INTRODUCTION
Clarice Lukenbill, Spencer, Ind. Christian Reader, "Lite Fare." I overheard two older men talking about their health problems at our church. "My new doctor doesn’t just treat the symptoms, he treats both the mind and the body." "Hmm," the second man grunted and thought for a moment; then he asked, "Does he give a discount if the mind is already gone?"
A lady said early one Sunday morning I was awakened by the telephone. Thinking it was my son playing a joke on me, I picked up the receiver. In a hoarse whisper, the person on the other end asked, "Who is this?" Still convinced it was my son, I replied in a fake hoarse voice, "It’s your mother. What do you want?" To my horror the person identified herself as a church member who had been up all night with a terrible sore throat and was asking for prayer.
When you look around you at church on any given Sunday, what do you see? You see a lot of nice people who for the most part appear to have it all together.
When you leave the church and go out into the workplace on Monday, what do you see? Many people who appear to have it all together.
When you dig a little deeper with people, you find out that there are many hurting people who need healing from Jesus.
I am not just speaking of healing from physical illness. There are plenty of people who need that and our prayer list is a testimony of that.
What I am talking about are people who are truly hurting inside. The deeper you dig, the more pain you see. They have fears of losing their jobs, losing their spouse, their children or losing their lives.
When you look around you, you will see many hurting people who need the healing hand of Jesus in their lives.
Today as we continue our Journey with Jesus we find Jesus back in Jerusalem for the Passover. The date is AD 28 sometime between March and May. About three to four months have elapsed since Jesus healed the nobleman’s son in Capernaum. In this passage we will see the third recorded miracle of Jesus in the book of John.
On His way to celebrate the Passover, Jesus is about to encounter a person who is in dire need of healing in his life. Not only a physical healing but also a spiritual healing.
Today I hope that you will accept the healing that Jesus has to offer for your life!
SERMON
I. THE NEED FOR HEALING 1-5 READ
As we read the text, this must have been a sad sight to behold. In Jesus day if you were sick, blind or lame, you were on your own. The government was not there to help you and the Jewish leaders were not always the most charitable people during Jesus day.
One of the reasons for this is that many felt that if you had physical aliments, that it was because of some sin you or your family committed in the past.
If you were blind or paralyzed, you were at the total mercy of other people. If you could not walk you had to have people who were willing to carry you to a public place so that you could beg for food and money.
Here we have Jesus standing in the midst of all these sick people. These people were lying by the pool of Bethesda because they though that when the waters stirred that an angel of the Lord caused it and the first one in was healed.
When you look at verses 3b and 4, these passages are not in the earliest or most reliable manuscripts. These verses would appear to be a later addition by a scribe who was trying to explain why the people were at the pool in the first place. The pool was fed by an underground spring that would bubble up on occasion and cause the waters to stir. The people would gather here because the porticoes would protect them from the weather.
This was a pathetic site to behold.
Here are all these sick people thinking that these waters would heal them. What a cruel site. These hurting people were putting their faith in some legend.
Just imagine being a person who was paralyzed lying next to this pool awaiting the waters to stir when all the sudden they stir, but since you cannot move, people push you aside and get into the water before you can. It was every person for themselves.
The ironic little twist to this scene is that the word “Bethesda” means “house of mercy.” Here all these people were fighting to get something they thought would help them. The scene here was not a very merciful one to see.
These people were looking for healing in the wrong place. These people knew that they need physical healing, but what about the healing of our spirit, the healing of the relationship between man and God?
There are so many people who need the healing and mercy that Jesus has to offer, yet they place their faith in all the wrong places. People will look everywhere except Jesus when all is falling apart around them.
Jesus comes across a man who had been ill for 38 years. Out of all the people who were sick that day, we do not know why Jesus picked this one to do anything with, but let’s look at what happens.
II. THE OFFER OF HEALING 6-7
Jesus looks at this man, who was not able to walk, he was lying on a small mat that could be used to carry him around.
We do not know how many years this man had been at this pool, but this would seem to be a last ditch effort to be healed.
Jesus looks at this man and asks him what seems to be an illogical question. “Do you wish to get well?”
If you were in this mans position, what would your answer be to that question? I would think most of us would give a resounding YES!
When any of us are sick, injured or are suffering from a disease, most all us long to be healed.
Why did Jesus ask this question? I wonder if Jesus was probing a little bit deeper than the physical?
Many people are hurting and seemingly helpless in their current spiritual condition. When we come to them with the answer to their problem, that being Jesus, they do not want the cure that will heal their lives, their families and their marriages and more importantly, their soul.
Mike Huckabee, in a sermon called "Practice of Patience," (Preaching Today, Tape No. 78.) said the following:
When [our son] John Mark was 4 years old, he was out playing in the back yard and got a splinter in his foot. He came in and held up his foot. He was crying, and he said, "I got a splinter in my foot!" I said, "Sit on the couch. Let’s look at it." So I looked at it.
Then, as he held up his foot and I reached over to pull the splinter out (because I knew it would feel better), he said what every kid says (which I still, to this day, don’t understand): "Don’t touch it!" I said, "What do you want me to do? Take a picture of it and mount it on the wall? I’ve got to touch it, Son. I don’t levitate splinters out of your foot. There is no choice." "It will hurt," he moaned. I said, "It might, but it won’t hurt as long. It will sure feel a lot better when I get the splinter out."
But somehow that wasn’t adequate. So Janet held down the top of him while I tried to hold down the bottom of him and pull that splinter out. He was kicking and screaming and jerking in all different directions, and here I was with the tweezers, trying to pull out the splinter. I was afraid that I would jab those tweezers way up into his foot.
I wanted to say to him, "Son, don’t you trust me? What do you think I’m going to do, cut your foot off? I’m not here to hurt you. I’m here to help you, and if you don’t let me help you, it’s going to get worse not better. Trust me; I’m your father. I love you. I care about you. I do this only to help you. Be still. Relax."
I think sometimes God in heaven must look down upon us, and we must be like a little child who says, "God, I’m hurt. God help me." God reaches in to help us, and the first thing we do is say, "God, don’t touch me! Don’t do that God!" God is saying, "But I’ve got to reach in there and deal with the hurt. It may hurt a little, but I’ve got to do it." We say, "No, God. Please, nothing like that!"
So here we are fighting with God. It is the equivalent of being in surgery when the surgeon has both of his arms up to his elbows in your abdomen, and suddenly you decide that you don’t want to be operated on and try to get off the table. How many times in our lives do we find ourselves on the surgery table of the Almighty, where God is trying to work in our lives that miracle of making us like Christ, and when we realize what God’s doing, we wake up and say, "God, I don’t want you to do this. Let me out of here!"?
All of us have a need for Jesus in our lives, but most of us will tell God to leave us alone if He does not do things the way that we want Him to do things.
If you are hurting today, Jesus is offering to bring healing to your life.
III. THE GIFT OF HEALING 8-9
Let’s look at verses 8-9
Jesus gives the man the gift of immediate and permanent physical healing.
You notice that Jesus did not pick a person with some unverifiable aliment, He picked a man whom people would look at and know that God had healed them, and there would be no question that the man was healed.
The healing was immediate. Whenever Jesus heals someone physically, it is immediate and permanent. Jesus did not walk through the crowd making ambiguous statements about I know someone here has an earache? He went right to a man who was lying on his pallet who was sick for 38 years and healed Him.
This man was going to the pool of Bethesda, the supposed “house of mercy” and it was not until he encountered Jesus that he found true mercy.
This healing showed how merciful Jesus was to this man. This healing changed this mans whole life.
When Jesus comes into your life and you allow him to heal your spirit and our relationship with God, your life will be new. Are you hanging on to hurts from the past? Are you allowing an abusive parent to still abuse you spiritually because you hate God over it?
Let Jesus heal you. Are you hurting from an abusive marriage? If you are letting that step between you and a relationship with Jesus, you are still living under the abuse.
Has life given you so bad breaks? Let Jesus give you the gift of healing today.
IV. THE RESPONSE TO HEALING 10-15
There were a couple of different reactions to the healing of this man.
The bad one and the one I do not want to spend much time to is that of the religious leaders.
Look at verse 10. This is amazing. These people most likely knew who this man was, but all they could think about was their manmade religious rules were being broken.
According to the laws that the religious leaders added to the Ten Commandments, this man either had to leave the pallet to be stolen or lay on it until the Sabbath was over.
The leaders had zero mercy or compassion toward this man. As a matter of fact when you look in verses 16 on, the leaders were persecuting Jesus because He showed mercy to a person on the Sabbath. Also you will notice in verse 18 that they understood Jesus making a claim to being equal with God.
In the church when a person comes to Jesus to give their life to Him, we need to always be encouraging to them. New Christians will make glaring mistakes as we all do, but when one stumbles, we must be there to pick them up.
The response by the man healed is that he went and told other people what Jesus had done for him.
When Jesus brings healing to our lives, we want to tell other people what God has done for us. It is interesting that Jesus just allowed the man to wander around with his pallet in hand. This would draw attention to the man so that he could testify about what was done for him.
I also want you to look at verse 14 again.
Jesus tells the man not to sin anymore lest something worse happen to him.
This does not mean that the man had to be sinless perfect, but what Jesus was talking about was repentance.
Jesus was telling the man that if there areas of his life that were not right, that he needed to clean it up.
When we want Jesus to be our Lord, we need to allow Jesus to clean us up. Our response to Jesus healing in our life should be a changed heart, one that does not want to sin, but one that wants to serve Jesus.
Our desire is to remove or fix anything that would come between God and us in our lives.
CONCLUSION
There is a whole world full of hurting people who need healing from Jesus. There is a whole world full of people who need the mercy that Jesus has to offer to them.
If you are a Christian, one of the most loving and merciful things that you can do for another person is to introduce them to Jesus.
Today, if you are ready to commit the rest of your life to Jesus, we invite you to come forward and accept Jesus as your Lord and savior.
HOW? EXPLAIN.
I want all of you to understand that no matter what has happened to you in your past, or what you have done in your past, Jesus loves you.
