Cruel Pool

It is so great to be here with you. It's St. Patrick's Day! Wow, that was not very enthusiastic. How many of you are wearing green? Can I see a show of hands? I, believe it or not, under the lights in my bedroom when I got dressed, this was green. And now it looks gray to people, but up close, I think it's green. I really do think it's green. It's kind of like that dress on the internet. Some people think it's gray, some people think it's green. I'll be in the lobby afterwards, you can greet me and make up your own mind.

But I want to start with a little St. Patrick's Day quiz, alright? And I want you to shout out the right answer and let's make this first one kind of a test, alright? Not a real question, but true or false, St. Patrick was a leprechaun. The answer is, it is false. You are correct. But now these next two are for real and they're maybe a little bit tougher, so think about this. True or false, St. Patrick is only legendary. He's not a real person. That is actually false. He's a real man. We know a lot about him because we still have his autobiography. It's called Confessio and he talks in detail about his life. It is a fascinating read. I was reading it yesterday, not in the original Latin, the English translation. I'd encourage you to read it. It's quite inspiring. He was born in 386 A.D.

Now here's the next true or false question. True or false, St. Patrick was actually Irish. That's a little bit more of a tentative answer from you. The correct answer is false. St. Patrick was actually a Roman. So here's kind of an interesting audience participation thing. Raise your hand if you've got any ancestry that's Irish. Can I see a show of hands? Raise your hand if you've got any ancestry that's Italian. Can I see a show of hands? St. Patrick's actually genetically more related to the latter than the former because he was a Roman who was born in Roman Britain. But when he was 16 years old, he was kidnapped and brought up to Ireland into slavery. And he was a slave to an Irish chieftain until he was 22 years old when he walked 200 miles to the coast and escaped on a Gaulish or French ship.

And he sails down to France where he is happy and safe until he's 41 years old. And he has a vision of an Irish man saying, "Come back to Ireland. We need you." And he felt that he was called by God to go as a missionary back to Ireland. And he writes in his autobiography that every single person you knew tried to talk him out of it. And he said, "They enslaved you and they beat you up. You are now safe. You do not want to go back to these pagan, crazy Irish people." But St. Patrick, later St. Patrick, he ended up going back there and his message to them was, "Yes, I was a slave among you. But now I am free, but you are all actually still slaves. You are slaves to your superstition and you are slaves to your sin. And Jesus Christ can lead you out of that."

And what happened next might be difficult for some of our modern minds to believe, but Patrick says in his autobiography that God actually performed some miracles through him. Why? To show the Druid Irish that God actually was Lord over all, even over the forces of nature that they worshiped. It's hard for us in our culture to know what to make of these stories of miracles, but we have to remember that in those days, people saw miracles differently. They weren't just tricks. They were signs that meant something. Yesterday I read an article by a historian named Mary Cagney. She says, "If Christianity had come to Ireland with only doctrines and ideas without miracle and mystery, it could never have wooed the Celtic heart." And the same is actually exactly the case with the miracles of Jesus too.

Let's talk about it today. Grab your message notes. "77" is the name of our series that takes us to Easter, "77 Days in the Life of Christ." We want to welcome you, whether you're joining us live or on Facebook Live or over in the venue service. It is just great to be with you on this journey to explore the plot line that led up to Easter. And this weekend we're going to expand our minds a little bit. We're going to zoom in on the miracles because to understand the story of Jesus, you really have to look at the miracles. Large crowds followed Jesus precisely because he did miracles. His enemies never denied the miracles. They opposed him because they were upset at how he did the miracles.

Our earliest historical source outside the Bible about Jesus is the first century historian Josephus, and he calls Jesus, "a doer of startling deeds." The Jewish Talmud calls Jesus, "a miracle worker." The Qur'an calls Jesus, "a miracle worker." Even in modern universities there's been a shift in scholarship away from debating whether or not Jesus did miracles to talking about what the miracles meant to the people at the time. So what I want to try to do this morning is to try to understand what did the miracles mean to people way back then? How did they see them? And then what do they mean for you and me today? And I think what we uncover is going to help you overcome some things in your own life that you need freedom from today. Addictions, compulsions, wounds from the past.

So let's start with trying to understand what the miracles meant to the people in Jesus' world 2,000 years ago. And I think one key to understanding this is to go back to the Dead Sea Scrolls discovered in the caves you see on the screen. Way back in 1947, the Dead Sea Scrolls are documents that were produced all the way back in the time of Jesus. And so they're kind of a time capsule into the hopes and the fears of the people of the day. We can tell by reading the scrolls that the Jewish people felt oppressed by the Romans, understandably. And they believed that very soon God would send his Messiah to set up a perfect kingdom. And in the scrolls it says, "Here is how you can recognize when the Messiah shows up." It says, "The heavens and the earth will obey God's Messiah. He will heal the sick, resurrect the dead, and to the poor announce glad tidings." Another of the Dead Sea Scrolls said, "Then when the Messiah comes, will the eyes of the blind be opened and the ears of the deaf be unstopped? Then will the lame leap like a deer and the mute tongue shout for joy." So miracles were part of the expected job description of the Messiah.

The idea is, men, when the Messiah shows up, all bets are off. Anything can happen. And then Jesus shows up and he acts like that description. And so this gets people's attention. By doing the miracles he did, he was saying, "Folks, I am the Messiah." And then each individual miracle is teaching people something else about Jesus. They're like object lessons. And today to show you this, I want to zoom in on just one miracle, Jesus' healing of a crippled man at a very cruel pool. It starts in John 5, verse 1. "Sometime later, Jesus went up to Jerusalem for a feast of the Jews." Now there isn't Jerusalem near the sheep gate, a pool, which in Aramaic is called Bethesda, and which is surrounded by five covered colonnades.

Now press pause for just a second because to help you picture this, back in 1956, archeologists dug up the ruins of this pool. And here's what it looked like in Jesus' day. And you can go to the ruins of it today and see the very 2,000 year old steps into the pool that these people in the story would have walked down into. And in Jesus' day, there was a legend about this pool, and the legend was that occasionally an angel invisibly stirred the waters, and you would see bubbles rising to the surface. And the first person who went down those steps you just saw to reach the water in those moments, that person would be healed. Now what was that all about? Well here is where archeologists again have helped us understand this.

We now know, thanks to what they've dug up in the ruins of this pool, that the pool was what was called an "esclepion." And most of you have never heard that term before, but it was very common 20 centuries ago. An esclepion was a shrine to the Roman god of healing, Asclepius. And here's how this worked, or how they thought it worked back in those days. You'd go to this pagan shrine, this esclepion, and you would purchase a clay model of the body part you wanted healed. Like if you wanted your arm healed, you'd buy a clay model of an arm, and then you would toss in your clay limb as an offering to the god into the pool. And this is how archeologists know when they find an esclepion, and they know that it's not just somebody's pool. Because they find clay models of limbs at the bottom of the pool, and it's really kind of sad.

Because they had the same kind of diseases we had today, cancer and so on. And so you see all the body parts represented, and they'd throw these into the pool, and then they would just wait. And hope. And at this pool, you'd hope you'd get healed when the pool bubbled again, if, if, you were the first down the steps, and your foot was the first to touch the water. Now try to imagine this, and here's why somebody said this was a cruel pool. Because who do you think were the first people to win the race to the pool every single time? The truly needy people? Of course not. It was the guy with an ingrown toenail, right? It was the woman with a headache. The truly needy people were doomed. Like the guy we meet in this story, until Jesus shows up and finds him.

Let's see what happens next. It says, "Here a great number of disabled people used to lie, the blind, and the lame, and the paralyzed." Now, again, you've got to ask, what were a great number of disabled people doing in Jerusalem at a pagan temple? Like virtually right next to the Jewish temple mount. Well, in those days, if you were disabled, you weren't allowed to go up onto the temple to worship. The law said, "No one who has a physical flaw may approach the altar. A blind man, when it was lame, when it was a broken leg or arm, and it goes on to describe skin diseases and so on." Now, originally, in the law, this restriction only applied to the priests, but in Jesus's lifetime, the religious leaders were applying it to everyone. And so basically, if you weren't physically perfect, you couldn't go up to the temple to worship.

The thinking was that if you were sick, you must have done something to deserve it. God is punishing you. You're broken. And so they couldn't go to the temple. Instead, they moved up to the pagan temple, hoping for some help from this superstition. And isn't that the case today? When people feel rejected by a traditional religion, often they'll go to some alternative spirituality. I mean, you see the same exact dynamic in Santa Cruz, don't you? But what's sad and ironic is that the place of alternative spirituality can often be just as legalistic and just as cruel as the traditional religion that the people left, as we'll see.

So Jesus visits this place. And what happens next is really a story all about how God changes you and me today. And here's why you really need to hear this story. You may or may not be physically hurting like the man in these Bible verses, but chances are you're hobbled in some other way. You're addicted to something, perhaps, like alcohol, meth, pot, porn, anger, donuts, whatever it is. Or it could be something else crippling you, a broken heart, or fear, or broken relationships. So how can Jesus help you? There's three timeless principles that jump out of the story. These are such a key to healing. They're on page two of your notes.

If you want to find healing, then you need to, number one, admit that what I'm doing isn't working. And this can be a very hard step for people. I need to admit that what I've been doing actually isn't working. Let's continue with the story. The rest of verse five tells us, "One who was there had been an invalid for 38 years." Now wait. I want you to just imagine this. 38 years of trying the exact same solution every day, week after week. Let me try to race everybody down the steps. Oh, didn't make it. Oh, man. The water's bubbling. Let me try to race everybody. Oh, didn't make it. The water's bubbling. Let me try to... No. For 38 years and every single time it failed. It's the 12-step definition of insanity, trying the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. And all of us have done this. We keep trying the same plan, which isn't working.

And it's when we stop our self-deception and realize that, that God can move us to the second point where I ask myself, "Now, do I really want to change?" Ask, "Do I really want to change?" The hinge of this whole story is a line in verse six. When Jesus saw him lying there and learned that he'd been in this condition for a long time, he asked him, "Do you want to get well?" I love this line, "Do you want to get well?" What a great question. The word translated well there is related to our English word hygiene. And it literally means, "Do you want to be made whole?" Literally, and I think it's interesting that in a place of body parts, Jesus is saying, "Do you want to be made whole?"

And I like this because often we view healing, even from an addiction or some other life controlling thing, as a loss. Even in our language, "I have to give up smoking. I got to give up drinking." But to Jesus, it's not about subtraction. It's about gaining back your wholeness. Not living a fractured life anymore, having integrity in your life. Now, why would Jesus even ask this question of a guy who's been ailing for 38 years? Why would I not want to be healed of my affliction? Well, there's a few reasons. Jot this down in your notes. Number one, I'm familiar with it. Like the man of the story, maybe you've had your affliction for a long time. It's like an old pair of shoes. Maybe they're not the best for running or hiking anybody, but they sure are comfortable. You know how to live with it, right?

Second, a lot of our character defects or life controlling issues in our lives, we say, "Well, that's just the way I am. I'm identified with it." We confuse our identity with our defects, and we say, "That's just me. I'm a workaholic." That's just me. I just work too hard. I just can't say no. That's just me. I just eat too much. I just love my food. That's just me. I'm just a warrior. Can't control it. That's just me. I'm a warrior. Oh, I'm just temperamental. You know, I just lose my temper because I'm Irish or whatever, you know? I got to tell you, have you ever noticed how basically every ethnic identity that I can think of, people use it as an excuse, you know? Of course I lose my temper. I'm Italian. I'm Spanish. I'm Irish. I'm German. It doesn't matter what it is. That's just me. I'm identified with it.

And what happens is subconsciously, you know why it's so hard to be made well, is you're afraid if I let go of this thing, will I still be me? If I stop drinking or if I can really learn how to control my temper and be a calm person or whatever your issue is, will I still have the good parts of me that I like? Will I still be creative? Will I still be funny? Will I still have the work ethic I do if I give up that thing? I mean, this has been a part of me for so long. I'm identified with it. Then there's a third reason I'm discouraged by it. That could be your reason. I'm giving up. I feel helpless. 38 years I've faced this, or 5, or 10, or 15, 20, and nothing has helped. And so I'm discouraged. And then fourth, I'm rewarded by it. There's a payoff.

I mean, the obvious one is pleasure, right? It feels good, so I don't want to give this up. But what's interesting to me is the reward is not necessarily pleasure. The reward might be it gives me an excuse to fail. Or it gets me attention. Or it helps me control other people. There's some kind of payoff. For example, when I was a younger man in my 30s and 20s, too, I really did have a temper problem. And it got to the point where I was embarrassed at the way I would sometimes explode at my own children. I'm never physically abusive, but I would yell. So I thought I got to get help. And I went the classic 12-step route, and getting every book I could read on anger and getting support. And by God's grace, I really had victory in my life in that area.

But let me tell you, there were a lot of payoffs to being a temperamental person. If you're a habitually angry person, I can tell you from personal experience why you found it hard to quit. It can feel really good to be angry. Not pleasure, but raised hormone levels. It can give you a feeling of excitement and passion and purpose. And anger can be self-affirming because it makes you feel like, "I'm right, darn it! I'm right!" And that's definitely a kind of reward. And my anger can control others for sure. When I'm angry, I can get what I want from people. And of course, it damages the relationship long-term, but it sure works in the short-term. Some of you, if you brought your kids or grandkids to church, what worked best? "Time to get into the car now!" Or, "Get into the car this minute!" Right? "So we can go worship Jesus Christ!" You know? There are all kinds of payoffs.

So, how does this man respond to the question, "Do you want to get well?" Now, what's interesting to me is he doesn't really answer the question. It's a yes or a no question. And he says, "Well, sir, I have no one to help me into the pool." When the water's stirred. "I have no one to help me." By the way, that means he's not in community. He's trying to go it alone. And that's one of the reasons we have recovery groups, support groups here. We'll talk more about that in just a second. But then he goes on, "While I'm trying to get in, someone else always goes down ahead of me every single time." Now, you can start to feel sorry for him at first until you remember he's talking about 38 years of this, apparently. He's blaming people, places, and things. The people who won't help, this place, the way it's constructed, it's unfair. Life's unfair.

And when you and I need to change, we do the same thing. We blame people, places, and things. People. It's my family of origins fall. It's my kids' fault. It's my spouses' fault. It's my friends' fault. Places. It's Santa Cruz. It's too hard to be sober here. It's too hard to live here. It's too expensive. It's too stressful. Things. I have this condition of a bad job. My car is broken. I can't make it to church. I can't make it to the meeting. But Jesus is not asking this guy for his excuses. He's asking him, "Do you want to be made whole? Are you entirely ready?" Because change will never happen until you're entirely ready. And you take ownership, and you say, "It's nobody's fault but my own, and God, I'm entirely ready to have you work in my life." And at that moment, the Lord Jesus can help.

And that's when you can move to step three. Act in faith. You act. You respond. You take a step in faith toward God's offer of help. Watch what happens next. Verse 8. "Then Jesus said to him, 'Get up. Pick up your bat and walk.'" And I love this little detail. "Walk" there in the original verb tense means, "Keep on walking." Get up and walk on. Get out of here. Don't look back. I like that because recovery is about forward motion, about taking one step, then another step, then another step, and you keep on stepping. And that's what this means. "At once the man was cured, he picked up his mat and walked." Now, you'd think everybody would be amazed and happy that this guy is healed. But that's not what happens. And that's not what happens when you change your life either. There's something a little like the status quo. And they're upset that things are different.

Next verse. "Now the day on which this took place was a Sabbath, and so the religious leaders stopped the healed man and said, 'It's the Sabbath. The law forbids you to carry your mat.'" Here, this poor guy had been waiting for 38 years to get healed, and when it happens, it's the wrong day of the week. See, they had rules, and they were biblical rules. Don't work on the seventh day. Keep the Sabbath holy. That's in the Bible. But then they added a lot of rules to define work, and one of those rules was you can't carry anything. And so by carrying his bed mat, he was working technically, and so they just skipped entirely over the miracle. He's walking! And they chose instead to focus on the rule he's breaking.

And don't just go, "Oh yeah, those silly religious leaders 20 centuries ago." All this applies to you and me too. It's kind of like when people come up to me, this has happened a couple of times over 25 years. Did you know that one of the church greeters is around the corner, back by the choir room, smoking a cigarette? And the last time it happened, I felt like saying, "Really? Was it a tobacco cigarette?" Because I think I know the guy you're talking about, and that would be progress, you know? Stop complaining about a rule that's being broken and just rejoice that they're here.

I probably shouldn't say this next thing. But, should I say it, Adrian? Go ahead. Adrian says yes. Okay. One time there was a big kerfuffle that happens at churches, a big kerfuffle about our recovery groups, our 12-step groups for alcoholics, drug addicts, and other life-altering, life-controlling things. Some people were very upset that occasionally, when sharing their struggles with addiction, people in the group sometimes swore. And they came to be very concerned. And in so many words, I said, "Okay, just to be clear, I don't think it's good to swear. That's a bad habit, too." But you do understand, these are people who've just been set free from, like, drug or alcohol addiction. Maybe they're carrying their bedroll on the Sabbath, but they're walking! They're sober!

Have you discovered yet that our timing for somebody else's healing is not necessarily God's timing? I'll say it this way. Our timing for the spiritual progress of others is not necessarily God's timing. We've all got a lot of issues to work out, and the order that God does those issues, you know, is not the same for us all. Here's a sentence that's probably going to release you from a lot of tension. Jesus will decide to change somebody else's life in a different order than you want him to. So don't be sort of an accidental Pharisee judging people for breaking a rule, instead of rejoicing that at least they're walking, they're on the path to wholeness.

One of the things I loved my first day at Twin Lakes Church, I thought, "I love this sign. Pastor Kraft, outside each exit door, and this was 30, 40 years ago, he put ashtrays. And that little symbol was a sign to smokers who came to church. You know what? We're accommodating the fact that you're going to come out those doors, you're going to want to light up. Here's some ashtrays for you. You know? We're not in favor of smoking, but at least you're walking! At least you're here finding freedom in Christ! But this reaction from the religious leaders is also very important to understanding the bigger plot line. Why Jesus ends up on a cross, why these leaders turned against Jesus.

A few verses later it says, "So because Jesus was doing these things on the Sabbath, the Jewish leaders began to persecute him." Note, not the Jewish people. They loved him. The leaders, specifically the religious leaders, specifically the temple system, religious leaders. Why? They realized what Jesus was saying through this miracle. He was saying, "You don't need all the falder all up there on the temple now. You don't need all this pagan temple superstition either. All these systems and rules and all you need is me." It's all by grace. And when you are vetoing a religious system, the keepers of that system do not look on that favorably.

See, why is this story in the Bible for us today? To teach that if you're sick, then Jesus will always instantly heal you of any disease? Of course not! He didn't even heal everybody then. So what is the point of this miracle? Why did he do this, there, then? Well, a little clue that I love about this story is that Bethesda, the name of this pool, is a combination of two words, "bait," which means "house" and "hezed," which means "mercy" or "grace." This means "house of grace." That's the way it started. That's the way a lot of churches start. But it had been turned into something completely different. It had been turned into a temple to superstition. It had been turned into a house of legalism. It had been turned into a place where human performance got you the gold medal.

But Jesus comes along and turns it back into a house of grace for this man. This man is meant to represent all of us because he was a lame person trying to win a foot race. By definition, that's impossible. And the point of the story is that's true of all of us. We're all crippled by sin. And we can deceive ourselves and think, "If I just try a little harder, I can beat this." But we're lame people in a foot race. It is impossible to save ourselves. Instead, we just need to receive God's healing straight from Jesus and then step one step after another as we keep moving forward, he changes us.

And you know, this exact same story still happens to this day. I want you to meet two people who are part of some of our recovery groups here at Twin Lakes Church. Of course, normally these are totally anonymous and confidential groups, but Mark and Amy were willing to talk publicly about their addictions to give you hope. If you're not struggling right now with something, maybe you've got a son or a granddaughter or a friend who is, I want you to listen to what they have to say because this is going to really, really give you hope that people are being set free. And if you are struggling, be encouraged. Change and healing and wholeness is possible for you too. But you need to take that step out of the darkness and into faith. Watch the screen. Listen to their testimonies.

I lived a secret life for many, many years in inappropriate sexual behavior based around pornography. I was a porn addict before I was married. For years, my wife didn't know what was going on, but ultimately the truth came out. She would have hopes that I was getting better and want me to be better. I wanted to be better and I lied to myself telling her and myself that I was better when in fact I was not. One of my denial beliefs was that I'm not hurting anyone. This is all done in privacy. But in the end, I couldn't deny the fact that I was hurting my wife. Ultimately, our relationship was at stake. And without me turning from this, I would not be married to the wonderful woman I am now. I fought under my own power for years, but always with much shame returned to my behaviors. I was always terrified of being rejected if I revealed my secret. The locker room is a very confidential community of men who understand our challenges. We get understanding, prayer, support, and absolutely no condemnation from our brothers. If I, with Christ's assistance, can overcome this addiction, any of us can. Nobody has to feel like they can't make it. We all can. We just have to choose to engage and not allow the shame to pull us back into it again.

I started using drugs in my early 20s and since then I was off and running. I used needles. I baselined drugs from the start. I started coming to the Monday night meetings January of 2018 and I had one foot in the door, one foot out. I knew I needed to be there, but I had a lot of resistance, especially when it came to God. I grew up in a cult-like religion and so basically any time I thought of God, I thought of feeling guilty, feeling punished, judged, all of that. As I got older and my addictive personality came up more and more, and then lots of personality traits that are frowned upon started to flare up as well. I just felt very unloved by God and I wanted nothing to do with him. That stayed the case for over a decade until I started going to the Monday night meetings here at TLC and it just has transformed me to remember and to know that God for me is like my best friend. He'll never leave me. He's got my back. It's a personal relationship as it should be for everybody. Until I was ready to look at myself and be honest with myself and want to get better, I couldn't. Every excuse in the book would come up and I would find people, places and things as my excuse to keep doing what I was doing. Finally it got to a point where I had had too much pain. I wanted a change and so I became willing finally and decided to trust God. Monday nights have become my favorite hour of each week and I don't miss it for anything.

So I'm addicted to Monday nights now. I love the fact that Mark and Amy were willing to share their stories. Yeah, amazing. But you've got to understand that Jesus's question to you and to all of us is the same as his question to this man. The question is, do you want to be made well? He's saying this to you. Do you want to be made well? And the first step to wholeness can be taken right now. Now maybe for you that means you decide I'm going to be at that recovery meeting Monday or Wednesday or Thursday. We actually have a table right outside or rather right in the lobby right now this morning. And if you're watching on venue, come on over and check it out in our lobby. It's got people there from our different recovery groups to answer your questions and also pick up. There's a lot of great little books that one of our recovery members, Heidi Garwood, has written and she's a photographer. They've got beautiful pictures in there. They're just available for free and or for a donation if you want to put something in. But these are really these are little devotionals that can really encourage you in your walk in recovery with Christ.

Your step to that table or your step into one of those groups could be your version of picking up your mat and taking the first step into a life of wholeness. See, I can teach you these things. I can try to help you understand a Bible passage. But only you can answer that question. Only you can decide how you're going to respond to Jesus. Maybe today, today is the day that you decide to follow Jesus in general to say, I'm going to take my first step. I'm going to be a Christ follower starting today. You may have been thinking about it for a long time. Today you can take that first step and everything changes after that. See, the miracles mean the really good news. The Messiah has come and that means anything can happen.

Let's pray together. Would you bow your heads with me? Heavenly Father, we just admit that we are weak and broken people. We admit that we're utterly unable to heal ourselves and our own power. We're crippled people trying to win a foot race. And so we open ourselves to your power and we receive the changes that you want to make in our lives, not to lead us to subtraction, but to wholeness. And Lord, maybe some of us in this room for the very first time are saying, Jesus, I want to turn it all over to you starting today. I don't understand it, but I am yours. So help me to take one step after another and keep walking into freedom. In Jesus' name we pray, Amen.