The Saddle Shop Man Who Knew Will Rogers
by Jim Christian
Transcribed from the original recording; may contain errors.
Well, how many of you… for how many of you is this your first Camp Farthest Out? Huh? Wow, can’t get over it. It’s amazing. Well, that changed things. Hallelujah. In the council ring meeting this morning, which is, you know, if there was… if you walked up steps to glory, the next step before entering in is the council ring meeting. In the early morning. Fine and beautiful prayer and praise time. It was brought out that there were many new campers here and that some of you may have real apprehension at what you see, wondering if… is this real, you know?
What are these people trying to do? What happened to those lovely people, you know? That sort of thing. Well, I thought I would spend a moment and put you at rest or at least share one man’s experience with you. This is not a testimony. I don’t give testimonies anymore. I used to be a professional witness, but I… That was when I was on a different circuit and you could tell it was professional because it got so slick it was just like glass.
But… Oh, some… I was having breakfast with a very lovely lady this morning. She was sitting beside me and she asked me how I got into this business. And I told her, in about 1961, in the fall, a friend invited us over to her house to meet a man who was supposed to be a powerful holy man. And we went in and sure enough, he must have been some kind of holy man because I had never seen anything like it before. He said two or three words and some lady went and kneeled at his feet and he put his hand on her head and prayed for her. And I looked for the nearest exit and found it and left. She invited us back a week later to meet another holy man. And I said, “I’m sorry, but I don’t have anything to do, but I’m going to find something in a hurry.” But in deference to my wife, we went over and I met a man who was the son-in-law of Glenn Clark, the founder of the Camps Farthest Out, Norman Elliott, some of you may know him, a very human being. And he was able to communicate with me on a level that I could understand. So, as a Christmas present to my wife in January of 1962, I agreed to go to the North Florida CFO because this very human being, Norman Elliott, was one of the speakers and some lady that I’d never heard of and couldn’t have made much difference anyhow named Agnes Sanford was…
She was the other speaker. It’s an interesting thing about that, which really doesn’t have anything to do with what I was talking about, but I’ll throw it in here anyhow for what it’s worth. Agnes was doing a series of talks that I interpreted to be telling everybody to throw away their crutches and pills and catch the first plane for Lourdes or wherever it was that they were going for healing. And I was convinced and tried to organize a group of people to have her tarred and feathered and ridden out of Ormond Beach, Florida, on a rail, but I wasn’t getting anywhere with it. I didn’t understand a word she was saying. Then five years… No, three years later at the Eastern North Carolina camp, I came back to the room one day and I said, “Reed, you know what that Agnes Sanford is saying down there today is really something. My goodness, she has grown and changed.”
And she says, “You don’t recognize that?” I said, “No, I don’t.” She said, “They are the same areas in which she was ministering in Florida.” And the reason that they were is that God was working out through her, working out through her own experience, the healing gifts of the Spirit. And the book had not at that time been published. It just so happened that at that same meeting when Agnes had finally learned to talk, I had gotten thirsty enough to meet Jesus’ baptizer. But let’s go back to 1962. We made a horrible mistake. We got there a day early. And there was a funny little lady named Hallelujah Brown. And that was her real name, Hallelujah Brown. And she runs a place for wayward kids, I guess you’d call it, in Mississippi. And this being the first day, no one anybody there, except Hallelujah Brown and a couple of other people that normally get there early and make the place comfortable for those who are coming later. And she ran up and did the craziest thing that I have ever seen in my life to that point. She threw her arms around my neck and when she did that, that caused her feet to leave the floor. She was so small. And she said, “Has anybody told you that they love you today?”
And I said, “Now, lady, let me tell you something. I’ve got a wife and we have five children and I’m down here to be spiritual and you want to play games.” Since that time, I have learned that one of the great joys is neck-hugging people, as Hal Hill puts it. It’s a great release. I have even learned to do devotion in motion. I have not accomplished a grand jeté yet, but I can make some pretty convincing moves and I recommend it to you. It’s fun. And it will give you a great sense of release. But unless you, you know, unless you be afraid, don’t be. Nobody’s going to hurt you. They might be a little zealous, but that will pass. And the way that it will pass is they’ll be permitted to quiet down because you’ll take over where they start. In due course. Yes, children, there is a Santa Claus. Not in that sense, but God’s name is Jesus and He’s here. And He came in when I came in and He came in when you came in and we didn’t pray Him here. He came in with us. Now, let me teach you a little song. Marge, I haven’t cleared this with Marge. I haven’t even cleared it with Mary. And I don’t see it.
Mary’s not smiling, so I don’t know whether this is all right or not. But I learned this at a CFO in Massachusetts a year ago and it was reinstituted in this year’s camp at Silver Bay, New York. A little girl got this song in the Spirit. It’s a beautiful song. And the words are right out of Scripture. Do you remember when Moses came up to that bush that was being burned and yet it wasn’t being consumed and he got in this dialogue with God and asked Him who it was and He says, “I am that I am.” And this song is “I am.” So you can think about all the rest of the words if you want to, but the key to the center of the song is the “I am.” And it goes this way. I am the center. I am sufficient. I am everything you need. Come and behold Me. Love and adore Me. I am the perfect one for you. Not very complicated and doesn’t have very long range, so if you bear with me, this isn’t normally done in CFO, but then this isn’t a normal CFO. This can never be duplicated. This morning can never be duplicated. You understand that, of course. You could bring all of these same individuals in here and we could have the same weather outside and we could have had the same breakfast and the same amount of prayer up to this time, the same beautiful meditation that Jerry did and praise God for that.
And all of these, but yet, inside of us, we would not be exactly the same. Our reactions wouldn’t be the same and the way the Spirit moves this morning is unique for this morning. So don’t you try to reproduce this. It can’t be done. It’ll be fresh the next time it comes out, just as it is this time. All right, I’m going to run this one by a couple of times. I might even ask Mary to peck away over there for us and we’ll learn a song. I just didn’t… I wanted you to know I am a frustrated song leader, among other things, but not very. I am the center. I am sufficient. I am everything you need. Come and behold Me, love and adore Me. I am the perfect one for you. Sing it if you can, I’ll hum it. I am the center. I am sufficient. I am everything you need. Come and behold Me, love and adore Me. I am the perfect one for you. Mr. Riet. I am the center. I am the center. I am the perfect one for you. Now this time, pray it, as we say. Sing it with your eyes closed and pray it through. I am, I am sufficient. I am, and behold Me, love and adore Me.
I am the perfect one for you. Glory to God, that Jesus Christ is center. Lord, we would center into Jesus. Be Yourself in us. Allow us to know ourselves in You. In Jesus’ name, amen. There’s been a small change in plan since I discovered that so many of you are new. And I want to do something with you this morning that I enjoy doing. I simply want to…
You know, we’re always talking about being like Jesus. And I don’t believe that’s possible. I don’t think you can be like the person on your right or like the person on your left. I think that God can reproduce His Son, Jesus Christ, in you as the Holy Spirit begins to work. But I don’t think you can imitate Him. I think He is the pattern and that we are to… we are to move and have being in the form of the patterned Son, as the Werm Frumke’s book would say. But let me take you on a few days with Jesus, a few different little simple things out of the Scripture that are familiar stories to you. And in the same sense that we say that George Parkhurst has divine imagination, which is simply the term that he put on the workshop and what it is that he does, let me suggest to you that you operate your divine imagination and begin to infuse yourself into the day-by-day-by-day walk of Jesus, as if you were a participant in it or a spectator, if you please. I don’t care how you see it. But allow yourself to be involved in what it is that He is and what’s happening to the people that are around Him in daily living.
And then maybe the next time that I get back here, we’ll do what I thought the Spirit wanted to do this morning before the council rang me. Turn to the first chapter of John, will you? I think I was talking with someone, maybe it was the council ring, about the fact that I never did get too excited over the baby Jesus. The thing that excites me is that God did come in human flesh. But it was necessary for Him to come as a baby. We’ll talk about that some other time. All right, John 1. Beginning with the first verse. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. And all things were made by Him, and without Him was not anything made that was made. In Him was life, and the life was the light of men. And the light shineth in darkness, and the darkness comprehended it not. There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. The same came for a witness, to bear witness of the Light, that all men through him might believe. He was not that Light, but was sent to bear witness of that Light. That was the true Light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world.
He was in the world, and the world was made by Him, and the world knew Him not. He came unto His own, and His own received Him not. But as many as received Him, to them gave He power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on His name, which were born not of blood, nor the will of the flesh, nor the will of man, but of God. And the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld His glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth. Now, the way that this little thing came to me was really in an airport, and I don’t remember the city any longer, but I remember distinctly that it was close to the middle of the night, and I seemed to spend a great part of my life in airports, and I fairly well memorized most of the travel brochures. I enjoy looking at maps, but I’ve gradually, over a period of years, become tired of looking at timetables. So as I sat there on this particular night, I got out a little pocket testament that I had, and I was reading through it. And I came to this first chapter, the Gospel of John. And I love the way John flows.
John speaks to me, you know. This was one of the things that got through to me in the sense of Norman Elliott. He was working on my head, which is where I was at that time. You know, he was speaking to the big cosmic Greek mind. And I thought I had one of those big old Presbyterian minds, you know, and I was just going to sit there and listen to it. So as I began to read this, I had my big old mind working, and I was thinking it through, and I suddenly came to the conclusion, “Son, your mind is tired. Rest now and let the Word of God do the work on you.” As I got down to the 14th verse, and the Word says, “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” I thought like someone having a conversion experience. It did, didn’t it? You know, it really did. He was flesh. He was flesh and blood. And He’s going to be bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh. And the night before, and this has been a long time ago, I was sitting in a motel looking at the late news. This was after the meeting, and I was looking at the late news, and the news said there was gunfire heard across the Sea of Galilee.
And I thought, “My gracious, you don’t shoot over it, you walk on it.” But isn’t that typical? Isn’t that just like us, how we’ve robed the Scripture in our culture? We’ve projected on Jesus a sort of a Friar Tuck image, a man in an old brown robe with a white belt around it and a certain number of knots tied running down the end of the belt and a hood on the back of it and a forked stick in his hand followed by a group of sheep. And we really have no picture of Him at all. If we’ve projected on Him some particular culture and fail to see the man. I went in town to get a suitcase taken care of yesterday. I always bring more than I have any use for and never use half of it. And God got my attention yesterday when He allowed the handle on the suitcase to break. And that was a way in which He was saying to me, “You don’t need that much.” And I said, “Yes, Lord.” So I’ve carried the suitcase in now and I’ve got a new strap put on. And I didn’t tell the man what kind to put on. But I believe that God has told this man that runs the saddle shop in Ardmore exactly what to put on.
And it’s in direct proportion to what I’m supposed to carry. Now, I don’t know how that’s going to work out. I hope He tells me what He told the man. But I went in and this gentleman was there and he had formerly been a cowboy on the rodeo circuit. And he was a rope twirler. And his father was a great friend of Will Rogers. And he knew Will Rogers quite well. And we had a grand conversation. Homer Martin and this fellow and I has a picture of him jumping nine feet off the back of a horse and a rope twirling around. Gosh, if you have time going there and look at a picture of the man jumping on the back of the horse twirling a rope, it’s worth it in your free time just to know that that sort of thing can be done. But I say all that simply to say that if we think back in our memory to a man like Will Rogers, a whimsical sort of a person and yet a sweet and gentle person who said, “I never met a man I didn’t like.” And we think, gosh, is that possible? Is that possible? Is it conceivable for somebody really to feel that way? And I believe that he did because I think his life evidence that he had affection for people.
They were important to him. He cared about them. But he was a delightful person. He was a charming individual who took life as it was and interpreted it as it ought to be. And you know, really, in essence, this is what Jesus did. And I don’t mean Jesus was a Will Rogers, but Will Rogers, if he’d been written up in Scripture, might have been some type of forecast of Jesus. Now, watch out. Don’t let that be the only thing you take hold of and go rushing out of the door with it and say that’s all He said. Some lady asked me coming down the hallway here this morning, “What happened to the things?” And I thought, what things is she talking about? She said she wasn’t the one who wanted to know, but her mother wanted to know what happened to the things. Well, about six hours after wandering around in the kind of grungy airport of Madeira, of the Azores, we were allowed to get back on the plane and get out. Man, they had enough guards around that airplane to keep the whole Portuguese army from taking it over. We were allowed to get back on and the rings and all the rest of this was there. And then my wife said to me, “You did something to those friends last night that you don’t like to have people do to you.”
And I said, “What’s that?” She said, “You told them what to do but not how to do it.” And I said, “Well, that was last night. Now this morning, I’m going to tell them how to.” But then God changed my mind so you don’t get to hear how to until He decides that it’s time to hear how to. But let me give you a quickie. Let me tell you a quickie on how to.
The quickie on how to come into the joy of the Lord is to stay in the presence of the Lord. You don’t… You have relationship. You remember? Remember relationship and fellowship? When my daughter, our daughter was in Europe, the relationship was not broken. But there was no fellowship. There’s only fellowship when we’re in communion. So as you are watching and waiting and praying for the joy of the Lord to become your strength, it comes in the personal fellowship, in the presence of. Being still and knowing. You know, I don’t even mean getting the word of God and chewing it up. Chew on it, fine. But then be still. Like I was being in the airport and listen. Listen. And let God reveal Himself to you in His humanity and in His sovereignty and in His love and in His beauty. And begin to see Him not in flowery phrases and pomp and circumstance and brown robes and old English and all that sort of thing. I was doing a bull session once with some kids and I was trying to give them a little illustration of Jesus and I said, “Here’s Jesus in his father’s carpentry shop and He’s got His maul here in His hand, this wooden mallet and a peg, and He’s building a table.”
And you know, if you’ve got a table and you put the thing together with wooden pegs you can sell it for a fortune today. But Jesus, I guess they’ve had a very modest price on these tables and He’s beating away at this peg and all of a sudden the head flies off the mallet and it strikes Him on the foot. What does He say? And a voice in the back said, “Hosanna!” You know, I have smitten my toe.
You know, I believe I’m satisfied that the reason the plainest and most ordinary people got a glimpse of God. The reason that we got a glimpse of God was because the Word really did become flesh and dwell among us. And we stopped projecting on the Lord Jesus Christ our culture and we allow Him to project upon us His spirit. We don’t conform Him to our image. We’re conformed into His likeness. And there’s a vast difference in this. Now, unless you can see Jesus in the ordinary circumstances of life, I think you’ve missed Him completely. You see, He is in the marketplace. He’s not sitting off somewhere contemplating His navel waiting for a palm tree to grow out of it. He’s not cloistered. He’s involved in the affairs of men in the daily, men and women. So let’s take three pictures of the life of Jesus and look at them. And I’ve, you know, I use these all the time. And I may have used them for some of you. I could use three different ones, but I just like these because they come bam right in the Gospel of John. Now, you don’t even need to open your Bible. If you open your Bible, you go back to King James and Mr. Taylor who wrote the Living Word.
I didn’t tell you all. Did I tell you what Jamie said when he said he was going to sing from the Psalms last night to tell you that? This was the same time he gave that gentle rebuke to the man that was prophesied and kind of had a need to prophesy. Then Jamie said, “We’re going to sing from the Psalms.” He says, “Open your King James.” He says, “Those of you with the Living Word,” he said, “you just hum along.”
Listen, you use anything that causes the Word to become flesh to you. Yeah, absolutely. Anywhere that Jesus is real, that He can infuse Himself into your life. Okay. Now, here’s a picture in the third chapter of the Gospel of John. I don’t know how you’ve seen it and I’ve taught it 988 different ways, but it is the story of Nicodemus. Now, let’s just change it a little bit. Let’s go up on a hillside outside of Jerusalem and I haven’t yet been to Jerusalem but here we are up on the hillside and there’s been a lean-to built by the disciples for Jesus’ benefit with the back of the lean-to against the wind from the north and the opening toward the south and it doesn’t make a whole lot of difference how they build the lean-to. That’s just a protection from the wind because there’s nothing that gets colder than the desert at night. Sand doesn’t hold heat. Sand doesn’t hold cold. It just is mean at night. If you don’t think so, well, get down in some desert country and find out. And they built a fire in front of the lean-to and Jesus has a nice flat rock that they’ve arranged for Him and He’s sitting on a rock that goes back to the lean-to and the disciples are sort of gathered like a Boy Scout patrol meeting around Him and they are rapping and drinking coffee and whatever it was they drank in those days and sharing what had gone on during that particular 24 hours.
Now, this is wild country. There’re beasts and things that’ll come in and catch you if you’re not careful. So they kind of keep one ear tuned off in the distance as they are listening to Jesus. And in the midst of this quiet and serene scene, there is a sound of a rock trickling down the hilly path. And Peter, who’s on the side nearest to Jerusalem and furthest from Jesus, which is not like Peter, but he considered himself to be the watchdog of the crowd and if things went wrong, he sat and growled like the elders of my church. And if things were going good, he smiled like the deacons when the offering had been successful. And they heard these rocks trickling down the hill and Peter’s head kind of comes to the half-standing position of attention and he’s listening to Jesus and Jesus isn’t paying any attention. They keep on talking. And then there’s the breaking and snapping of a twig. And all of the disciples hear this. And heads spin the staff to see what’s going on. And out of the darkness comes the grandest thing that you’ve ever seen. It’s like a million sparklers all twinkling at the same time. And what’s happening is the lights from the fire are being caught up by the jewels on the garment of Nicodemus.
And as he begins to come closer and closer and closer, this man in all of his wriggle robes and his haughty bearing, the disciples know that he hadn’t come to see them. And they sort of steal like Arabs quietly into the night and Jesus sits across holding His cup in His hand and Nicodemus arrives on the opposite side of the fire. And he says, “Shalom.” “Shalom.” Jesus says, “Good evening.” Nicodemus says, “Shalom. We understand and know and have come to believe that you are a man sent from God.” And what that really is that means that in spite of the fact that you don’t have a seminary education you are teaching something that has interest to us and we want to come and hear about it. Jesus is not fooled by this at all. He simply raises through the veneer of Nicodemus and pierces right into his heart. And He says, “My friend, you can be born again.” Huh? I don’t know what, I don’t know what the Hebrew for “huh” is, but I think “huh” has always been “huh.”
And Nicodemus says, “Huh?” And at this point, if you miss the twinkle in Jesus’ eye, and one of the beautiful things about it, you see, is He’s not clubbing this man to death and saying, “Hey, brother, you’ve got to be born again.” He’s holding out to him the infinite possibilities of God and saying, “Nicodemus, you can be changed totally and completely.” Well, Nicodemus obviously misses the point and he says, “Look, you’re not making any sense.” Jesus says, “I never made more sense in my life.” “How in the world can somebody crawl back inside of their mother and begin?” And then Jesus talks to him about the transforming power of God. And He’s saying, you’re counting on the fact that because you were born in such and such a situation of such and such parents, because you’ve ascended to such and such a position and thus and so, that you have more perfect attendance pins than Douglas MacArthur has campaign ribbons. You’re counting on the fact that you’ve prepared this or you’ve done that or you’ve done the other to give you King’s X into the kingdom of God. But this only comes about as a man is transformed from the inside. It means literally to become a new person by the grace of God.
You see, the spirit of Nicodemus isn’t dead today, is it not, by any manner of means. How many years did we spend believing that doing so and so and so and so was the answer before the Word really did become flesh in our own experience. And He and I began to become one. Now, I don’t know whether you go to the movies or not. I don’t even know whether you believe in movies. But there’s a technique called the zoom technique where they’re centered in, where the camera is centered in on a group sitting talking. And then suddenly the zoom lens comes back and you get the wide panorama of the whole thing. Now, let’s just visualize we’re right in on Jesus and Nicodemus around the fire. The camera zooms back and you get the broad side of the hill with a flickering fire, the man Nicodemus, Jesus just barely discernible. And a word out of the wings, so to speak, from the side of the stage to the right of the proscenium says these words: “And God so loved the world that He sent His only begotten Son to wrap around fires with men like Nicodemus that they might experience eternal life.” Well, now let’s just put a semicolon there. The rest of the chapter is commenting on that encounter and it follows this same sort of picture down through the next seven or eight chapters of the Gospel of John, but let’s move on to another one.
In this particular situation Jesus is in Jerusalem and He informs the disciples as they are preparing to lie down to rest that night He says to them, in King James, “We needs must go to Galilee,” but I don’t believe He said it that way at all. I think He said, “Fellas, we’ve got to get up early in the morning. I would like to be up at Galilee before dark tomorrow afternoon.” Now, what we’re getting into is the story of a woman at the well. So whoever was designated to wake the disciples and everyone else up gets up at the appointed hour and they prepare themselves to come forth from the gate of Jerusalem and, as, see, this thing, well, this is the Jordan River, this is the Dead Sea down here and the Sea of Galilee up here, Jerusalem is over here and Galilee is there. Now, the customary procedure is to come out of Jerusalem as far as you’re concerned. Well, now the way I’m looking at it is the way I hope you’re not seeing it. The way I want you to see it is for you, Jerusalem over here and the Sea of Galilee is out there. The normal thing is to come out and to turn and cross over and go up and back. Now, you know why. You know what’s in here. Yeah, Samaritans. Good gracious of life. The place is full of them. And they come out, and Jesus turns, instead of the way they customarily go, He turns to go up through Samaria.
The disciples are half asleep. Peter’s kind of wiping the little sleepy things out of his eyes, and he’s leading the rest of the pack, grunting along like this, like the seven dwarves coming back from a hard day’s work. And suddenly he realizes that Jesus is no longer in front. And he raises his head, and he looks around, and he says, “Oh, Lord? Lord?” “Yes, Peter.” “Peter, you turned left a little early, didn’t you, Lord?” “Why, certainly not, Peter. Come, this is the shortest way.” “Yes, Lord, but we don’t go that way.” “Well, we are today.” “Yes, Lord, but…”
“What’s the matter, Peter?” “There are Samaritans out there.” “Well, what about it?” “Well, they’re out hiding behind rocks just waiting to jump out and be Samaritans at you.” Jesus says, “Oh, come, come, come, come on, Peter. Come on.” So they turn. You know, isn’t it amazing? When you are prejudiced, any old excuse will do. Along about the middle of the day, in the heat of the day, they get to a place named Sychar, outside of which is a well. And Jesus sits down beside the well of Sychar, and He wipes the perspiration from His face, and He kind of fluffs His robe and lets the perspiration underneath His arms fall to the ground, and I’m sure it was there. And He says, “Oh, man. I’m thirsty. And I’m hungry.” Peter says, “Lord, I tried to tell you, if you had gone the other way, there are two Howard Johnsons and a Holiday Inn.”
And Jesus says, “Peter, you don’t understand. I’m hungry.” So they all get together and take off all but Jesus. Isn’t it amazing? It took 12 men to go and get one fish. Peter’s sitting by the well. I mean, Jesus by the well. A woman appears on the horizon, walking, carrying a pitcher, trying to act as if it had something in it. And her face is all made up. You know, another interesting thought is that you can’t hide sin in your heart by what’s put on your face from the external. And she comes up and she puts this pot down by the well and looks over at Jesus. Now, He’s not looking at her at all. He’s just simply looking. And He says, “I’m thirsty.”
And He says, “I’m thirsty. I’m thirsty.” Still hasn’t looked at her. She says, “You’re a Jew.” “Yes, ma’am.” “The Jews don’t speak to Samaritans.” “I do.” “Jews wouldn’t even take a drink from a Samaritan.” “I do.” And sensing something which she’s never sensed before, the woman lowers her little small lifting pail by rope down into the well and begins to raise up from the bottom the clear and cool water. And you can hear the drops coming as they spill away, trickling and bouncing against the water that remains in the well. And she brings it out and pours a cup and hands it to Jesus. And He still is not looking at her. He looks at the water. He takes a drink of it. It runs down His beard. He catches it and rubs it in the back of His neck and up His arms and puts the cup back and looks in it again. And He says, “You know, I could tell you of a water that if you drank, you would never thirst again.” And she says, “Come, come, come, come. Running water is not invented until 1916.”
And He begins to talk with her about the well of God’s forgiveness which never runs dry. And the lady senses for the first time in her life that she is face to face with God’s Messiah. And she jumps up and runs into the city. Jesus remains seated. In a few moments, hours, she comes back. Another rather interesting thought. Men who would not walk out with her in the cool of the day run out with her in the heat of noon. Because if you can’t hide sin in your heart, you can’t hide transformation in your life either. And as God, Jesus Christ, begins to expound to her the love of God, the forgiveness of God, He causes her to see that first, God loves. God loves because we are more important to God than what we do. That God loves us because we are so important to Him that He will give this Son to restore us. And those who have experienced the love of God form the body of God to come and nurture and cherish one another and guide gently one another into this love of God. But there’s a third aspect of it too. That we have to be secure enough in the love of God to receive this personage of Jesus to be able to love ourselves.
To see ourselves as holy, acceptable, and perfect under the blood of Jesus Christ. That it is a triune Father, community, individual love. Semicolon. We move to the next story. This is a man who for 38 years has sat by a pool of water waiting for it to bubble. This is the pool of Bethesda and the story is that an angel comes down once a year and troubles the waters at this pool and the first person that gets into the water after the troubling is healed.
Did you ever sit by a pool of promise waiting for it to bubble so you could jump in? Like how long? Jesus comes along. I don’t know what attracts Him to this man. I suppose he sat there and rattled his little cup louder than anybody else. Maybe he was some sort of wit that made funnies by the edge of the pool. But in any event, Jesus comes over to him and He squats down beside him because this man has been seated here by friends on a little mat every day for 38 years waiting for a pool that for him never bubbled. And Jesus says to him, “Listen, my friend, do you really want to be well?” “Do you see any bubbles?” “What do you mean, bubbles?” “Listen, I’ve been sitting here for 38 years waiting for something to happen. If you see bubbles, don’t tell anybody. They always put somebody in the water before they get in.” “I’m not talking about bubbles. Do you want to be well?” “Man, I have been here for 38 years.” “I was just curious. Take up your bed and walk.” And the words are such a shock to the mind and the nervous system of the man that he finds himself coming up on his one good leg, pulling behind him his straw mat and the dead leg dangling just like a plumb bob from his side.
And you can almost see what’s happening. It’s as if you sat too long in the movies or in front of the television set with your legs crossed and one went to sleep. And you uncrossed them and the tingling sensation began to come back into them. And you can see the dead leg begin to stop its dangling and almost visibly catch the healing power of God moving through and causing the tingling sensation within it. And you see the man touch it to the ground. And then he touches it to the ground again and again and again in a rhythmic beat until suddenly he’s twirling with the grass mat around over his head and he says, “My God, I’m healed.” And he rushes off down the street screaming at the top of his voice, “I’m healed!” Four blocks away outside of the synagogue, the Pharisees are having a convocation. And off in the distance you can hear the voice, “I’m healed!” Around the corner and into the front, “I’m healed,” he says.
“Da-dum-dum. You’re carrying your bed on the Sabbath.” “I’m healed. I’m healed.” “You are carrying your bed on the Sabbath.” Jesus, isn’t it amazing? The day that God healed his leg, the church broke his heart. And he ricochets off the synagogue door and goes up to the center and falls on his knees and says, “Oh God, why?”
Now, let’s go back. Let’s go back and see what happened. Let’s go back and look at the pictures where we stopped looking at the pictures. We’ve seen Jesus in the affairs and the life of people. I think there are three of the most beautiful illustrations of Jesus’ relationship with people. This is a sense, in a sense, George’s divine imagination. It’s in a sense, meditation. It’s in a sense, pondering. It’s in a sense, just allowing the Spirit of God to talk to you. What would you do? What would you do? In the case of Nicodemus, I know what I would have done. I would have sat all night drinking coffee and arguing a case for the existence of God. And I would have gone back to my disciples in the morning and I would have said, “He brought up so and so and so and so, but I told him this.”
And I won the argument. But I lost his soul. What did Jesus do? Did it make any difference when Jesus raised it through to the heart of Nicodemus? Did it make any transformation when He said, “My friend, you can be born again”?
Let me give you an example. There was a man who earlier had come under the dark of night to see Jesus. Who, when the court sat in inquisition of Jesus Christ, and the vote was 69 to 1, crucify Him, one man abstained.
There was a man who came to Jesus in the dark of night, who came in the heat of the day and paid a king’s ransom for His dead body, that he might carry it down the streets of Jerusalem to be buried. Did he make a difference? I would say it did, wouldn’t you? The man was Nicodemus. Or the woman at the well. And you looked, and I looked, and I thought, “Well, he really got that together, didn’t he? He really put it on. He got it all together. If that had been me, I would have thought, Hallelujah, what a conclave. What a revival. And I would have packed my bag and immediately headed for the airport and gone home.” What did Jesus do? The Scripture said He spent two more days in the city of Sychar. Well, now, I don’t know that He did, but you don’t know that He didn’t. Because how like Him to have stayed in the house of that former prostitute. Because when the Lord Jesus Christ hung from the cross, that was the sort of people that stayed to love Him. I wonder if there’d be any there at my appointed hour to meet the Lord in that way. I doubt it. But when it comes to rubbing elbows with the people of the world, when it comes to being involved with the people that we see, I rush on, having gotten my little concerns together.
But Jesus stays and causes babies to grow into maturity and to establish people. Two nights in Sychar, I think it was with that woman, don’t you? Well, the man across the pool, here he is at the altar rail, we’ll say, of the synagogue, crying, and Jesus comes in and He kneels beside him and the man says, “Where were you when I needed you?” Jesus says, “It isn’t easy to explain a miracle, is it?” And He puts His arm around the man and He pours the love of God into him and sends him forth. Did you ever try to explain a miracle? Or have you been satisfied simply to let people see what the transformation has done? Allow them to ask the questions. Then you’re free to answer.
Have you ever felt that the Word was becoming flesh in you? Have you ever felt that perhaps that’s why we’re here? And you begin to ask the question, well, who needs me? Well, who needs you as the sophisticated intellectual leader?
Who needs you as the social outcast, the prostituted blight on society? Who needs you as the derelict man who all of his life has been misguided to sit by pools that never bubble? They need us desperately. And most of us are content to sit around and argue our little theology to get our resources together and, oh, bless the afflicted with our little concerns.
And I think the reason that we are here in this season is to stop playing church and to start being the church. To begin to let the world know that the Word really did become flesh. And we are today’s manifestation of it. As Rufus Moseley would say, we are the glory on the way to glory. And I like that. And I’m ready. Are you ready? Lord, help Yourself to us. Break the ties that have bound us to everything except Yourself.
Put the yoke of the knowledge of Jesus Christ upon our hearts and upon our minds and set us free to be. In Jesus’ name. Amen.
