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Just One Step Away | David Fisher

Y’all ready to study the scriptures today? Let’s turn to John, the fifth chapter of John. We’re going to continue. The title of the message today is just one step away, and I hope it’ll make sense by the end of it, just one step away.

The book of John is really one of my favorites, and it presents, his gospel presents the message very differently than Matthew, Mark, and Luke. Matthew, Mark, and Luke, you have miracles, and miracles, and healings, and healings, and healings, and healings, and miracles, and some teachings, and some healings, and some healings, and they just have them on almost every chapter in those three. John is very different.

John records three, three healings. Now, that’s not to say that John said there was only three, but John said at the very end of his gospel that there’s so many things that have happened, and so many things we could tell you, we could write books, and books, and books. He just doesn’t record them, and I believe he’s trying to be very targeted.

The Holy Spirit has inspired him to be very targeted with the three healings that he mentions, and it’s not the fact that Jesus was a miracle worker, even though he was. There was something, a deeper message behind the healings, and he picked three of them. We talked about one of them last week, about the first sign the week before.

Well, the first sign is God does the impossible, turning water into wine. That’s just, from our standpoint, that’s not possible, and then last week we had the man, the nobleman’s son who was healed, and it was just, it, Jesus just spoke the word. He spoke the word, and the man who’s 30 miles away was healed.

I believe John is trying to focus on a message of not just, not just in one dimension. His, the way he approaches it, and particularly here in chapter five, it is multi-layered, multi-dimensional, each of which is deserving of its own sermon, in and of itself, but we’re gonna, we’re gonna lay out at least seven of these layers today. Here’s the story.

It’s the Feast of the Jews. They’re going up to Jerusalem, and they’re over by Jerusalem. On the north side of the temple walls, there’s a place called the Sheep Gate, and that Sheep Gate was built back when, in the time of Nehemiah.

In fact, the high priest and the other priest along with him built that gate, consecrated that gate, called the Sheep Gate, and that’s the gate through which the, from the north, where they would bring the sheep into the temple grounds for sacrifice. Very, very special. I believe there’s some significance there, but right outside, this is, so right outside the temple wall, there’s this pool called Bethesda, and it has these porches.

It has these porticos around with these columns with porches, and in these porches are a bunch, a multitude of sick people who come. They’re sick. There’s people who are blind.

There are people who are lame. There are people who are paralyzed, meaning they’re withered. They’re, I mean, they’re, truly paralyzed and have no ability to walk or to move, and they’re all waiting.

They’re waiting for this pool of water for the angel that would come sometime and stir the water, and the first one who would get in the water would get healed, and so they all have this hope. They’re all, they’re circulating around, and Jesus comes to this same, this very place outside of the temple wall, and in the midst of all of these sick, lame, paralyzed, blind people, Jesus comes up to one man and asks him, do you want to be made well? And the guy didn’t answer the question. He says, well, nobody’s around to help me, and every time I try, somebody else gets in first, and so Jesus just says, rise and take your bed and walk, and right then the man’s healed.

He picks up his bed, and this was a little pallet, you know, not an apostrophedic like us. You know, we have these apostrophedics. They just had these little mats, these little pallets, and so he picks up.

He follows. He does exactly what Jesus did, picks it up, and, oh, that was a no-no on the Sabbath. See, the Pharisees were around.

They said, oh, you’re not supposed to be picking up. You’re not supposed to be carrying stuff on the Sabbath. You’re working, and he said, well, this guy told me to do it, and that’s usually our explanation for breaking a rule.

Somebody told me to do it, and so he says, somebody told me to do it. He says, who? I don’t even know who he is, and later on Jesus comes to him, finds him in the temple, and tells him who he is and says, hey, don’t be sinning anymore. Sin no more.

You’re well. Sin no more. This man had been sick for 38 years.

Kind of forgot to mention that. That’s one of the important facts in the narrative. He’d been sick for 38 years, and Jesus now heals him.

He didn’t even know who Jesus is. Jesus says, don’t sin anymore or something worse might happen to you. I don’t know what else could be worse than being sick for 38 years, but that’s a pretty bad one, and then he leaves, and the Pharisees, the Jewish people, get all upset, and they get mad because they were going to kill Jesus, and Jesus says, my father’s been working, because they’re upset because he’s telling somebody to work on the Sabbath, and Jesus says something very unusual on verse 17.

My father has been working until now, and I’ve been working on the Sabbath. Let’s talk about the first layer. The first layer on top.

All of John’s accounts, and he only mentioned seven miracles in his whole gospel, three of which were healings. The second one, this first layer is, who is Jesus? Who is he? There are a lot of people out there who believe that Jesus is a good storyteller. There are a lot of people out there who believe that Jesus said good, wise things.

There are people out there, even in other religions, even Muslims believe that Jesus was a prophet, and all the people who saw him recognized that he was a miracle worker, but he was far more than that. He was the son of God himself. Now, that may not seem to be a huge, the most significant point of this account, because we’re all Christians, and we believe that Jesus is the son of God.

If you don’t believe Jesus is the son of God, then you’re not a Christian. But there are a lot of people out in this world who don’t believe that. They struggle with that.

So, if they’re asking, you want to know who Jesus is, you can point to this. Jesus says, I am the son of God, and I do what my father does. Huge, huge layer.

Let’s go to layer two. Layer two says something about the location. It’s the sheep gate.

And as I told you, that was consecrated by the high priest way back hundreds of years ago, when the temple was being rebuilt in the times, in the days of Nehemiah. It was especially, it was the only gate that the priest built, and the sheep were used for sacrifice. And to be a sheep, who’s going to be used for sacrifice, would mean you had no blemish.

There were no sheep allowed in the gates to the temple for sacrifice if they had defects or problems. And you know where this pool was? It was outside the gate. And that’s where all these people who had illnesses, sicknesses, lameness, paralyzed conditions, they were kept outside of the temple.

And here Jesus is making somebody well so that they can do what? Come into the presence of God. They can now enter the sheep gate. He can come into the sheep gate to be a living sacrifice free of blemish.

It’s a beautiful thing. Let’s look at the third layer. Let’s look at the man, the man himself.

We don’t know what his name is. We don’t know where he’s from. We don’t know how old he is.

We don’t know what he might have done for a living at one point in time. We don’t know exactly what his sickness was. He was just sick, and he was sick for 38 years.

That’s all we know. We don’t know how many times he came to the pool. We don’t know if this was his first time or he’d been there many, many times.

Most likely it wasn’t his first time because he talked about other times I’ve been here people get in there first. So it’s not his first, I guess it’s not his first rodeo. It’s not his first time to be there.

But we don’t have any idea how long he’s been there. We don’t know anything about his family. We don’t know anything about his roots.

We know nothing about him other than he’s a man who is sick and been sick for 38 years. Scripture gives a little other hint. It says when Jesus told him, go and sin no more, something worse might happen to you, it kind of means that maybe there was some sin in his life and that was the consequence of what was going on.

We don’t know that, but you can imply that. So we could speak along about this man who was sick and why he was sick and find all the faults and pick it apart of why he was in that condition. The truth is when bad things happen, what do we generally think? We think I must have done something wrong, don’t you? Man, what did I do? Or I start getting into the mental gymnastics of God.

I know I did some bad stuff, but it wasn’t that bad. It wasn’t that bad to deserve this. God, why? I mean, I said I was sorry.

I mean, why am I still suffering for something that might have happened 38 years ago? The truth is I can identify with that, can’t you? Our past somehow has a way of haunting us and it makes us sick. Let’s go to the fourth level. The fourth level is faith.

It could be a sermon about faith. We don’t know what the man’s faith was at this time that Jesus spoke to him. A lot of the miracles, I mean, they’re coming with faith.

I mean, they’re coming with urgent faith like the nobleman with his son. I mean, he had an urgent situation. He had to take care of it.

He believed that Jesus could heal him and his faith, Jesus reacted to and his son was well. Lots of miracles were done because of the person’s faith. Sometime it wasn’t that person’s faith, it was the faith of a friend.

It was somebody who brought them. Remember bringing them down through the ceiling, tearing off the ceiling? It was the friend’s faith that said, we got to get you healed. We got to get you to the place where you’re going to get healed.

This account doesn’t talk about the faith of the man at all. He didn’t even know who Jesus was. So if you have a template cookie cutter of how people get healed and you say, well, you got to have enough faith, you know, because when people don’t get healed sometime, my first default is, oh, I just didn’t have enough faith.

Or somebody didn’t have enough faith. Oh, maybe they didn’t have enough faith. That faith is not even talked about here, but the man was healed.

Now, I guess he had some kind of faith because somebody carried him or somebody brought him to the pool area, but it was kind of a general faith. And he wasn’t waiting on anything other than, am I going to have a chance to get in the pool first? I don’t know about you, but I would imagine if the first, if the common rule was the first one gets the healing, I would think everybody’s kind of laying right there, right outside the water. You’re not sitting up there, you’re not sitting up there in the shade underneath the porch, you’re sitting right there by the pool.

Just once, once you’ll see that water stir, is it the wind or is it an angel? I think it’s an angel, he stepped in that water. But I don’t think this is a story about the man’s faith. Something maybe about this next layer, the fifth layer, and I think it’s a layer I’m going to just call legalism.

It’s this misguided belief that many of these Jews had is that you don’t work on the Sabbath. And I’m telling you, God just poked him right in the eye. Jesus poked him right in the eye, says, I’m going to tell you what, our God is working on the Sabbath, and so am I. He’s doing something good for somebody.

We could spend a lot of time on that sermon, but I’ll tell you what, there’s an honest truth that God is always working. God is always working. The Sabbath was created for us to have a rest so that we can regroup and regather.

We were not made so that somebody could just honor the Sabbath. And the Jewish Pharisees had a really tough time with this, and because of the law breaking, they wanted to kill Jesus. I have one more layer.

I’m going to call it the am I worthy layer. Am I worthy? Now we’re getting kind of deep into what our motivation is. Am I worthy? See, the man didn’t even know who Jesus was.

But what he did know is he was sick. There wasn’t a single thing he did to bring about that healing. Not a thing.

Was he worthy? Was he healed because he was worthy? No. So why do we think we have to have it all together before God’s going to do something in your life? I’ll tell you, that’s a real problem we struggle with. I’ll start coming to church when I got it all worked out.

I’ll start coming to church and I’ll start doing things of God when I quit doing whatever I’m doing. When I feel more worthy. Have you ever stayed away on a Sunday morning because you didn’t feel worthy to come to church? I don’t know what you did on Saturday night or Friday night or Thursday night.

Maybe you just had a horrible, sorry week and you say, I just can’t go to church and listen to all this church stuff. I just need a break. Ever been there? I just don’t feel.

I hope we can cut through that layer. Being worthy had nothing to do with him being healed that day. God just said, I’m going to do the work on this man right here.

Heal. I want to spend the rest of the time on what I think’s the deepest level. It’s the seventh level.

It all comes down to the question that Jesus asked. Do you want to be healed? I’ve skipped over that question so many times and reading this and not even thinking about the significance of it. And I’m going to tell you, it’s one of the most profound questions that Jesus could ever ask a man.

Do you want to be healed? Really? Oh yeah. Of course. You think that’s a silly question? Of course I do.

I will tell you, not everybody wants to be healed. They don’t. We like to dabble in sin and management.

We don’t want to be healed and delivered from it completely. That’s the sad truth. Many Christians who are walking these days.

Is that true? If I wanted to be completely healed, I would be delivered from the desire to do whatever it is that I do that I think I can control. I think I can manage. I think I can take a little bit of it and not go too far.

I’ll tell you, Jesus is going to ask the question, do you want to be healed? That’s all that he did for the man. He came up to him out of all of these people who were sick, this multitude, a multitude, a great multitude of people were there. And Jesus came up to this one man.

I saw a presentation, a film presentation one time, and it was like this. The man was laying there on the porch and it had Jesus just standing above him like this. Do you want to be healed? I don’t think that’s how Jesus did it at all.

I really don’t. I think this, I hope you can see it. I think the man is laying there on his mat.

He’s done. I think he’s hopeless. I think he’s just there.

And I believe Jesus came down and he kneeled to him and held him by the hand and says, do you want to be healed? Can you see it? He just kneels down before him and says, do you want to be healed? And the man didn’t say, oh yeah, man, I sure do. He says, you know, nobody helped me. There’s nobody here.

There’s nobody here to put me in the pool. When it stirred up, somebody gets in there before I do. In the law, your world, I would say objection, non-responsive.

You didn’t answer the question. Do you want to be healed? I wish I could sit down with you and hold your hand and look you in the eye and say, do you want to be healed? Because usually when we come into church and the first thing we, what do we say? What’s the first thing we say? Good morning. How are you doing? Right? You don’t get that at church.

You get it at Walmart in the greeting line. Don’t you? You get that if the checker at, at Brookshire’s, how are you doing? You get that from the stranger on the street. How you doing? And what do you say? Almost every time you say, I’m fine.

You bunch of fibbers. You’re not fine. You’re hurting.

Sometime when you’re a little more honest, you go, I’m okay. And that’s a flag, isn’t it? That something’s going on that I’m dealing with, and I’m just not going to talk to you about it right now. I remember Ms. Nelda, I’d say, Nelda, how are you feeling today? And she’d go, I’m here.

Because she didn’t want to have a negative confession about hurting, and she wasn’t trying to avoid it, but she was not going to say fine. Man, I admire that. With somebody who will be honest enough to just, when you ask the question, how are you doing? If it’s something more than just a casual greeting, you say, how are you doing? And they say, you know, I’m having a tough time today.

Man, can I, would you like to talk about it? No. Okay, well, I’ll back off. But you know what? They might.

I can’t send Sherrilyn to Walmart or Brookshire’s without her being 30 minutes longer than she said she would be. Because people walk up to her and just start talking to her. And before you know it, they’re telling her about her, their whole life story.

All because she said, how are you doing? And they give them, they just, just, if she’s long and she’s late, I know she’s talked to somebody at Walmart who’s telling them a whole lot more about her life than she ever imagined she would get. We’re not fine. I mean, we have things to be thankful for.

Don’t, don’t, don’t get me wrong. We all have things for which to be thankful. But deep down, most of us aren’t fine.

We’re struggling. Aren’t we? With something, with something that’s going on. And I’m going to tell you, Jesus is asking you, he is taking you by the hand and he’s saying, do you want to be healed? And I’m not as close to God because I know there’s something wrong with me.

I’m sick. And I know it. And I don’t know what to do about it.

Antibiotic won’t fix it. Aspirin won’t fix it. I mean, it may make you feel better for a little while, but it doesn’t get down to the root of my problem.

My root of my problem is I’ve got a sin problem that I’ve got to get rid of. And even if you’re a Christian and you know that God has forgiven your sins, I’ve met few Christians who still are free from struggling with the grip of sin, the consequences of sin, the past that they deal with, and then just living in a sinful world. I don’t know why you’re here today.

I wish I could sit down with each and every one of you and ask you, why are you really here today? Is it because your wife said we’ve got to go today? Your husband said, get up out of bed. You do it because you’re trying to be an example to somebody. You’re doing it because it’s just kind of what we do on Sundays.

I don’t know what it is. I don’t know what you’re looking for. I don’t know what ails you, but I’m going to tell you, God knows.

He knows exactly what’s wrong with us, each and every one of us. And I think it’s important for us to be honest with God. I think it’s important for us to be honest with him.

And when he asks us, do you want to be healed? Do you want to be saved? Say, yeah, I do. And I throw away this not feeling worthy lie. But I’m going to tell you what God loves sinners.

Jesus died for sinners. He didn’t just die for folks who already had all their stuff together. He died for folks like us.

And even if we know and we believe and we accept that, we still struggle and we have hard times. We have good days and bad days, but we struggle. I don’t know why you come here.

Some, it’s because they honestly want to serve and connect with people. They want to be used by God in some way. That’s a beautiful, wonderful thing.

But there’s some people who come because they just want to feel better today. Just want to hear something that’s going to make me feel better. I want to see somebody.

It’s just going to make me feel better. I want to shake a hand, get a hug, and I want to feel better today. And that’s good to want to feel better.

But I’m going to tell you, we need to do more than just feel better. We need to get healed. We need to be well.

Don’t we? I want to be well. But we get tired. We get worn out.

Yesterday after the birthday party, Matt, we had two birthday parties. We had Dawn’s birthday party up at Shane’s place, and then we had Madeline’s birthday party, the three-year-old. At the end of the party, I told my daughter, we were cleaning up.

I told Sarah, I said, oh, I’m tired. I’m whipped. And she says, yeah, all that sitting in the shade will do that to you.

They’re out wrestling, chasing kids on the playground, Pawpaw sitting there watching it all in the shade. You know, sometimes we just get tired, and we don’t know what to do. We just need some rest.

I just need a break. And I hope you’ll quit taking a break just staying at home. I hope you’ll come take a break among God’s people, because it is important for us to encourage each other, to strengthen each other.

You could have stayed home today, but you didn’t. I bet some of y’all it crossed your mind, didn’t it? None? No? Is anybody here going to be honest and say it did cross your mind? Of course, Sarah did. She was tired.

You know, that birthday party, all that running around after kids will do it to you, won’t it? Sometimes we just get tired, and we need to be here. We need to be among God’s people, because I believe there’s healing that comes from being among God’s people. There’s an energy that comes from being with God’s people.

I cannot tell you how many times through the years I didn’t want to come, get dressed. I’d rather just rest. But I’m going to tell you, it’s those mornings where I came to church anyway, I left feeling so good.

I thought, God, I am so glad I did that today. I feel better. I don’t just feel better.

I feel more well, because by the time I’ve left, I realized these things that I’ve been threatened about, these things that I’ve been struggling with, these things I’ve been worried about, these things that have upset me so much all week, really don’t matter a whole lot. It was a time for us to be here with Jesus to say, do you want to be well? And I do. I want to be well.

And I walk out of there into that service with a little higher step, a little smile on my face that I didn’t have when I came walking in. Any of y’all ever been there? Man, it’s important for us to do it. It’s important for us.

God wants his people to be well, to be well. And that means I’ve got to be honest with God, said, God, there’s some reasons why that maybe I’m struggling. I’m not casting my, all my anxieties on him.

I’m violating God’s law. I’m worried about things I shouldn’t be worried about. God says, I want you to be well.

Listen to my word, cast your anxieties on me, and you will be healed in this world of filth. There’s a world of filth out there. Your filth is this close to you these days, isn’t it? Even when you’re not looking for it, it somehow seems to find you.

And you got things that pop up and you go, well, where did that come from? It’s there, right? And we see those things and you can easily be drawn into it, or you can resist. But I’m telling you, anytime we start drawing into it more than the, oh, get away, it starts making you sick. Your soul starts getting a little sick.

And Jesus will say, do you want to be well? And what I think he’s saying is, are you willing to put away all the things that you’re making you sick? Quit doing the things that are making you sick. Quit going to the places that are making you sick. Quit having relationships with people that are making you sick.

Quit doing those things and put yourselves in the position. Don’t be drinking those things that you shouldn’t be drinking. Don’t be doing, saying these things that you shouldn’t be saying.

No watching these movies that we shouldn’t be watching. Those things are making your soul sick. Do you want to be well? And he says, this is not from a point of legalism.

It’s a point of, I want to be well. And if I want to be well, I’ve got to, I’ve got to change my life. That’s why some people don’t want to be well, because they don’t want to change their lives.

I want to manage it. I want to sip it every now and then. I’m not going to drink the whole cup, but just want to sip.

The truth is the sip of sin makes people feel good. Doesn’t it? For a little bit. But one sip leads to another.

And another sip leads to another. And before you know it, you’ve taken a whole cup of sin. You’re sick.

You’re sick. We become addicted to things in this world that Jesus wants us to be delivered from. Do you want to be well? Do you want to be made well? You are one step away from doing it.

You are never more than one step away from saying, Jesus, make me well. And I want you to deliver me from the things that are making me sick. I’m going to tell you, it takes some courage.

It’s not just a matter of whether you’re worthy, because we’re not. It’s not a matter of whether your faith is strong enough, because it’s not. But I’m going to tell you, we serve a man named Jesus, who is the son of God, who commands the heavens and the universe at his word, at his command.

And if Jesus says, rise, take up your bed and walk, I believe God will heal you. And he will give you that healing that we need. Don’t you want to be well? I want to be well.

I want to be well. Well, that’s the seventh layer of the sermon. It’s the seventh layer of the multidimensional things that I think John is, I’m sure there are more layers, but this one’s kind of the ooey gooey middle center I hear from me getting down to the center of it.

I don’t know what’s going to shake you to cause you to be honest with yourself. But God knows where you are. In the midst of all these other sick people all over this world, he knows where you are, and he knows where you’ve been.

And for some of you, you may have struggled with these sins, these attitudes, these things that have made you sick for 38 years. Today is your day of jubilee. Today is your day to be healed.

The question is, do you want to be made well? I hope in my prayers that God will move upon you, just like the waters were moving and stirring in this pool, that God will move the waters around you, that God will move you and stir you in a way that he hadn’t stirred you in a long, long time, to stir your waters, that you will have the courage to say yes when Jesus says, do you want to be made well? I’m going to ask us, I’m going to encourage you, I’m going to encourage you to come ask for prayer from people. I’m going to ask the elders to post up over here. I’m going to ask the prayer partners to kind of be here.

I’m going to ask you to have the courage to ask for God to heal you. You know, I was a little, I know it sounds silly, but I was a little timid about coming to the elders to ask for them to pray for my shoulder. They got other things to pray for, other people to pray for.

No, they got to pray for you. If you want to be made well, if you have a sickness, come ask for somebody to pray for you. You know why I wasn’t asking for prayer? If I really get down to the root, I was too prideful.

Didn’t want to have to admit to somebody that I’m hurting. You’d think that the preacher wouldn’t have any aches or pains. Well, you don’t know preachers then because you’ve got lots of aches and pains, got a lot of struggles and torments, just like you do.

So I asked somebody to pray for you. Have enough boldness to say, I’m one step away from getting a healing by the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. You don’t have to come to an elder.

You don’t have to come to a prayer partner. Just turn to a brother and sister in Christ you’re sitting with. Don’t pray with each other, pray for each other.

Say, I’m tired, I’m sick, I am sick and tired of being tired. And I’m sick and tired of being sick about being sick. I’m sick and tired of sick.

I’m just tired of all of it. Sick and tired, one step away. Spend some time, maybe you just need to get alone with God and come pray at the altar.

Maybe you need to come pray with somebody, but I’m going to encourage you, don’t let this time go to waste. Please use it for the glory of God.