Pool's Closed
Nathan Adams · Tidal Church Moncton · April 19, 2026 · The Chosen series
Nathan Adams explores Jesus healing the man at the pool of Bethesda in John 5. He shows that Jesus alone is the source of healing, calls us to let go of false spiritual remedies, and invites us to trust Him with an unboxed view of what God can do.
More from Nathan Adams · The The Chosen series
Topics: Faith, Suffering, Discipleship
Transcript
[0:00] Well, I have more gray hair than last time I talked to you, and one thing about getting a little bit older is you start thinking that when something goes wrong, it's because I'm old. So, I realized when I was playing with my brand-new grandkids a little bit ago that all of a sudden I'd get down and then I couldn't get up. The knees were just shooting pain, and I'd have to do this or grab ahold of something. So, I go to the doctor, what can be done? He sends me for X-rays, says, "You're getting older." Thank you, appreciate that. Not very helpful. This really hurts. I'll go to the gym, I'll try a different thing. No, can't do anything with these old legs. And so of course, the internet was extremely helpful with this, so I looked it up to see what do you do. So I decided to make a Costco-sized bet on glucosamine and fish oil and turmeric. And listen, I don't want to down these at all, but I took them religiously for three months.
[0:54] And of course, after a month or two, you're thinking, oh, I think it's doing something. I'd go to the gym and try. Ugh. Nothing. It was doing nothing. So after three months, I'm like, this is terrible. The doctor can't help me. The internet can't help me. I'll try a physiotherapist. So I go to see the physiotherapist, and she goes, "Okay, go down and show me." I'm like, "Ow." Then she says, "Okay, take this ball, put it between your knees, squeeze, and do it again." Huh? Like, what? She goes, "Oh, yeah, the way you were doing your exercises, you were not developing your inner quads enough, and your outer quads were more developed, and it was just putting torsion on your kneecaps. Squeeze the ball between your legs, you'll be all set." What?
[1:40] And I was like, what is going on here? And so I didn't need these things. I'm not trying to down them, but it wasn't what I needed. And have you ever taken the wrong medicine when you were sick? Yeah. I once had a friend, raging fever, popping the Advils like crazy, realized they were laxatives. Another raging problem. Anyway, you got to take the right medicine when you're sick. And so I want to ask you if you're hurting at all today. Is your body hurting? Is your soul hurting? Or life overall? And I want to ask you, are you sure that you're taking the right medicine? Now, Jesus had an encounter with a man who had been hurting a very long time.
[2:25] It's recorded in John, chapter 5, if you'd like to turn there. So I want to introduce the first character in this story, and it is character one, the hurting man. It says, "Inside the city, near the Sheep Gate, was the pool of Bethesda, and five covered porches." Big pool, big colonnades with covering over it, people all around. "Crowds of sick people (blind, lame, or paralyzed) lay on the porches. One of the men lying there had been sick for 38 years." So a partly paralyzed man has been trying to find healing for 38 years, laying around at a pool named Bethesda. Why would he do that? Well, Bethesda means house of mercy. It is a real place.
[3:19] The ancient Jewish historian who lived shortly after Jesus Christ, named Josephus, wrote about it. And then what's really cool about the Bible, it's real people, real places. So archaeologists started to dig around in 1860, and they found it. And it's been excavated for the last 110 years. We've got a little pic of what it looks like now. This is the pool of Bethesda. Really deep. Now, maybe the bottom third would've been filled with water, but to get down to it, there's a lot of very steep steps. Now, I would've had trouble with my knees trying to get down those steps, but the paralytic, he can't get down those steps. Also around this pool, there's other sub-pools in caves and grottoes, and maybe there were some springs that were coming up there, like mineral springs bubbling up from time to time, and people thought they were healing.
[4:10] And this pool actually was fed by an upper pool, kind of a rainwater collector right near the temple. And every so often, they'd let the water from the upper pool down a little causeway into the lower pool, and the waters would be stirred. So whatever was happening, something was happening. The waters would get stirred up once in a while, whether from the upper pool being emptied or from mineral springs or something like that. And even after the Jews were driven out of Jerusalem, in later times, the Romans made it a healing shrine. You could find little idols to their god Asclepius there at that time. So what was going on in this healing pool? Well, if you have your Bible open and you look at verse 3, you'll see a little footnote. And it says, "Some ancient manuscripts add the following information: The sick people who were around the pool were waiting for a certain movement of the water, for an angel of the Lord came from time to time and stirred up the water.
[5:06] And the first person to step in after the water was stirred was healed of whatever disease he'd had." So why is that not in the main text of your Bible? Well, kind of simple. This Bible, if you want another one, somebody presses print somewhere on a big machine, and a printing press puts it out. In ancient times, if you wanted another Bible, you said to the scribe guy, "Write me a Bible." Wow, that's a lot of work. Can you imagine? Anyway, and they're writing along and, what... have you ever tried to copy something? Okay, copy, copy, copy, copy. And then you realize, oh my goodness, I missed a verse. Well, scrap the whole Bible you've been writing and start again. No, you don't do that. What they do is that if they missed a verse, they'd write it in the margin. Okay? Good idea. And then when it got copied 50 years later, when that one was worn out, the new copy would insert that marginal verse back into the body where it went. However, how many of you write in the margin of your Bible? You ever do that? You write a little observation, question, or a little background information?
[6:10] Once in a while, a scribe would be looking at a manuscript and they would go, "Is that background information, or was that a verse they missed?" And the scribe would just put it in. And so that's why you've got a footnote. Now, good note. So all it was is some scribe's marginal note that somebody thought belonged in the main text. And you go, "Oh, my goodness, I can't trust the Bible." Not true at all. The Bible has, by probably a factor of 100 more than any other ancient book in the world, manuscript copies. There's 5,700 manuscript copies of the New Testament alone, or parts of it. And so what happens is, scholars today can compare all these copies, and they can very easily see any errors that are made, because if a guy in Egypt makes an error, the guy in Rome, Spain, and Ethiopia didn't. And so you can easily see it.
[7:03] So what we have down there in that little note is some scribe's, ancient scribe's, idea about what was up with the pool. He says, "I think there was an angel that would come and stir the waters, and that's why people would jump in the pool." What do you think was going on with the pool? What was up with it? People hung out there all the time. Do you think it was an angel? I think part of me says it's glucosamine. Placebo effect. Someone says it's a healing pool. People get there, they go, "I think it's working." And the odd person feels better, says they felt better, kind of a delusion, really. Another thing, though, is it could be a bit of a diversion.
[7:49] Maybe there was an angel that would show up from time to time. But I've noticed something about people and angels, and it's the difference between how angels appear in the Bible and how angels appear to people today. In the Bible, when someone meets an angel, they're like, "Whoa!" And the first thing the angel says is, "Don't worship me. Worship God." An angel is a messenger of God pointing people to God. But when I hear people talking about angels sometimes nowadays, I almost feel like the angel has become a substitute for God to them, their primary point of contact. And if that was the kind of angelic thing that was going on there, I'm not saying it was bad in and of itself, but it was diverting attention, maybe. The third option on this is this could be a bad angel, a demonic, deceptive angel. Nobody...
[8:42] Actually, I shouldn't say nobody. There's a few crazy people out there that look for evil and invite it into their lives. They're really hurting, usually really angry. But most people look for good and get duped by a false spiritual presence that acts good. So 2 Corinthians 11:14 says, "Satan disguises himself as an angel of light." And so I don't know what was going on with that pool, but there was something, and then character number two enters the scene. It's Jesus, the Creator become human. It says, "When Jesus saw him," saw this man who had been laying there for 38 years, "and He knew he had been ill for a long time." Jesus knows.
[9:32] "He asked him, 'Would you like to get well?' 'I can't, sir,' the sick man said. 'For I have no one to put me in the pool when the water bubbles up. Someone else always gets there ahead of me.' And Jesus told him, 'Stand up. Pick up your mat and walk.' Instantly, the man was healed. He rolled up his sleeping mat and began walking." Wow. That's a very few words to describe a huge transformation in this guy's life. You don't need this pool. You only need me.
[10:19] So do you want to be healed? You notice the two groups of observers. The first group was devout religious leaders whose beliefs about God tried to box God into their limited view of reality. They were the ones with the ornate robes standing to the left. Then on the other side were the disciples, Peter, Matthew, John, and their faith is being built up by every encounter as their view of what was possible was expanded, and John's writing it down as it happens. So then what happens to these people, to the healed man, to Jesus, to the observers of the miracle? So let's continue where the video left off.
[11:12] It says in verse 9, second half, "But this miracle happened on the Sabbath," on a Saturday. "So the Jewish leaders objected. They said to the man who was cured, 'You can't work on the Sabbath. The law doesn't allow you to carry that sleeping mat.' But he replied, 'The man who healed me told me, "Pick up your mat and walk." "Well, who said such a thing as that?" they demanded. The man didn't know, for Jesus had disappeared into the crowd." He hadn't given His name. So the devout religious leaders are concerned that a religious law has been broken which says you cannot work on Saturday, the Sabbath. We'll come back to that in a second.
[11:59] But first, Jesus seeks the man out again, because the man is at the pool. He's walking. He's very near to the temple, so he goes to the great temple to worship God and say thanks, I assume. And so it says in verse 14: "But afterwards, Jesus found him in the temple and told him, 'Now you are well, so stop sinning or something even worse might happen to you.'" You see, the healing that Jesus offered was physical, but it's meant to bring him to a spiritual healing too. It's meant to cure him from the sickness of sin. And I'll tell you what's worse than sickness in this life, it's lostness for all eternity.
[12:51] And Jesus is coming, and as He heals that man in the physical, it is a sign not only of His love and power for him, but of what more He can do for this man. And He is inviting that man to experience cleansing from sin that will happen through Jesus' own sacrifice on the cross, and it's what He offers to each one of us as well. So now the man begins to understand who it is that's healed him, it is Jesus, that there's a deeper purpose even for the physical healing, that he might come to know the power of Jesus and be cleansed from sin. And then what does he do? In verse 15: "The man went and told the Jewish leaders that it was Jesus who had healed him."
[13:37] I'd like to think that the man was so excited that it was Jesus that he shared the good news with the Jewish leaders, but I wonder if he wasn't just trying to get the Jewish leaders off his back. It wasn't me, it was Jesus. Because look what happens in verse 16. "So the Jewish leaders began harassing Jesus." Some translations say persecuting Jesus, "for breaking the Sabbath rules. But Jesus replied, 'My Father is always working, and so am I.'" That's more interesting than you think, that phrase. "So the Jewish leaders tried all the harder to find a way to kill Him. For He not only broke the Sabbath, but He called God His Father, thereby making Himself equal with God." So they were persecuting Jesus, and probably the man that He had healed, all because the man had picked up a mat on the Sabbath and moved it. Now, the Sabbath is a big deal, make no doubt about it. In Genesis 1, God creates all things in six days, and on the seventh day He rests in celebration of all He has done. And based on that precedent and that model, we have the Ten Commandments, and the fourth one is that you shall not do any work on the Sabbath. It's to be a day holy to the Lord. Now, the Jewish people were busy people, and they didn't always abide by that, so God would send prophets to them.
[15:01] He sent the prophet Jeremiah, who said in Jeremiah 17:21, he said, "Do not bring a load out of your house or do any work on the Sabbath, but keep the Sabbath day holy, as I commanded your forefathers." Now, I'm picturing, I'm going to go to the hardware store, get a load of supplies, bring it to my house, and do some work. Or my house, we produce stuff here, I don't know, pottery, and I'm going to take a load of that and take it... Because you're making your living, right? But the Jewish people went from disregarding the Sabbath to, after their exile and really a strong judgment of God upon them, saying, "Man, we are going to keep the Sabbath and then some." The only thing worse than breaking God's laws is keeping too many, or adding to them in particular. So they kind of added to it, and what they did is they said, and this was recorded in the Mishnah, it says, "Taking anything from one dwelling place to another violates the Sabbath."
[16:06] So if I take these from my house to your house, I just violated the Sabbath. You see, we've taken the Sabbath that's meant to be restful and life-giving and made it into just another prison. And so this is why it's so interesting what Jesus says, "My Father is always working, and so am I." Because guess what? When the Pharisees and other Jewish philosophers and thinkers got so focused on the Sabbath, they had a little conundrum. Because there was someone really important that always was working on the Sabbath. He was answering prayers, forgiving sins, keeping the world spinning and going with His providential care. It was God. And they actually had to say, "Hmm, how come God can work on the Sabbath and we don't?" Kind of a weird conundrum. It's not something I think about, but within their system, it was a conundrum for them. So then they decided, "Hey, it says don't carry a load from one house to another.
[17:06] Good news, the entire universe is God's house. So anything He does within it isn't breaking the Sabbath. And besides, He just says it and it gets done. He doesn't really lift a hand or lift a finger." Little bit of a technicality, and this is why it's so cool. "My Father's always working, and so am I." He just claimed the God exemption, and that ignites those religious leaders. These are like, "Blasphemy. Only God can say that." And Jesus says, "And that's just what I said." You see, Jesus was extremely controversial. As much as you loved Him and were amazed at what He could do, amazed at the depth of His insight and wisdom, He would come and say something that would just violate your common sense.
[18:07] I am God in the flesh. I am the way, the truth, and the life." And when He's saying to this man, "I'm not a source of healing, I'm the source of healing." And so He's saying to that man, and He says to each one of us, "There's not going to be any competition here on the spiritual level between what I'm offering and what you're trying to do." Let Me give you a few things that today are very much in competition with Jesus for the healing of our souls and our bodies. They are the pool that we are waiting around sometimes looking for answers from. This applies to people that are coming in from the world into the church. It applies to people in the church that are getting sucked into things they shouldn't, and applies sometimes to people that are desperate for anything to help them.
[19:03] What is your pool? There's crystals. People are carrying around crystals, charms, things like that. There's Reiki, where people are thinking that they have healing hands and they are accessing a power. In fact, they are a power. They are God, they say sometimes in Reiki. Extremely common these days. Many people do yoga, which I personally have no problem with, but then they go deeper into the philosophy and spirituality behind it, and they start talking about chakras and energy flows and things like that. There's people that have angel guides, whereas an angel should only guide you to Jesus, these angels are guiding them ever to themselves.
[19:51] There are people doing Wicca. They're using tarot cards to get insights into what's going on in their lives. They are manifesting, thinking that they can harness the power of the universe, and then that they are indeed are part of the universe, the universe itself. People going back to old things like voodoo, seances, mediums, tantric meditation, and there's what I just call McEastern religions, because some of you think you're practicing Buddhism or Hinduism or some other thing from an ancient place. You have the fast food packaged version of it that's been offered up to you in the Western culture, which has just been simply customized to you and your desires. It's no more ancient than McDonald's.
[20:41] Some of these things that we are involved in are simply delusions with a placebo effect, and you've been wasting time and money on them. Others are not good. You should never have been involved in it, but I want to give you a little bit of God's goodness. I've noticed that some people who had no idea that there was a God, as they begin to journey towards God with a pure heart, has sometimes taken some detours into some things that have not been right in the end, and they had to let them go. But Jesus doesn't come and say, "Idiot." He says, "I'm here, and you can leave those things behind." But the other things sometimes are so much darker than we thought.
[21:28] There's only a very few people in the world that are so full of hate and evil that they go actively seeking evil, malevolent spiritual forces. Most people go seeking good. But so many of us get deceived into something that seemed good at first, but it gets worse as we go. I've talked to people that have been involved in these things, and what got them involved is sometimes they actually did experience a small miracle or felt something very strong or something that just didn't make sense, and so they got into it. But it's a bad medicine, because what does bad medicine do? The wrong medicine? Even if there's an initial something that seems good, it makes you sick in the end, and people are getting sicker and sicker.
[22:19] It's like someone that has anxiety and they start self-medicating. Before you know it, the self-medicating has created three times the anxiety they ever had. And so Jesus calls us away from these things. He always has. He has always been controversial. When the gospel first went out after the resurrection and ascension of Jesus, and the Holy Spirit was poured out upon the first disciples, and they evangelized the Jewish people that would respond, and then were sent out beyond that to the Gentiles, they went to a whole lot of people who just didn't know any better. And so Peter is in, I think Antioch, and he's laying hands on people that have accepted Jesus so they'll receive the Holy Spirit. And there's a guy there named Simon the Sorcerer, and he sees it and he goes, "Wow, this is great." And he comes up to Peter and says, "How can I get this power so I can have it too?"
[23:16] And Peter says, "You totally got it backwards, Simon. God's not a power that you get to control." And as the gospel kept going, there was an interesting situation in the city of Ephesus, a big city in what is now Turkey. And the name of Jesus had been getting around. So there was these seven brothers that liked to do exorcisms, but they weren't Christians, but they liked to use the name of Jesus. So I find this to be a funny scripture. It's in Acts 19. These seven brothers are using the name of Jesus like a magic charm, and so they're trying to do an exorcism, and it says, "One day, the evil spirit answered them, 'Jesus I know, and Paul I know about, but who are you?' Then the man who had the evil spirit jumped on them and overpowered them all. He gave them such a beating that they ran out of the house naked and bleeding."
[24:20] And then when that happened, a great holy hush fell over Ephesus at the actual power of Jesus' name, and they began to bring all their spiritualistic things, their scrolls, their spells, their charms, their amulets. They piled them up and had a big bonfire, and the estimated value in today's dollars of that bonfire was $8 million worth of junk, and they let it go. They let it go. And it's really important that for any of you coming out of those other types of religious practices, or if you've been inadvertently dabbling in it, or know someone, that these things have to go because there's a radically different premise at work in those things.
[25:17] You see, for Christians, we give up our power to God because He's limitless and we're in a relationship of trust with Him. He is God and we are not. I was talking to someone a few months ago, not in the church, and this person had had a couple things happen that was really making her open up to the spiritual, and she said I could share this today. And she starts disclosing, she goes, "Well, I'm involved in Reiki and tarot cards and stuff like that. What do you think of those?" And I'm like, " poison." Anyway, but no, let's see. Where is she at right now?
[26:03] I said, "It's different. In Reiki, you think you are God and you are using your power." I said, "In a relationship with God, He's God and you're not. You trust Him and His power." She said, "That's pretty cool." A few days later, she was at a spiritualistic store on Botsford Street, full of New Age stuff and everything, and she goes for another pack of tarot cards and grabs one that looks exceptionally pretty, brings it home. Didn't she accidentally pick the only Christian card deck in that whole place? Opens it up. First card says, "God is God and you are not.
[26:48] Trust in God." And within the next couple weeks, she came to church and gave her life to Jesus, and she continues to grow and prosper in a relationship with Jesus Christ out at our Shediac campus. So I just want to encourage you today, if that's you, to leave those things behind. But now I want to put everyone else on the spot, because we've been sitting here like Pharisees. We have. We've been like, "Oh, we haven't been messing with any of that stuff. Aren't we good?" The Pharisees had put God in a big, actually, in a small box, and for them it was all these Sabbath rules.
[27:34] And you go, "I don't care about those Sabbath rules." Okay, fine. You've still boxed Him in. You've still boxed God in. I'm a Western person, and many of us are, and even if you're not from the West, you might've been educated in a Western environment, and what we're taught is that the foundational building blocks of life are atoms, cells, chemistry, physics, math, biology, geometry, and these things are incontrovertible laws. And then anything spiritual that happens has to happen around those things or on top of those things, like a little sprinkling of fairy dust. Our box of reality is materialistic, and the spiritual cannot really truly penetrate it.
[28:25] But in my life, I've had some things that just broke my box, where I was like, "Oh my goodness, God is bigger than math," and things like that. And so it gave me this thing where I started talking to people from other cultures, non-Western cultures, and I'd say, "Hey, I saw a miracle once." And they go, "Oh, you did?" "Yeah," I said, "Have you seen any?" And they go, "Well, you wouldn't believe me." I said, "Try me." And over and over again, I've had this conversation, and people from other cultures have said, "This miracle, this miracle, this miracle," and they've been sharing them with me. Most recently, a guy that had a PhD in theology from Ghana sharing how he had seen an extraordinary miracle.
[29:18] And these things burst our box of what we think it is possible for God to do. And I just want to invite you this morning to open your sense of reality right now, because the foundational reality of the world is not material. It is God, who is Spirit and who by His word alone spoke all material things into existence. And by His word and in the power of Jesus' name, there's not one aspect of this reality that can't be changed. Now, we do not come at God like He is a power and we are a bunch of magicians and sorcerers who can pronounce things in Jesus' name. We come as humble children of God, trusting His limitless power, love, and wisdom.
[30:05] And we say, "Heal me now. Heal me how You will. Heal my heart. Thank You for heaven where all is healed, and no matter how You're going to interact in my journey, I trust You. It is relationship, but I am not going to limit You. Not in the least." And I just want to invite you this morning to have God blow apart those smallnesses. Now, I don't want you to go chuck all your medications. God gives us many good things, but I do want you to think about getting rid of the wrong things. These things were fine, but they were the wrong medication for these knees, which are just great now. So many of you guys have been using the wrong spirituality.
[30:51] It's the Reiki, let it go. It's the crystals, let it go. It's all those charms and superstitions and things you've been trying to tap into. Those must be let go, because Jesus says, "Do you want to be well?" Then the pool has nothing more for you. Let it go. And so I want to invite the prayer team forward, and I want to invite you guys to come forward as we sing this last song about the power of the name of Jesus. And I want you to come, and no one will know why you're coming. Are you coming to let the box be burst, or are you coming to let go of some things? You come up here, and maybe there's some stuff that has to be thrown out right along with those things. I found them in the back of my cupboard the other day, taking up space, and it reminded me that they didn't do anything for me.
[31:39] So Lord Jesus, as we worship You now, we pray that Your Spirit would be present. We pray that all other spirits will be driven back, driven out, revealed, and that any person that's had contact with them will today have freedom and the ability to turn it over to You, receive Your forgiveness from sin and Your cleansing. And we pray for each one of us, Lord, believers for a long time, or people that are turning away from things to believe in You, Jesus, as the true source. We pray, Lord, that today You will open up our view of what is possible, You will begin to do more wonderful acts of mercy and power in our midst than we've seen before.
[32:25] We love You, Jesus. Thank You that You've always known what we're going through, and that You're here today to meet us. In His name, we pray. Amen.