Why We Struggle to Receive the Life Jesus Offers (John 5:1-17) || 03.29.26

So, a little known fact about Angela and me is that we have been sued. When we moved to Orlando and sold our house in Oxford, the people who bought our house sued us for deficiencies in the house that existed before we ever owned it and deficiencies that never showed up in the inspection. We actually only lived in the house for five years and two other people owned it before us. That’s the simplest way to describe the suit. We have walked through cancer, we have walked through my heart attack, we have moved across the world with three kids in diapers, and Angela and I will both tell you that this lawsuit was in many ways harder than any of those things.

We had to hire lawyers that cost a ton of money. We were living with my parents and spending all the money we had for a home downpayment on lawyers. And this went on for two years! And it didn’t help that the other lawyer suing us was a member of the church I pastored! I will say that he now has the reputation in Oxford of being the only lawyer in town to “Sue his own dang pastor.”

Our lawyer warned us that in suits like this, they often cut the baby in half and that’s what happened. They didn’t get what they wanted, but we had to give them more money than we have ever spent on a car. The thing that made this so hard for us was the feeling of hopelessness that had taken hold of us. We felt like we were doing what God wanted by coming to Orlando and suddenly we don’t even know how we will afford to live in Orlando. It was hard to trust God that He was going to provide in other areas and it was at times hard to even believe He has good intentions toward us.

Now, I have never lost a child. I have never lost a spouse. I’ve never experienced life long chronic pain. I know some of you have. But, that experience is the closest I can place myself to the struggle of this man by the pool who had been an invalid for 38 years. He’s in a crowded place, he has a long and unimaginable history of disappointment, and hopelessness that had to be as disabling to his spirit as his physical disability. And he’s not alone here.

In John 2,3, and 4 people come to Jesus. In John 5, Jesus comes to someone who can’t come to Him. And I think John is showing us not just that Jesus does miracles, but three postures that cause us to struggle to receive the life He offers.

I. We become resigned to our helplessness 1-7

We can see this in Jesus’ simple question: Do you want to be healed? That seems like a stupid question, but it’s not because Jesus knows what this man is feeling in his heart. John tells us that all this unfolds in Jerusalem during a crowded Jewish feast at the Pool of Bethesda, just inside the Sheep Gate. The Sheep Gate is where sacrificial lambs entered the city. It’s interesting that John records the detail of the five covered colonnades because archaeology has confirmed not just that this was a real location, but also found the five colonnades. These are basically shade walkways packed with the blind, the lame, and the paralyzed, many of whom had been waiting for years to be healed.

There was a popular belief at the time that the pool waters could bring healing at certain moments when the pool rippled or bubbled from some divine intervention. But, you had to be the first in the pool at that time. This wasn’t a peaceful scene. It was a scene of suffering, religious expectation, and repeated disappointment. Think about getting stuck for years in a type of spiritual waiting room, but no physician ever comes. Where people lived in both hope and hopelessness at the same time. This man had spent 38 years chasing a moment he could never reach and now the moment has come to him.

“Do you want to be healed?” Jesus isn’t just asking him about healing. He’s asking if he still believes change is even possible after 38 years of waiting for it. And does the man say, “Yes”? No. He doesn’t say, “Yes.” He doesn't say, “Please help me.” He doesn’t say, “I believe you can do this.” He gives an explanation. He says, “I have no one to put me into the pool when the water is stirred up, and while I am going another steps down before me.” He doesn’t believe healing is possible.

We don’t just suffer that long, we adapt. We change. We build a life around the limitation. We lower our expectations of this life. We lower our expectations of God. We stop putting ourselves in positions to be disappointed.

How many of you have experienced profound disappointment or suffering and just stopped asking God for things because you don’t want to be disappointed again? I have. Prolonged disappointment doesn’t just wound us, it reeducates us. It changes what we expect from God, what we expect from life, and what we expect for ourselves.

We may not say it out loud, but we have quietly concluded that this marriage will never change, this anxiety is just who I am, marriage won’t happen, kids won’t come, loved ones won’t get better, or this pattern in my life isn’t going to change. When this happens, it isn’t that we reject Jesus, we have just stopped expecting Him to show up when we need Him. The barrier isn’t necessarily resistance, but resignation. 

That’s what had happened to this man. He’s not content. He’s not at peace. He’s just so familiar with disappointment, he’s adjusted his life around it. His whole life was waiting for a moment that would never come. He went from ‘God can heal me’ to ‘Maybe I can get in the water’ to ‘I guess this is just my life.’ And here is something else that I had not thought of before Joe White taught on this passage at our men’s retreat. In that world, many people in his condition survived by begging. And places like this pool were where you positioned yourself to be seen. This means that healing wouldn’t just change his body, it would change how he survives, how he relates to people, how he understands himself. It might even mean stepping into a life he no longer knows how to live. So Jesus isn’t only asking, “Do you want your legs to work?” He’s asking “Are you ready for your life to be completely different?” Makes me think of Red in Shawshank Redemption being scared to be be let out of prison because that is all he had known for decades.This is what it looks like to become truly resigned to our helplessness. There is this subtle transition in our hearts from ‘I don’t think change will happen’ to ‘I don’t know who I’d be if it did.’ Being resigned to our helplessness doesn’t just mean that we resist change, it means that we no longer know how to live without the version of ourselves we have learned to survive as. But what is so important to see is that this man doesn’t just need new legs. Jesus is going to give him new legs, but Jesus knows he needs something deeper. He needs a restored imagination of what is possible with God. 

And I love that even though this man shows no real openness to hope and healing, Jesus moves toward him in the middle of his resignation. He doesn’t wait for the man to regain hope, express faith, or give the right answer. And, in so doing, Jesus is showing us how He moves toward us in our resignation as well.

Jesus doesn’t just want to just give us healthier bodies that will just break down at a later point in time. He wants to give us spiritual life. And the way He does that is by stepping into our dark places. Helping us to see the ways we have stopped expecting Him to move. 

But, the passage doesn’t stop there. John wants us to see something else. When we live resigned to our hopelessness long enough, when we have been disappointed enough, we don’t just stop hoping, we change where we place our hope. 

II. We fix our hope on manageable saviors 2-9

And that is exactly what we see in this man’s response. “I have no one to put me in the pool…” The pool felt like a manageable system. It may be conditional, competitive, and impersonal, but it’s something that feels possible under the right circumstances. If he could just get there.

But the tragedy is that Jesus is standing in front of him! He’s still explaining the strategy behind the pool to the Savior of the world! That is a manageable savior. Manageable saviors are hopes that fit inside our understanding, hopes that give us a sense of control, and hopes that actually keep us from seeing our need for radical grace. 

And this makes total sense given what we’ve already seen resignation to helplessness. When we’ve adapted to disappointment, we don’t stop hoping, we just shrink our hope down to something safer. Big, God-sized hope feels too costly, too exposing, so we begin to look for smaller, more manageable saviors that we can understand, control, and improve with effort. Instead of risking disappointment again, we settle for systems that feel predictable. “If I can just get in the water” “If I can just position myself better” That’s what resigned helplessness does. It moves us away from a Savior who brings life and toward systems that help us cope. We trade the dream of transformation for the lie of control. We trade grace for something we can manage.

For this man, the pool was his manageable savior. Now we have to ask ourselves what ours are. Here is a diagnostic question. Where are you strategic more than surrendered? What do I mean by that? If you are married, strategy is replaying conversations, crafting arguments, and trying to manage responses. Now, there may be a place for that, but if that is where your hope is, it’s a manageable savior. Surrender says, “God, I can’t change their heart. But You can. Help me to love him or her faithfully.”

Or if finances are your biggest struggle. Strategy is constantly doing mental math, feeling anxious about it, and holding onto control. If that is your main hope, that’s a manageable savior. Surrender, though, says, “God, I will be wise. But help me see that my security is in You and not in my control.”

Afterward, Jesus finds the man in the temple and says, “See, you are well. Sin no more, that nothing worse may happen to you.” That can sound heavy, especially for those who live with ongoing or chronic pain. But Jesus is not saying all suffering is caused by personal sin. He rejects that idea elsewhere. He’s pointing to something deeper: there is a healing greater than the body, and a brokenness more serious than anything physical. And this is where strategy and surrender come into focus. Strategy says, “If I can just find the right treatment, the right solution, then I’ll finally be okay.” Again, there’s a place for that. But surrender says, “God, even if this doesn’t change, don’t let me miss You. Don’t let me settle for physical relief and lose spiritual life.” Jesus is inviting him…and us…not just to be healed, but to receive a life with God that nothing, not even ongoing pain, can take away.

It’s really important to notice that this is not a ‘your faith has healed you’ kind of a passage. There is no record of this man believing. At least not in this chapter. He may have believed later, but it doesn’t happen here. Jesus said, “Get up. Take your bed. Walk.” Then, the man is confronted by the Pharisees for carrying his mat, which is not allowed on the Sabbath, and it feels like the man actually blames Jesus. Like, “I don’t know, talk to Jesus. He healed me.” I think what John is wanting to show us is the power of Jesus to speak resurrection power into this man’s body against every instinct this man has and the power of Jesus to speak resurrection power into our souls against every instinct we have. We struggle to receive life because we keep placing our hope in systems that never require us to fully trust Jesus. And Jesus will do whatever He needs to to interrupt those systems and bring us not just physical life, but spiritual life. 

And often, Jesus uses the hard things to draw us closer to Himself and to show us things we wouldn’t otherwise see. When we thought things were so hopeless with our house, a member of the church made it possible for OGC to buy the house we know live in as a parsonage until we could buy it back. When the judgment came down that we owed all that money, members of our former church paid it for us. We were literally brought to tears seeing how God provided for us through His church in two cities. We would have never seen that if not for this lawsuit. We still go back to it in our minds when hard things happen because we have seen God do what felt like the impossible for us. 

And if we stopped the story right here, we might think this is just about a desperate man with misplaced hope. But John doesn’t let us do that. Because as soon as the man is healed, the camera shifts. And what we see is surprising. The problem isn’t just out there in broken, desperate people. The same problem is also in the most religious put-together people in the room. Because the Pharisees are doing the exact same thing, just in a different way. The third posture that prevents us from receiving the life Jesus offers…

III. We long for a performance religion 10-17

For the first time in 38 years, this man is walking. Instead of sitting on the mat, he’s walking and carrying it under his arm. And instead of celebrating this, the Pharisees are offended! They stopped this man and said, “It is the Sabbath, and it is not lawful for you to take up your bed.” A man who has not walked in 38 years is walking and their first response is, “You’re breaking the rules.” That’s not just insensitivity, it's a different kind of blindness. These Pharisees were deeply religious. They knew the Scriptures, they cared about obedience, they were serious about honoring God. But, they completely missed the life of God standing right in front of them. Why? Because they had built a system where life comes through performance. The man trusted the pool. The Pharisees trusted their performance. The man said, “If I can just get into the water…” The Pharisees said, “If I can just keep the rules.” Different systems, but the same instinct. 

At this point in time, the command to honor the Sabbath and keep it holy had accumulated layers of man-made interpretation onto it. The Ten Commandments are good and we should strive to honor God by doing them, but the first role of the Ten Commandments is to show us that we can’t do them perfectly. That we are sinners in need of grace and forgiveness. But the religious leaders of that day added all these other rules to feel like they were perfectly accomplishing all the commandments. They wanted to make God’s commands manageable. They defined what was work and what wasn’t. Carrying a mat like this, according to them, was work. So in their framework, this miracle couldn’t be evidence of God’s power. It was a problem that had to be corrected. Performance religion says, “If I do the right things, if I stay disciplined enough, if I live well enough…then I will have life. Then God will accept me. Then, I’ll be ok.” 

And I want to at least acknowledge that this is kind of appealing. It feels measurable. It feels predictable. It gives us a sense of control. If you’ve been disappointed, it feels safer. But instead of leading to hopelessness, it leads to self-rightessness…which is just as lifeless. 

In a room this size, there are going to be some people who run to the pool, but there are others who run to performance. We think that if my kids behave a certain way, if I give a certain amount of money, if I go to church on a regular basis, then God will love me more. Then, I’ll feel secure. Then, life will work. But, here is the danger. Performance religion doesn’t reject God, it redefines Him. God becomes a scorekeeper. And when that happens, you stop relating to God as a loving Father, but as a manageable formula. 

And you can see this in the Pharisees because they don’t ask the man, “How were you healed?” or “What has God done?” They say, “Who told you to take up your bed?” They want to be on the right side of the Cosmic Scorekeeper. They are more concerned with rules than restoration. 

And Jesus’ response is, “My Father is working until now, and I am working.” That means that God is not bound by the Pharisees systems. God doesn’t stop working in accordance with their made up rules. In fact, He is coming to disrupt them so that He can bring life to His people. So often we struggle to receive life from Jesus not because we feel helpless, not because we cling to manageable saviors, but because deep down we want a version of God we can manage. The man tried to manage his life through the pool. The Pharisees tried to manage God through performance, and both missed Jesus. 

So, if we are really honest, how do we relate to God? Is it more like a Father…or is it more like a system? [Pause] Performance religion says, “If I can get it right, I’ll have life.” But Jesus says, “I bring life to those who can’t get it right.” Some of us cope with our helplessness by chasing control. Others by performing for approval. But both postures keep us from receiving life as a gift. 

So, how does Jesus actually bring that life? If we are honest, we are all in this story somewhere. Some of us are the man by the pool: resigned, disappointed, barely hoping anymore. Some of us are more like the Pharisees: trying to hold it all together, trying to get it all right. But actually getting it all wrong. 

None of us come to Jesus with what it takes. And that is exactly the point of the story. Because the life Jesus offers is not given to the strongest, the fastest, or the most disciplined. It’s given to the one who can’t get there. And here is how Jesus makes that possible. Jesus didn’t just walk into our brokenness, He took it on Himself. 

On the cross, Jesus stepped into a different kind of pool. Not a pool of water, but a pool of the full weight of sin, judgement, and death. He became the One who was rejected, condemned, and cut off so we could become the ones who are invited, restored, and brought in. 

The man at Bethesda spent 38 years trying to get to the water. But on the cross, Jesus went all the way down into our inability so we wouldn’t have to. And this means that we don’t get life because we fought our way there, because we figured it out, or because we finally got it right. We get life because Jesus came to us and speaks life into us. 

The Bible ends with a picture of that life. It’s not a pool, it’s a feast. The marriage supper of the Lamb. And do you know who will be there? “Blessed are those who are invited…” Not “Blessed are those who made it first.” Not “Blessed are those who performed well enough.” Blessed are those who are invited. That is the gospel of Jesus Christ. 

The pool says, “Get there first.” Performance says, “Do it right.” Jesus says, “I’m here. Come to me.” He’s saying the life you’ve been trying to reach, has come to you.

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