Would you take your Bible, please, and turn to the gospel of John, to chapter 5, where we have a story about a man who is healed by Jesus Christ, this God who works wondrous things, and who shows his mercy to us, well, here's a classic story about what the choir just sang about. John, by the way, is telling us all of these encounters with Jesus Christ and how he works in supernatural ways so that we will believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing in him we might have life in his name. So he's introduced us to who Jesus Christ is, and what we call the overture of salvation in the first 18 verses of chapter 1, and then he's introduced us to different people who have an encounter with Jesus Christ, John the Baptist, and his disciples, and a man named Nicodemus who was a Pharisee and a Samaritan woman at the well who led less than a reputable life, and then a royal official who worked for King Herodogrippa, and now a man who is a Jew and is an invalid in Jerusalem, and in each one of these encounters, Jesus Christ does something supernatural. In fact, and several of them, John mentions that Jesus Christ displays a sign, a portent or a wonder, a miracle, we would say, to convince us that he is who he says he is because he's able to do the things that only God could do his works or validating his words. We enter into chapter 5, a new section. This is a section where the controversy in Jesus' life begins and increases. For Jesus Christ will continue to do signs, John has organized his whole gospel around seven great signs or miracles, but now rather than draw people, they will begin to repel people. Because following these signs, Jesus will, in this chapters that follow from 5 to 11, follow his miracles with a long discourse describing who he is, usually with some statement about I am, I am the bread of life, I am the light of the world, I am the good shepherd, I am the way the truth in the life, and no one can go to God except through me. And the miracles will draw people while the discourses upset them. And increasingly, these discourses, these explanations of who Jesus is, will pit the ruling officials of Judaism against Jesus Christ. Sometimes it's hard for us to read these sections because it sounds like Jesus is making almost outlandish proclamations about who he is. But we have to remember several things. First of all, the purpose of John's gospel is to convince us through the signs that what Jesus says is true. This is how his gospel ends. Jesus did many other signs in the presence of the disciples, which are not written in this book, but these are written, these seven signs are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the son of the living God, and that believing in him, you might have life in his name. Second thing we have to remember is that everything we read about Jesus Christ, what he does in what he says, we have to read in the light of two great events in his life, the cross and the resurrection. For these signs are pointing spiritually in a physical example to what Jesus will do on the cross. The water that turns the wine will become the wine of his blood that cleanses us from all that's wrong with us and makes us alive. The Holy Spirit that he gives, this living water he talks about to the moment he gives after he is crucified. John will say that the Spirit had not yet been given because Jesus had not yet been glorified. So we have to understand that these things take on more of a significance for us. Once we understand who Jesus is on the cross and once he has been raised, as he has been declared, as Paul says, the son of God by the resurrection of the dead, then we will believe. Because the greatest miracle of all, the greatest sign of all, actually the eighth sign validates all the ones before it, destroy this person, Jesus said, this temple, and I will raise it up on the third day, and he does that, making all the other minor signs, just a footnote, to the great miracle of his resurrection. Thirdly, we have to remember that we cannot read our postmodern anti-supernatural, cynical biases into the text. We have to take John as we would take any other writer of a biographical event. John says, this is the disciple who is bearing witness about these things, and who has written these things, and we know that his witness is true, John saw all these things. And the fact that he saw supernatural things is not to be discounted as untrue, any more than if he recorded natural things for us. We tend to believe men and women who were eyewitnesses of events in history, and that is what John says he is to all these spectacular things that Jesus does and says. Fourthly, we must admit the same struggle we have is the struggle we find in this gospel that Jesus Christ comes and he confronts our religious status quo, and we don't like that. We don't like it at all. And that makes us a little bit biased against what Jesus Christ is saying about himself. And finally, we have to remember that it is sinners, even as converted sinners at times. We are never comfortable when God comes too close to us. There's something about the human soul, even the converted human soul that likes God in his place and us in our place and never the twain shall meet. But Jesus Christ is pushing himself into the lives of these people in the stories of John. He's pushing himself into our life. And one of the ways he uses to open up the door of our life is he does miraculous things. We tend to have trouble with these things in our postmodern age, but it's interesting statistic that 20% of all the gospels are stories about healings. That means loved ones that out of every five stories in the Bible, one of them, every five stories in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John about Jesus Christ will be a story about Jesus healing someone. Now that doesn't mean a whole lot to us in the West, but it does to people in what we call the Southern churches, or what we used to refer to as the third world, or the emerging nations. Little Jenkins has written in his book, The Next Christendom, that the practice of healing is one of the things that unites the global South churches in South Africa and in South America and in India and the Far East and in Southeast Asia and in the Pacific. It's these stories of healing that draws these people to Jesus Christ. Why? Well, they don't live in the post-Christian West where because of our gospel, because of the teachings of Jesus Christ, we have followed the gospel into an elevated level of society, a higher standard of living and higher health care. It's a historical fact that hospitals were invented by Christians in the Middle Ages and so that people who live in a country in Europe or in North America or in Australia or in South Africa where the gospel has been for a long time, they have better health care, better hospitals, better medicine, and so they rely upon their medical systems to heal them, which happens most of the time, but in the emerging nations, those things don't exist and they are dependent upon God to heal them and the stories in the Bible that Jesus heals lepers means a lot to the people of Sudan where leprosy is a major problem. The fact that Jesus gives a widow back her dead son means a lot to a people where one out of every three children died before the age of five. These things mean a great deal to our brothers, sisters, in the global south because they realize what we don't, all healing comes from God. It comes either from God's common grace through medicine and science or from his special grace through divine intervention of the Holy Spirit in our lives and that is biblical. Isaiah said of this coming Messiah, surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows, yet we esteemed him stricken, smitten by God and afflicted. He was wounded for our transgressions. He was crushed for our iniquities upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace and with his stripes, we are all healed. I had the opportunity along with other pastors from our staff to go just two weeks ago to hear Dr. Philip Jenkins here in Charlotte who talked about the importance of healing to the churches of South America, Africa and Asia and how that is going to eventually draw them together and may separate them from the Western church that seems no longer to believe in divine healing. And yet in the gospel of James, we are instructed by Jesus Christ to gather the elders together to anoint the sick, lay hands on them and pray for healing in Jesus' name and healing is promised. Not in every case, but it is promised that God will supernaturally heal where perhaps medicine has failed. I myself am rediscovering this with a little granddaughter whose declining health has stumped every doctor she has been to. I am asking for the doctors to be given wisdom, but I am asking Jesus Christ to save the life of my five-month-old grandbaby and heal her once and for all. All of the sudden, all my Western excuses for why that usually doesn't happen have gone out the window and I am looking at these stories and asking Jesus to heal. Miracles are essential to Christianity. My dear friend Rick Phillips, who is the pastor at the second Presbyterian church down in Greenfield, has written a wonderful book called Mighty to Save. And he says, miracles are essential to Christianity in a manner that is not true of any other religious system. Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam do not require us to step out of the bounds of nature. The difference from these and that it posits a world that in its natural state is lost and requires God to break into the world with divine power to heal and to save. That's the difference between us and all of the religions. Our God takes on our bodies, afflicted with our illnesses, and invades our world to change us physically and spiritually. This is the great work of the incarnation and what C.S. Lewis calls the grand miracle of all. Leslie Nubigan, who spent years on the mission field in India, says 1-5th of all the material in the four gospels is concerned with the healing of physical diseases. The virtual ignoring of this work of healing during most of Christian history is one of the astonishing facts that theologians and historians must someday have to explain. How can you ignore 1-5th of all of the stories in the gospels and say, well, that used to happen, but it doesn't happen anymore? Not according to John. John says there are signs that Jesus Christ heals. And there are signs that flow from his incarnation. You see, that is the great miracle. The impossibility that God would become a man and still remain God. It is what Lewis calls the central miracle. Listen to what he writes in his book called miracles. The central miracle asserted by Christians is the incarnation. They say that God became a man. Every other miracle prepares us for this, or exhibits this, or results from this. Just as every natural event is a manifestation of a particular place and moment of nature's total character, so every particular Christian miracle manifests at a particular place and moment the character and significance of the incarnation. There is no question in Christianity of arbitrary interferences just scattered here and there. It relates not to a series of disconnected raids on nature, but rather to complete the conquest and the occupation of the world through the incarnation of Christ. The fitness and therefore the credibility of any other particular miracle depends on its relationship to the great miracle, the incarnation, because all discussion miracles apart from God in the flesh becomes meaningless. You see what's happening? For God to come into our world and really impact us the way we needed it, he had to and did take on a human nature and came to be one of us and the word became flesh and dwelt among us. And we saw His glory, how through miracles and signs and wonders, we saw His glory, the glory of the only Son of God, full of grace and truth. We say in Presbyterian and Reform Circles that nature reflects the character of God through what? Common grace and general revelation. Well, there's also a revelation of God in a special way through the saving grace of Jesus Christ and through the special unveiling of Jesus Christ, the special revelation, so that in the nature God heals by common grace, God heals by special grace. He heals through doctors, whether they're Christians or not, but He only heals through Christ in some instances and only for those who will believe. And that is what this story is about this morning. It's a story about a man who's sick. He's been sick for 38 years and he has a divine appointment with Jesus Christ who heals him. Let's look at this story beginning in John chapter 5. Let's look at the miracle of healing in his first nine verses, the miracle of healing by Jesus Christ. 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, an air make called Bethesda, which has five roofed colonnades. And these lay a multitude of envelopes, 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, sir, I have no one to put me into the pool where the water is stirred up. And while I'm going another step down before me, Jesus said to him, get up. Pick up your bed and walk. And at once the man was healed and he took up his bed and walked. One unique thing that John does is he ties these miraculous signs of Jesus Christ to the Jewish feast days. For example, he turned water into wine at the first Passover of his public ministry in around 27 AD. Here it says in verse 1 now, there was a feast of the Jews and Jesus went to Jerusalem. I don't know which one it is, but if you look back in chapter 4, verse 35, look what Jesus says. He says to his apostles, it is but four months until the harvest. Meaning what? Four months from his work there would have pointed to the spring harvest of pentacost. Calvin says we have good reason then to conjecture that pentacost was the feast of John, chapter 5, verse 1, when he decides to multiply the bread and talk about the bread of life in chapter 6, it's at the second Passover of his public ministry. When he talks about the gift of the Holy Spirit being the living water, it was at the feast of booths in John chapter 7, or tap her knuckles. He's at the feast of dedication, Hanukkah around our Christmas time. When he tells people, I am the good shepherd and I lay down my life for the sheep. He raises Lazarus from the dead on the third pentacost a week before he raises himself. So Jesus Christ does His great miracle works, His healings, His signs and His wonders around the feasts of the Jews to tell them that all those things they looked for on the Old Testament have come with power in the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. It's an odd story that unfolds for us here because if you look at your text, if you're using the English standard version, you have verses 1, 2, 3 and 5. It's you notice that you're missing a verse, verse 4, it's in your footnotes. The verse that is not in the text is this, for an angel of the Lord went down at certain seasons into the pool and stirred the water, whoever stepped in first after the string of the water was healed of whatever disease he had. Now why does the English standard version leave this at? Well because it's not in the oldest and most reliable transcripts or parchment or old documents we have from which we get our modern New Testament. It is not what we call a reliable text, but it also seems to be a funny way for God to heal we know of no other time in the Bible where God heals through an angel or where he heals through a thing or where God would stir water for thousands of people so that only one, the fastest God healed, healing by the quickest. What if you want to see the doctors and they said you know I'm going to take one patient a week, the first one through the door gets healed today. I doubt if you go back to that doctor, bless you were quick. So it doesn't seem to fit, plus it seems pretty superstitious. There were Alfred Ederstein said dozens of stories about bubbling pools that healed. Even to this day there's the pool of the virgin in Jerusalem where certain members of Christendom say you can go and get healed when it bubbles up. What appears to be the case is that this stream bubbled up every once in a while. In fact, Bethesda means Beth, House, Ezda of the bubbling up. The house of the bubbling up. It's at a place called the pools of Bethesda, literally there's two of them. There was a northern one and a southern one, archaeologists have discovered this and they were covered, the Kumran manuscript say, by a portico that was a trapezoid. Remember that from geometry? It had pillars on all the four corners and one in the middle to hold up a canopy over these twin pools. And the belief was that an angel came down every once in a while, stirred up the waters. You can see that belief reflected in verse seven. And whoever jumped in first, they were healed. Jesus ignores that. And he says, do you want to get better? Strange question. For a guy who's been sick, lame for 38 years. Odd question for a guy who's been there a long time. Look before that question, look at the statement. Jesus saw that he had been there a long time and then he asked him, do you want to get well? I think if I had been laying there, I'd have said, excuse me, Rabbi, what kind of question is that? I want you to notice that no one had called for Jesus Christ. In fact, the pool of Bethesda, which lies at the northeast corner of the city by the sheep gate, the scripture says, was out of the way of the temple. Jesus had to go on a special mission to find that, why did he pick him out of all these hundreds of people lying at the pool? Why did he go up to him and say, you've been laying here for 38 years, do you want to get better? Unless Jesus saw something in the man that we don't see. I've told you several times in these stories and you've noticed that. That Jesus is able to look into the souls of people. He looks at Nathaniel and says, Nathaniel, before I met you here, I saw you under this tree. And I know you're a man who doesn't like spin. He's a man of no guile. I think, Ademis, I perceive that your real question is, how am I to be born again? Woman, you've had four husbands and the fifth one you have now is not your own. Come, she said, see a man who told me everything about me. He's able to look into the human soul, this God in the flesh. And he looks into this man and there's something that troubles Jesus about this man. And he says, do you want to get well? Do you want to be healed? And the man really never gives him an answer. He would expect him to say, absolutely. But here's what he says, sir, I have no one to put me into the pool where the water is stirred up. And while I'm going another steps down before me. John's portrait of this man, Dei Carson, says, indicates that perhaps this, quote, crotchety, grumbling old man is not very perceptive and who thinks that he's answering a stupid question from a stupid man. But Jesus is pointing to something. There are people who don't want to get well. Medical professionals see them all the time, they've got a word for them. I believe it's hypochondriac. If they're not sick, they'll invent something. Counselors see them all the time. They call them codependent. They actually feed upon and rely upon the illness to give them their self-identification. We see that in people who are alcoholics and don't want to go for some kind of treatment. People who are addicted to drugs and they don't want to go to some kind of place where they go cold turkey and come off of it. We see violent wife beaters who say, well, I have a chemical imbalance or somebody who's depressed, but they don't want to take action to reconcile, to fix the things that have come into their life and give them such deep levels of anger and unforgiveness, self-pity or hatred of others. Immediately people will say, pastor, you're being unkind. I have a brother who's, I'm not saying that these people aren't sick, they are. That's obvious to any human being. I'm asking you what caused their sickness. Was it that they were born this way? The text never says the man was born lame. It will say in chapter 9, the boy was born, but it doesn't say that. And in fact, if you go further in the text and you look at verse 14, Jesus says a strange thing to the man, see, you are well, sin no more that nothing worse may happen to you. Now listen carefully please, save yourself some emails, listen, not all sicknesses do to sin. In fact, the vast majority is not. The vast majority of illness is just living in a fallen body, in a fallen world where everything is slowing down and dying. It just can't be helped. But Jesus seems to indicate that some sickness may truly be due to sin, at least in this case. Beyond more it says, in the present verse, Jesus seems to imply that the man's sin had bought about this infirmity, deacarson agrees. J.C. Ryle says, there are sins which bring their own punishments on men's bodies, and I'm strongly just to think that this may have been the case with this man at the Pula Bethesda. Rodney Whitaker says, in practical terms it sees wise to take any illness or calamity as an occasion for an examination of the conscience because some could be due to sin. Go your way and sin no more that nothing worse may be for you. That seems to imply that this infirmity was caused by his sin, not in his youth or birth, but for something he did as a younger man that has had consequences for 38 years. Jesus doesn't ask that question to most people. He doesn't ask lepers. You want to stop sinning so you get cleansed. He doesn't talk to blind men and say, oh you want to repent so he does do this man. In fact, in chapter 9 we'll see a mirror story of this that is conversed. It's the opposite. They ask him, Lord was it this man or his parents who sinned of making blind Jesus at neither. But in this case Jesus indicates that the man's illness was due to unrepentant sin. And yet, miracle of miracles, Jesus decides to heal him anyway because Jesus Christ, like his father, loves and has compassion for sinners. So he simply says, 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. So there is the miracle of Jesus Christ healing seen in the mercy of Jesus Christ. Look again in verse 9, now that day was the Sabbath. So the Jews said to the man who had been healed, it is the Sabbath and it is not lawful for you to take up your bed. But he answered them, the man who healed me, that man said, take up your bed and walk. They asked him, who was the man who said to you, take up your bed and walk. Now the man who had been healed did not know who it was for Jesus had withdrawn as there was a crowd in the place. Afterwards Jesus found him in the temple and said to him, see you are well, sin no more than nothing worse may happen to you. The man went away and told the Jews that it was Jesus who had healed him. This was why the Jews were persecuting Jesus because he was doing these things on the Sabbath. But Jesus answered and said to them, my father is working until now and I am working. This is why the Jews are seeking all the more to kill him because not only was he breaking the Sabbath, but he was even calling God his father making himself equal with God. It's interesting that when the man is confronted by the Pharisees they said, not, how did you get well? But who told you to carry that bed on the Sabbath day? Well the man says the man who healed me did. What man told you to carry that bed on the Sabbath? They never addressed the healing, they don't care about the healing. Their religion is more important than the mercy of God, but Jesus carried about that man in his healing. And healed him to open up his heart so that through the sign, what he calls this third sign, that Jesus Christ would become real to this man, but you know what folks, it doesn't happen. In this text, it's never mentioned that the man believes in Jesus Christ. Faith has never mentioned. In fact, when the man is put under the pressure cooker, he kind of begs it off and says, this guy that made me do it, and later on when Jesus Christ meets him, he runs in tattles and says it was Jesus who did this. Here is a divine work of grace done in a person's life, and it is meant with resistance, resentment and unbelief. It's not a happy story. This story does not have a happy ending, and there is nothing as much as we want it to be that indicates that this man ever put his faith in Jesus Christ. In fact, George Beasley-Murray along with him, vast majority of commentators say, the paralytic appears to be a colorless invalid without faith or hope, grace and mercy, returned with resentment and in gratitude, a divine intervention and the encounter with Christ that meets with the rejection of unbelief. There's a lesson here. In fact, there's a lesson in all these stories, and I have just discovered this in the past couple of weeks. I've been watching this as I go through these stories with you. Each one of these five stories about people encountering Jesus Christ illustrate one different facets of coming to salvation. First, the disciples, you must come and see for yourself who Jesus Christ is. It is impossible to be saved without knowing Jesus Christ, too, nicodemous. You must be born again. You must experience a regenerating, a new life work of the Holy Spirit who enters into you and brings you spiritually alive out of your darkness and death so that you begin to understand Jesus Christ and the things he says and does thirdly. You must have a personal encounter with Jesus Christ, like the woman of the well, which is often uncomfortable as he goes through your life with a buzzsaw and tells you everything about yourself, even things you didn't want to know and long will go forgot. You must go through that. You must fourthly put your faith in Jesus Christ, first in the reputation of who he is, then in the word that he speaks, and finally, him as the person whom God sent to save you, just like the royal officer did with his family. And finally, you must repent of your sins. You have to face with Jesus Christ as if you're stepping outside your sick and twisted soul and looking back at you, you must look at what your sins have done to you and go on your way in repentance so that nothing worse befalls you. You must, to be born again, to be a Christian, to be saved, examine who Jesus Christ is for yourself, be regenerated by the Holy Spirit, have a painful personal encounter with Jesus Christ where you work it all out and argue until he wins. You must put your faith in Christ and repent of your sins. Then you will be born again. Then you will be saved. Then you will be a Christian. And if any one of those five things is lacking, you will not. But you know what I'm also discovering? Is that those five things are necessary not only for salvation but for revival. But people's souls get sick again. They get sin sick. They get lazy. They become as dismantled whining victim who has all the excuses for why things didn't go the way they should have gone in their life. And so they usually look for another church. It's that denomination or that elder group or that pastor or those sermons or the music or there's always some reason why they want to go somewhere else because you know what? They're looking to be renewed again. But they take their sin sick infested soul to another congregation and nothing changes. So it's from one church to the other church to the other church and it's usually people my age. People in their middle ages, these baby boomers who started off with a bang because they encountered Jesus Christ. They were born again. God went through their life and college with the buzz saw they put their faith in Jesus Christ, turned from their sins and they had a wonderful life for a while and what they need to do. Not to be regenerated. That happens once. But to be renewed. They must go back and do the things they did in the beginning. They must once again start relating to Jesus Christ in a personal manner, not just through their church. They must go back and discover again who Jesus Christ, he says to them, come and see who I am and what I can do for you now that your marriage has failed. Now that your children didn't turn out the way you wanted. Now that your portfolio is gone and yourself planned the wonderful plan for your life that Bill Brighton, the four spiritual laws promised you didn't happen, come and see. Remember that I began your life with a personal relationship but over the decades our relationship is anything but personal anymore. They have to ask the Holy Spirit to bring them alive again because they're spiritually dying. That's why they need revivifying, revival, renewal. They have to have another painful encounter with Jesus Christ who looks over the last 30, 40, 50 years of their life and says you see this is really not the way it should be. They have to put their faith in Jesus Christ again and again and again and they must repent. They have to come to the place where they say Jesus my life is the way it is because I've drifted from you and gone back to my sins. Once they do those things, revival comes which is in itself a supernatural work of God. Will you not yourself revive us again? The Psalmist says so that your people will find joy in you. Answer me, loved ones please. Most are man who's going through this process himself as a pastor. Have you lost your joy in Christ? Well it didn't just happen. It's because you've drifted away from him and now it's time to go back to him. Rabbi, where are you staying? And he will say to you with a smile on his face, come and see for yourself. It's time to ask the Holy Spirit to give you a new life again, a revived life. It's time to sit down with Jesus by a well or in a library or as you have that long drive on the road somewhere and say could we talk about my life? It's not headed in the right direction. It's time to believe his word, trust his promises, surrender to him, it's time to repent again and say I'm sorry Jesus Christ for what I've drifted into, revive us again and I will find my joy in you. Jesus offers us new birth and a renewed life. You will follow that trajectory of grace that takes us deeper and deeper into him. And without it we are simply left with this command, go through the rest of your life and sin no more so that nothing worse can befall you. I don't know about you, but that's not the way I want to end my journey with God so that nothing worse happens to me. I think it's time to be born again and to be revived. Now I believe that Jesus has proven he's capable of both, amen? Let's pray. Father, we want to thank you for Jesus Christ. Thank you for the power of the Holy Spirit he's given us. We shall receive power when the Holy Spirit comes upon us, the power to be changed, to believe, to repent, to examine ourselves, to be changed. Help us this day not to be like this man who had lived so long in his sin and his sickness that he really didn't want to be well. He resented Jesus Christ breaking into his life and changing things. He had a comfortable religion, one of excuse making. We don't want to end that way. So I pray for every person in the shun there either in one of two categories either they have not been born from above and have not become a Christian and I ask you to give them the gift of the Holy Spirit and quickly, along with that the gifts of repentance and faith in Jesus Christ, that they might be new creatures in Christ, the old things going away and new things coming, and for those of us who do know Christ who have been regenerate but sometimes you couldn't tell that and sometimes we even doubt that. Because of us who's lives are stale, restless, empty, broken and full of some kind of illness, spiritual or physical, help us turn again to Jesus Christ and ask Him to come with us, to talk to us, to give us His Spirit in full measure, to renew our faith and bring us again to repentance so that in turning away from sin we might turn to Him. Father, we know that we don't ever come to you empty handed, there's always something in our hands and so we must lay that down in repentance to pick up in faith all that Christ offers us and what we usually have to lay down is our sin so that we can receive full handedly the Savior and His great graces. We pray this for ourselves so that you could regenerate us and revive us. So that your people can rejoice in you and that you might once again find glory and pleasure in us. And this we pray in Jesus' name, amen.