In the sermon 'I Have No One to Put Me In' by Scott Brown, the healing of the lame man at the Pool of Bethesda is examined as a powerful demonstration of Jesus' authority and compassion. The story from John 5:1-18 is used to illustrate the multifaceted impact of Jesus' miracles, which have both physical and spiritual significance. The sermon emphasizes the importance of understanding our lives in different stages: pre-conversion, conversion, sanctification, and glorification. It suggests that Jesus' miracles challenge lifeless religious traditions and highlight His equality with God. The phrase 'I have no one to put me in the pool' is explored as a metaphor for the need to share the Gospel, with the sermon urging believers to have compassion for the spiritually lame and to fulfill the Great Commission. The sermon also discusses the healing of the lame as a central theme in Jesus' ministry, signifying the transformative power of the Gospel in a believer's life.

I'll be reading John 5, 1, verse 1 through 18. 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, 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. And that day was the Sabbath. The Jews therefore said to him, who was cured, It is the Sabbath. It is not lawful for you to carry your bed." He answered them, He who made me well said to me, Take up your bed and walk. Then they asked him, Who is the man who said to you, Take up your bed and walk?

But the one who was healed did not know who it was, for Jesus had withdrawn, a multitude being in that place. Afterward, Jesus found him in the temple and said to him, see, you have been made well. Sin no more, lest a worse thing come upon you." The man departed and told the Jews that it was Jesus who had made him well. For this reason the Jews persecuted Jesus and sought to kill him because he had done these things on the Sabbath. But Jesus answered them, my father has been working until now, and I have been working.

Therefore the Jews sought all the more to kill him, because he not only broke the Sabbath, but also said that God was his Father, making himself equal with God. Please pray with me. Father, we are gathered this morning here really for one purpose, and that is to glorify your name and your son, Jesus Christ. And Lord, we do this imperfectly and we need your help. We ask that you would pierce our hearts this morning with this passage from your word that that it would penetrate deep within us Lord that we would not only be encouraged as we see the compassion and the power of Christ towards this man, but also be challenged Lord to have that same compassion upon others and Lord that our faith would be great as we look to you and your power to heal and to save.

Father, help our minds to be sharpened this morning. Pray that we would lay aside all distractions and please be with Scott as he comes this morning. Lord, give him wisdom and power in your spirit to proclaim these things to us. In Christ's name we pray, amen. This great passage before us teaches us to understand every era of our lives.

It teaches us to understand our lives in our pre-conversion state. It helps us to understand our salvation. It helps us also to understand what happens after you're converted. It helps us to understand our sanctification, and it also helps us to understand what life will be like in heaven. And this miracle is, of course, the healing of the lame man in the pool of Bethesda.

This is the third miracle that Jesus performs in recording the Gospel of John. You remember John only records nine miracles. The other Gospel writers record dozens of them and of course John says if everything that Jesus did was written down even the whole world couldn't contain the books so but this is the third miracle that Jesus records and these miracles always have a double meaning they have a spiritual meaning for example Jesus has already he had turned water into wine you know he meaning He makes everything better than it was and it keeps getting better. He healed the lame man, or He healed the nobleman's son, and he's telling us that the sick, even at the point of death, can be made well. And by the way, they will be made well.

Every sickness will be healed, at least if not here in heaven. And then now with the nobleman at the pool, we learn that he makes the lame walk. And this is the power of Jesus Christ to heal physically and to sanctify spiritually and to finally glorify eternally. The healing power of the lame man gives us many things to consider about every era of our lives. We learn that Jesus cures our lame lives.

Jesus cures our lame lives and He makes it so that we walk places we never walked before and we see things we never saw before and we experience changes that we never dreamed could happen in our lives. And we do things that we never did before. And this miracle, of course, it was so offensive to the Jews that they wanted to kill him. And of course when he did this miracle he was confronting their dead lifeless religion, their legalistic church, and Jesus also did this miracle for a very specific reason, and that was to declare that he was equal with God. So there are two very powerful throw-offs of this miracle.

Now, In the narrative here, we read that there were multitudes of sick people sitting in these five porches of the Pool of Bethesda. And when I read that, I thought, you know, He must be speaking as a parable in a way. He's speaking literally. But also, you know, there are multitudes of sick people in the world. I think it's a picture of the world the way it really is.

There are multitudes of sick and blind and lame. And we need a physician. We need somebody to put us in that pool. We need to get in that pool where we can be healed. But here, No one was there to put them into the healing pool.

There's so many gripping phrases in this narrative. I have no one to put me in the pool. What does that mean? I think all of us have felt that at different times in our lives. And all of us have needed somebody to put us in the pool at different times in our lives.

You know, like for example, think back in the days before you were converted. You needed somebody to tell you. You needed somebody to put you in the pool. You realized you weren't in the pool of living waters. You knew that the waters you were swimming in were polluted.

You realized that. But you didn't really know how to get in that healing pool. You might have tried everything. Every psychological trip, every kind of food, every kind of lifestyle jag you could figure out to try to get yourself right. But you realize that you weren't in the right pool, and you needed somebody to get you there.

I think this has implications For all of us who have been called to fulfill the Great Commission, there's a multitude of sick people out there. And there's nobody to put them in the pool. There's nobody to tell them. So that phrase alone, there's so many phrases like that, but there is no one to help this man. There is no one to get him in the pool.

In our terms, there's no one to share the gospel with them. There's no one who's going. There's no one who has it in their heart to speak to them about their sin and also the healing waters of that pool that can swirl around them and give them life. You know, Jesus said that only the sick need a physician, and only the great physician can heal and bring the healing waters. Now, there's a three-fold thrust here that this miracle bears witness to.

Now, the first is that, on the one hand, Jesus is declaring his authority over the lame and over every bodily function. Secondly, he is denouncing a false religion which had lost its delight in the Sabbath, just doing stuff on the Sabbath that was right but not completely right. And then thirdly, he was claiming that he was equal with God. So that's the scope of what we find here, and it's really a parable of a changed life. Now, this man was in this condition for a long time, 38 years, and I think it should also help us to think about our own lives, you know, like in this way, is this true?

What we are now is what we will be. Is that true? And I think this parable would help us to say no, it's not it's not completely true Because we can be redeemed and we can we can be sanctified we can't change And we can swim in living waters. You know, what was doesn't have to be. Because Jesus is the healer of the lame.

And maybe you've been lame in one area or another. But don't forget that God is sovereign and He's powerful to heal you of your lameness. Just saying that, I can think of, you know, before the back of my eyes I see various areas of lameness in my own life. Is there any hope? Well, there is where Jesus is and where the healing waters are flowing there's always hope.

So as you can see I've broken this down into three sections. If you have an outline in front of you, then the first section in verses 1 through 9, Jesus goes to the feast and he heals this lame man. So we'll talk about that first. Then we'll go to the second section where the Jews confront the man for violating the Sabbath because he picked up his bed and he walked. That's in verses 9 through 15.

And then in verses 16 through 18, there's the persecution of Jesus. And really, what is the revelation of why Jesus did this miracle? So let's begin in this first section where Jesus goes to the feast and he heals this lame man. Jesus goes and he's seeking the lost among the religious. Did you get that?

He's going to the religious people to find the lost. And by the way, sometimes we think in our era, well, there's so many lost people in churches. That's nothing. That's not new. It's always been that way.

And he goes where dead religion is being practiced. And interestingly enough, when Jesus goes into the places of dead religion, he's not defiled by it. He's not against going into the places where there's dead religion, which sometimes we're not willing to do such a thing. Okay, so we read these words, after this there was a feast of the Jews and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. You know, after this, after the healing of the nobleman's son, Jesus, he celebrated the feast.

We're not exactly sure what feast this was. There were seven feasts of Israel and, you know, so he went up to the feast. Interesting, he went up to Jerusalem. That language is really language that goes all the way back to the Old Testament in the songs of ascent. Psalm 120 to Psalm 134, there are 15 of them.

And there are songs that the children of Israel would sing as they went up to the feast. You can just picture families walking along these dirt roads going up to the feast. They're going up to Jerusalem because Jerusalem was on a hill. So he went up to the feast. Jesus had done this many, many times before, maybe over 200 times in his life.

The Bible says that Jesus went to all the feasts. He definitely went to every Passover. So this was something that Jesus had been doing his whole life long. And he was going up to the feast even of a religion that had gone corrupt and gone dead. And I think there's something that we can learn from Jesus about our lives.

Jesus, you know, did not forsake the assembling of himself with the brethren. And even though the temple was in the hands of hypocritical men, he still went up to those feasts. And I think we have to be very careful that we're not the kind of people who have to wait for perfection to be part of a church somewhere. There are never perfect men or perfect people in churches, neither perfect men presiding over those churches or the people who attend those churches. This is just a reality of life, and God brings his people together so that he might truly save some.

And, you know, can we be a part of a church or a major denomination where you can identify problems? I mean, you know, I'm actually part of a network of about 500 churches And some of them are sick. But I'm not disassociating myself from them. I want to bring the Word of God to them. Our church isn't a perfect church either.

If we're Presbyterians, can we be part of a Presbyterian denomination? Probably, yeah. Can you go be part of the OPC or the PCA? Well, probably. If you're a Baptist, can you be part of the SBC?

I think the answer is you can. Jesus went to a corrupt religion to speak to that people so that they might repent and turn to Jesus Christ. But Jesus was focused on building his kingdom. He didn't seem to be focused on excluding himself from the polluted kingdoms of man. He entered into those kingdoms and he preached there And he was seeking and saving the lost, and ministering and reforming.

He was not imbibing. There's a big difference. And that's what Jesus was doing. Now the other thing that we see here is as he was attending the feast, he was obeying the laws of Moses. And he went to the feast even though it was led by sinful men, but he was obeying the law of God.

You know, Jesus said, don't do what they do, do what they say. Don't do what they do, do what they say. But Jesus did obey all the laws that were in the Old Testament. And what we see Jesus here in this passage is the one who kept every law, and he kept every law perfectly. He observed every Sabbath perfectly.

For those who don't keep the Sabbath perfectly, that would be all of us. He kept every law of God. And in doing so, he presents himself as the law keeper that we are not and his substitutionary obedience and his substitutionary sacrifice is to cover for our disobedience and our inadequate sacrifices. And so Jesus, he went up to Jerusalem to celebrate the feast. Now, just one more note, historically or maybe technically, about the gospel of John.

You know, as you remember, there are four gospels. Matthew, Mark, and Luke are called the synoptic gospels. And the synoptic gospels focus mainly on Jesus' ministry in Galilee. The Gospel of John focuses on Jesus' ministry in Jerusalem. And so they're different in that sense.

Now Jesus is now in Jerusalem. So verse 2, now there is in Jerusalem by the sheep gate a pool which is called in Hebrew Bethesda, having five porches. In these a great multitude of sick people, blind, lame, paralyzed, were 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 for thirty-eight years. By the way, I read a commentator who said he was a representative of Israel who walked in the wilderness for 38 years. But he had been infirm for 38 years. When Jesus saw him lying there and knew that he had already been in that condition a long time, he said to him, Do you want to be made well? Jesus knew that he'd been in that condition a long time.

I think there are two possible reasons for that. First of all, he's omniscient. But also remember, Jesus went to the temple every year of his life. He probably saw that guy. You know, Jesus was not a stranger in Jerusalem at the feast time.

Now there were thousands and thousands of people there. It would be easy to get lost in the crowd. But Jesus had been there before, and if he'd been at that pool for years, Jesus might have seen him. He knew he'd been there. He'd seen him there many times.

He walked by him before his public ministry began. Now, for those of you who might have read commentaries or you have a study Bible, you'll read that in the middle of verse 3 to the end of verse 4, scholars have wondered if this is a variant, whether this really should be in the Bible. And it's the part about the moving of the water and the angels coming down. That's the part that's in question. What are the principles that guide us in interpreting the appearances of these variants today?

Was it an interpolation that a scribe brought into the Byzantine text? What was it? What about the earliest manuscripts? What about later manuscripts? How do you make those decisions?

We're not gonna talk about that today. But we're gonna talk about it more when we get to John chapter eight, where there's probably the most popular variant or possible variant in the Bible of Jesus and the woman caught in adultery. But I just recognize, my view is that this does belong in the Bible and the reason I think so is that, you know, it might sound strange to us that the water would stir up and an angel would come down, but if you go back and read what the Bible says about what angels do, It's not surprising to me at all that an angel did that and people actually got healed. Now if the people weren't getting healed, do you think people would have come? Well I don't know, maybe maybe there maybe Benny Hinn was or his onset one of his ancestors was at the pool and was able to convince enough people to come and not really get healed, but maybe get a few that acted like they did?

We don't know that. I expect stuff like that probably happened back then, too. But Angels do really remarkable things. In the Bible, they're called ministering spirits for those who will inherit salvation. They, in some way, prepare...

We're not anti-supernaturalists. If you believe in the Bible, you believe in angels. So we believe in angels. We also believe that God can heal anytime He wants. Could an angel have done this?

Well, the Bible says that many people have entertained angels and they didn't even know it. That's what the book of Hebrews says. And you find angels doing really remarkable things. You know, they're guarding the tree of life, they're delivering messages, they're leading God's people, They're helping to fight physical battles. Angels do a lot of things in the Bible.

So it's not surprising to me that an angel could do that. That doesn't necessarily argue for me that it was an interpolation, not belonging in the Bible. We'll try to later on give a number of principles and talk about variants and textual criticism later on. So here is this man. He's been in this condition a long time.

And then Jesus heals the man in verse eight, look at that. And Jesus said to him, rise, take up your bed and walk. And immediately the man was made well. He took up his bed and he walked. This was absolutely a miracle.

This was not physical therapy. He got up and he'd been in atrophy for a long... 38 years! Imagine what would have happened to his muscles during that time and what it would really take to walk. You know, if you had a particular infirmity healed, it would still take you time for your body functions to restore.

But he walked just like that. Everything was restored. Apparently his muscles, his muscle conditions were restored and he was able to walk, he was able to function. You know, so what about this? There are several Ways we can think about this and I think apply it to our hearts.

And the first is this, you and I are lame. This man represents the rest of us. And Jesus came to cure your lameness. And there are three kinds of lameness. There's the lameness of being unconverted, and there's the lameness of being sanctified, and the progress that's necessary, the turning from sin that's necessary, and our sanctification.

And then there is the throwing off of absolutely every form of lameness in heaven. And all the crutches get thrown away, and all the heartaches get healed, everything goes away. All the wounded spirits are made well. That's glorification. I think Jesus takes care of our impotence, our inability, and...

You know, you've probably noticed this. You know, certain millennials like the word lame. Have you noticed that? They like to use the word lame. In fact, I actually went to the Urban Dictionary, and you know, I think millennials probably used to use the word lame because it's now lame to use that word.

It's kind of an epic fail, which really is not now really, it's kind of a lame overused term but the urban dictionary says it's a characteristic describing someone who is not cool and they talk about how people are just lame and they act like someone they're not. Well, there are many forms of lameness in our lives, many forms, forms of hypocrisy, pride. Most lameness comes from our pride. And And so the Lord Jesus comes and He heals us as lame, as the lame. Our lameness may be in the form that we don't know Jesus Christ and we have no power, we have not been converted.

And how in the world can you be put into the water? Only Jesus Christ, by His Spirit, can put you in the water to save you. Only Jesus can do that. That's how lame we are. The Bible says we're actually not just lame, we're dead in our trespasses and sins.

And we need the hand of God. We need someone to draw us and carry us into those waters. And maybe that's your condition today. But also, you know, Jesus calls this man to do something that's reprehensible culturally. And he asks him to do something that is so offensive to the Sabbath keepers of his day that it makes it makes them want to kill Jesus and so he he did something that was offensive and that was he picked up his bed and he walked But Jesus told him to do that.

Now the Jews had a multitude of laws of what you could and could not do. The Jews had 39 rules for the keeping of the Sabbath and picking something up was determined to be work by the Pharisees. Like what is work? You have to ask what is work? Well most people know what work is.

They do. Most people know when they're working and they're doing something for remunerative value. Most people know when they're doing it. It's not rock of religion. The Bible says don't work on the Sabbath.

Well, the Jews created all kinds of other laws to define what is work, like what does it mean? And one was you couldn't pick up your bed and you couldn't pick up anything. You could not write more than one letter. If you wrote two letters, that was work. You couldn't erase more than one letter.

If to erase, the second letter would be work. You know, if you had a piece of thread, you could only make one loop. But if you made two loops, that was work. So the Jews had defined working down to an insane level and that's what this man was offending. He was offending laws about the Sabbath that weren't in Scripture.

The laws of the Sabbath are really very simple. Don't work and delight yourself in the Lord and do everything you can to remove anything that removes your delight from of the Lord and focus on him and do the stuff that he's commanded. That's basically it. There's not actually a lot of detail. There's really nothing in there about what you can pick up and what you can't pick up.

Like, is it work to pick up your crock pot and bring it to church so you can have a filth. Is it, some of you, I know I think I might have seen some Bible bags here in this room, is it work to pick up your Bible bag? Well that's what the Pharisees had done. It probably would have been illegal for you to have to pick up a bag and have your Bible in it. So that's what the Jews had done.

But I also, I'm very interested in this cry, I have No one to put me in the healing pool of water. No one. There's no one there. And there really are many ways that God and His sovereignty heals us in our lameness. Well, he does it in salvation where he gives us a new heart.

He causes us to be born again. He's the one who does that. It's the Spirit of God that changes the heart. The Spirit of God turns the heart of stone into a heart of flesh, and only God can do that. If you don't have that, you just need to recognize only God can do that.

Cry out to God for that. He's merciful. But when you think about healing of lameness in terms of sanctification, there are many experiences that God brings into the life of a Christian to help to cure them of their sin. You know, God might give you children and those children might expose your sin. You know, most people when they get married say, I didn't realize how selfish I was.

You know what that is? That's sanctification. God's dealing with your sin. You might show up at a church and there's even more sanctification that happens there, especially with a church where people know each other. I don't know if you've ever been in a church where people don't really know each other that much, nobody really knows the pastors, and everything is kind of on a surface level, that's actually kind of nice.

There's less conflict in places like that sometimes because people have fewer opportunities to be offended with one another. And so being in a church where people know each other is actually pretty sanctifying because you end up saying things you shouldn't have said, you know, and you do things that you shouldn't have done and people get, they know and they actually might talk to you about it and you might get mad and stomp off Or you might just say, Lord, help me. I'm lame. Or maybe the person who rebuked you is lame. Maybe it was their lameness that made them rebuke you.

That happens too, by the way. But God uses all these things to sanctify his people. And why is this? God wants to grow people in love. And the way that you grow in love is you have an opportunity to love.

If someone disappoints you, you have an opportunity. If someone dishonors you, speaks wrongly, cheats you, you get an opportunity. For what? To grow in love. Well, we'd rather not grow in love.

You know, so, but God does this in every relationship with children and marriages, He does it in churches, He does it in your business too. You know, some of you men right now are getting cured of your lameness because your boss wants you to do stuff that you don't want to do. But God is actually trying to cure your lameness in that, because He loves you. And He doesn't want to leave you as you are. You come as you are, but He don't leave you as you are.

And so there's the sanctifying work of God. Now, I think that, you know, healing of the lame was a central matter in the ministry of Jesus. We see him doing this all the time. In Matthew 11, 5, Jesus said that the healing of the lame was a sign that he was the Messiah. In Matthew 21, verses 14 and 15, we see Jesus, he goes in the temple, he drives out the money changers and then right after that the blind and the lame come to him in the temple.

But something really remarkable happens in the temple. The children see this. The children see the lame and the blind being healed, and what do the children do? Because the children were actually there in the temple, right? That's where they should have been.

They should have been seeing Jesus working in his church, and that's where they were. So the text specifically says that the children burst out, and they're crying out in the temple, and they're saying, Hosanna is the son of David. But the scribes and the Pharisees were indignant. And they said to Jesus, do you hear what they're saying? You hear what those children are saying?

Those dumb children. They're so happy, and they're happy because a lame man was walking, a lame woman was moving in a way she never could before. You know, This was a central part of Jesus' teaching. I mean, even the work of sanctification is dealing with lame things in your life. We learn that in Hebrews chapter 12.

The discipline of the Lord strengthens the lame and the feeble knees. And so in Hebrews 12, you know the passage, you know, the author says, My son, don't despise the discipline of the Lord, and don't be discouraged when you're rebuked by him. For whom the Lord loves, he disciplines and he chastens. And then he says, he's dealing with you as sons, And he's strengthening your feeble knees. And I think a lot of this is related to walking in love.

You know, what the Lord does with us is he scoops us up, having learned so many wrong things about love. And he teaches us how to walk in love, because we were very lame in matters of love. We didn't really know what love was. He taught us to walk in the Spirit. We used to walk in the flesh.

We walked like... When you're walking in the flesh, you're limping. And it's not pretty. But He teaches you to walk in the Spirit. You know, in Psalm 1, your happiness really depends on whether you walk in the counsel of the wicked or the counsel of the Word of God.

It's the way you walk. God's very concerned about how you walk, and the lame walk, and they walk in various ways. In Psalm 23, there's a way you walk through the valley of the shadow of death. In Isaiah 9 verse 2, those who walk in darkness will see a great light. God wants to help us to walk differently than we ever walked before.

In Deuteronomy 8, we find the people of God are the people who walk in his ways and who fear him. This is how the lame walk. They walk like they never walked before. And what Jesus does is He creates a people who think like they never thought before, they talk like they never talked before, they walk like they never walked before, and they have affections like they never had before. That's what it means to be saved.

So I do believe Jesus is talking not only about salvation, he's also talking about sanctification. And he's calling this man to live differently than the religious community. And this happens, Jesus will often call you to live differently than what's common in a dead religion. And he was running against the religious culture. Why?

Because he delights in mercy. And he had mercy on that man. So then, after the healing, you'll see the second point that needs to be made here. The Jews confront the man about violating the Sabbath. And that's in the end of verse 9 through verse 15.

And that day was the Sabbath, the last phrase in verse 9. And then verse 10, the Jews therefore said to him, who was cured, it's the Sabbath, it is not lawful for you to carry your bed. And then the man answered him, He said, He who made me well said to me, Take up your bed and walk. You know, who wouldn't bite on that bait? And he did, and he believed.

And then they asked him, Who is the man who said to you, take up your bed and walk. But the one who was healed did not know who it was, for Jesus had withdrawn a multitude being in that place. There were so many people there, the man didn't even know who it was. And then afterward, Jesus found him in the temple and said to him, See, you've been made well. Sin no more, lest a worse thing come upon you." So he's in the temple on the Sabbath.

We don't know exactly why he's in the temple on the Sabbath. I started writing down reasons, you know, he could be ahead of gone to the temple, maybe to show himself to the priest, because the lame could not go into the temple. Maybe he was just wandering all over the place seeing stuff he'd never seen. He was astonished. He was able to go to places he wasn't able to go before.

And maybe he just wandered into the temple. Who knows? We don't know exactly why, but he went into the temple. And the Jews, of course, confronted him. And Jesus, in the healing of this man and asking him to take up his bed and walk, was correcting false doctrine regarding the Sabbath.

And he was confronting them in their false doctrine regarding the Sabbath. It's easy to have a false doctrine of the Sabbath. You can have an unbiblical view of the Sabbath one way or another. And, you know, in the way that the Jews and the Pharisees did at that time, they had reduced God down to a list of requirements and they had a small view of God, they had a wrong view of God. It was shallow, it was a veneer, it was about performances.

Their view of the law really was just a very wooden view of the law. But for Jesus the law was alive, it was spiritual, it reached down into every part of your life. Like you could, if you just didn't pick something up or you didn't erase more than one word, you were keeping the Sabbath. Jesus says, no, it goes way beyond that. It goes way deeper than that.

It goes deeper than anything. It goes down to the heart of who you really are and what you think and what your affections are and what you love. Do you really love to delight in the Sabbath? That's the bottom line. And do you delight so much that you're just willing not to work and trust God?

That's it. But the Jews wanted to reduce it to a number of things that people could just know for sure. But the deal is that God made you so that you know. You know when you're working on the Sabbath and you know when you're not delighting in Him. I don't even know how many times I've broken the Sabbath today.

I've had thoughts that have strayed into various troubles or whatever and I've had to come back. But I did go to church today, you know, I'm not really working in the sense that the law spoke of. Somebody might say, well, you are working, you're a pastor. Well, I think that the way that I view that, and many of you that, is that it's an act of mercy to obey a command of God. It's an act that's necessary on the Sabbath, that preaching and the worship of God should take place.

And people need to, there are things that people need to do to do that. It's serving. It's doing good on the Sabbath. It's the same way Jesus healed on the Sabbath because it's right to do good on the Sabbath. He preached on the Sabbath because it's good to do that.

But here we're learning about God that you don't reduce Him to a set of rules. The rules are important and they must be followed but that's not the heart the rules really bear witness to something greater that goes deep into every single part of your heart and Jesus made that very clear like what is murder murder isn't just when you stab someone and they die and they bleed that's not murder is way deeper than that it's being angry with your brother so Jesus was saying no you know you're not you have a small view of God. You have a small view of the law. And Jesus was confronting that. And you can see how legalism in a lifeless, godless religion can be so harmful, and how it can just suck the mercy out of the Church of Jesus Christ.

And so I think that Jesus is teaching the Pharisees that God is much bigger than they thought he was. You know, the Bible does say, don't carry burdens on the Sabbath. That's in Nehemiah chapter 13. But that's because the traders were going in and out of the city, buying and selling. That's why.

But the Jews took that law about bearing burdens way beyond what it was ever meant to be. But Jesus never broke the Sabbath. You know, one of the bittersweet blessings that we've had happened last Sabbath day, when our dear sister Jenny, just after noon, passed into eternity. And she entered into delight that none of us have ever experienced yet. We have these little foretastes here in this world, But she experienced a complete healing.

For quite a while she couldn't walk, and for quite a while she couldn't go to church even, and she couldn't visit her neighbors, and she couldn't watch her grandchildren play in the yard like she used to. But now all those things have been healed completely, beyond anything she could have even experienced here. All of her ailments were cured, all of her fears were subdued, all of her sorrows were submerged in that great pool, that healing pool, the pool of Bethesda in heaven. You know, Jesus gives this man a command, and it really was a command to increase his delight. Every command to keep the Sabbath is a command to increase delight.

And he says, but he tells it more, that would even increase his delight even more. He says, go and sin no more. That's also a command to experience the delight of God. And Jesus is with him in the temple And he says, I see you've been made well. And he says, see sin no more, lest a worse thing may come upon you.

Now, the world is full of multitudes of people who want to get well, but they don't want to turn away from their sin. That means that they're never going to get well, by the way. But Jesus is in the business of increasing the delight of those whom he has created. And you know, What does this mean? Go and sin no more.

Of course, he wasn't saying, well, from this day forward, you can decide not to sin anymore. That's not what he was saying. He was saying that there are sin patterns in your life that you need to turn away from, and your sickness might have been related to your sin patterns. That does happen. You know, it's possible that maybe one of his sin patterns is that he was looking at the wrong place for his healing.

He was looking in these waters. He was looking for some remedy apart from God. You know, maybe he was like Asa who at the end of his life he didn't trust in God anymore and he trusted, he just trusted in the physicians. He went to the king of Syria because he didn't trust in God anymore, even though God protected him when a million Ethiopians came against him and he trusted God and they won. He trusted God when he had an army of 400, 000 and Israel had an army of 800, 000 and he won the battle because he trusted God.

Maybe he just didn't trust God. That was his sin. He didn't believe in God that way, where you would put your whole trust in Him. Maybe this man was trusting in these waters and he didn't really look. He just wanted help.

He didn't really want true healing of his soul. So when we arrive at verse 16 in this last section, the persecution of Jesus, we come to understand the reasons why Jesus healed this man. And I do believe that these things are the main point. The main point isn't really that a man gets healed. There are greater points that are being made.

This is true of every one of the miracles. We think it's so amazing that somebody got healed. That's not the amazing thing in the Bible. But he did this to correct a legalistic religion and to teach them about true delight and about how he delights in mercy and that he wasn't meaning that you couldn't pick up your Bible bag on the Sabbath. He was meaning something far deeper than that.

And he did do it to demonstrate his mastery over every bodily function, every cell of every body is controlled by the king of the universe Our sicknesses do come from God by the way And we should always seek him in all of our sickness. It may be because of sin But it may not be because of sin like Job. But it did come from God for a particular reason. And so when we get sick we should seek Him with all of our hearts. Every malady should drive us to Him.

And we live in a world, and I think we've always lived in a world where people ran to the physicians first. I would never make an argument that you should not run to physicians. God believed God's given physicians. But where is your trust? Where does your heart go first?

Give me a pill or, oh Lord, help me to see what my life is like and confront me in my sin and heal me, increase my delight in you, and decrease my trust in this world. And so the persecution ensues because Jesus is confronting this religion and he's also claiming himself to be equal with God. That was the big problem. The Sabbath was probably a more minor infraction to the Jews than him claiming himself to be God. And Jesus interprets this miracle, he makes it very clear, John makes it very clear why this miracle took place.

And I would just submit that it's to correct their views of the Sabbath and also to demonstrate that he's equal with God. Now when we get to the next section, We'll really deal with this matter of him declaring himself equal to God. And the next time we deal with this passage, we're going to begin in verse 16 and cover these verses again because it's part of this long discourse that Jesus is engaging in. And it's a very long discourse of Jesus and but we'll deal with this matter of him being making himself equal with God in far more detail when we develop it next week. Now this is not the first time something like this happens in the Bible, and I'd like you to go to one of the prominent places.

This same kind of thing appears, and it's in Acts chapter 3. So please open your Bibles to Acts chapter 3. And I'd like to use this to sort of bring us to the final conclusions of interpreting this whole passage. And in Acts chapter 3 and 4, we find that Peter and John experience a very similar incident with a lame man, and here it's a lame man at the beautiful gate. It was the pool of Bethesda, the place of outpouring, and now they're at the beautiful gate, and there's a John and Peter, and there's another lame man there.

And I believe you can connect these two because they, this in Acts chapter 3 instructs us as what is the heart of the meaning of what we read about in John chapter 5. Now what we find here is that there's a lame man at the beautiful gate, and Peter and John, they pass him by and they say, we don't have silver, we don't have gold, but we'll give you what you have in the name of Jesus Christ, stand up and walk, and that lame man stood up and walked, and he went walking and leaping and praising God right away. It's a very similar kind of miracle. And then after that, Peter gives a sermon in the same way that Jesus instructs after the healing of this man. And Peter and John give a defense of the gospel here.

And then when you go to chapter four, the religious leaders respond, and there's the first major persecution of the church. You have the same elements, the healing, the walking, the rejoicing, the resistance of the religious leaders and a sermon and an outbreak of persecution. It's the exact same pattern in Acts 3 and 4. And so I think that we can look there to help us understand. And this man was walking and leaping and praising God because he was doing what he never could do before.

And so in verse 11, we pick up the narrative in chapter 3 now as the lame man who was healed held on to Peter and John all the people ran together to them in the porch, which is called Solomon's, greatly amazed. And so when Peter saw it, he responded to the people. So now Peter's gonna give a sermon. He's preaching now when we get to verse 12 and he says, men of Israel, why do you marvel at this? Or why look so intently at us as though by our own power or godliness we had made this man walk?

The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God of our fathers, glorified his servant Jesus, whom you delivered, up and denied in the presence of Pilate." And then skip over to verse 18, rather verse 16. Skip over to verse 16. And in his name, through faith in his name, has made this man strong, whom you see and know. Yes, the faith which comes through him has given him this perfect soundness in the presence of all. Now we don't know if the man at The pool of Bethesda was actually saved.

It's possible that he wasn't, maybe possible that he wasn't. But here explicitly, this man walked because of his faith in Jesus Christ. And verse 17, yet now, brethren, I know that you did it in ignorance, as did also our rulers. But those things which God foretold by the mouth of all his prophets, that the Christ would suffer, he has thus fulfilled. Repent therefore, and be converted that your sins may be blotted out so that times of refreshing may come from the presence of the Lord and that he may send Jesus Christ." That's the point of the healing of the lame, and that is to demonstrate the times of refreshing that come from repentance.

Jesus called this man to repentance four times of refreshing. In verse 22, He continues in this sermon, he says, For Moses truly said to the fathers, The Lord your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among your brethren, him you shall hear in all things, whatever he says to you, and it shall be that every soul who will not hear that prophet shall be utterly destroyed from among the people." This healing of the lame man is a picture of the gospel, and that every soul will hear these words, pick up your bed and walk. The question is, will we pick up the bed and walk? And then in chapter 4, Peter and John are arrested. They speak to the Sanhedrin.

And they explain why this happened. And they speak of Jesus of Nazareth, who was raised from the dead. And in verse 10, we learn exactly why he was healed. By the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, whom you crucified, whom God raised from the dead, By him this man stands here before you whole. This is the stone which was rejected by you builders, which has become the chief cornerstone.

Nor is there any, nor is there salvation in any other. For there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved." And so this healing is really about the power of the gospel of Jesus Christ. That's what it points to. It isn't that a man could now walk, but it's that the gospel is so powerful to make all lame walk. And He will cure your impotence if you come to him.

He'll make you alive. He'll take you places you've never been before. He'll give you thoughts you've never had before. He'll bring people into your life that you've never known before. And he'll do it for his own glory.

The thrust of this passage is not the man and his body, but it's the faith that makes people well and his power to save those who go into that pool. And the big question is this, do we want to be made well? Do we want to be made well? If you're a Christian, you do. You do want to be made well.

But you might struggle with it from time to time. And God is there by His Spirit to help you into that pool. And if you've been resisting the Lord and you're saying, I don't think I want to be well, know who you are. But remember that Jesus Christ does make people well. He does make the lame walk.

He does make the blind see. And this is the power of the gospel. Would you pray with me? Lord, we thank you for this power that makes the lame walk and the blind see and the dead raised. We're so thankful Lord for your power and I pray that you would give us such a desire to continue in this sanctification for all who love you and love your appearing.

And also Lord, if there are any who are still saying I don't want holiness, I don't want Jesus, oh God, that you would take them by your spirit and you would put them in that pool and they would be healed. Amen.