Jesus Doesn’t Need Your Faith to Work a Miracle
Jim Clements · Tidal Church Moncton · August 3, 2025 · What Do the Miracles of Jesus Mean? series
Jim Clements looks at John 5 and the healing of the man at the Bethesda pool. Jesus moves first with grace, before the man shows any faith, and He offers more than a quick fix: a whole, transformed life.
More from Jim Clements · The What Do the Miracles of Jesus Mean? series
Topics: Faith, Grace, Discipleship
Transcript
[0:00] I'm gonna just ask if you would stand as I read the scripture passage that we have for today. It comes from John chapter 5, starting in verse 1. Sometime later, Jesus went up to Jerusalem for the feast of the Jews. Now there in Jerusalem near the Sheep Gate, a pool, which is in Aramaic 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?"
[0:50] The invalid replied, "I have no one to help me into the pool when the water is stirred. While I'm 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. The day on which this took place was a Sabbath, and so the Jews said to the man who had been healed, "It is the Sabbath, and the law forbids you to carry your mat." But he replied, "The man who made me well said to me, 'Pick up your mat and walk.'" So they asked him, "Who is the 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.
[1:35] Stop sinning or something worse may happen to you." The man went away and told the Jews that it was Jesus who had made him well. Well, this is the Lord's Word that we read. You may be seated. So let's picture the scene a little bit. What's happening? You know, what's all this? The feast, and Jesus is coming into it, and like most of the feasts, there's traditions, there's moments, there's things that happen to remember what God has done in the past. But then Jesus walks into this. And so when you're thinking of feasts and traditions, think of, like for us, Easter and Christmas. And like most things, when time goes by and we celebrate these and we get further and further away, the actual meaning and the power in some of it, we lose the familiarity with it, of why we do it.
[2:25] But here comes Jesus, as I like to refer, a divine disruption into the moment, because He wasn't there just to observe the feasts. He came to fulfill it. As Jesus walks in, He takes these sacred symbols that everybody's had, and He is like a grenade that gets tossed into it. And He says, "They are all pointing at Me. All that you've been doing has been pointing towards Me." He not only takes all those traditions that they've had and just acknowledges them and shows respect, He explodes them, He challenges them, and He transforms them. He steps into the culture and He just shakes it up for what's happening in that moment.
[3:11] He walks into this scene, to this festival that's full of meaning, full of tradition, but absent of healing in the middle of all of it. And where does Jesus go? He goes straight to the pool first. The pool is just like a hospital filled with desperation, filled with hopelessness. I don't know if you've ever been to the ER. Last fall when I had something going on, it doesn't matter, all the details. And I ended up being taken from here into the ER in tremendous pain. And as I arrived at the spot, got well taken care of, and I sat waiting my turn. I kind of reflected and thought, man, it's just a little bit like at the pool.
[3:58] Like there's a lot of people here and it's taking some time and, like, I'm desperate. I'm in a lot of pain, and desperation leads to hopelessness. And I'm sitting there and all of a sudden, you know, have you ever been there? There's like these sliding doors that open and close and they're kind of green colored, and you start looking at those doors just going, man, is that gonna open for me, like the bubbling water in this pool? And I'm thinking like, come on, just say "Clements" and open up and let me go through. And I will tell you, eventually that happened, and it was 26 hours later. And when I got in there, I just wanna tell you, the people did incredible, taking care of me, what they have to do and how they do it, and with the accuracy and the care, whether that's outside the door, inside the door, I got incredible care, as I'm sure you do when you go.
[4:53] But He goes to the pool first, and the people that are there, they've been there, you gotta think, been there a long time. And they're superstitious, right? And it's like mythical. They're, this bubbling water, like it's magical. They're thinking, they're hoping for a miracle for whatever it is that ails them. But time and time again, this place is just a place of letdowns. There's nothing magical about it. The crowd of people that are there, they're blind, they're lame, they're paralyzed, they can't move. They're lying around this pool. And not to give, like, too much information, but I mean, just think about it. If they've been just there, everything of humanity is there as they live in that spot. And it's gotta be just nasty. Here's kind of an image of a rendition of what this pool may look like as people are surrounding it, waiting. The pool, Bethesda, means house of mercy.
[5:51] But for many it was broken dreams that happened there. And let's be honest, in society today, in 2025, it's kinda like being at the pool right now. And so many of us, like we say, "Hey, we're all for justice," but then we settle for outrage online instead of justice. We say we want deep relationships. I wanna build with some people I'm close to. I want to have friendships that are lifelong and lasting. And then we go with the digital surface, posting and likes and communicating other ways other than face to face. And then we say, "I want to experience everything life's got for me. I want to experience life to the fullest." And then we chase that with lifestyles that we're being told that we need to live or we should seek after, and maybe even substances that pollute our body or cause us to go in places and do things we shouldn't do.
[6:50] All of them distracting us from the hope that God has for us. The answer is not more hustle and bustle and running around or listening to more podcasts about who's got an opinion about something or who's got an insight on it. The answer is, Jesus is always enough. It's Jesus, no matter what your situation is. Jesus approaches the man at the pool. In verse 6, when Jesus saw him lying there and learned that he had been in that condition for a long time, He said to him, "Do you want to get well?" The question: do you want to get well? Jesus sees him there as an invalid for 38 years.
[7:35] Hadn't moved, hadn't walked, just lived there. And that was the normal life for almost four decades, four decades. Imagine the hopelessness. There's no hospital, no rehab, no wheelchairs, just pain, isolation, broken promises, the routine every day, the same thing as the water bubbles. Historians will say that the reason the water bubbled was because it was attached to an aqueduct system. So when they would open and shut different levers to send water to different parts of the city. And when the water came rushing that way and it hit that opening, it bubbled up because of the pressure before it continued on to wherever it was going.
[8:21] There was nothing magical about it. See, this man wasn't just physically stuck. He was spiritually and emotionally and mentally stuck. And Jesus asks him one of the most powerful questions in Scripture: "Do you want to get well?" The story for us isn't just a descriptive about the body getting well. It's a diagnostic of the soul because that's the question Jesus is asking for us today. When we look at our lives, Jesus has come to find us. Do we find ourselves paralyzed because of fear? Blinded, maybe because of the sin that we have brought into our lives and we're just going through the routine of it because now it seems normal, so we've become blinded by it. Or if wounds from relationships and engagements in our past cause us to be lame.
[9:14] It might seem like a strange question to ask somebody, like, who wouldn't want to be healed? Who wouldn't say yes? Like, "Pick me. Yeah, I'll take that." But Jesus is cutting to something deeper. He's cutting to something that He's asking a question that's more than just physical that He's talking to the man about. What He's asking him is, are you wanting to be transformed? It's a deeper question that He has asked. But even in the brokenness, even in the familiarity, people don't always say yes. Because when we look even in our lives today in society today, people get comfortable in their dysfunction. It's the routine. It's what you become used to and you just settle in.
[10:01] And if someone was to come and ask, "Do you want to be transformed?" You go, "Oh, I'm kind of used. This is my thing, this is what I do." We settle, we say, "Well, I'm surviving." And we then begin to identify with our wounds, it becomes who we are. That's the first part of our conversations that we have, is talking about our wounds and our past that is happening. When healing shows up in lives today, people are not always sure that they wanna receive it because in order to receive that healing, it means change has to happen. And a lot of people don't like change. Change is not a favorite thing of a lot of people. It also means that we gotta re-accept responsibility, whatever that's happened in the past and those wounds, we've gotta accept responsibility, what our part is in it or how we're gonna move that forward or how we're gonna leave it behind.
[10:56] And then we've gotta accept responsibility for our lives and move in a transformed way moving forward. And the other part is movement. We gotta move. We can't just stay still and huddle down and wait. We've gotta move. We've gotta be willing to take that. So surprising to me when you read the Scripture and the man doesn't say yes. What's he do? He gives excuses, comes up with excuses, right? "Well, you know, there's nobody here to help me down to the pool. Well, others get there before I can get there. And so I miss out." Sounds familiar to sometimes today, maybe it's just a little bit different. But some people today, when we struggle and we sit in situations and we're in that routine of dysfunction or routine of hurt and wounds, we'll say things like, "Well, there's no one here to support me.
[11:49] I'm all by myself. Oh, I can't catch a break. Seems like everybody else is getting a break. I can't catch a break." When we begin to convince ourselves, there's no chance of that ever happening for me. And we settle in. There's a quote from John Wesley that kind of comes alongside. And here it says, "It will be a double blessing if you give yourself up to the Great Physician that He may heal soul and body together. And unquestionably, this is His design. He wants to give you both inward and outward health." So when the question is asked, "Do you want to be healed, do you want to be transformed?" That is an inward and outward question.
[12:36] John Calvin quote: "The sick man does what they nearly all do. He limits God's help to his own ideas and does not want, does not dare promise himself more than he can conceive in his mind." We tend to just look at things in a human aspect and forget how great our God is and that He's not limited by what we can conceive, by what we've seen, but by what He can do and what He wants for each one of you. Jesus doesn't argue. Remember the question: "Do you want to get...?" Well, Jesus doesn't argue with the excuses He gets from the man. He just says to him, "Get up. Pick up your mat and walk."
[13:26] He didn't give him a motivational speech, a TED Talk, give him four podcasts to go listen to, said, "Hey, we're gonna do a 360 review of your life to see what the advantages, disadvantages are." He didn't give 'em a five-year plan and lay it out how to do it because Jesus has a resurrecting power to walk in to broken places and make it happen. In that moment, everything changed for that man. When Jesus spoke those words, his limbs were healed, his muscles were strengthened, his stability was given back to him. And the man who did nothing for 38 years gets up, picks up his mat and walks.
[14:13] That's an incredible resurrection of an individual. It's not just healing. It is a resurrection for that individual. When you look at "get up" in the Greek for, in this story, it is the same Greek word that's used when it refers to the resurrection of Jesus. And so we know this is how we're supposed to take that. That this is more than just a healing, it's a picture of a new life, not a physical healing only. It's emotional, it's social and it's spiritual restoration that is happening for that man. When I was studying, going through this Scripture, the statement when He says, "Get up, pick up your mat and walk."
[14:59] It just stuck in my brain and it stuck there to the point I wrote it on a whiteboard and I just kept staring at it. I was staring at it and staring at it. I'm like, "There's something You want me to get out of this and I don't know what it is yet." And then I realized there's three things in there. We tend to read it for years. I've read it as one command. And I believe there's three commands in there, even though we read it. When God, when Jesus says to him, "Get up," that's the first command. He tells him to get up. That's a mental and spiritual restoration of that man.
[15:45] He's overcoming the hopelessness. Why do I think the mental? 38 years, he just stayed in the same routine, in the same place. And a man who you do not know tells you this, "Get up," and you get up. That is mental healing that happens. Spiritual, that he can overcome the hopelessness, the goal, yes. And be rejuvenated to get up and do that, to get up. And then the second part is pick up your mat. That's when the physical healing and renewal happens. I believe that man takes responsibility. We see him go, "Okay, like, I'm gonna bend over and pick this up."
[16:31] Whatever the past has been is now gone. You haven't used a muscle, you haven't done anything, you haven't stood up, you haven't walked. You Now you can bend over, pick up, and I'd fall right over if that was me. When you think about it from a human concept that we talked about when we, when John Calvin's statement, we tend to put it in our minds that's not possible. His muscles would've been all kind of non-used and just deteriorated, but he's physically healed to the point that he can, bend over and pick it up and hold it. And then the final part is walk. I believe that's a social missional restoration. Leave this place of pain, leave this and reenter the world with a new purpose and a new life.
[17:18] Not defined by here, but walk and leave this place. The really interesting thing in this whole story is that there's no display of faith on this man's part. There's nothing that says, "Oh, he had this much faith" or "He had a lot of faith." He really didn't display anything. In fact, he didn't even know who Jesus was. Remember when he was later on asked, he said, "Well, who told you this?" He goes, "I don't know. I don't know who it was." See, Jesus moved first. He didn't wait. He didn't want to be known. He didn't want His name to kind of just say, "Hey, I'm Jesus, I'm here to heal you."
[18:04] Right? But He moved first. You know what He did? He showed grace. He went into a place where people are forgotten, people are broken. Where life is messy, where it doesn't seem to line up with all the reasons that people were coming there at the time. And He walks into the midst of it and He shows grace first. And then He shows the gospel. Grace comes first. Compassion comes first. It's not enough just to have faith though. There's a lot of us that go through life and we go, "Okay, you know," someone invites us to church or we come to church and we've got some previously church background.
[18:52] And we go, "I'm gonna figure this out in my life first. I'm going to, like, come to church at least, like, twice a month. And then if I get this sin outta my life, then I'll talk to someone and then get involved." And we go through this list of trying to figure out all the human stuff we need to fix. And I'm here to tell you that you can't fix it. There's only one way to fix it. And that's accepting Jesus as your Lord and Savior. And He gives you the strength, He gives you the courage, you have the bravery. You have the ability to step into a spot then to allow Him to change it. Some of us will even say, "You know, well, I'm waiting for, like, good karma to come along." There's no such thing as good karma. There's no such thing as karma. I just want to tell you, it's the experience, the grace and compassion of the Lord and Savior.
[19:43] Jesus saw somebody stuck and hurting and alone and He stepped into that. What do we see from Jesus? First thing we see is authority. He commands it and it happens. This is who we serve and follow and give our lives to. He speaks and it happens. It's instantly, but it's a journey. The instant power is the next thing we see that comes from that. That there's no delay. The man stands up, picks up his mat, there's no delay. Like, "Oh, you know, I'm a little, I'm stable," or any of that. He literally makes it happen. There's no ritual. Like, turn around five times, stand on your head, drink this drink and you'll be all good when you're done.
[20:31] Right? There's none of that stupid stuff like that. It's instant power that comes from the authority of Jesus. And finally, what we see is the compassion. He came, there was a feast, there was a celebration, there was tradition, but He stopped where the people that were forgotten were and said, "I see you." And the funny thing that happens in this story is, like, you think, "Man, that'd be awesome, right?" It's like if He ended there, like, that'd be cool. But then there's more for us to learn as followers of Jesus, because not everybody celebrated the guy getting healed. It didn't go over well. And we get down in verse 10.
[21:19] And so the Jewish leaders said to the man who had been healed, "It is the Sabbath, and the law forbids you to carry your mat." But he replied, "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 up and walk?" The man who was healed had no idea who it was, for Jesus had slipped away in the crowd that was there. I love this. You know, here's the dude. Been in one spot for 38 years, four decades. And the religious leaders come, they go, "What you doing? Carrying that mat on the Sabbath?" They're not like, "Dude, you're walking. I've never seen you walk. That's incredible. That's unbelievable."
[22:04] No, they go, "Yeah, you're not supposed to carry a mat on the Sabbath." That's what they pick out, right? And we're like, and then we get confused in our own society when we do the same thing as sometimes I've, I've done it, and we lose focus. We're kind of focused on the wrong thing, like our heart and our mouth might say the right thing. But we've lost focus because we begin missing the person and we focus on the mat. And it's too often in life that is people that are broken and hurting and suffering in pain. And we go, "Well, you don't align with this." Or you don't want, like, the mat's not the focus. Extending grace to people is the focus.
[22:50] And sometimes being obedient to God might offend some people that call themselves followers of Christ. But we're called to be obedient to God, but get this, Jesus didn't just heal and then leave him. He might have disappeared in the crowd at the time, at the pool when He did it, but He circles back around 'cause He's not done yet. He wants to bring clarity to this man who He's healed and has no faith. Later on He finds him. And in chapter, verse 14, it says, "Later Jesus found the man at the temple and said to him, 'See, you are well again. Stop sinning or something worse may happen to you initially.'" That sounds pretty harsh, right?
[23:36] You better stop it or something. Worse is gonna happen to you. But what He's telling him is that you thought physical struggles were tough. You thought that it was so bad for 38 years where you are and sitting there and waiting for this to happen with the secret water, the magic water. But He says, "A sin in your life will keep you separated from Me. And separation from Me will be the worst thing that you could ever experience." Because He wants the man to have a transformed life, not just a healed life. And sometimes when we're going through life with the, to bring it to us, the full circle to hear, you know, we'll, we'll say to God, you know, well, God, I need, you know, I got problems. I need You to, can You fix my finances? Can You fix my job?
[24:24] Can You fix, can You fix my marriage? Can You fix this? Can You fix that? You know, can You make my anxiety go away? Now He cares about all those things, but really what He wants to do is transform you into the follower that He needs you to be. There was a time that I got really frustrated. We had at our property, we just had, when Fiona went through a number of years ago, and we were out cleaning up stuff and it wasn't good. And all the debris and all the stuff that was there, and there's this one thing I was like, I'm never gonna find this. And I was digging through and punching through stuff and everything, and all of a sudden the Spirit spoke to me and said, "Your attitude stinks right now."
[25:16] And I wasn't in a good spot. I don't mind being vulnerable with you like I was. I was angry, I was frustrated, I was mad. And I sat down when I heard Him say, "You're not in a good spot right now." And I sat down and I said, "You know what? I'm gonna pray." And when I prayed, I said, "God, You could care less about the thing. I'm looking for You. You really don't care." And I know that and I respect that. I know that He doesn't care about the item I was looking for, but do you know what? He cares about me and He cares about you. And I said, "But I know You care about how I'm feeling inside, and it's not good and it's not healthy, and it's not gonna end well if I keep letting this grow inside of me.
[26:05] So just help it be gone. I surrender it to You now and help it to be gone, because that's what You want from me, is wholeness, His transformation, to not be like this." And I settled down and I was good. And I stood up. I took two or three steps, I don't remember exactly, had a shovel with me, drove it down into the dirt to keep looking. And I found the thing I was looking for. He doesn't care about that thing. What He cared about was me. He wants transformed lives. He can fix every part of your life. Everything you ask for, He can put it in order.
[26:51] Just like He healed the lame man. He can put it in order, but you're headed towards destruction if you're not following Him. That's what He wants more than anything, is that transformed life, so that you know that He is over all. The fate that you would suffer would be worse than any physical pain, worse than any mental pain, if you were completely separated from God, from what Jesus can do. Because being better isn't the name of the game, being renewed is the name, being transformed. What happens next with the man is, you know, we don't know a lot afterwards, but we do know that in a way he betrays Jesus.
[27:42] Because when Jesus circled back around to him and told him who He was, he went right to the church leaders, the religious leaders, and gave Him up. Right? It was Jesus that did this. And we don't know what the outcomes of that were. We can only imagine. But we do know that today Jesus wants to heal people's souls. He wants to heal yours. He wants to heal those that you come in contact with. He wants to heal people. Are we willing to give our life completely over to Him? The question, remember: do you want to be well or do you want to be whole? You can be better and not change. You can walk with new legs and walk away from Jesus and never follow Him and still have a broken heart.
[28:33] If you look through the Gospels, there's only 36 healings in the Gospels. Some of you may think, "Oh, that's a lot." I think with all that went on, like, man, that's not many, 36. Why so few? Because healing wasn't the point. Being a disciple and a follower of Jesus Christ, surrendering to Him to transform your life. That's the point. That's the point to it. Jesus asks us all the time, "Do you want to get well?" But what He really is asking is, "Do you want to be whole?" Matthew 7:14, "Narrow is the road that leads to life, and only a few find it." The road to transformation is hard. It's long. It's hidden in the light of a life that we live in society and navigate through.
[29:23] It's not magical. It's a moment and walking and obeying what God is calling you to. And maybe today you're here and you're stuck sitting around your own pool of whatever it is, whatever your mat is that you're sitting on, and maybe you're limiting God to your own imagination, to your own concepts of what human says that we can experience or what we're limited to. God is not limited. My question is, are you willing to walk away, or are you willing to experience change that Jesus has for you? Jesus isn't asking you if you want to feel better. He's asking you, "Do you want to be made new? Do you want to be made new in Him?"
[30:11] Our culture, even today, is filled with hurting, struggling, broken people, chasing false hopes, trying to fill it with whatever the next new thing is, stuck in a cycle, day in, day out, routine of function and brokenness, distracted by the next self-help commercial, book, advertising, social media posts, whatever that lures you in, whatever the clickbait may be. But I will tell you this, the Jesus that I serve today still walks in the messy places, in the painful, hurting places, in the midst of people's lives to offer them to be made new.
[31:02] He's still commanding people, "Pick up your mat and walk in the fullness and the transformation that He has for you." It's not a quick fix, and it's a long walk, and you have to know that discipleship is lived out every day. It's a hard-fought obedience to living the way that Jesus calls us. It's hard to step into spots where He wants us to share. It's through the hurt, the pain, the tears, and the sweat that everyday life brings that we live that transformative life that God calls us to. And He will be there in the midst of it with you.
[31:50] Jesus is now and every day until you accept Him fully, completely, and only you know what you haven't given up yet. He's standing next to you as you sit on your mat, and He's asking you, "Are you ready? Do you want to be made whole? Do you want to be made new? Do you want what He has planned for you beyond a simple healing? Do you want the transformative life that not only allows you to experience the power of God, but the peace that He can bring in the midst of wherever that brokenness is?"
[32:36] If you would bow your heads, close your eyes. If you're here today and you never accepted Jesus as your personal Lord and Savior, and you want to be made new, that you've struggled and you've gone through all these different challenges and the hardships, I just want you to pray this with me. Father God, I surrender to You. I ask for wholeness in my life. I ask You, Jesus, to be my Lord and Savior. Father, I know that the walk is long, but I know that You'll be with me.
[33:27] Whatever has been my struggles, whatever have been the thing that's been holding me back, I release it to You. I don't accept human limitations. I accept the fullness and the incredible power of the God that we serve. And I ask and invite You into my life. Father, I just pray for all those that may have prayed that today, that even for all those of us that are challenged, that may be in corners of our life, we haven't completely given over to You, that we've been healed and we've started our journey, but the transformation of the completeness of our life, we still need to give to You, that You would help us to take the courage and not have fear get in the way.
[34:20] You are not a God of fear. You are a God of joy. You are a God of love. You are a God of grace. You are a God of compassion, that we just give it all for You. In Jesus' mighty name, we pray and ask this.