When Physical Healing Isn’t Enough

Audio Transcript

Alright, as I always do, let me ask you to take your Bibles and turn this morning to John chapter 5. John chapter 5. We’ll be in verses 1 to 15, mostly in the first nine verses today as we continue our study through the entire Bible. Now we’ve been—we started last January in the New Testament—been going through all four Gospels at the same time, and today we switch over to pick up the narrative in the Gospel of John.

And today has some strong life-giving words for us, and next week at the conclusion of John chapter 5 will be a real bombshell. Jesus throws the gauntlet down there and forces us to choose what we really think about Him.

In 1967, a man named Martin Seligman conducted a series of experiments that I rather wish he wouldn’t have because I’m an animal lover. And in order to do this experiment, he had to subject animals to repeated, stressful, and painful situations in an enclosed environment from which they could not escape. And after doing this for long enough, after repeating this process and subjecting these animals to pain and frustration for long enough, the animals reached a point where they simply stopped trying to get away.

Even when the exit was left open, they had learned that effort was pointless, and they just gave up.

Seligman coined this “learned helplessness.” And the frightening thing is he later proved that human beings do exactly the same thing. People who experience prolonged trauma, repeated failure, ongoing disappointment or suffering or setbacks eventually stop believing that anything they do will make a difference. They don’t stop hurting; they just stop hoping.

Our daughter is a suicide crisis counselor. For eight hours a night, she takes calls from people who have reached a place of such utter hopelessness that they can’t face the thought of living another day. Her youngest (caller) was six years old.

I’m going to tell you, if you haven’t recognized it yet, there are people all around us, probably in this room, who have been dealing with pain and trauma for years and even decades: physical suffering, crushing setbacks, financial burdens, relationship battles, abuse, or other emotional wounds from childhood. They’re exhausted, they’re discouraged, and they feel hopeless.

In the verses we’re going to read this morning, Jesus met a man who had suffered with an affliction for 38 years. It had robbed him of all hope that his life could ever change.

Are you there this morning?

You know, we polish ourselves up pretty good to come here on Sundays, and we look the part, but if anything has sobered me after many years of being a pastor, it’s that outward appearances rarely tell the whole story. When you get to talking to people and they open up to you, you find a shocking number of people going through life day after day carrying devastating trauma and burdens and pain.

So what can we learn from this this morning? Well, I hope something that will be a tremendous blessing to you.

If you don’t mind, may I ask you to stand one more time just as we read the first nine verses of John chapter 5, if you’re able to, please. John chapter 5, starting in verse 1.

“After this there was a feast of the Jews, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. Now there is in Jerusalem by the Sheep Gate a pool, which in Hebrew (or Aramaic) is called Bethesda, which has five covered porches (or colonnades). In these lay a great multitude of sick people: blind, lame, and paralyzed.” Now your Bible may not have the next verse that I’m about to read, and I’ll explain that in a moment.

“They were waiting for the moving of the water, for an angel went down at a certain time into the pool and stirred up the water. Then whoever stepped in first after the stirring of the water was made well of whatever disease he had.” Verse 5. “Now a certain man was there who had been an invalid for 38 years. When Jesus saw him lying there and knew that he already had been in that condition a long time, He said to him, ‘Do you want to be made well?’ The sick man answered Him, ‘Sir, I have no one to put me into the pool when the water is stirred up, and while I’m trying to get in, someone else steps down before me.’ Jesus said to him, ‘Get up, pick up your bed, and walk.’ Immediately the man was made well, and he took up his bed and walked.”

Thank you, you may be seated.

For centuries, skeptics and critics were quick to point out that the Pool of Bethesda didn’t exist, and they called the Bible unreliable. That was until 1888 when a German archaeologist named Konrad Schick was digging just outside the walls of Jerusalem, and he unearthed exactly what John described—a series of pools with five covered colonnades right there near the Sheep Gate in Jerusalem. The ruins are visible to this day. There’s a photograph of it.

All of that was underground. It had been filled in and built on top, and they took years to painstakingly dig that out. Now you’re just looking at a portion of it. This place is massive. It stretches more than 300 feet long and 130 feet wide, so, bigger than a football field. John says, “A great multitude gathered there,” and whenever you see John using the word “multitude” in his Gospel, it’s a lot of people.

Blind, lame, paralyzed, sick, hopeless. What a heartbreaking sight this must have been to stand there and see hundreds and hundreds of sick people sprawled out across this vast complex. They came here for a reason. The Pool of Bethesda.

Bethesda means “house of mercy.” Beth means house, so Beth-el means house of God. El is the name for God. Bethlehem, house of bread, and so on. This was called—it had been nicknamed—the house of mercy. What’s going on here? Well, if you have the King James Version or the New King James Version, you will have verse 4, which talks about what we just read, an angel coming down periodically and stirring the water, and whoever was first into the pool would be healed.

If you have another version, the ESV, the NIV, and so on, NASB, you won’t have that verse, but it may be in the footnotes. Now, please don’t believe the nonsense that translators deceptively removed this verse because they wanted to corrupt the Bible. I mean, of all verses to remove? Why not, let’s remove the blood of Christ saving us from our sin? How about let’s remove all that?

Now the answer is quite simple, although some refuse to admit it, and that is the earliest or the oldest manuscripts that we have of the Gospel of John, P66, P75, do not contain verse 4. It is found in a newer manuscript that the King James Version comes from, but since the older versions and older or earlier manuscripts are considered more reliable because they’re closer to the actual writing of the document—and so it’s been copied and copied, and we looked at all that back in last January, if you want to go back and dig up those sermons, “Can We Trust the New Testament?”—and so since it’s not found in the oldest or earliest manuscripts, it’s believed that it’s more of an explanatory note that was put in to help readers understand why sick people gathered there in the first place.

Archaeological and geological studies in that area have revealed that these pools were connected to a system of underground water sources or springs that would periodically bubble up, just like places all over the world do today. There are mineral springs in different parts of the world that people flock to, and apparently many of them do have some kind of healing properties. I’m not an expert in that by any means, but I’ve seen these places, seen videos of them, and people going in and soaking in these natural springs and gaining some kind of health benefits from them.

In fact, if you happen to go to Jerusalem this week and visit the Pool of Bethesda, you’ll see a plaque there that says “Pool of Bethesda where Jesus healed the crippled man,” and it calls them medicinal baths. Now, what really happened there? Did God occasionally send an angel to stir the water and heal people? Or had people just come to believe that that’s what happened? Listen, I have friends on both sides of this discussion, and let me solve it for you right now: I don’t know. I just don’t know. This is not a hill I’m willing to die on.

What we do know is, whatever this was, it was a system that favored the strongest and the fastest and left 99% of the people with dashed hopes day after day after day. I struggle to connect that to the God of the Bible. Jesus made no mention of this system at all. Instead of saying to the man, “Quick, I know an angel is going to be coming in three and a half minutes, let me help you into the water,” Jesus bypassed all that, and He walks right up to the man, and He says, “I’m the one who can heal you.” Now John, in these verses, suddenly narrows the lens from this sprawling landscape of hurting people down to one man in the crowd.

Look at verse 5 again. “Now a certain man was there who had been an invalid for 38 years.”

38 years. Think about that. This man had been suffering in that condition for longer than Jesus had been alive. Before the manger in Bethlehem, this man was suffering in that condition. 38 years. You know, if I bear a burden for a year, I’m ready to pull my hair out. 38 years.

And Jesus walks over to him and asks him a question that frankly sounds offensive. I really struggled with this as a teenager, but now that I’ve gotten a little older, I understand this so well, just from personal experience.

Verse 6, “Jesus said to him…” (Can you imagine saying this to this man?) “Do you want to be made well?”

“Excuse me?”

“Do you want to be made well?” Surely everyone there would scream out, “Of course he wants to be well! Why do you think he’s here? Of course he wants to be well!” But is that really the truth?

Jesus wasn’t being unkind. He was doing what we see Him do with so many people throughout His ministry. He was digging deep and putting His finger on the man’s real problem that human eyes could not see.

Hey, it took me years to believe what I’m about to say to you next. I just… I could comprehend that this would be true of anyone, but the brutal truth is some people don’t want to get well. They’ve become comfortable where they are, and in fact in some cases their trauma has become their identity.

Think about what healing would actually cost this man. He would have to get a job. He would have to take responsibility for himself. No more having food brought to him, no more money tossed in his direction, no more getting sympathy from everyone. Psychologists call this secondary gain. It’s the hidden benefits of staying stuck where you are.

As I said, when I was younger I simply could not fathom anyone choosing to stay in this kind of condition, and yet I’m telling—I could write a book. I’ve met people who were broken by one thing or another, and they don’t want help. They want sympathy, they want attention, they want pity, but they don’t want help. And I’m such a genius it took me about 50 years to figure out that I can’t help people who don’t want help. I wasted a lot of time trying.

Now listen, I want to be very clear on this. Whether you like to hear it or not, there are some struggles that you will carry to the grave.

God gave Paul something called a thorn in the flesh. Don’t know what it was, but this man had been—he had lived a very rough life. He had been beaten, he had been stoned so badly that they thought he was dead. He had been imprisoned, he had suffered shipwreck, and he took it all with joy, and yet whatever this thing was, this thorn in the flesh, was so bad, the Bible says he pleaded with God three times, “Please God, please take this away! This is too much!” And God said, “No.” God said, “No.” He said, “Paul, I know if I remove this from you, you are going to become arrogant. And so I need to keep some pressure on you, Paul, to keep you humble.” And Paul lived with that, whatever that horrifying thing was, for his entire life.

And sometimes when a person has borne a burden for so long, they can reach a point where they just lose hope. They want to get well, but their situation never changes, and I’m telling you, in time it can grind a person to dust.

Be very careful judging other people.

But there are cases… there are cases where people have grown comfortable in their condition and they don’t want to change, because that would mean giving something up. And this is not just true for physical or emotional trauma. People also get stuck in patterns of sin that they don’t want to leave. Again, as a pastor, I’ve pleaded with people, “Please turn from what you’re doing.” And some of them have said, “No.” Sat right back there, me and one of our former elders who’s in heaven, Moose Keller, with a man, married, children, addicted to cocaine, and we pleaded with him, and he shredded a Kleenex while we were talking into tiny pieces in a pile on the floor, and his wife said, “I’ve tried and tried and tried. I can’t take it anymore. It’s cocaine or it’s me,” and the man said, “I choose cocaine,” right there.

Some people get stuck in sin and they don’t want to leave. It’s not that they haven’t had opportunities. There have been altar calls, but they didn’t respond. They’ve been given wise counsel, but they didn’t receive it. Friends have pleaded with them to come back on the right path, but they’ve chosen to go the other way. It’s just easier to stay where they are.

It seems that this man at the pool was in the second category, because Jesus sees right through his excuses, and He says rather bluntly, “Are you sure you want what you say you want? You’re here with all these other sick people with whatever’s going on in the waters that Phil Pike can’t explain. Obviously you want to get well, right? Or do you?”

It’s as though Jesus is saying, “If I heal you, nothing will ever be the same.” Notice what the man does not say in response. This really jumps out at me. Sometimes what’s not said in the Bible speaks loudly. He doesn’t say, “Yes, please—heal me now!” Isn’t that what you would say? If a healer came to you and said, “Do you want to be made well?” “Yes! Yes! Do it now before you change your mind!” He didn’t say that. He gave Jesus a list of reasons why healing was impossible. Look at it again. Verse 7, “The sick man answered Him, ‘Sir, I have no one to put me into the pool when the water is stirred up, and while I’m trying to get in, someone else steps down before me.'”

The first thing he does is puts the blame on other people. “No one will come and put me in the pool, and when I try to get in, some other joker steps in in front of me.” It’s everybody else’s fault. Instead of him saying, “Yes, I’ll do whatever You want me to do so that I can be well,” he says, “Other people are the problem.” Oh, how often we hear this: “It’s my spouse’s fault. It’s my counselor’s fault. It’s my parents’ fault. It’s the church’s fault.”

Not only is he blaming other people, but notice he’s still putting his hope in the very thing that has failed him for years. He’s still looking to the pool as his source of help when Jesus, the healer, is standing right in front of him.

Why do people keep turning to the same things over and over again that have failed them in the past? There will be someone tonight reaching for a liquor bottle, saying, “If I just drink a little more tonight, my heartache will go away.” They’ve tried it a hundred times, hasn’t worked yet, but “just a little more, and things will be right.” No, it won’t. “If I just buy more things, then I’ll feel satisfied.” You sure about that? “Once I reach the top of the ladder, I’ll find meaning.” I doubt you will.

What is it? The definition of insanity? Hasn’t it been described as doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results? We look at that on paper and go, “Well, that’s dumb, who would do that?” And yet we look in the mirror and go, “Oh, I do that.” God said to His people in the Old Testament, “My people have committed two evils. They have forsaken Me, the spring of living water, and they have dug for themselves broken cisterns that will not hold water.” And yet they go back day after day and lift the lid and look in, thinking there’s going to be water.

This man keeps returning to broken cisterns hoping to find water this time but always comes up thirsty. 38 years. And so his only conclusion is to keep making excuses for why it’s not working. “I’ve tried. The system is rigged against me. It’s always going to be this way.” That’s exactly where so many people live. They’ve gotten so used to living in their trauma that you can put an answer right in front of them, but they won’t see it. They’re like the mice in Seligman’s experiment. Even when the gate is swung wide open, they don’t walk out. They’ve reached a place of learned helplessness.

Listen, I want to say to you, sometimes the greatest obstacle to a transformed life is the story we tell ourselves about why we can’t change. There’s actually no hindrance in front of us at all. It’s just the lies we tell ourselves.

Jesus asked this man an offensive question, “Do you want to get well?” And the man rattled off a list of reasons why he never would.

Watch what Jesus does next. He doesn’t even acknowledge the man’s excuses. He simply says, verse 8, “Get up, pick up your bed or your mat, and walk.” No therapy session, no seven-step program, just the authority of the Son of God landing on 38 years of helplessness.

And John records what happens next. And I’m telling you, he says this with—to me—astounding casualness. Again, it’s one of the tiny, tiny proofs that this is true. If you were writing something that was a lie, trying to convince future generations that it was true, and you were including all these astounding miracles, wouldn’t you feel like you had to go to great lengths to over-explain how it worked and that, “No, no, really, this is really true, it really happened, okay, here’s how it happened”? I want you to watch how casually John states this in verse 9. Jesus said to him, “Get up, pick up your bed, and walk.”

Verse 9, “Immediately the man was made well, and he took up his bed and walked.” John’s like, “Yeah, it’s just another Tuesday in the life of Jesus.”

But don’t miss this. Why didn’t Jesus just say, “Get up and walk”? Why did He tell the man to pick up his mat? Imagine how nasty that thing was. Wouldn’t it have been better just to leave it there?

Wouldn’t it have been better just to leave it there? Why make the man carry it? Because that mat had defined who he was. It was the symbol of his brokenness, and Jesus was saying, “Don’t leave it there. Take it with you. Let it be your testimony.” It’s amazing, the very thing that was once the picture of his captivity became proof of his freedom. Folks, this is how the gospel works. That pain from your past that you thought would ruin your future is the very thing God uses to showcase His grace.

I think of a friend right now who’s not even in South Carolina but I talked to recently, who went through some horrific things over the past few years, and he just thought like, “Man, this has ruined my life. I’ll never get out of this.” And yet I had such joy talking to him because he’s now starting to see that all of that pain that he thought was going to destroy his future was actually the doorway to his greatest testimony.

We won’t have time to read all the remaining verses, but in the verses that follow, things sadly take a dark turn. It says that Jesus made His way through the crowd, and the astonishing thing is this man who had just been healed didn’t even bother to find out who Jesus was. I mean, when Jesus had just healed you and then turned to walk away, wouldn’t you chase after Him and go, “Wait a minute, wait, sir! Who are you?”

The man gets in trouble with the Pharisees, we’re told, for carrying his mat on the Sabbath. A miracle had just occurred, and the only thing they could focus on was a legal violation. And so they asked him, “Who healed you?” and the guy basically says, “I don’t know. I don’t know.” Like, what? I mean, wouldn’t you want to send Him a postcard a year from now and say, “Hey, I just… thanks, you know, thanks.” Like, nothing. “I don’t know who He is.”

And then something really bizarre happens. Look at verse 14. “Afterward sometime later Jesus found the man at the temple and said to him, ‘See, you’ve been made well. Stop sinning or something worse may happen to you.'” Now this verse gives people conniption fits, and it ought not to. This does not necessarily mean that his infirmity was caused by sin. Doesn’t necessarily mean that, and we’ll see that in John chapter 9 later when we get there, and we see the man born blind, Jesus’ disciples immediately said, because it was a superstition of theirs, if someone was born blind, either their parents sinned or the child sinned in the womb. And so they said to Jesus, “Who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” Guess what? Jesus said, “Neither.” You knuckleheads, “Neither!” Neither of them sinned. He was born blind for this moment so that God’s glory may be revealed. There’s a shocker.

So what Jesus says to him here, “Stop sinning or something worse may happen to you,” it doesn’t necessarily imply that his problem was caused by sin. See, Jesus sees what we don’t see. He sees the heart. And He obviously saw that this man, even though physically healed, was already sinning. Because He said to him, “Stop sinning!” Like, I’m not real smart, but that’s pretty plain.

If I came up to you and said, “Stop shouting!” and you were sitting there quietly, you’d call the loony bin on me, right? “I’m not shouting.” Jesus said to the man, “Stop sinning!” Because he was sinning, or at least headed towards sin, and Jesus knew this.

And we must remember Jesus didn’t come to merely heal people’s bodies. He came to save people’s souls. And He’s issuing a warning that we all need to hear. There’s something worse than 38 years of suffering, and that’s eternity without God.

People think that if God fixed everything in their life, then they’d love Him, then they’d live for Him. But this man’s story is a caution against that idea. Jesus has just healed his biggest struggle, and he went right on sinning.

The question isn’t, “Would you believe if God removed your worst struggle?” The real question is, “If God never gave you relief from it, would you still love Him and serve Him?” That’s the real question.

If God never gave you relief from your burden, would you still worship Him and praise Him and serve Him? Seeing a miracle, getting all your prayers answered will not necessarily make you live for Him.

We’ll see this throughout the Gospels as we continue to make our way through. You know, one astonishing example is, listen to this, the day after Jesus miraculously fed the 5,000, those same people the next morning said to Him, “What sign will You perform that we may see it and believe in You?”

What now? People say, “If God would just write it across the sky, I’d believe.” No, you would not. Jesus said to some who were skeptical, “Even if one came back from the dead, you wouldn’t believe.” You wouldn’t believe. You may think that being freed from all your struggles and burdens is the thing you need most, the thing that would enable you to finally be free to live for God, but that is not true. It’s not true!

Trace the story of the Apostles, and we’ll do this in the coming months, and the early church. They were mocked and threatened and beaten and in prison. They went hungry and cold and naked. They were killed for their faith. That was their life. Who do we think we are to skate free?

I love what our dear brother Lee Crandall years ago told me in the hospital room as he was dying. Struggled with cancer for so long. He said to me, “You know, Pastor Phil, people sometimes say to me, ‘Lee, do you ever ask God, “Why me?”‘” And Lee said, “No. I ask, ‘Why not me?'” “Why not me?”

Read Foxe’s Book of Martyrs. Put the TV Guide down for a week. Read Foxe’s Book of Martyrs. Read Tortured for Christ by Richard Wurmbrand. I dare you. Read The Cost of Discipleship by Dietrich Bonhoeffer. You will see that the people who’ve gone before us, the giants upon whose shoulders we stand, the very reason we’re able to be here and worship God and study His Word and freedom this morning is because the people who went before us suffered and died for this.

God didn’t remove all their burdens so that they could live for Him. What utter nonsense! That kind of theology leads to the foolishness that one pastor wrote in his best-selling book, “Every time you go to the mall, pray that God will give you the best parking space and He’ll give you favor.” What? Like, I try to be a patient person, but I have a short fuse for that kind of stuff.

My dad was crippled when he was 18 years old, never walked another day in his life, died at 90, and served God the whole way in spite of it.

I love what David said up here last week or the week before: “We pray for healing here.” Thank you. We pray for healing here. The elders have anointed people with oil. We’ve prayed for you. Some have been healed. Some haven’t. It’s not in my hands. God is sovereign.

If God heals the person sitting next to you and never heals you, because He knows something you don’t know, are you still able to worship Him? Or are you holding a grudge against God this morning? “I’ve prayed, I’ve tried church, I’ve read the Bible, it doesn’t work for me.” Be very careful. Oh listen, it’s wonderful that this man was healed after 38 years of suffering. I would wish that for everybody who’s hurting, but it turns out that wasn’t his biggest need at all. He had a restored body, but he had a lost soul.

I’d rather suffer every day of this life and know that my soul is saved than I would to live my best life now and miss heaven when I die. You can have your best life. I want mine then.

That’s why I try to be very, very careful about not complaining over the physical struggles of this life. I don’t always do a good job. But I never want to come to the place where I complain about the immediate and the temporary and lose sight of the fact that Jesus has already done the greatest miracle of all time for me when He forgave my sin and saved my soul. If He never does another thing for me, I owe Him my life.

Listen, it’s so easy to want what Jesus can do for us and yet remain uninterested in truly knowing Him. This man didn’t give a rip about knowing who Jesus was.

I’m done, but I want to say this to you. I took this out of my notes three times over the past few weeks, and I had no peace about taking it out, and so I put it back in. I don’t want to say this to you, but I need to say this to you, and please accept it with all the humility that I’m trying to say it in. I am not trying to minimize whatever you’re going through. Listen, I know some of you are carrying huge burdens beyond anything I could ever understand. My heart goes out to you. But if you find yourself here this morning angry at God, holding a grudge that He hasn’t answered all your prayers, listen, that doesn’t make you evil; it makes you human.

But here’s what I want to say to you. Maybe this morning you need to pause momentarily from asking God to fix your life and start asking Him to fix your perspective. Pray, “Lord, give me a heart that doesn’t need a miracle to stay faithful. Give me a heart that loves You even when nothing changes. Give me a heart that is more concerned about my sin than my suffering.” Oh my word, how that would transform all of us.

Because in the end, folks, when all this is said and done, when life is over, when we stand before Him, the only thing that will matter—it’s not, “Did I get something from Jesus?” but “Did I truly know Him?” I pray wherever you are in your journey, you will take this in the spirit that it’s been delivered, you will take it to heart, and you will just say, “God, I’ve been in a bad place with this. I’ve been making excuses, I’ve been holding grudges. God, and I’m going to stop for a while asking You to change my life. I’m going to ask You to change my perspective.” And see what He will do.