. And the Bible goes on to say
that Jesus left because there were many. Why? Because His intention
was not to have a ministry of healing, His intention was to
glorify the Father. His intention was to proclaim the gospel and
to not save men temporarily in their bodies that would eventually
die because of the wages of sin, but to save them internally so
that not only would their souls be alive, but their bodies also
would be glorified in the day of His return. See, we look too
much at the world that we live in. We look too much at these
empty shells that will be left behind to rot in the dirt. We
look too much at all the things that we gather up for ourselves
and that we're stewards of, and they do bide for our time. But
in the midst of those things, let us pause and let us take
the moment to look upward to the eternal glory that is ours
in Christ Jesus, and know that it is the reason that we live,
and it is the reason that Christ came. so that He could seek us
and save us who were once lost, who are now saved. Who were once
blind, who can now see. Who were once lame, but who can
now walk. Who were once dead, but who are now alive. I pray
that you hear that and be encouraged by the Word of God this day.
Let's pray. Thank You so much for this Word.
Thank You for this truth. Thank You for Your Spirit within
us. Thank You, Lord, for growing us and teaching us and helping
us and encouraging us. Thank You, Lord, for equipping
us to do the work of the ministry. Lord, put inside of our hearts
Your Word and hide it there that we might be able to give it to
others. that we might be able to take it to our own consciousness. Father, when we get down or get
depressed or stop or start losing our focus, Father, help us to
be able to teach each other and to encourage and to correct and
admonish each other with the gospel of grace. And Lord, this
simple, short narrative of how You commanded this man to walk
and he did, how much greater we will see this coming week
when You commanded him to believe and he did. That You changed
this man. that You changed us. Because
of Your mercy and because of Your great love toward us, Lord,
You caused us to be born again. We praise You for that. Let us
learn these things as a people, as a congregation, as a family.
Let us live these things powerfully for the sake of Your name. And
I pray these things in the name of Jesus. Amen.