Part One
John 4:5-15
A few weeks ago, I read the story of Albert Sydney Johnston. He was a Confederate general during the Civil War. At the Battle of Shiloh, Johnston was hit in the knee by a stray bullet. Supposing that the wound was fatal, Johnston sent the division surgeon away to look after other wounded men. He ultimately bled to death.
But it hadn’t been inevitable. It was later determined that had Johnston or somebody else applied a tourniquet to his wound, the bleeding would have stopped, and he would have survived. The irony is that Johnston had a tourniquet in his pocket when he died.
Our Bible lesson for today tells the true story of what happened one afternoon when Jesus and His disciples passed through a Samaritan village. While the disciples went into town to buy food, Jesus sat down next to the well outside of town. A woman came to get water, a curious thing to happen under the noontime sun. In those days, women always got their water in the early mornings and again, after sundown, precisely to avoid the heat of the day.
Jesus asks this woman for water and she’s taken aback for two reasons. First, because in those days, Jews never spoke to Samaritans if they could avoid it. Second, because men and women weren’t supposed to speak in public.
Jesus tells her, “If you knew the gift of God, and Who it is that is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked Him, and He would given you living water.’”
Jesus is offering the woman a brand new start on life, a life with God that lasts forever. Like Albert Sydney Johnston, who had the capacity to save his earthly life in his pocket, this woman is being given the possibility of a fresh start by the unexpected presence of God-in-the-flesh right next to her!
If you feel far from God and Jesus seems distant to you, let me assure you this morning, that has nothing to do with Jesus. As the saying puts it, "If you don't feel God is close to you, remember that it wasn't because He moved away."
Through Jesus Christ, God has entered your life. He’s next to you right now. He offers you living water, a relationship with Christ, that will keep bubbling with newness and vitality for all eternity. You simply have to take the life He offers!
Part Two
John 4:16-26
The word rapture literally means to be carried beyond oneself. I don’t know if people are going to be raptured as they drive their cars and then be carried to heaven at the end of time, as some Christians insist. But I do know that the experience of rapture, of being freed from the prison of selfishness and sin and loneliness and being ushered into the presence of God, is something that every follower of Jesus can experience. In fact, one of the ongoing themes of the Gospel of John, from which out Bible less for today is taken, is that we can experience reconciliation with God and eternal life today.
In one of his books, the late missionary, evangelist, and author E. Stanley Jones, friend and confidante of Mahatma Gandhi, talks about three different women of his acquaintance who had experienced rapture.
The first was a forty-five year old, whose marriage had ended and whose life was a mess. Then, she came to believe in Jesus Christ. New hope came to her. She became so certain of the new possiblities that life with Christ brought her, that she enrolled as a student at a local university, paying her way through school by working as a full-time secretary. She graduated cum laude with her Bachelor’s degree. She then went on to graduate school, where she received all A’s. She later wrote to Jones:
Wasn’t God amazing? I don’t know why any Christian should discard miracles. I believe in miracles. [Jesus] healed me. What could be more miraculous than the forgiveness of sins? Or the taking away of all bitterness, all resentment? And the peace and joy that follow are indescribable. The laughter that comes bubbling up at most unexpected times, in me who thought a few years ago that I would never laugh again...it rises from a well of living water that will never cease. I am grateful beyond words.Jones also quotes a young college woman who told him after she’d come to faith in Christ, “I feel as though I’ve swallowed sunshine.” (I love that!)
And another, while watching a sunrise told him, “That’s the way I feel inside.”
The Samaritan woman must have felt very like these three women when she encountered Jesus. After verbally sparring with Him for a time, this woman who had been passed along from one man to another, forced to come to the town well in midday in order to avoid the putdowns of the other women who condemned her immorality, she began to see that Jesus might be the hope she’d been looking for all her life.
She realized that new life and hope and fresh starts and forgiveness of sin don’t come from the things we do. And she saw too that those blessings don’t come by fixing our hopes on earthly relationships. They only come from a faith relationship with Jesus Christ.
When Jesus affirmed to the woman that He was the Messiah, the world’s Savior, her new life began. Rapture carried her to a new place with God, the certainty of eternity. We can have the same experience if we will allow ourselves to take Jesus' offered hand!
Part Three
John 4:27-30
At the beginning of one chapter in her latest book, Jesus, Life Coach, author and business consultant Laurie Beth Jones, writes:
I don’t know how anyone attempting to follow Jesus could ever be bored. As author Anne Dillard says, if we truly knew Who we were worshiping, we’d all be wearing hard hats in church.Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a great Lutheran theologian and pastor, killed by a Nazi firing squad sixty years ago this April. Bonhoeffer once wrote, “When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.”
Jesus came not to reinforce your comfort zone, but to set your old small-minded ways on fire.
He doesn’t ask you to just take a step here or there–He asks you to leap tall buildings in a single bound. His requests will cause you to leave behind maybe everything that you thought you knew. [emphasis mine]
As it dawned on the Samaritan woman Who Jesus was and what he was offering to her, she was given new life.
But she also underwent some deaths. She knew that Jesus would kill the addicting power of her sins and that she must leave them to leap into His forgiving arms. She knew that she must let go of her shame in order to embrace her new and unlikely role, one that she undertakes with zest and enthusiasm: She becomes an evangelist, telling the very townspeople she had been trying so hard to avoid, “This Man has changed my life. Could He be the Messiah-Savior for Whom we’ve been waiting.”
The disciples had need of hard hats that day themselves! Jesus was calling them to die, too.
Their old worlds were crashing down around them. By speaking to and reaching out to this Samaritan woman, Jesus was telling them to let their old prejudices and religious arrogance die. Instead, they were to embrace a new humility that included a humble submission to God and a humble acceptance of the potential for change and transformation even in people we hate.
And hate too, must be killed, replaced with a new love for all people. As you have been loved, Jesus was telling them, so you must love not just God, but every child of God.
Are you ready to put on your hard hats and follow Jesus? Jesus has work for us to do. He calls us to die to our old sins and our old comfortable, selfish ways of living so that He can begin constructing the new and better people God wants to make of us all.
Part Four
John 4:39-42
Margaret Meade, the famous anthropologist, once said, "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” [emphasis mine]
Jesus came into our world in order to change our lives.
He came to change us from sinners heading for hell to sinners who are forgiven and given heaven.
He came to change us from people wounded by the world to people healed by His love and goodness.
Jesus spoke to crowds, of course. But He did His most important work with small groups of people. And sometimes, as with the woman at the well, He gave His greatest attention to just one person.
Why? Because one person and one group of persons, however small the group, set on fire with the Good News that God so loved the world that He gave His only Son so that all who believe in Him will live with God forever, that one small group, that one person, can change the world.
Light, when focused by a magnifying glass, as Pastor Rick Warren points out, can burn paper or leaves. When focused still more, as a laser beam, light can bore through steel.
Jesus used a single life, that of a Samaritan woman whose neighbors formerly derided as a lowlife (or worse), to take His good news to her hometown.
Our Bible lesson tells us that many believed in Jesus because of what she said. Others, having encountered Jesus, were able to say, “We see for ourselves. He is our Savior.”
Today, I ask you to ask God to use you and Friendship Church as a laser beam that bores through the layers of resistance, sin, and hopelessness we encounter each day.
As we approach Forty Days of Purpose, coming up April 9 through May 22, ask God to fill us all with the life-changing power of Jesus Christ so that, as individuals and as a congregation, we become agents by whom God changes our world.
I ask you to commit yourself to the following:
- Agree to serve on a team when one of our team leaders calls you this week.
- Agree to read one chapter of The Purpose Driven Life throughout each day of our campaign for spiritual renewal.
- Participate each week of the campaign in a small group.
- Host a small group to which members of Friendship and our non-churchgoing neighbors will be invited during the campaign.
- Prayerfully ask God how you can live out His five major purposes for your life.
God wants to use us to spread the light of His love in our community. In prayer, let’s tell God that He’s free to do just that!
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