Do You Want to be Well?

It’s interesting walking up here. I hear a lot of the noises you guys make. It’s very interesting. Awesome. Well, if you are new to our church, just want to say welcome. And if you’re new in a long time, say welcome back. And for those of us, I see you every Sunday. Man, it’s good to see you every Sunday. Thank you so much.

So we’ve come to the point of our service where we just pray. We believe that when we attempt things in our power, man, we might be able to produce some sort of good, Wayne. But, man, whenever we attempt things in God’s power, according to His ways, we get what God can give us. And here at Sauldam Baptist Church, we are not interested in what man can make. We are only interested in getting what God can give us. So that’s what we’re going to pray for.

So we’ve been praying all month for our kids’ ministry. Super grateful for that. Grateful for those of y’all who have responded to the prayers of our congregation on behalf of the kids’ ministry and serving in that same ministry. Really grateful for that. So we’re going to take a few moments and continue to pray for the kids’ ministry. Not only that God would continue to use that ministry to create little disciples who are already sharing the gospel with their friends, who are already growing to love Jesus with all their heart, soul, mind, and strength, already looking to love others as themselves, but also that God would bless this ministry with more and more volunteers so that more and more kids could be raised up in the faith as well.

So I invite you to take a moment and pray. Ask that God will bless this ministry. If you’re comfortable praying alongside somebody else, then man, grab a neighbor and do that. If you would prefer just you and Jesus, may you just put your head down like this? Especially if you put your hands out like that, people could think you’re really spiritual. They’re not going to bother you, okay? All right, y’all take it away. I’ll put a bow on it here in a second. Thank you.

Holy Spirit, thank you for this time. As a dad of four kids, I just want to say thank you for Kim and Matt and their leadership in the kids’ ministry. Lord, I want to say thank you for what they do on Sunday mornings and Wednesday nights, sometimes as the teachers for my kids, but also all the time as the leaders for that ministry. Lord, I just want to praise Your name for what they do and how they’ve done it. I want to thank You for the fact that when I’m having lunch with my kids this afternoon, I’m going to know what they have talked about. I’m going to know that my kids have been instructed to love Jesus with all their heart and to love others as themselves. I’m so grateful I get to partner with them in raising up my kids to love You, God.

Lord, thank you for the folks that have committed to serving in the kids’ ministry. Thank you, Father, for calling these folks. Holy Spirit, for working in their hearts. Jesus, for giving them this assignment. I pray that You would do that again with four more people, Lord, to serve either on Sunday mornings or Wednesday nights. God, I pray that there’d be four more people that would recognize that they don’t have to have it all together, that all they have to be is available and willing and teachable. And that out of that, God, that they would help these children step into discipleship, Lord.

I do pray for these kids. I agree with Michael. I don’t think that the kids are the church of the future. I think that they are our youngest church members today. But I do recognize that today’s kids are tomorrow’s adults. And I pray that out of our kids’ ministry would come pastors, missionaries, deacons, elders, but also Christian business people who use their businesses for good. Stay-at-home moms who do the same thing for them that some of their moms are doing for them of just raising these little kids to love You. Dads who would take seriously the call to lead their families well. I pray that the overflow of this kid’s ministry wouldn’t just be conversations I have with my kids this week, but it would be the ministry that comes from these kids decades from now, please. God, we love You.

I pray for the same sort of generational impact from the sermon this morning as well. Holy Spirit, I need You. I really need you. Holy Spirit, I am not content to stand up here and just deliver a decent speech and not actually do anything. And I don’t think that the members of Sauldam Baptist Church are interested in that either. God, we are here to encounter You. We are here to hear a word from the God of the universe. I need that. God, even as the pastor, as the one that’s about to preach this message, I need to hear from You, God. These people here don’t need to hear from me. They need to hear from You, Lord. Would You please use these next few moments? Would You just please use my offering and speak to this congregation? For the person in the room that’s coming in and they are so beat up by life, would You just comfort them? For the person who’s coming in and they are rejoicing over the good things, would You help them to see the need of their neighbor and their friend in the room? They would not just rejoice, but also mourn with those who mourn. For the person who’s coming in today looking to know what is my next step as a follower of Christ, would You speak to them directly and give them that next step? For the one who came in without a love relationship with God, Holy Spirit, would You speak to their hearts and regenerate their souls this morning? Speak to us, God. We are listening. It’s in Your great name that we pray. Amen.

Open up your Bibles to John chapter 5, verses 1 through 16. We’re going to cover a topic this morning that as a young follower of Christ, I heard a lot about growing up. As a seminary student, I studied in class, but it wasn’t until Becca and I moved overseas that I really began to practice this. We’re going to look at a topic called the Sabbath. It was when we were overseas that me and Becca really began formally to practice any sort of dedicated Sabbath observance. That looked when we lived overseas, when we started practicing this, was we would get up Sunday mornings, and there was this little pop-up market that happened on our street. So we would walk that market, and we would have a couple evangelistic conversations. You know, we were missionaries, after all, and that’s an incredible opportunity. It’s literally outside my door, and just take that opportunity. And then, man, we would just, we would go to church. We would celebrate Jesus with our local church family. We’d go get some lunch afterwards, we’d go to a coffee shop after lunch and just read and get some good coffee and just talk, make some dinner that night. And we made a habit of this every Sunday. And honestly, it was that was the season, Beth, where me and Becca started practicing this, and we started realizing the Sabbath isn’t just something that used to be protected by blue loss, nor is it just something that the spiritual cremudgens of the New and Old Testament would get all worked up about. But the Sabbath is actually a gift from God for us.

Did you know the very first Sabbath observer was God Himself? That across six days, He worked. If I can say this, He worked hard. He worked well. He was dedicated to what He did. And then God Himself, who is limitless in power, who is unbothered by the issues that we deal with, who has never needed to put up His feet and rest. That’s what God did. On the seventh day, God decided to rest. And He actually wove this pattern of six days of work, one day of rest. Six days of work, one day of rest. He wove that into, I would say, the fabric of our universe. And He has woven it into us as well. For we are made in God’s very image. That does not mean that when we get to heaven, we will. Encounter God and he will have two arms and two legs and ten fingers and toes like we do. It means that we have God’s characteristics. We have in part some of His attributes. And part of being made in His image means that God, if He Himself sabbathed, He wants us to sabbath as well.

Oftentimes, though, what we do with God’s gifts is kind of like the child that receives that coveted present on Christmas morning, and they are so determined not to break the gift that they never actually get it out of the box. They never play with the gift. They never actually enjoy it. So even though the parents have spent the money, the Kid has never actually embraced the gift. They’re not actually benefiting from the gift. They set up all these rules around the gift so that they don’t mess it up. Others of us, we received the gift on Christmas morning, tear it out of its package, and we’re banging it on the floor, and we’re abusing the gift. We’re doing stuff with the gift we’re not supposed to do, and we break it.

I remember being a kid and getting a Mark McGuire plastic baseball bat as a kid. My parents must have really been into Roids or something. I don’t know. Thank you. They weren’t into steroids. He was just the popular name at the time. Amen. It was a lot of fun. It came with some plastic baseballs to play with, but as a child, I hear baseball bat, I’m going to hit some baseballs with it. Exactly. I’m not that coordinated. I don’t have a whole lot of hand-eye to me, but that day I did. My younger brother pitched me a ball, and I whacked that ball, and it completely destroyed this plastic Mark McGuire little baseball bat. And I destroyed the gift. I abused the gift.

That’s what we do. That’s what we do with the Sabbath, too. Some of us, we never actually take the gift out of the box. We never actually enjoy it. We create all these rules around it. Out of the desire to protect it, we never actually embrace it. Others of us, we may rip it out of the box and we abuse it for something it’s not meant to be used for. Jesus speaks to both.

John chapter 5, verses 1 through 16. I’ll go ahead and give you the main point if you want to write this down. If you need something to talk about over Fajitas at lunch, here it is. Religion offers rules. Jesus offers rest. Religion offers rules. Jesus offers rest.

There will be other points in Scripture where Jesus and the authors in the New Testament will write to this side. And they will say, hey, the way that you are abusing the gift of the Sabbath, you got to stop that. This morning, Jesus is specifically going to address this group. Hey, the way you’ve created all these rules, you got to stop that. Religion offers rules. Jesus offers rest.

Before I really get into the passage, let me give you some context. John chapter 5, it is a bit of a hinge for the Gospel of John. So far, Jesus’ ministry has been mostly received in positive terms. Okay? John chapter 2, he flipped some tables in the temple. And even that, while it garnered a lot of attention, did not get him actually publicly reprimanded or anything like that. And then Jesus goes to the wedding, and he turns the water into wine at the wedding. Those are flipped, actually. And then John chapter 3, he has this conversation with Nicodemus. Nicodemus and the other Pharisees, clearly very interested in Jesus, and they’re curious where he comes from. John chapter 4, Jesus makes his way through a Samaritan village called Sychar, where he has the conversation with the woman at the well, and he tells her that he is the Messiah, the promised one of God. She takes that message back to her village, and eventually a lot of people in the village also believe in Jesus as the Messiah. Following that, Jesus is traveling through Galilee, and there’s this royal official who has a son sick on his deathbed. And this royal official walks 20-some-odd miles to find Jesus and is pleading and begging with Jesus to heal his boy. Jesus does it with a word: Go. Your son will live. Man makes it back home, finds that his son is well, finds out that his son was made well at the moment that Jesus told him to go. That’s been the story of Jesus so far. Mostly a lot of belief, mostly positive reception. John chapter 5, that starts to change. Jesus starts upsetting some of the folks wanting to create the rules around the gifts that God has for his people.

All that being said, let’s look at John chapter 5, verses 1 through 16. After this, i.e., after Jesus heals the royal official son, after this, a Jewish festival took place, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. By the sheep gate in Jerusalem, there’s a pool called Bethesda. Your Bible might say Bethsada or Bethzada. My Bible, the CSB, calls it Bethesda in Aramaic, which has five colonnades. Within these colonnades lay a large number of the disabled, blind, lame, and paralyzed. One man was there who had been disabled for 38 years. When Jesus saw Him lying there and realized He had already been there a long time, He says to the man, “Do you want to be well?” “Sir,” the disabled man answered, “I have no one to put me in the pool when the water is stirred up, but when I’m coming, someone goes down ahead of me.” “Get up,” Jesus told him. “Pick up your mat and walk.” Instantly, the man got well, picked up his mat, and started to walk. We’ll pause there.

This first scene of this passage, if you see on the Sermon Insert Guide, it is a miracle of physical rest. It’s a miracle of physical rest. Jesus makes His way to Jerusalem to celebrate another one of the festivals that the Jewish people have. They need no excuse to get together for a party. That’s the type of people we’re dealing with, all right? They’re throwing these parties all the time. So the Jewish people, they’re getting together for another one of these parties. Jesus goes to Jerusalem, which would have been the hotbed of the party. It’s where everything would have been happening. And instead of going to the temple, the center of all the really devout religious activity, instead of going maybe to the market where there would have been a lot of people congregating and enjoying time and talking about the football game, Jesus goes to this weird place, this pool of Bethesda.

We know from archaeology that this place really existed. This is just outside of the temple structure itself. It’s these two huge twin pools that we think the priests would have brought some of the animal sacrifices to. They would have brought the meat there to wash it off before it would have been lit on fire, before it would have been sacrificed. So imagine you go to your neighborhood pool. All right? Okay, Paul is starting to get it. Imagine you’re going to your neighborhood pool and you see some dudes walking up with some butchered meats. And they dip it into the water to try to get some of the hair off, some of the blood, some of the just the normal stuff, right, Kenneth? Like, just some of the crud, okay? And that’s the water. And every now and then, this water starts to kind of swirl around and do something. You have to create a myth around this.

You may have noticed in your Bibles, it jumps from verse 3 to verse 5. Anyone else notice that? Okay, you ought to have like a little side note at the very bottom of your page about what this is. There’s a second half of verse 3, and there’s an entire verse 4 that’s being omitted from the normal text there. Those verses are not part of the best original manuscripts. So, most Bible translators have not included those in the main body of the text. But in verse 7, what the man is implying when he says that the water is stirred up, he’s implying a myth that was popular at the time, which is this: that occasionally, spontaneously, the water would start swirling because an angel had stuck its hand in the water and was swirling it. And the first beggar who could make their way down the steps of the pool into the water would be healed. That’s the myth. That’s the understanding at the time.

What we know now, because of archaeology, is that these pools are being fed by outside springs. And it seems like on random occasions, water would come into these pools and would just kind of disturb the surface. But that wasn’t so important to all these beggars. What they were looking for was healing. They were looking for wholeness. They were looking for something so much better than what they had.

Just put yourself there. Put yourself, you’re in the shadow of the temple. You’re outside of this pool. You’ve got this body disablement that doesn’t allow you to participate in normal life. There’s dozens of other people just like you surrounding the pool. Y’all aren’t sunbathing because you’re relaxing on a Saturday afternoon in July. No, you are there because it is the only place that you’re accepted to be. And your best hope for healing. Your best hope for community, your best hope for a future is to make it down into the water whenever it starts swirling. That’s this guy.

38 years he had lived there. 38 years he had begged. 38 years he hadn’t worked. 38 years he hadn’t gone to the temple because the temple rules disallowed him from participating. 38 years. That’s about as good as a lifetime, Lindsay. 38 years. He’s been sitting there waiting for something. Waiting for some sort of hope.

Waiting for some sort of miracle to overtake him and change his life. And that’s exactly where Jesus goes. Jesus shows up to this party in Jerusalem. He doesn’t go to where the main partying is happening. He doesn’t go to the living room where all of your friends are congregated enjoying a good time. He doesn’t go to your kitchen to grab some food. No, He goes, I don’t know, in this metaphor, to the back porch where there’s just one other dude sitting by himself because he doesn’t actually feel accepted at the party. That’s who Jesus goes to. That’s still what Jesus is doing. Jesus is still pursuing those who have pain. Jesus is still running towards those who are cast out. Jesus is still yearning in love for the good of those who feel they don’t have a place in society. Man, God’s got a special place in His heart for the downcast and the downtrodden.

Man, and this is not like… Preachers like me, we get in trouble when we start saying stuff like this. Man, this is not like woke theology coming into your church. Man, this is the Bible speaking, that God has a heart for people who are poor. He has a heart for the sick. He has a heart for the widow. He has a heart for the orphan. He has a heart for the people that this world would cast out and call worthless. Those that we would deem as being of less value, God seems to put greater value on. And every time Jesus would mingle Himself with those people in the gospels, He’d get in trouble for it. All the religious folks expected Jesus to go to the wealthy, to the morally upright, to the really good people, to the very well-respected. And Jesus, at every chance He could, said no to them, and He would run to the people who were the most desperate. In fact, He said, blessed are the poor. Blessed are the meek. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness. That’s just my little personal soapbox.

Jesus finds this man. He singles this one guy out in this whole multitude of sick and blind and lame and paralyzed. And He asks him, do you want to get well? What a question. Of course he does, right? He’s there. He tells us in verse 7, he tries to get into the water. He’s trying to get his healing. Do you want to get well? Man, it’s like going downtown to the hospitals or going to St. Francis and you find yourself in the ED and you look at somebody and their leg is gushing. Do you want to be healed? What? It’s like going to Sean Jenkins and meeting all those kids and saying, Would you like to be cancer-free? What? Yes. Yes, of course.

Jesus does this to test this man, to try to evoke some sort of faith, to try to help this man see that there is a way forward. But instead of just simply saying yes, the man starts making excuses. I’ve got no one to put me in the pool. I can’t get down there. People keep taking my healing. They get down into the water before me. And look at what Jesus says. What does Jesus say? Verse 8, what does He say? Get up. Do you want it? Here it is. Get up. Pick up your mat. Walk. And what happens? Y’all sounded great out of unison. That was fantastic. I heard the man instantly gets well, he picks up his mat. He starts to walk away, right? That’s what happens.

Man, Jesus’ knowledge of the guy’s situation, His compassion for his plight, His power to override this disability, He wields these things on this man’s behalf to totally change his life. And I will tell you, Jesus has deep, intimate knowledge of your pain too. There is not a single thing you go through that Jesus is unaware of. From the smallest paper cut that I got this morning putting my sermon in this notebook to your diagnosis you’ll get next month, Jesus knows. That family fracture you’ve experienced, that broken friendship, that relationship that’s never been the same, Jesus knows. From the ache in your back to the ache in your soul, Jesus knows. And He doesn’t just know, man, His heart breaks over that thing. Man, His heart breaks when your kids get hurt. His heart breaks when your family is broken. Man, His heart breaks over your situations. He doesn’t just know what’s going on. He feels deeply for you. But He doesn’t just feel sad for you. He actually has the power to do something for you as well. Man, Jesus Is so much better than just a counselor who can sit with you in the midst of your junk. He’s better than a friend who can try to give you some advice. Man, He’s better than the bottles that you run to to numb the pain. He’s better than the screens that you try to escape into. He is better than all of those things because Jesus, knowing full well what you are going through, has the power to actually do something about it. Man, you will never overwhelm God with your junk. What overwhelms you does not overwhelm God. Jesus intentionally goes to the destitute, He goes to the outcast, He goes to the disabled. He finds this man, doesn’t recoil at his grossness, isn’t repulsed by his beggarness. 38 years living outside, 38 years homeless. Did this man smell good? Was his hair nice? Fingernails? A little gross. Skin? And Jesus goes straight to him, Josh. He finds this man. Do you want to be well?

That day, though, was the Sabbath. It was the Sabbath. So the Jews said to the man who had been healed, “This is the Sabbath. The law prohibits you from picking up your mat and walking.” He replied, “The man who made me well told me to pick up my mat. I didn’t do it. He told me to.” “Who is this man who told you, ‘Pick up your mat and walk’?” they asked. But the man who was healed didn’t know who it was. What? Ow, you know every doctor that’s ever worked on your body, right? I hear you recommending these doctors. You’re like, you’re trading like playing cards with church members. Like, you got to go to this guy for your knee, you got to go to this guy for your shoulder. If you have a heart issue, go to this guy. I hear it all the time. This guy is ignorant of who Jesus is. I don’t know. He told me to do it. I just did it. I didn’t even look at His face. Jesus had slipped away into the crowd that was there.

Man, if the first scene of this passage is a miracle of physical rest, the second scene is a clash about the rest. Clash about rest. Man, these Pharisees can find any good thing to argue about. That’s what’s happening. God had given them this gift, and they had created all these standards and boundaries and all these issues to go along with it. They couldn’t recognize the miracle for what it’s worth. The guy had been there for 38 years. Now think about that. 38 years. Your job is a priest. I’ve got to slide this. I’ll move this back, okay? You’re walking to work every day as a priest, all right? 38 years, you pass the same dude sitting at the pool, right? That was Monday. Today’s Tuesday. Same guy at the pool. 38 years of this. You would recognize him. You would know who he is. You would be deeply aware of this guy’s issues. 38 years ago. Years of seeing this guy beg, 38 years of understanding this guy has a disablement, 38 years of seeing him outcast from your job, which is supposed to be to invite people in to worship the God of the universe. You can’t be bothered for that. 38 years of this, and instead of sitting there where he normally sits, the guy is walking around. And you’re not marveling at this? You’re not amazed by this. Your heart isn’t breaking in joy over this. It was the Sabbath, after all. The law prohibits you from doing this.

Of course, they’re going back to Exodus 31. I know that you already know this, okay? But for my sake, I’m going to read Exodus 31, which tells me about what they’re missing. The Lord said to Moses, “Tell the Israelites, you must observe my Sabbath, for it’s a sign between me and you throughout your generations, so that you will know that I am the Lord who consecrates you. Observe the Sabbath, for it is holy to you. Whoever profanes it must be put to death. If anyone does work on it, that person must be cut off from the people.” The Sabbath is a big deal. God Himself took a Sabbath, Genesis 1 and 2. He commands the Sabbath in Exodus. He writes it into the big ten, in the Ten Commandments. The Sabbath is a really big deal. And these Pharisees, they understood, man, we’re not about to be breaking the Sabbath. We deserve to be put to death if we’re breaking the Sabbath. So, what does it mean to work? Because we don’t want to work. If we work, that means we Deserve to die for how we have broken the Sabbath. So, what does it mean to work? The Jewish people had what we would call the Old Testament. All right? They had all these law books. They had this history. They had Psalms, Proverbs. They have all these prophecies. They’ve got Scripture, but they want to make sure that they obey Scripture. So they write something else called the Mishnah. Can you say Mishnah with me? Mishnah. It almost sounds like something you could call a loved one. How are you, Mishnah? Almost. The Mishnah is a set of extra rules that they would write so that they don’t break the commands of God. Does this make sense? They’re so scared to go over the line that they create this set of rules way back here.

Let’s look at what the Mishnah says about work. All right? The generative categories of acts of labor, i.e., what is prohibited on the Sabbath, are 40 less than one. He who sows, plows, reaps, binds sheaves, threshes, winnows, selects fit from unfit produce or crops, grinds, sifts, kneads, bakes. He who shears wool, who washes it, beats it, dyes it, spins, weaves. Sounds like a bobpet. Anybody else play with a bobpet growing up? Sows two stitches, tears in order to sow two stitches? Okay, a lot of this sounds like work. Like, don’t be going and like gathering all the wheat and sifting it. Don’t be going to your sheep and shearing them and dealing with it. Some of the rules, though, sound a little less like work to me. Cordrace, y’all care about this? He who traps a deer, that made it into the Mishnah, Kenneth. Slaughters it, flays it, salts it, cures its hide, scrapes it, cuts it up. That just described y’all’s process exactly. He who writes two letters, that’s work. He who erases two letters, also work, Amber. No homeschool on the Sabbath, all right? He who builds, he who tears down, he who puts out a fire or kindles a fire, he who hits with the hammer, he who, get this, transports an object from one domain to another. That’s the specific rule this guy broke. Lo, these are the 40 generative acts of labor, less one. They’re super curious. What does it mean to work? And they’re really scared to break the rule. So they said, we’re going to create all these other rules to try to not break the rule.

All right. I have here a TV, as you can see. When I thought about comfort and when I thought about enjoying God’s gifts, I’ve thought about college football. And this is just kind of where my mind went. Anybody else have younger children in the home? And the children like to get right up here on the TV? Anybody else? I trust there’s a lot of hands up behind me right now. I’m really nervous when my kids are right here that they’re going to bop this thing and break the gift. So I want to tell them, hey, keep your distance from the gift. I don’t want you to break this. I want you to be able to enjoy this. So then I come up with a bunch of rules to protect the thing.

I need like five helpers. Can I get five? Thank you, Nolan. Come up. No one’s going to be embarrassed by this. Okay, Caleb, come up. Yep. Let’s get some round of applause for our two bravest volunteers. I still need like three more. Can I get a couple more helpers, please? Thank you, McKenzie. I appreciate that. Come on up. Thank you. Wayne, thank you so much, man. You don’t even go here. Thank you so much, Wayne. Come on up. All right. Very good. Thank you so much, Donna. I appreciate you rescuing me. Thank you. Come on.

So, we want to be able to enjoy this gift, all right? These are our two gift enjoyers. So, boys, what I need y’all to do, I need y’all to sit on the couch, okay? Can you see the TV? But I want to make sure you don’t break the TV. So, Miss Donna, I need you just to stand right here in front of it. Can you still see the TV? Somewhat. Yeah, okay. But I’m going to create another rule to make sure you don’t break the TV. McKenzie, you stand a little bit beside Miss Donna. Can you still see some of the TV? No, yeah, okay. All right, Wayne, you come just stand beside McKenzie. Can you see the TV? You can’t see it. What’s your favorite TV show, Caleb? I know you don’t actually watch TV. You just read. What’s your favorite TV show?

What’s something that you like to do? All right, Nolan, what’s your favorite TV show? Huh? Planes? Oh, the movie Planes? Okay, it’s like Cars, but planes. I spoiled it. Sorry.

Okay, so imagine that Planes is playing on the TV right now, and you want to enjoy the gift. But you’ve created all these rules between you and the gift that you can’t actually watch the thing. That’s what we typically do with God’s good gifts. We have the thing playing on the TV, but in our fear to break the gift, we create all these rules between us and the gift, and we can’t actually enjoy it.

Round of applause for my volunteers. Thank you, guys. Y’all are great.

That is clearly what was happening with the Pharisees. Man, Jesus has just healed a man on the Sabbath. He has just returned this man to rest. He has just provided a new future for this man. But they’re so bound up in all the rules that they can’t see what God is doing. Who told you to pick up your mat and walk? Who told you to carry an object from one domain to the next? Don’t you know that’s against the law? I don’t know who did it, but somebody told me to do it. That somebody is going to find this man and straighten some things out.

Verses 14 through 16: it’s a warning towards true rest. So, after this confrontation between the Pharisees and the healed man, Jesus finds the healed man in the temple. Again, Jesus goes and pursues the man. He goes and finds the man. He leaves where He’s at to go and put Himself in that man’s proximity. He finds him in the temple and He says to him, “See, you’re well. Don’t sin anymore so that something worse doesn’t happen to you.” The man went and reported to the Jews that it was Jesus who made him well. Therefore, the Jews began persecuting Jesus because He was doing these things on the Sabbath.

Man, Jesus is our loving, pursuing, kind Savior, the one who wants to embrace us, the one who wants to make us whole. And instead of simply enjoying and receiving this good gift, the man who has been healed, it seems like he goes in tattles. He blames the [inaudible]. The moment he’s got a face to put with an action, he goes to the Pharisees and says, “It was Him. It was that guy.” Therefore, the Jews begin persecuting Jesus.

Jesus warns this man, “Go and sin no more so that something worse doesn’t happen to you.” A lot of differences in interpretation on this point. Was the man disabled because he had sinned and God had just thrust a consequence of disablement on him? Or was this man just generally disabled because of the effects of sin in this fallen, broken world that we happen to inhabit? Either way, there’s one main application. Pursue holiness so that the greatest consequence for sin doesn’t happen.

You see, that’s the whole reason Jesus came. The whole reason Jesus came, the whole reason that Jesus left His throne is so that we could avoid the greatest consequence of our sin. You see, you and I, we have been created for a relationship of peace with God above. A relationship of total harmony where we always obey Him and always enjoy Him and not just have harmony with God, but we would have harmony with people. And all of our relationships would always be good. We’d never fight with our spouses. Our kids would always obey us. Our friends would never misinterpret our text messages or our phone calls. Our neighbors would never gripe about the decorations we put in our yards, or they wouldn’t gripe about the lack of stuff we have going on. Total peace, not just with God or with people, also peace here. Never have those nagging, dark voices in the back of your mind, never feeling the depression and the darkness that so often comes with this world. That’s what God made us for.

Yet, sin comes into this world through Adam and Eve’s disobedience. And just like this giant monkey wrench into your car’s engine, everything [inaudible] and grinds on it and keeps trying to turn over on it. And things just don’t work quite right. That thing, that monkey wrench, is called sin. And Jesus came to deal with that monkey wrench so that we could be restored to wholeness.

You see, the man’s disability, his 38 years of lying there at the pool begging, it’s just really a sign. It’s a symptom of a bigger issue. His real issue isn’t his physical disability. His real issue is the sin of his soul. That’s your Real issue. Man, your real issue is not your financial shortcoming. Your real issue is not your broken friendship. Your real issue is not your divorce. Your real issue is not your aching back or the cancer. Man, your real issue is this predatory darkness that lives in your soul that would create warfare between you and God called sin. Where we break God’s heart, we break His rules. We bring shame to Him, and we can’t make it right. Man, we’re like the kid who’s made a mess with finger paint, and he keeps trying to clean up the mess, but there’s still paint on his hands. And every time we try to clean up the mess with God, we just make it messier. We need God to come in and clean us up. We need God to come in and change us. We need God to come in and save us.

Jesus looks at this man. He says, go and sin no more so that you can avoid the greatest consequence. In other words, trust in Me. Look to Me as your rescuer and your master so that you will not have to pay for your own sin eternally, physically, consciously in hell, but that I will restore you. I will bring you to a relationship of peace so that when your days are over in this life, you will wake up in the life to come fully restored with God in a relationship of peace. And that’s what Christ came to do. Christ cares about your physical issues. He cares about your mental and emotional well-being. He cares even about your financial situations. But what Christ most deeply cares about is so much bigger and greater and deeper than all that. What Christ most cares about is your soul. And whether or not you will get to spend all of eternity enjoying Him or suffering the consequences of your sin.

The book of Hebrews actually compares heaven to Sabbath. The writer of Hebrews makes the same call. He says, enter into the Sabbath rest still awaiting you. Man, my call to you this morning, enter into God’s Sabbath. For some of us this morning, you’ve never placed your trust in Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior. And take this as the voice of God through Jeremy Simmons to you this morning. God loves you, He is absolutely wild about you, and He cares about your problems. And the greatest problem of yours that He cares about is your lostness, your sinfulness, your brokenness before Him. And He has made a way for you to be free of that problem. And it’s not through your effort, it’s not through your rule keeping. It’s not through your moralism. It’s through the perfection of Jesus Christ for you and the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross, where Jesus would be ultimately disabled for you. Where the consequence of your sin would come on His shoulders and He would not be able to get Himself out of the weight of it. Where He would die, He would be in the tomb on a Sabbath day, and He would rise on the first day of the week, conquering sin and death and darkness so that you could have a new future and a new life and become a new creation in Him. Man, if you’ve never embraced that this morning, please embrace that. Give your life to Jesus. Say yes to Jesus, even if you don’t know all of what that yes means for you.

And if you are a follower of Jesus. Man, this morning, I just want to give you a couple minutes of teaching about the Sabbath and how to do this in a way that will actually fill your tank. There’s this book called Emotionally Healthy Spirituality, written by a pastor living in Brooklyn, and he has found a way to rest. Think about it. This pastor living in Brooklyn, in one of the loudest, noisiest, busiest cities in the world, has found a way to stop and enjoy God and rest. And if he has found that way, I’m going to listen to him. He says, the first thing you do to enjoy Sabbath is you stop. Stop. Stop working. On six days, God created everything. On the seventh day, He rested. He stopped. And He intends the same thing for you. Man, the best way, one of the best ways to set yourself up to Sabbath and to enjoy and to rest the way God wants you to is simply stop. Stop working. Some of us are in positions where we get to control how much work we do and what days we do it on. If that is you, my plea is to stop Working on your Sabbath day. If you’re in a place where you cannot control your schedule, where somebody else makes your schedule, then man, you may need to Sabbath on a different day than Sunday. I am not resting right now. This is not—Sundays are not my Sabbath day. Saturdays are my Sabbath day. I try as I can. I don’t do anything for Sauldam on Saturdays. My sermon is finished before Saturday. I’ve done all of my Sunday communications before Saturday. I try not to do a whole lot of church meetings on Saturdays. I need to rest. I’m not going to be very good here if I don’t treat yesterday well.

So yesterday, I didn’t work. I did not work. After stopping from rest, I did the second thing. Or after stopping from work, I did the second thing. I rest. I fill my tank. I find ways that are restful for me. So for me, that’s reading. That’s coffee. That’s books. That’s spending time outside. That’s moving my body. I find things that fill my tank. You know, for you, it may not be the same. Like, for me, I really enjoy sitting in one place and drinking coffee, and then I enjoy getting outside and just walking. That is really nice for me. That might not be very nice for you. For you, it might be going on the boat. For you, it might be sitting in the deer stand. For you, I don’t know what it is. But find some way to fill your tank.

So you stop from work, you start resting, then you start delighting. See, it’s not enough to stop doing work. You’ve got to also fill. Like, you’ve got to find ways to enjoy God’s great gifts. Men, for us, on Saturday mornings, I make a really big breakfast that I don’t make any other day of the week. It’s probably not that special for you, but for our family, it’s really special. We have this food that we only eat once a week, and it’s always on Saturday mornings because we just want to delight together. We just want to enjoy a special meal. So we do that. Every Saturday morning, that’s what we do. Every Friday night when we begin our Sabbath, we have the same meal. Not the same food as Saturday morning, but yeah, you understand. So, man. For us, Friday night, we make homemade pizza. Saturday morning, I’m making bacon and pancakes and eggs, and I’m doing all that stuff. It’s a lot of fun. That’s just part of our process.

And then fourth, you contemplate. Man, take some special time to focus on God and what He’s done for you. Man, if all you do on the Sabbath is just do things that you like to do without ever bringing God into the mix, then you haven’t actually made it much of a spiritual practice yet. Man, spend some time on your Sabbath contemplating God and what He’s done for you. If Sunday is your Sabbath, then this makes sense for you to contemplate. Like, what other time are you sitting in a congregation listening? But for me, because Saturday is my Sabbath, that means Saturday afternoon, I’m going to need to take some time to just focus on God for a few extra minutes. But I’ll tell you, ever since we began doing this in Indonesia seven years ago or whatever it was, man, I have found that that weekly rhythm of resting in God has been huge.

I give this to you. I offer this to you. Don’t live according to the pace of this world and just constantly work. Nor do I want you to try to practice something in your own strength and create a bunch of rules between you and the gift. You never actually get to enjoy it. Man, if you want just a little more conversation about what it might look like for you to Sabbath, I would love to have that conversation with you. But for now, let’s pray as we close our sermon.

Lord, we’ll say thank you for today. God, thank you for your kindness to us. Thank you for your love to us. Thank you, Jesus, for pursuing us in the midst of our lostness, in the midst of our dirtiness, in the midst of our pain. I pray, Jesus, that you would please help us to just find ways to enjoy you together. God, I pray that you would open our eyes to the suffering of those around us, that we would emulate you in taking good news to those that are hurting and outcast. And I pray that all of us would drink deeply of a Sabbath rhythm that wouldn’t Just create a bunch of rules between us and You, but would actually tune us into You, that we could enjoy You, please. God, we love You. Thank you for loving us. It’s in Your great name that we pray. Amen.