Sermon Tone Analysis

/" Some time later, Jesus went up to Jerusalem for a feast of the Jews.

Now there is in Jerusalem near the Sheep Gate a pool, which in Aramaic is called Bethesda and which is surrounded by five covered colonnades.

*Here a great number of disabled people used to lie*—the blind, the lame, the paralyzed.

One who was there had been an *invalid for thirty-eight years*.

When Jesus saw him lying there and learned that he had been in this condition for a long time, he asked him, “*Do you want to get well?*”

“Sir,” the invalid replied, “*I have no one to help me into the pool* when the water is stirred.

While I am trying to get in, someone else goes down ahead of me.”

Then Jesus said to him, “*Get up! Pick up your mat and walk*.”

At once the man was cured; he picked up his mat and walked.

The day on which this took place was a Sabbath, and so the Jews said to the man who had been healed, “It is the Sabbath; the law forbids you to carry your mat.”

But he replied, “The man who made me well said to me, ‘Pick up your mat and walk.’”

So they asked him, “*Who is this fellow who told you to pick it up and walk*?”

The man who was healed had no idea who it was, for Jesus had slipped away into the crowd that was there.

Later Jesus found him at the temple and said to him, “See, you are well again.

Stop sinning or something worse may happen to you.”

The man went away and told the Jews that it was Jesus who had made him well."

(John 5:1-15, NIV) /

 

This third miracle demonstrates that salvation is by grace.

This man was in a pitiable condition.

Because of his past sin (see v. 14 ) he had been afflicted for thirty-eight years.

He was surrounded by afflicted people, all of whom illustrate the sad condition of the unsaved; impotent (without power— Rom.

5:6 ), blind, halt (unable to walk correctly— Eph.

2:1–3 ), withered (paralysis), and waiting for something to happen (without hope— Eph.

2:12 ).

If these people could get into the water when the angel came, they could be healed; but they lacked the power to get there!

How like the sinner today: if he could keep God’s perfect law, he could be saved; but he is unable to do so.

It was not the normal scene at poolside.

The bodies were not bare, bronzed and buffed but broken, bent and blind.

Some believed that it was an angel that stirred the waters of the healing pool.

The blind had never seen anything and by the time they heard the commotion it was too late.

Someone, some lucky soul had been the first to receive a healing.

That was what they said anyway.

In many ways it seemed to be a cruel trick.

A tease to raise the hope of healing so close and yet such an impossible distance.

What sort of mind would force the blind and the lame into a race, stumbling around or over those who were totally paralyzed.

Was it God and was he laughing at the confusion.

It seemd that way because only one person ever received their healing.

In an instant there were hundreds soaking wet in the pool and what man could say he was the first.

I guess it was up to God to tell, . . .

if he could stop laughing long enough.

How many times had they pulled the runners up paralyzed and gasping for air, from the pool, just as they were when they rolled or were tipped in.

But they all stayed, day in and day our waiting for the next cruel game to begin.

Someone would win and everyone else would win and that just increased their sense of suffering and despair

 

The Bethesda beach people were not there by choice but by chance, a terrible twist of fate.

It was not a 5 star resort but a last resort and this was no vacation.

One man in particular above and beyond the others knew this well for he had been here longer than any of the others.

He had seen a few miracles here .

.  . and there, amidst a multitude of misery and the disappointment – for every one that was healed the rest remained each time a little less hopeful.

1.

Long Term Disability

*/ /*

*/Here a great number of disabled people used to lie/*/—the blind, the lame, the paralyzed.

One who was there had been an *invalid for thirty-eight years*/

 

[     The things we learn to live with.

He was the senior most of the sick.

Thirty-eight years hoping.

Like many others, he’d taken his dive into the pool but obviously not in time.How does a person live with that kind of repeated disappointment.

So close and yet so far.

There are those here today who have suffered for long periods of time with illnesses and maladies, physical, emotional, spiritual.

Like this man you’ve seen others come and go.

They have received their miracles in short order and you’ve begun to wonder what hides you from the sight of God.

Why can’t he see your need ahead of others?

You perhaps experience the pain of the poolside patients who didn’t quite make it in time.

You’ve been sitting in God’s emergency room for years, unnoticed it would seem.

Maybe you forgot to take a number and get in line.

Your life can become your pain if you suffer with it for a long enough time.

You can tend to interpret life through this lens and pain is not a reliable eye piece when we try to make in an instrument of interpretation.

What do you learn in God’s waiting rooms?

[     Sensitivity for one thing.

You learn how to avoid saying stupid things.

Sheila told me this week that in conversation with my ailing grandmother, she told her a story that occurred as she was grieving the loss of her husband, my grandfather.

This person told her, “Well Percy always prayed that if God had no more use for him here on earth, that he would take him.”

[     Endurance for another.

You learn that you can tolerate much more than you ever thought you could.

You learn that no matter how much it hurts, you have to keep going because it doesn’t hurt any less when you stop.

You learn that when you stop too long, you don’t want to start again and there is that insidious voice of despair that makes you want to curse the God that you love or to feel so sorry for yourself that everything turns pitch black.

[     And intimacy or relational authenticity.

Why?

Because no one in this world seeks God more intensely than the one who suffers.

Sometimes you need to yell at God in order to understand Him.

Many years ago I decided to do that very thing.

I was fed up with empty words and pharisaical phrases.

In my search for new meaning, I came across this brief description of prayer, which I set on my desk and carried in the front of my Bible for years.

I cannot locate the book from which it was taken, but I do know the author, a seventeenth- century Roman Catholic Frenchman named Francois Fenelon.

Although written centuries ago, it has an undeniable ring of relevance:

 

Tell God all that is in your heart, as one unloads one's heart, its pleasures and its pains, to a dear friend.

Tell Him your troubles, that He may comfort you; tell Him your joys, that He may sober them; tell Him your longings, that He may purify them; tell Him your dislikes, that He may help you to conquer them, talk to Him of your temptations, that He may shield you from them; show Him the wounds of your heart, that He may heal them; lay bare your indifference to good, your depraved tastes for evil, your instability.

Tell Him how self- love makes you unjust to others, how vanity tempts you to be insincere, how pride disguises you to yourself and to others.

If you thus pour out all your weaknesses, needs, troubles, there will be no lack of what to say.

You will never exhaust the subject.

It is continually being renewed.

People who have no secrets from each other never want for subjects of conversation.

They do not weigh their words, for there is nothing to be held back, neither do they seek for something to say.

They talk out of the abundance of the heart, without consideration they say just what they think.

Blessed are they who attain to such familiar, unreserved intercourse with God.

 

   -- Strengthening Your Grip, Charles Swindoll

 

You can learn to live in God’s waiting room when the doctor is worth waiting for.

There are others though who conclude that they have to find their own way out and they begin to focus on the tiniest shreds of hope and they chart the course for a lifetime of disappointment.

Some have estimated that there were thousands gathered around the Pool of Bethesda.

They were focused on a mechanism that could bring healing to their lives.

Living graceless in the House of Grace which is what the word Bethesda means.

2.

Long Shot Cure

 

/Here a great number of disabled people used to lie—the blind, the lame, the paralyzed.