Sermon for Sunday November 26th, 2006

ON THE VERGE OF A MIRACLE by Bruce Ball

John 5:1-5:9

Please turn to the fourth book of the New Testament, JOHN 5:1-9. That will be our main text for today.

‘Some time later, Jesus went up to Jerusalem for a feast of the Jews. 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. One who was there had been an invalid for 38 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?”

“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.” Then, Jesus said to him, “Get up! Pick up your mat and walk.” At once, the man was cured; he picked up his mat and walked.’

Today, we are going to be talking about how all of us are on the verge of a miracle in our lives. But to receive that miracle, we must sacrifice ourselves to the One who sacrificed Himself for us – Christ Jesus, the Son of God – the Living Sacrifice.

But the only way we can sacrifice our hearts to Him is to have total and absolute faith in Him. I am not referring to the faith we talk about having, but the kind of faith that is mentioned in HEBREWS 11:1.

‘Now faith is being SURE of what we hope for, and CERTAIN of what we do not see.’

When we claim that we have faith in our Lord, we must also demonstrate that faith by being responsible for our choices. And, if we are responsible for our choices, we must get over this tendency to …


1. EXPECT OTHERS TO HELP US, AND COMPLAIN IF THEY DON’T

What do we see in the story I just read about the man who was crippled? I’ll tell you what I see. I see a man who has been crippled for most of his life, and had seemingly grown accustomed to lying there wishing, but not doing anything to change the situation.

Verse 6 says, ‘when Jesus saw him there and learned that he had been in that condition a long time …’

That tells me that Jesus took the first step; He inquired. He didn’t wait until the man yelled for attention; it shows that Jesus cared enough about the man to find out about him. What is the first thing Jesus did? He asked the man if he wanted to get well. And in his answer, the man showed the human condition in all of us.

He said he had nobody to help him into the water. He went on to say that every time he tried to get in by himself, someone else would beat him to it. What is he doing? He is doing the very same thing that we do today. We feel sorry for ourselves and how nobody will help us, and then we start blaming others.

Why do we do this? Because we always want a rational explanation for the things in our lives, but this precludes us from having faith in the supernatural in our lives. Faith comes by hearing, and hearing from the word of God. The Scripture does not say faith comes by being able to understand or by being able to blame somebody else for what ails you.

There is the story a missionary tells of his time in the jungles of South America. He said that the people in the village were terribly sick, and being a medic, too, he found out it was from dysentery. He began to boil their water and they all got well. He left shortly thereafter to come back home for a while. When he went back two months later, they were all sick with dysentery again. They were willing to use the boiled water, but wanted someone else to boil it for them. And when nobody would, they got sick and blamed each other.

This tribe of South American Indians did the same thing the man at the pool of Bethesda did. They depended on others to help them, and when they didn’t, they began to blame them for the plight they were in.

If we are to grow as people, and grow as Christians, we need to start expecting more out of ourselves than we have in the past, and take more of a personal responsibility for the situations we get ourselves into. We cannot expect to receive any miracles if we are always expecting others to do the work for us; or if we always blame others when we don’t get what we want.

Now, let’s talk a little about …


2. THE MIRACLES OF GOD

The Bible writes about many miracles that Jesus performed. I am sure that we have all heard about some of them, but most of us have never heard about all of them, and many of us don’t know about most of them. So I want to take a few minutes and give an overview of some of the miracles we find in Scripture. And I am taking them at random, not in any specific or chronological order.

In LUKE 8:22-25 it tells us

‘One day Jesus said to His disciples, “Let’s go over to the other side of the lake.” So they got into a boat and set out. As they sailed, He fell asleep. A squall came down on the lake, so that the boat was being swamped, and they were in great danger.

The disciples went and woke Him, saying, “Master, Master, we’re going to drown!” He got up and rebuked the wind and the raging waters; the storm subsided, and all was calm.

Where is your faith?” He asked his disciples. In fear and amazement, they asked one another “Who is this? He commands even the winds and the water, and they obey Him.’

These men followed Jesus and were being personally tutored in faith by the living Son of God, yet they doubted. I think that when Jesus said, “Let’s go over to the other side of the lake,” that would have been a guarantee they would have all gotten there, so they should not have doubted. But they did.

And what did Jesus do? He got up and He performed a miracle. He made the storm go away. In verse 25, Jesus asks them where their faith was. I have heard many a preacher claim Jesus chastised them, but I have a different view. I think Jesus knew how scared they were and that he asked that question in such a loving way it made them think about where their faith really was.

Right after that passage, it tells of another situation where Jesus performed several miracles.

LUKE 8:26-33

‘They sailed to the region of the Gerasenes, which is across the lake from Galilee. When Jesus stepped ashore, He was met by a demon-possessed man from the town. For a long time this man had not worn clothes or lived in a house, but had lived in the tombs.

When he saw Jesus, he cried out and fell at His feet, shouting at the top of his voice, “What do you want with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? I beg you, don’t torture me!” For Jesus had commanded the evil spirit to come out of the man. Many times it had seized him, and though he was chained hand and foot and kept under guard, he had broken his chains and had been driven by the demon into solitary places.

Jesus asked him, “What is your name?” “Legion,” he replied, because many demons had gone into him, and they begged him repeatedly not to order them to go into the Abyss.

A large herd of pigs was feeding there on the hillside. The demons begged Jesus to let them go into them and he gave them permission. When the demons came out of the man, they went into the pigs, and the herd rushed down the steep bank into the lake and was drowned.’

Here is what I see in this passage.

First of all, contrary to what the world around us says, being demon-possessed is a very real occurrence. Nowhere in the Bible does it say that demons have stopped possessing people, and if it occurred in the day of Jesus, it still occurs in the 21st century.

The man fell at the feet of Jesus shouting to not be tortured or sent into the Abyss. That shows me that the devil and his minions are very aware of the power of Jesus Christ. Sometimes we give the devil too much credit. He is more powerful than we are, but he isn’t nearly as powerful as our Jesus, Amen?

Next, we see where Jesus drove them out of the man, which is a supernatural miracle in itself, and let them inhabit the pigs, which is another miracle. When somebody has the power to direct demons that would be a miracle and when a person can make pigs commit suicide that would be another miracle.

In VERSE 38, we find a command that is for us today, also. Once he was healed, the man begged to follow Jesus, but Jesus commanded him to go home and tell others how much God had done for him. And the man did as he was told.

Jesus gave us the same command in MATTHEW 28:19-20, and sometimes I wonder how many people are as obedient as the man we just spoke of. He evangelized. Sometimes, we don’t.

There is another miracle that also shows the love Jesus has for us. You can find it in JOHN 11.

In this passage, we read where one of Jesus’ friends, who lived in a town called Bethany, was sick and dying. Bethany was a suburb of Jerusalem, being about two miles away. The man’s name was Lazarus, and he had two sisters, Mary and Martha. The sisters knew Jesus could heal their brother, so they sent word for Him to come to them as quickly as possible.

So what did Jesus do when He got that message? He stayed where He was for two more days. Why do you think Jesus delayed his return to help his friend? In this passage, Jesus said the sickness would not end in death, but that it would be for God’s glory.

A couple of days later, Jesus started on the trip back to Bethany. When He got back, he found out that his friend had been in the tomb for four days already. Can you imagine how upset the sisters were? After all, the only person who could have prevented their brother’s death didn’t hurry back to do so!

But the passage says that when Jesus saw everyone weeping, He was deeply moved and He also wept with them. That shows that Jesus cared very much; in fact, He cared more than any of us could. He performed a miracle by calling Lazarus out of the tomb and Lazarus came forth, still wrapped in his burial cloths.

Jesus first prayed to God, the Father. And He did so to model prayer for us. Jesus knew that when He prayed silently, God heard ever word, but He knew a silent prayer could not teach us how to do the same, so He prayed for our benefit.

And then Jesus performed that miracle so that people would recognize that He was truly the Son of God and had the power to do so. And He did that miracle because Lazarus and his sisters had faith in Him.

There are many more such miracles in the Bible that Jesus performed, but there is one thread of commonality that runs through them all. That thread is …


3. THE BELIEVING POWER OF FAITH

Back when Oklahoma was going through the Dust Bowl, a group of farmers would meet daily out in the fields to pray for rain. They would assemble each morning, all of them would get on their knees, and they would pray hard for over an hour each day. But there was still no rain.

A stranger happened by one morning and watched them for a while and then asked what they were doing. They said they were praying for rain. The stranger said he didn’t think so. The farmers said they certainly were praying for rain and again the man said they weren’t.

By this time, the farmers started getting upset and asked the man what he would do differently. The man said that if he were praying for rain, he would have brought an umbrella. That is the difference between what we sometimes call prayer, and praying a prayer in faith and belief.

JAMES 5:15 tells us,

‘And the prayer offered in faith will make the sick person well; the Lord will raise him up. If he has sinned, he will be forgiven.’

The point is that when we pray, we need to pray with the faith that we will receive what we are praying for. We all agree how foolish it would be to pray asking God to give us something and at the same time believe He won’t give it to us. But as foolish as that is, isn’t that what most of us end up doing most of the time?

There is something else I want to quickly touch upon, but will save the teaching of it till later. And that is this: There are many verses in the Bible, just like the one I just read, where it speaks about praying and tells us that if we will just believe, or just have the faith, we will be forgiven and healed.

But when most of us think about them, or teach on them, we hi-light the forgiveness part, but totally skip over the healing part. In ISAIAH, it tells us that by His stripes we are healed. Did you know that God wants us to be healthy? But what do we do? We concentrate very hard on how bad we feel, don’t we? We need to speak those things that aren’t, as though they were. And we will get into an in-depth teaching on this soon.

But today, I want to focus on having faith. Faith that God will do as He said He will do. Faith that we can go into prayer and access the most powerful thing in existence – the word of God.

Do you remember the cartoon, “Family Circus?” There was one where the father was helping little Billy with his homework and the rest of the family was sitting in the same room. Little Billy asked his dad what the most powerful thing in the world was.

In the next clip, you could see these little thought-bubbles above everyone’s head as they thought about what they considered to be the most powerful thing in the world. Above one of their heads was a speeding locomotive, while another one thought of Niagara Falls. Someone else was thinking about a strong man lifting weights, but when it came to the mother her bubble showed that she was thinking about her and Billy on their knees, saying their prayers.

Prayers are certainly the most powerful, and the least used, thing in existence. Too many people only offer what I call “prayers-to-go” as they think about other things. Very few take the time to step off the merry-go-round of this world and take the time to fully focus on our loving God while they truly communicate with Him.

I have been talking about miracles today, and want to talk about just one more.

JOHN 1:1 tells us,

‘In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning.’

In VERSE 14 it continues,

‘The Word became flesh and made His dwelling among us. We have seen His glory, the glory of he One and Only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.’

The Word was Jesus Christ. Why did Jesus come down as flesh? Well, that is the biggest miracle of all.

JOHN 3:16-18 tells us why Jesus came to us as man.

‘For God so loved the world that He gave Hs one and only Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through Him. Whoever believes in Him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because He has not believed in the name of God’s one and only Son.’

We saw the CrossRoads Drama Team perform “Living Sacrifice” this morning. Do you want your miracles from God? They are yours for the taking, and they are free, but there is something you must do to get them.

You must sacrifice yourself fully and finally to the One who was made a Living Sacrifice for you. You cannot keep part of your heart or part of your will for yourself. You cannot say that you will give God 98% and just keep 2% for yourself. There is no such thing as a 2% Christian. That only applies to milk.

You either give Jesus all of your heart in submission to His will, or you end up giving Him nothing. That’s the way it works. There are no gray areas when it comes to salvation. It is either black or white, one or the other, saved or unsaved.

By definition, a miracle is a happening of the supernatural. In other words, a miracle is when God does something for us that we cannot do ourselves. It is important for the Christian to look around and see how many miracles God has already done for each of us.

But even more importantly, we need to realize that God wants to do another miracle for us, one that will bring us much closer to Him than ever before you can receive that miracle you are on the verge of getting, you must do something.

You must sacrifice your faith in the world so that you might have faith in Him; the One who made himself … the Living Sacrifice for you.