John 5
Mark Buckley - August 2, 2020

Welcome. It’s good to have you here today. I’m glad to be with you. I’m Mark Buckley, one of the pastors at Living Streams—Pastor Emeritus, you could say. I’m just full of the grace of God right now. I’m going through personal trials, but still, the grace of God is sufficient to get us through whatever we need to go through.

I want to thank those of you who have been praying for my wife, Kristina. She’s been back in the hospital the last couple of weeks, fighting different lung mold and different kind of infections that have been brought about by immune suppressant drugs that she’s on to keep her from rejecting her heart. She has had a heart transplant. The heart is doing great. She’s full of energy, full of grace, even in a very difficult situation. Thank you for your prayers.

I also want to point out that I’ve got a book here. It’s called From Darkness Into Light. It’s basically my story, my journey in the early days of my walk with Jesus. I’ve been thinking about that recently because, my story, when I tell it, it’s actually liberating. It’s actually healing for me. It’s good for me to talk about how I was brought out of darkness and into the light by the grace of God. And it’s good for you to tell your story, as well.

Today I’m going to be giving you a message from the gospel of John. The title of this message is “Do You Want to Get Well?” Now in the 60’s, when I was wrestling with forces of darkness—the things that I write about in this book—it was a challenging time. It was a difficult time. The nation was in turmoil. The nation was conflicted about the Vietnam War and about the legitimacy of what our government was doing.

I was involved in a protest one time with 200,000 people. Over 40,000 American soldiers were killed in Vietnam. It was a big deal and it divided our country. And our country has been divided recently, as you well know. And there are powerful political pressures. There are powerful forces of darkness trying to divide us.

We, as believers, are called to be peace makers. We, as believers, are called to be “salt and light.” That doesn’t mean that we are to preach our political perspective louder than anybody else. It means that we are to declare the lordship of Jesus. He is the head over all rule and authority. His government is the government that will never cease on the face of the earth.

Anyway, so if you want one of these books, if you’re down at Church on the Street, ask Pastor Walt Rattray. He’ll get you one. If you want to come in the Living Streams office, they’ll give you one. If you want to go to my website: markbuckleyministries.com we would be glad to send you one. I’ll sign it for you if you ask for me to do that. I also want to urge you: Tell your story! I’m promoting that book because it tells my story. But you tell your story. It’s going to help you get healthy.

Let’s look at this story in the gospel of John and then I want to give you a little background in just a moment. It says this in John 5:1:

Some time later, Jesus went up to Jerusalem for one of the Jewish festivals. Now there is in Jerusalem near the Sheep Gate a pool, which in Aramaic is called Bethesda and which is surrounded by five covered colonnades. Here a great number of disabled people used to lie—the blind, the lame, the paralyzed. For an angel of the Lord went down at certain seasons into the pool and stirred up the water; whoever then first, after the stirring up of the water, stepped in was made well from whatever disease with which he was afflicted. One who was there had been an invalid for thirty-eight years. When Jesus saw him lying there and learned that he had been in this condition for a long time, he asked him, “Do you want to get well?”

What kind of a question is that? Do you want to get well? The guy’s been paralyzed for thirty-eight years. He hasn’t gone hardly anywhere unless somebody’s carrying him. But if he was going to get well, it was going to require some changes in his life. He might have to get a job. He might have a new group of friends. He would have to accept a responsibility that he hadn’t had to accept for a long time.

And my question to you is, do you want to get well? Do you want your soul healthy? Do you want your life transformed? Do you want the power and grace of God? Or do you want to be like this guy who had an excuse for not being well?

Now, what they said here is that there was a saying, and it’s in the fourth verse that the angel would come down and stir the water. And if you were first into the water after the angel stirred the water, then you could get the miracle of healing. But if there’s a whole bunch of lame, blind and paralyzed people there, and only one of them gets the healing, it would be a mad scramble. And if you were paralyzed and you couldn’t walk, you would probably never get in there first unless you had a real fast, big, strong person rush you down there.

Here’s what I love about the gospel of John. It is so unique. This story isn’t in any other gospel. There are four gospels, as you probably know. Matthew, Mark and Luke are called the synoptic gospels. They all have the life of Christ, the teaching of Christ, the death of Christ on the cross, and the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. They all tell many of the same miracles and cover many of the same teachings. But the gospel of John is different. Every chapter is different. Every chapter in the gospel of John has teachings that Matthew, Mark and Luke didn’t cover.

In the first chapter, it’s the Logos—the reason, the purpose, the divine order. And it’s John the Baptist saying to Jesus, “This is the Lamb of God. This is who I’m telling you about. He’s going to take away the sin of the world.”

In the second chapter of John there’s the miracle of Cana, the wedding feast where water is turned into wine. The bottom line of that to me is the simple becomes special. And in Christ, the simple things of life can be really special. You don’t need to get drunk. You don’t need to get stoned. You need to be filled with the Holy Spirit and then you can celebrate each and every day.

In the third chapter of John there’s Nicodemus coming to Jesus and wanting to know who he really was, and Jesus saying, “You’ve got to be born again.” That isn’t covered in any other gospel.

In the fourth chapter there’s the woman at the well, a woman who had been married five times and now living with her boyfriend. And Jesus says to her, “I can give you living water.” Jesus says to her, “You Samaritans aren’t quite sure who God is. The Jews know that we worship God in Spirit. Everybody who worships God must worship in Spirit and in truth.”

And as you go through the gospel of John, there’s one unique story after another. There’s the woman caught in adultery in the eighth chapter of John and him talking about knowing the truth and the truth setting you free.

There’s the blind man who was blind from birth and at the disciples saying, “Was it this man who sinned or his parents who sinned?”

Then in the tenth chapter there’s the story of the Good Shepherd, and us knowing his voice if we’re his sheep.

In the eleventh chapter there’s the story of the resurrection of Lazarus, and Jesus saying, “I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, they’re never going to die. And those who die and believe in me, they’re going to live forever.”

Every chapter has something unique. A foot washing in chapter thirteen. It’s a unique perspective. And why am I saying that? Because you’ve got a unique perspective too. You’re getting spoken to by God and you’re being called by God to do things that nobody else is being asked to do. You’ve been created for a special, unique purpose. So you have to believe in the things the Holy Spirit is saying to you.

I hope this message is going to help you believe in the one he sent, and believe in the calling that he has called you to embrace. So he’s asking now, this guy paralyzed for thirty-eight years, “Do you want to get well?”

I had a woman call me and she was in marriage turmoil. By the time she hung up, I was convinced of one thing. She didn’t want anybody to know what she was going through and she reiterated to me, “Don’t tell anybody what I’m going through.”

I thought to myself, You’ll get healed when you’re willing to tell your story. When you no longer care about who knows, when you’re not trying to cover it up, because all of us have struggles in our marriage. Kristina and I have been married forty-seven years this month. Forty-seven years. We’ve gone to marriage counseling. We’ve gone to seminars. We’ve read books. And we still have our arguments at times. We still have our struggles at times. What I’ve learned is, if I want unity with my wife, I have to humble myself.

And the scripture says that if we humble ourselves, he will give us grace. And grace is the power that makes life worth living. Grace is what enables us to follow Jesus and overcome this world. Grace is the special gift that we don’t deserve that God pours out into simple people like us, people who have made all kinds of mistakes and he allows us to triumph in this world.

Jesus asks this man, “Do you want to get well?”

I had a guy come to me a number of years ago. He weighed about 400 pounds. He had been in our church for a couple of years. A really nice guy. And when he made the appointment, I wondered what he wanted to talk about. He told me his story, and his marriages. He told me the pain he was in, the trouble he was having sleeping at night, the fact that he didn’t have a job.

And I started to give him some counsel, and some encouragement, and told him to get a job. He had these different excuses and, basically, I looked at him and asked the same question that Jesus asked this man. “Do you want to get well? Do you? Do you want to get well. Because if you want to get well, you’re going to have make some changes. You’re going to have to be willing to embrace a discipline. You’re going to have to practice doing the right thing, even if you don’t feel like doing the right thing.”

Speaking of practice, my granddaughter is fifteen and a half. And as soon as she turned fifteen and a half, Ava went and got her learner’s permit from the Department of Motor Vehicles. Then she comes over to my house after her mom’s driven with her like once or twice a little bit. And she wants to take me driving. She goes, “Papa, do you want to go for a drive?”

And I’m like, “Not really. Not really at all.” But I knew that when somebody is fifteen and a half and they’re asking you to go for a drive, within six short months, when she has her license and she can go wherever she wants with all of her friends, she won’t be wanting to go places with me. So this is the time for me to say, “Yes.”

So I say, “Yes.” And we get in the car. And it’s about 7:00 pm and it’s dusk and there aren’t a lot of cars on the road. So I say, “Just go around the neighborhood, wherever you want to go.” And then I’m gripping the seat and I’m like, “Watch out for that car there. It’s parked, I know, but don’t get too close. And make sure you know that kids could run out from behind.”

And I’m doing the whole parental thing, trying to be nice, but finally, I’ve got to break the ice so I say, “You know, it’s the first time in a long time I’ve just gone for a drive. And I haven’t even known where we’re going.”

And she looks at me and she says, “Oh, Papa. Isn’t it relaxing to just go for a drive? I just love to go for a drive with no desintation.”

And I’m like, “That is not what I would call relaxing. This is more like putting my life in your hands.”

So what I’m about to tell you in terms of getting whole isn’t going to necessarily be relaxing. It isn’t necessarily going to be completely affirming. But it’s going to make a difference if you’re willing to go for it. Anything worth doing is worth doing poorly. You know why? If you’re going to start playing a guitar, you’re going to start poorly. If you’re going to start becoming a worship singer, you’re probably going to start poorly. But if you’re willing to get past the “poorly” aspect of it and practice what you want to do, you can get whole. You can get well. You can become competent. You can be used by God.

The Greek word here is hygieias, which means healthy, sound, well, cured, healed. You can be healthy, well, sound, cured, healed.

We had a girl in our church way back in the 70’s when we were in California, who I had to pick up every day from her house on Sunday mornings, and carry her into the car and drive her to the services, and then drive her home after the services. Her name was Debbie Lynn Simmons. Debbie Lynn was born with cerebral palsy. She couldn’t walk. She couldn’t feed herself. She could talk but it was hard to understand her. She could not use her arms very well except to push the power button on her wheelchair as she got older and had a motorized wheelchair

Debbie had accepted Jesus and she loved the Lord. She believed that her life would really matter. So our church fasted and prayed for her to be healed. We did this for a number of Sundays, a number of weeks, for I think a couple of months. We all fasted and prayed for God to do a miracle. Well, we didn’t see the miracle, but we still loved Debbie and she still loved Jesus. Even though she wanted to be able to walk and run and sing and dance, she wanted to serve God.

As time went on, I saw Debbie Lynn in Wales when I was teaching at a school of missions in Wales. She said to me when I saw here there, she said, “Mark, I always wanted to be a missionary and look at me now! I’m doing missions for the Lord.”

Debbie Lynn Simmons graduated from Dominican College in San Rafael, California, a Catholic university that’s not cheap, that’s not easy to get into. But she not only graduated from high school, she graduated from college because she believed that Jesus really wanted to use her and to get an education was going to further her ministry.

One year I was reading, after I had moved to Phoenix, I was reading a newsletter sent out by a ministry called Love in Action, which helped people who were coming out of the homosexual lifestyle to find the grace of God to be healed, to be transformed. And I’m reading this article in a magazine. And it was the most well balanced, well thought out, sound healthy, affirming article I think I had ever read. And I’m reading, and I get to the very bottom. There’s the byline and it says, “By Debbie Lynn Simmons.”

And I’m thinking. Wow. She has taken this most complex subject matter and made it so pure, so simple, so straight forward, so filled with grace, so filled with love for anybody that’s struggling with same sex attraction. It was so great. And I thought to myself, We did that fasting and praying for Debbie. We asked God to do a miracle, and the miracle that he did wasn’t to make her run and walk in this world. What he did was, he gave her such a sound, clear mind and the ability to express herself, even though when she typed out that article she had to have a stick in her mouth and type it on a computer one letter at a time. She persevered because she wanted the God who had given her grace to be able to give grace to others.

Debbie eventually got married and moved to Boston. I haven’t been in touch with her recently, but here’s a girl who could’ve just felt sorry for herself, could have been mad at God because of the disability that she had. She turned her disability into an ability—an ability to describe and to declare and to display the glory of God because he uses us even in our weakness, each and every one of us. Because we’ve got weaknesses as well.

So let’s continue on in our story. In verse 7, the invalid is speaking:

“Sir,” the invalid replied, “I have no one to help me into the pool when the water is stirred. While I am trying to get in, someone else goes down ahead of me.”

This is his excuse. And you might have an excuse. You could say to me, “Well, sir, you don’t know what kind of family background I was raised in.” “Sir, you don’t know what kind of a difficult marriage situation I’ve got.” “Sir, you don’t know how I’ve been abused and used and discarded.” “Sir, you don’t know how I’ve been betrayed.” “Sir, you don’t know what it’s like to be in prison like I was in prison.” “Sir, you don’t know what it’s like to be in poverty like I’ve been in poverty.”

And you know what? You’re right. I don’t know what you’ve gone through. I don’t know what you’ve had to overcome. I don’t know, but I do know this, that if Jesus himself is speaking to you and he’s asking you a question, “Do you want to get well?” You can either hold on to your excuse or you can say, “Yes, Lord, help me. I want to get well.”

That’s what I had to say. In my book, if you read it, you’ll know that I went through some dark days in a mental institution and electric shock treatments, and depression that made me suicidal. You’ll know that I went through things that I didn’t know if I would ever get over. I only knew when people told me that there is a God who loved me, that if he was there, I asked him to help me and then I began to experience, day by day, each and every day, something that made that day worth living. Something that encouraged me to keep ongoing. Something that began to make me believe that there is a reason and a purpose beyond myself, and that something is the one who has healed my soul and who will heal your soul as well.

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

A very simple exhortation.

“Get up! Pick up your mat and walk.”
At once the man was cured; he picked up his mat and walked.

You know, Jesus didn’t make him jump through a whole bunch of hoops. He just said, “Pick it up. Go for it. You’re going to be okay. Go ahead. Pick it up. Walk.”

I remember praying for a guy by the name of Jack Donohue one night. We were having a Bible study. This was many years ago. The older you get you have many “years ago” stories, by the way. So many years ago, we’re in a home group, we’re gathering in a circle at the end of the meeting. We had asked, “Who wants prayer?”

Jack wanted prayer. He was in law enforcement. He needed to be physically fit and able. He had a really bad back and it was hurting him just to walk. So we gather around and we’re starting to pray. As I’m praying for him and I’m being quiet, somebody else is praying at the moment and I’m preparing to speak out loud, I see a vision in my mind. What I saw in my mind was Jack doing a karate kick. And I try to sort of get it out of my mind. I don’t know what it’s doing in my mind at a time like that. But I see it. And then I pray for him and then we say, “Amen.” And everybody leaves. And Jack walks out the door. It’s time to go home.

And then I thought, You know what? I’ve got to tell him. So I go out to the street, and I say, “Jack, Jack. Hold on one second.” I said, “You know when we were praying, I saw you do a karate kick and I just thought I would tell you. Good night. God bless.” And I went back in my house.

Now this is as very intense man I was talking to. This is a guy, the first time I saw him at our church, he looked me in the eye and then he stuck out his hand and he said, “Hi. I’m Jack Donohue.”

I said, “Hi. I’m Mark Buckley.”

He goes, “I can tell a fraud when I see one.”

And I said, “Well, welcome to our church. You came to the right place.”

That’s how we met. He was in law enforcement. He was trained to tell if somebody was telling stories that didn’t matter. And so, anyway, long story short, the next time I saw Jack after that Bible study where we prayed, he comes up to me and he says, “Did I tell you what happened?”

I said, “What? What do you mean?”

And I had sort of forgotten. And he says, “Yeah. Remember when you came out and you told me that if I did a karate kick, that’s what you were thinking you saw in this vision? So after you went back in the house, I thought Sounds crazy but what do I have to lose?”

And he does this big karate kick. He said, “My back snapped right back into place and I have been good to go ever since.”

I’m like, “Praise God. Because I would have never thought of that myself.” I would never recommend it. I’ve never recommended that to anybody before or since. But sometimes the solution the Lord has for us is a very simple solution. In this case, “Pick up your mat and walk.”

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

The law forbids it. You are breaking one of the Ten Commandments by picking up your mat. Well, the Ten Commandments, it says, Keep holy the Lord’s day. It doesn’t say Don’t pick up your mat. It says Don’t do any work. But they had interpreted it. They had put all these layers of interpretation on it so that people were pretty bound up and afraid to do anything that the rabbis would say, or the Pharisees or Sadducees would say was actually work.

Let me suggest something about our nation and about healing in general. The people who become too legalistic have a tendency to hinder what God really wants to do. These people were hindering what God wanted to do through Jesus. Because when Jesus tells you to do something, it’s okay with the Father.

I was telling one of my friends in a political discussion last week. I said, “You know, in the Boston Tea Party, they destroyed thousands and thousands of dollars worth of goods that had been imported through that company and they threw them into the sea, and that was illegal. And we consider those guys heroes today.”

Anyway, that’s my last political statement.

So it says in verse 11, when this guy was challenged about doing something unlawful on the Sabbath:

“The man who made me well said to me, ‘Pick up your mat and walk.’ ”
So they asked him, “Who is this fellow who told you to pick it up and walk?”
The man who was healed had no idea who it was, for Jesus had slipped away into the crowd that was there.
Later Jesus found him at the temple and said to him, “See, you are well again. Stop sinning or something worse may happen to you.”

Stop sinning or something worse may happen to you. This is sort of a fascinating thing to say to a guy who had been an invalid for thirty-eight years. What kind of sin had he done? And Jesus is warning him. And Jesus, through him, is warning us. Some of you have been forgiven for your sin. Do not return into that muck anymore.

I have been following Jesus now for fifty years. And you know something? I still have to resist sin every day. Every day I have to guard my mouth. Every day I have to guard my heart. Every day I have to make sure that I am obedient to the Lord and not just giving in to the flesh. I wish I could tell you that, after fifty years, you are free, that sin has no hold over you. Well it doesn’t have a hold over me, but it still is lurking. As it said in the book of Genesis about Cain, “Sin is crouching at the door and it wants to grab hold of you.”

And we’ve got to be honest about that. And the reason that I even mention it is this: That if I walk in the light as he (Jesus) is in the light, then you and I have fellowship with one another. That means we connect in the Spirit. And when we have fellowship with one another, then the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin. It cleanses us. It removes the residual affect of sin and sets us free.

So don’t go back into sin or something worse could happen. Now, let me suggest this. I do’t have an opportunity to speak to the assembled Congress of the United States. But if I did, I would probably want to share some parts of this message with them that I’m sharing with you. We have been divided and I think the Lord would say to us, “Stop sinning or something worse may happen to you.”

In the Revolutionary War, there were the Tories and then there was the Continental Army under George Washington. In the Civil War there was the federal troops and there were the confederate troops. And there were born again believers on both sides. And believers are not called to go to war against one another. Not called by God anyway. Maybe called by man. Maybe called by their own frustration. And in our frustration, we have a tendency to dehumanize people. To say that they’re stupid. We have a tendency to demonize people and say that the devil is working through them and they’re going to destroy the world. And before they destroy the world maybe we should destroy them. To dehumanize, to demonize, and ultimately to destroy people—those are sins. And Jesus warns us, “Don’t call your brother stupid or you’re going to be liable to judgment. Don’t tell him that he’s empty headed. Don’t be angry at your brother, because otherwise you’re going to be liable to judgment.”

That’s not what we’re called to do. We’re called to build people, to love people, to put out the fire of division, to explain the good news of the kingdom of God, which is really what’s going to satisfy the frustration in the heart of man.

So verse 15:

The man went away and told the Jewish leaders that it was Jesus who had made him well.
So, because Jesus was doing these things on the Sabbath, the Jewish leaders began to persecute him. n his defense Jesus said to them, “My Father is always at his work to this very day, and I too am working.” For this reason they tried all the more to kill him; not only was he breaking the Sabbath, but he was even calling God his own Father, making himself equal with God.
Jesus gave them this answer: “Very truly I tell you, the Son can do nothing by himself; he can do only what he sees his Father doing, because whatever the Father does the Son also does.

So Jesus says, “My Father’s always working. He works on Sundays, he works on Saturdays.”

How does he work? Well, if you’re sick and you stay home in bed on the Sabbath day, which is Saturday by the way, chances are you’re going to be better by Sunday. Chances are you’re going to be better because God your Father is a healer. Sometimes he heals speedily, sometimes he heals slowly. Jesus said, “I don’t just do anything I want to do. I do what I see the Father doing.”

Let me tell you, what I see the Father doing, I see the Father healing people. I see the Father encouraging people. I see the Father creating an environment on this earth that is spectacular in its diversity. The sunsets are beautiful. The storm clouds are magnificent, The rain, when it occasionally falls here in the desert, is refreshing. It waters the earth. It makes things sprout and bud. Those things come from the Father. The fish in the streams and in the rivers and in the lakes. The elk and the deer and the forest. Those come from the Father. The waves that break on the beaches of San Diego and Los Angeles. Those come from hte Father. We have a good, good Father. He’s always a giver. He’s always a lover. He’s always an encourager.

Since I’m running out of time I’m going to give you one last verse and that’s verse 39:

You study the Scriptures diligently because you think that in them you have eternal life. These are the very Scriptures that testify about me, yet you refuse to come to me to have life.

So these Pharisees, they were men of the word. They would memorize scripture, study scripture, be obsessed with scripture. And the scriptures talked about Jesus. Through Moses, he said in Deuteronomy18, “There will be prophet coming and you can trust every word he says.”

Through Isaiah in Isaiah 53 he says, “The one who comes is going to be a sacrifice for us. By his stripes we will be healed. He will be bruised for our iniquity. He will be broken for our transgressions. And by his grace we’ll be made whole.”

The prophets declared the coming of the Son of Man. And now the Son of Man had come and they’re like, “No, no. We see it different than you. We think you’re trying to exalt yourself to be like God.”

Jesus says, “Come to me if you want eternal life.”

And in our day and age, Jesus said when we’d come to him, he’s going to pour out his Holy Spirit on us. We’re to seek to be full of the Holy Spirit. It’s not just the Bible. It’s not just accepting Jesus. But the Holy Spirit will lead us into all truth.

I had a chance to speak to a group of pastors this last week, of some of the largest churches in Arizona. They asked me to talk about the political climate, Here’s what I did. I made a list of all the principles that are in the Bible about humbling ourselves and about honoring leaders and about being peace makers. But I also realized, they have the same Bible I do. They know exactly what those scriptures say. I can remind them of those truths, but here’s what I really want to tell them. I’m going to tell them what I’m going to tell you as we close this message:

That even though times are dark in many ways, the kingdom of God is going to continue to expand. Even though people are troubled by Corona Virus, even though people are troubled by unemployment, never in the earth’s history has there been more food security. There are more people having access to food today than at any other time. There are more people with access to health care than at any other time. There are more people with access to transportation today than at any other time. There are more rights for women today than in any other time. More rights for minorities in more countries than at any other time. There is less slavery today than at any other time. There are fewer people dying by preventable, treatable diseases today than at any other time.

The kingdom of God is expanding. More people are accepting Jesus today than at any other time. Even though we’re in a dark, challenging, troubling time, there is going to be an outpouring. There was an outpouring in the sixties and seventies after the tumult of the Vietnam War. There is going to be an outpouring today. And it’s going to come through you and me, those of us who have been made whole, those of us who have been made well, those of us who have embraced the grace of God that Jesus gives to everybody who calls on his name.

Let’s pray together:

Lord Jesus, thank you for this time. Thank you for this day. This is the day that you have made. I ask Lord God, now, for those that you’re speaking to, those whose hearts have been stirred by this message, that we would yield to you. That we would not make excuses, that we would not cower in fear of a disease or political conflict, or whatever it might be, but I pray that we would be bold in proclaiming the truth that you are alive, that you have plans and purposes for all of us, and that you, as you chose to heal the invalid, have chosen to give us life. And we praise God and thank you for this life.

Unless otherwise noted, Scripture is taken from the HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®. NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide.

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