Well, as pastor Matt said, my name is Hunter Jones. I am over in Queen Creek, so it's a nice long drive, a lot of praying on the way over, so that was fun. I am so thankful to be here. I'm a pastor at Rock Point Church. Like pastor Matt said, I get to work there with my beautiful wife, Ellie.

We live out in Queen Creek. We have a picture for you. Yeah, obviously I have one nice shirt and so wearing it for you guys today, all right, so it's going to be a good morning. I can't wait to dive into God word with you guys. We are in a series going through the Book of John.

So if you have your Bibles, I'd love if you'd already have them open to John, chapter 5. That's where we're going to be today, but if you would join me in praying over the message, I'd appreciate it. Father God, thank you so much that we get to come to church and hear your word. I pray that you would speak powerfully this morning. I pray that we wouldn't come to church or your word Just for information, but for transformation.

God, I pray that we walk out of this room different Cho, choosing to do something. Put a call on each of our hearts, let us know exactly what you want us to do and, God, I pray that you would speak through me, that I may decrease and you may increase. In Jesus name, everybody said amen, amen. So, growing up in Missouri, every once in a while, when I was in high school, my dad would want to take me on a hunting or a fishing trip, and so there was a three-day weekend. We packed up the car, we drove a couple hours south and we went to this fishing spot that my dad just wanted to try out.

So we camped out that that night. We got up early in the morning and we started hiking out to this fishing spot. He laid out the map and he drew exactly where he wanted to go. So we're carrying our Tackle Box, the cooler for lunch, we got our fishing poles, all our fishing gear. We're walking all the way out there and as we're hiking along the river, I realized that the ground, this little rocky Cliff, is starting to get higher and higher above the water, and if you know anything about me, I hate heights with a passion.

People ask me all the time: don't you want to go skydiving just once in your life? And I was like: no, no, I'd rather just die, okay. And so we are getting higher and higher off the ground and I'm starting to freak out a little bit. I'm stand close to the other wall, away from the Edge, and as we're walking we're almost there. We go around to bend and I see where my dad wants us to go, but between there and here where I'm standing, is a gap.

It's about 5 foot wide and bridging this Gap is a 2x4, an old 2x4, and I look down into this Gap and there's just Jagged rocks down there, like 15, 20t below, and I'm thinking there is no way on God's green earth that I am walking over this Gap onto this board. But I'm watching my dad as he's walking ahead of me and he just puts his foot out onto the board and steps out and I'm literally watching the board bulge beneath his weight, about to snap, and I'm freaking out. I'm thinking there is no possible way I'm going to get to where we're going. I'm just like: go on, without me, I'm going to die right here. And so I'm standing there just thinking about- I know I have to get over this Gap- and I'm just looking at the jagged rocks playing over and over in my mind just watching myself die.

You know, you get in your head like that sometimes. And my dad finally stops and he turns back and he realizes that I'm not following him and he knows I'm afraid of heights. And so he looks at me and says, Hunter, it's going to be okay, just step across. It carried me, it's going to carry you. And I'm just like mm.

I'm not doing that. And he Tri to keep convincing me to step out onto the board and I'm saying, listen, I'm not going to do it, I'm not going over there, it's not worth it. And finally my dad steps out onto the board and he reaches his hand out and he says, Hunter, look at me, you don't need to trust the board, you need to trust me. Okay, give me your hand, don't look down, look at me. And then I died.

I'm just kidding. I obviously made it across and we had a great fishing day and it was miserable. But here's the thing that I want to bring to you this morning: the truth that we're going to wrestle with. Where you put your focus is where you've placed your faith. Where you put your focus is where you've placed your faith.

See, I couldn't get my focus off of this board that I had no faith in and so I couldn't get across. But as soon as my dad said, put your faith in me, put your focus on me, that's what was able to get me through. Maybe you're coming to church this morning and life is just messing with you. You're in a valley, you're frustrated, it feels like your marriage is falling apart, your kids are driving you crazy, the job opportunity is never going to come, your health just keeps dwindling down. But the truth I want to share with you, and that we're going to see in God's word, is where you put your focus, is where you've placed your faith.

Where's your focus this morning? Is it on getting another healing? Is it on finding another job? Is it finding another marriage? Is it a better circumstance?

Where is your focus this morning? Because I hope at the point that we walk out of here we can all say: I know how to fix my focus on Jesus as the foundation of my faith. Amen. So let's jump into God's word. John, chapter five: you guys there, all right, me and that guy are there, awesome.

Okay, John 5:1. Here we go afterward. Jesus returned to Jerusalem for one of the Jewish holy days, so this is a Jewish holy day. They are in Jerusalem, the capital, and what you need to know about Jerusalem is during a holy day. That's where we get holiday.

Okay, a holy day, all of the people all around that are Jewish come to Jerusalem to celebrate. It's like Disneyland on spring break. All right, every family is there. So many that you're like: why did God make all these people? There's so many, many people, and Jesus is entering into Jerusalem.

So in verse two we pick up inside the city. Near the Sheep gate, was a pool of Bethesda which or with five Co covered porches. Crowds of sick people- blind, lame or paralyzed- lay on the porches. One of the men lying there had been sick for 38 years. When Jesus saw him, he knew he had been ill for a long time and he asked him: would you like to get well?

So here's the thing: in the middle of Jerusalem or off to the north, there is this Olympic siiz swimming pool. It is massive and it used to be a place where all the rich people would hang out, and they loved being by the water. It was fed by a natural spring, so the water was always fresh, it was always amazing, and so they built these beautiful porches so they could Lounge by the water. And then a superstitions started to spread around this pool that anytime the water got stirred up, they would say an angel would come down and stir up the water. And anytime the water got stirred up, if you had an ailment, if you were paralyzed, if you were blind, if there was something wrong with you and you were the first person to make it into the water, then you would be healed.

And this Superstition started to spread. And so, rather than the rich, nice people coming to the pool, all the time it was crowded with people who were paralyzed, people who are ill, people who were struggling, people who needed healing. And then we Zone in on one person. For years he's been focused on a miracle. He's been looking for healing.

He's been looking for his body to work again. You see, in this time and age, if you were paralyzed, you still had to provide for your family, but you couldn't get a job. You'd have to be set outside on the street and beg people to give you money. So for 38 years, this man- we think he's in an accident and he was paralyzed- and he's begging people for money for 38 years- he's asking loved ones to bring him to the pool because he's hoping, praying, asking, wanting a miracle, healing, and he's so focused on this water. At this point, the natural spring is probably no longer connected or only connects every once in a while, and so it starts to get this gross, nasty, scum me water.

And he's so focused on this water that he's hoping, praying, will come alive. And then Jesus steps into his story. Jesus walks into this pool where there's hundreds of paralyzed, blind, lame people waiting for a miracle, and he walks up to this man that he knows has been here for 38 years and he asks him: do you want to get well? What a question. I mean, this guy, for 38 years, has been waiting, hoping, praying, wanting to get well, and he's been focusing on this Dead, gross water.

And yet Jesus, Who Says I Am The Living Water, steps into his story. But look at his response, verse 7: I can't sir, the sick man said, for I have no one to put me into the pool when the water bubbles up. Someone else always gets there ahead of me. Now here's the crazy thing: he's been so focused on a healing, so focused on a miracle, so focused on this dead water. He's hoping, praying, will come alive and someone will be nice enough to throw him in the water, that when Jesus, Living Water, himself steps in, he asks: Jesus, could you throw me in the water?

Could you wait with me? Could you sit here with me and be the one, because if I get first, I might just get healing. He had his faith. He had his focus in the complete wrong place. The first thing I want you to walk away with this morning, if you want to put your faith in the right place, here's what you have to do: you have to set your focus on the Healer over the healing.

We have to set our focus on the Healer over the healing, because if we're so focused on the healing, we might just miss the Healer. If we're so focused on what God can give us, we might just miss God himself. If we're so focused on what we want from God, we might end up getting so frustrated because God's not giving it to us that we write him off completely. We have to focus on the Healer rather than the healing, and this man, after 38 years, almost missed it, because he put all his faith in the wrong place. He had all his focus on the healing and then Jesus, in verse eight, said: Jesus told him: stand up, pick up your mat and walk.

And instantly the man was healed. He rolled up his sleeping mat and began walking. But this miracle happened on a Sabbath. So Jesus enters into this man's story, realizing he's wanting, wishing, asking for healing, and he turns his attention to himself and he heals him. But the issue is, it's the Sabbath.

See, in the Jewish religion there was one day- today it would be our Saturday, but it was one day you weren't allowed to do any work and the religious leader got really, really strict about this. Verse 9, verse 10, sorry. 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. Now here's the thing: you and I could read the Old Testament, which is the Jewish Scriptures, and we could look up and down and try to find a place where God says: don't carry a mat on the Sabbath.

It's not there. There's no law in the Old Testament that says you can't carry a mat on the Sabbath. But these Jewish religious leaders were so strict about following God's rules that they made their own extra rules so that they wouldn't even come close to Crossing God's rules. And so they said: you not only can't work on the Sabbath, but this is all the things that we Define as work on the Sabbath, and one of those things is moving property over property lines, and so you could have accidentally put something in your pocket and cross property lines in your working on the Sabbath. These guys are just making things up, making it harder to connect with God.

Here's the other thing I have for you guys. We have to be careful, because we can get really religious too. If we want our faith in Jesus, our faith in the right place, we must set our focus on the law maker over the law. Because the truth is, these people probably just witnessed a man who they've seen in the streets begging for money each day. They saw him walking carrying his mat and they said: that is not allowed.

A miracle just happened. Man, are you serious? You don't think God is moving? But you and I can set our Focus so much on what we should do that we miss the healing, the miracle, what God is doing. You see, when we focus on the law over the law maker, the law fulfiller, Jesus, one of two things can happen: either we try to live up to God's standards without his power and we, over and over and over again, come short and we start getting frustrated.

We mess up and we mess up, and we mess up and we mess up and finally we're just like you know what. I'm not good enough. I feel like God's disappointed in me. I feel like God's angry with me. I'm done here.

I'm done with the church thing. They're judgmental, they're mean, they're rude. And the truth is, you've been trying to follow God's standards without God's Holy Spirit, his grace and his love and his power, and it's not going to work. And that's where the Pharisees were at. They were so focused on the law that they missed the law maker.

So that's one thing. The other way, if we're so focused on the law rather than the lawmaker, we can get to a place where we just hide. We know we're not perfect, but everybody else needs to think, so we need to look really good, and so the sins that we're struggling with we would never talk about. That's why I'm so thankful here at Orbit Church, we are a church that wants real people, not perfect people. Amen.

And that's why pastor Matt, over and over, encourages you to get into a small group, because people don't grow in rows. They grow in circles and we want people to get real with a circle of people. We want people to know what you're struggling with and so when you can talk about your Brokenness and your sin and your hurts and your Hang-Ups, you can be met with the love of Jesus Through people who know you, people who see you. So if you're not signed up for a small group, man, I encourage you to do it. So verse 10, as we're reading through.

So the Jewish leaders objected and they said to the man who was cursed: you can't work on the Sabbath. The law doesn't allow you to carry that sleeping mat. Verse 11. But he replied: the man who healed me told me: pick up your mat and walk. Who said such things as that they demanded.

The man didn't know, for Jesus had disappeared into the crowd, but afterward Jesus found him in the temple and told him: now you are well, so stop sinning, or something worse may happen to you. If you're someone like me and you're reading this, I'm kind of like man. Jesus, you kind of ruined the moment. This was supposed to be an awesome story about miraculous healing and this man was: his life is fixed forever. And you come in.

You're talking about his sin. That's kind of awkward, but here's why Jesus did it: because, yes, God cares for our needs here on Earth. He cares about the life that we live, but he cares far more about the eternity. He cares far more for your soul than your situation. He cares about your situation, don't get me wrong, but he cares far, far more about your soul.

The third thing I have for you: if we're going to put our faith in Jesus, we must set our focus on the Eternal over the temporal. Temporal just meaning what's going on in our life. What's going on, what the things that are going to ultimately Fade Away. We have to set our eyes on the Eternal over the temporal. If I had a rope representing our Lifeline in eternity, I started with it in my hand and it wrapped around this whole room.

It went down the road, it went all the way down to my house in Quinn Creek, an hour and a half away, and then it shot over all the way around the world and off into space for eternity. This would be our life right here, this, our 80 years on planet Earth, and a lot of us are like man. I want to work really hard right here so I can have really comfortable life right here. I don't want to get married right here and I want to make sure I'm have this job by this point and I want to get rid of the Sickness by this point. And the truth is, we invest so much in our 80 little years on Earth that we miss our eternity.

Man, our stock portfolio is horrible right now. If we're investing only in the next 80 years, what about the eternity? You realize the money that we are given by God, we can invest in our eternity by giving it back to him. That's why pastor Matt encourages you to tie that's. I mean, he does need your money, don't get me wrong, but God is going to provide.

And the truth is God knows. The best antidote to Greed is generosity. The best way to find Financial Freedom is giving, and God knows that because he created you and wired you. That's why God is calling us all to serve, because if we're faithful with him, if we're investing in our eternity with our time, we win. In the end, the results are out of the water.

There's no better way we can spend our time time than investing it in accomplishing God's mission to help people revolve their life around Jesus. Amen. We have to set our focus on the Eternal over the temporal. Verse 14, oh, I'm sorry, verse 15. Then the man went and told the Jewish leaders that it was Jesus who had healed him.

So the Jewish leaders began harassing Jesus for breaking the Sabbath rules. But Jesus replied: my father is working, and so am I. What is Jesus saying? He's saying: since the beginning of the world, the first six days of creation, God worked. On the seventh he rested, and ever since then God has been working.

That's the same with me. Jesus is saying: I was there at creation, I, I will be there in eternity. I am God. What he's claiming is that he's God. And the truth is, if we want to base our faith on who God is, our immovable Rock, we have to realize that Jesus is the savior.

Because over and over and over in our life, storms will come, sickness will come, we will lose jobs, we will lose opportunities, the tires on our cars will pop. It's just going to come. But what is your foundation? Because when the world gets darker, we are called to shine brighter. We can only do that when we set our foundation.

Put our faith Faith, put our focus on Jesus if your political party doesn't get elected this November. Where are you at? Is your foundation? Is your focus on who's in the Oval Office or is it who's on the throne? Where you've put your focus is where you've placed your Faith Church.

I want to ask you this morning: where is your focus? Because when you put it on the Healer rather than the healing, you're unshakable. When you put it on the law maker rather than the law man, the devil can't attack you. When you put your focus on the Eternal, over what's going on in the world, nothing can shake you. Church- we need to be a church that is a light in the darkness, that point people to Jesus through his love.

I remember when this became real for me in a whole new way. As a young man, I was able to go on different trips around the world to see what God is doing in different countries, and there was one trip I'll never forget. I went to Nicaragua and we were helping these people build a house and at one point the guide over our trip. He came to us and he said: hey guys, tonight we're actually going to go pray for some people who are sick-, they have leprosy- and we're going to go and pray for them. And I'm like I read the Bible.

I'm pretty sure you're not supposed to go around lepers, but I was like, whatever you know modern medicine, I'm sure they're not contagious. And so we go out to this lepre colony and he said: hey, we're going to be praying for these people, just know. Just to just to warn you, leprosy what it is it? It causes your fingers to start to lose sensation and slowly they might fall off, and so these people might not have the ends of their fingers and also they may not have the ends of their legs. A lot of people have their legs amputated at the knee and just be aware.

And so we get there and we start walking around and I'll never forget there was an old man- I never got his name, but he wheeled up to us in his wheelchair. The end of his nose was deteriorating off, the end of his fingers were almost gone and his legs were amputated right below the knee. And I'll never forget what he said to my friend and I. He said: do you know Jesus? And I'm thinking I'm here, here to pray for you, man, what are you talking about?

And he said: he is my Lord and my savior. He is going to be the one who saves me in the end. You look at my body: it's falling apart, but because of Jesus man, one day I'll get to praise him, standing up, jumping around, moving around, praising him with my arms. Health, High, amen. The truth is, he had his Focus set on Jesus, not his situation.

He had his Focus set on the Healer, not the healing, because the truth is, the healing never came on this side of planet Earth, this side of Eternity. But when your eyes are set on the Healer, nothing can stop you and nothing can shake you. When your eyes are set on eternity, it doesn't matter what your situation looks like. You can say: I have a savior, I don't need a circumstance change. Church, where are you at this morning?

I think all of us could raise our hand and say, man, we'd love Jesus to move miraculously in our life. But the reality of transformation is it can sometimes be slow. It can sometimes just be one small step of obedience and faithfulness, keeping our focus on Jesus. And I know we have a next steps class coming up right after this and I encourage you to go. But what is your next step?

Where do you need to keep your eyes focused on Jesus as the foundation of your faith. Maybe it looks like giving for the first time, saying: God, I'm going to trust you as provider over your Provisions, even when it doesn't make sense. Maybe it looks like getting in a small group because, for the first time, you need to experience the love of Jesus Through people who know your sin and choose to love you anyway. Maybe it looks like signing up to get here early in the morning to serve Jesus because you're more interested and investing in your eternity than your portfolio here on Earth. What is that for you?

Don't let yourself leave the room today without keeping your eyes focused on Jesus, and I know we have a couple baptisms this morning, people choosing to fix their eyes on the Living Water, Jesus Christ, rather than the dead water. They're fixing their eyes on God, saying: I am publicly proclaiming my faith, that I am putting it in Jesus, and there's nothing special about the water they're getting dipped into. It's the water that they're being covered with and Jesus's blood, amen, amen. So I want to finish with this. Some of you, you may be new to orbit, you may be new to church, or maybe you've been coming for a long time, but you're realizing your focus hasn't been set on the Savior.

It's been set on your circumstances. Maybe you've been frustrated with God because he didn't provide the healing when you thought you needed it. Maybe you've been so focused on the law that you made you missed the law maker. And I want to give you an opportunity this morning. If you, you want to, for the first time, give your life to Jesus.

Saying Jesus, I'm going to fix my focus on you. I want to give you that opportunity. So, if you would, I want everybody to Bow their head and close their eyes. And if that's you this morning and you're choosing to make the very for the very first time, say yes to Jesus and fix your eyes on him. I just want you to raise your hand so I can be praying for you.

Amen, I see your hands and if that's you right now, I want you to pray this prayer. There's nothing magical about the words, but just pray this prayer to God as commitment. God, I know I have sinned, but I trust in you. I know you are my savior and I want to commit the rest of my life to following you. In Jesus name, we pray.

Everybody said amen. Can we give it up for all the people around the room who gave their life to Jesus amen.