Episode Transcript
[00:00:07] Good morning, church.
[00:00:13] I love that we get to pray for missionary friends all around the place. But the fact that we get to pray for missionary friends who are in restricted places like that, I'll tell you guys, if you've never done this before, I would strongly encourage you to familiarize yourself with the testimonies of the great missionaries who've come before us. Read a missionary biography this year, like, and if you don't, if you don't know where to start, start with Adoniram Judson was the second Baptist missionary ever sent out of North America and really, really powerful picture of exactly the kind of thing we're praying over. He ministered in Burma at a time where to be known as a Christian was to be beheaded.
[00:00:58] He translated the Bible into their heart language in it. The reason I share that I won't get too far down a rabbit hole there is this. When you read these stories, especially of missionaries who go to the cutting edge, the absolute edge of unreached people groups taking the gospel where it hasn't yet been or where it hasn't been for a very long time, what you find is that the ministry is totally different than we think of when we think of evangelism. There aren't open public church services. There aren't tents, there aren't bands. There are slow, quiet conversations over meals in dark rooms over years. Adoniram and his wife were in Burma for seven years before a single person professed Christ. Seven years of faithful ministry before saw conversion. That's the kind of labor it takes in these kind of fields. Often it's good because it gives us fuel to pray for our brothers and sisters. It also gives us context on the place within which we find ourselves and the struggles we have with being on mission in our own context. And I hope every time we pray for our missionary partners that it makes you think of the field that God has placed you in and the harvesting that you get to be a part of. Okay, too much of a rabbit trail. We're gonna jump into it. We're gonna be in John chapter four today. If you want to turn there in your Bibles. If you don't have a Bible with you today, we have house Bibles around the room, looking at the chairs in front of you. We really believe in the importance of access to God's word here at Amania Fellowship. If you don't own a Bible, I say this every week. I will say this every week as long as I can. If you don't have a Bible, take one or talk to one of our pastors. We will get you a nicer one. We believe it's important for everyone to have access to God's word. We're taking a short break from our series in Matthew for a few weeks coming out of Easter, and we're doing a short sermon series that I'm calling Distinctive, Distinctive. And it comes down to this question. We're going to spend time talking about some of the cultural, theological, convictional distinctives of our church family here at Emanuel Fellowship. And I think this will be good for us because there is a really important question we all need to know the answer to, which is, why do you go to church here?
[00:03:15] Why here? And here's what I mean by that. There are so many, in our context, wonderful gospel preaching churches in our community. Most of you drive past wonderful gospel preaching churches on your way here.
[00:03:37] So why do you go to church here? Now, if you were just in your head, we're like, that's a good point. I'm gonna leave. Don't do that. Don't do that. That's not what I'm going for. But I do want us to ask this question, why are you here? And if your answer is, well, I've just always gone here. I grew up here. My friends are here. My family is here. Be honest with you. As your pastor, as your friend, as your brother in Christ, that's not a sufficient answer. It's not a good enough answer. I believe.
[00:04:08] There we go.
[00:04:11] I believe passionately, passionately, that God calls individual believers to individual churches for individual reasons, to be a part of what God is doing in that context. So why has God called you and your family here versus all the other wonderful sister churches that preach the same gospel we preach?
[00:04:32] We believe that God has given IFC a distinctive way to live out that same mission that the whole church has to bring God glory and to advance the kingdom. And we pray, I pray, that you specifically latch onto this mission here and join us in it.
[00:04:50] And so that's what we're going to talk about for several weeks here at Emmanuel. And so my main point today is simply this Kingdom ministry is overflow ministry. It's overflow ministry at the absolute foundation of what makes Emmanuel, Emmanuel. It is this conviction.
[00:05:07] The best kingdom ministry is overflow ministry. As we experience more and more of Jesus, we overflow in his goodness to the world around us. We say this every single week at ifc. As Christ pours into you, he pours out of you. That is what we mean by that phrase.
[00:05:26] We believe in overflow ministry. The Best kingdom ministry is overflow ministry. And the question that goes with that is just this. Why? Why that order of operation?
[00:05:39] Why would we plant our flag in that? Why is that a thing that we make such a big deal out of? So we're going to look at the answer to that today in one of my favorite texts in John chapter 4. So pray with me. And we're going to go through this chunk by chunk. Jesus, we need you this morning. We ask that you would be our discipler. We ask that you would be our teacher Spirit, Encourage us, convict us, remind us of your gospel. Let us leave here today filled to the brim with you, Lord, we trust you, Jesus, we pray these things in your name. Amen. Okay, John, chapter four. We have a lot of text to cover today, so jump in with me. We're starting in verse one. It says this.
[00:06:22] When Jesus learned the Pharisees had heard he was making and baptizing more disciples than John, though Jesus himself was not baptizing, but his disciples were. He left Judea and went again to Galilee. He had to travel through Samaria. So he came to a town of Samaria called Sycher, near the property that Jacob had given his son Joseph. Jacob's well was there. And Jesus, worn out from his journey, sat down at the well. It was about noon.
[00:06:51] So as we jump into this story, for many of you church folk, this is probably a familiar text. If you don't know this story, that's fine. We're gonna go through it, we're explain it. I think it's powerful. If you do know this text, do me a favor, pretend you don't for a couple minutes. Let's hit it fresh.
[00:07:08] Let's talk about our context for a second. John is unique in the four gospel writers. One of the ways that he's specifically unique in the way he talks about Jesus life and ministry is that he highlights an aspect of Jesus life and ministry that was really normal for rabbis of his day, that for whatever reason the other three gospel writers ignore, which is that in the normal life of a Jewish rabbi in the first century Palestine, they would travel back and forth between Jerusalem and wherever they lived multiple times a year. That was a normal rhythm if you lived within a reasonable distance of Jerusalem. We know that Jesus is from Galilee and did the vast majority of his ministry in Galilee. But John highlights the fact that over the course of his ministry, he made his way to Judea and Jerusalem several times. That's important because this text picks up the story at a specific time when he was moving From Jerusalem in Judea, in the south, back north to Galilee. And if you're not 100% sure what I'm talking about right now, I'm going to put a map up on the screen. A lot of your Bibles probably have a map in the back, but this is what Palestine looked like during the time of Jesus. And you see at the south part of the map there is Judea. That's where Jerusalem is. That's where the center of Jewish worship is. At the northern part of the map, up by that little jelly bean of the Sea of Galilee is Galilee. This is where Jesus spent most of his life and did most of his ministry. And he traveled back and forth between those two locations probably several times a year his entire life. And now you'll notice right there in the middle, a region called Samaria. Now, I'm going to give us a little bit of history here to better understand what's going on here. But Jesus, our text tells us, has to travel through Samaria to get from Judea to Galilee. And if I'm just saying a whole bunch of Bible names right now and they don't make sense to you, just hold on to them. It will make sense, but we're going to have to do a little bit of head work to put ourselves in some historical context. Cool. Okay. So the thing you have to remember is that in Jesus's day, the Jewish people really hated the Samaritan people, and pretty much vice versa. In fact, in Jewish culture, Samaritan was used as a slur. Like, that's how little they thought of these people. This is actually because of their shared history.
[00:09:41] See, if you go all the way back to First Kings, you can read about how Solomon's son and heir, Rehoboam, was a terrible king. Where Solomon was the son of King David, his son Rehoboam was an awful king, only two generations removed from David himself. But he destroyed Israel by his foolish leadership. Because of his pride, because of his arrogance, he sparked off a civil war that split Israel into two nations. There was the southern kingdom of Judea and the northern kingdom of Israel. And this split was along tribal lines. Remember, Israel was made up of multiple tribes. The southern kingdom was really just the tribes of Judah and Benjamin and some Levites. Sprinkled in the northern kingdom was the other 10 tribes. There had always been tensions in ancient Israel between the 10 and the 2. You can read that throughout ancient Israel's history, Judah was by far the biggest tribe, had the most power. And once David became king, he centralized both Political power and religious worship in the city of Jerusalem in the south, in the heart of the Judah's territory. And this made it literally physically hard for the northern tribes to engage in their shared culture. They had to travel pretty extensive amounts of distance for their normal regular worship. It created lots of tensions even in unified Israel under David and Solomon's leadership. The civil war that we read about in ancient Israel was a powder keg that was waiting to pop off. And once it did, things went poorly. Those two nations never unified again.
[00:11:29] Once they were cut off the north and the south, and especially with the northern kingdom being cut off from temple worship, they soon degenerated into this kind of conglomerate, syncretistic religion. They tried to stay faithful to Yahweh, but they chose to do that instead of faithfully going to the temple and engaging in worship as the scripture prescribed. They set up their own high places and altars around their own country. And that eventually led them to mix Yahweh worship with pagan BAAL and Asherah and all sorts of other kinds of worship. And add into that they had just terrible king after terrible king after terrible king. In ancient Israel, the king's duty was not just to lead the country politically, but to lead them spiritually, keep them faithful to the covenant. And if you read through the chronicles and the kings, you find the northern kingdom just didn't have good kings. Their kings, pretty much across the board, led them into increasing faithlessness and breaks with their covenant. It comes to a point that eventually, after generations of warning through the prophets, God has had enough. And he specifically anointed, appointed and sent the Assyrian empire as his judgment on the northern kingdom. They ransacked and destroyed the northern kingdom of Israel, including their capital city, Samaria. They wiped them off the face of the planet, destroyed the entire kingly line, and enslaved everyone that survived in the Assyrians. For everyone, not just Israel, used a brutal system of forced relocation to keep their conquered people from rising up and rebellion. They would deport and forcibly mix and intermarry peoples to destroy their sense of national and cultural identity. They did exactly this to Israel. They deported most of the citizens and brought in conquered folks from other lands around their empire and essentially forced the intermingling and intermarrying. And in this way, the 10 tribes became totally lost to history.
[00:13:44] They're gone. They don't exist. If you have friends today who have Jewish heritage that comes from the southern kingdom, Levi, Judah or Benjamin, because the 10 tribes are lost now, the folk who stayed in the region of Samaria, they stayed claimed their heritage.
[00:14:04] They claimed to be specific descendants of Joseph to the tribes of Manasseh and Ephraim. But as we look at the books of Ezra and Nehemiah, you see that once God's people actually returned and began restoring Jerusalem and trying to rebuild their culture, it was the Samaritans who resented the reestablishment of Jerusalem and fought against it. They opposed rebuilding the temple, they opposed rebuilding the wall, they opposed Nehemiah's political authority and Ezra's spiritual authority, to the point that once Jerusalem was set up and they decided to set the record straight of who were God's people who survived the exile, the Samaritans were cast out. Nehemiah refused to include them in the Jewish national records because they could not properly prove their ancestry with proper genealogies.
[00:14:56] So all of this comes together, by Jesus's day, hundreds of years after that, in a deep cultural resentment and bigotry. Many faithful Jews would refuse to even walk inside Samaritan territory.
[00:15:12] If you go back and look at that map, they would cross over the Jordan river and walk through Perea and then cross back just to avoid setting foot in Samaria. A ludicrous amount of extra effort and work in a day before bridges and highways, right?
[00:15:30] All because of this deep cultural hatred between the Samaritans and the Jews. By Jesus day, the Samaritans were proud of their claimed Jewish heritage, but they were also excluded, excluded entirely from Jewish worship. And so they had continued in this synchronistic mishmash of Yahweh and local and Roman deities at high places set up around their region. One of them being Mount Gerzim, who we'll reference a little bit later in this text. Essentially, they considered themselves Jewish, and the Jews said, no, you're not. And that was the main point, their conflict. So right off the bat, the fact that Jesus, a Jewish rabbi, is traveling through the region and doesn't mind eating their food or drinking their water sets him up as a different kind of Jewish rabbi. It's noon. It's the hottest part of the day. They've been traveling. Jesus is tired and he sits and rests and sends his followers out to the market to find. Find food. Let's read on and see how this story unfolds. Verse 7.
[00:16:43] A woman of Samaria came to draw water. Give me a drink, Jesus said to her, because his disciples had gone into town to buy food. How is it that you, a Jew, asked for a drink from me, a Samaritan woman, she asked him for Jews do not associate With Samaritans. Jesus answered, if you knew the gift of God, and who was saying to you, give me a drink, you would ask him and he would give you living water.
[00:17:09] Sir, said the woman, you don't even have a bucket and the well is deep, so where do you plan on getting this living water? You aren't greater than our father Jacob, are you? He gave us the well and drank from it himself, as did his sons and livestock. Jesus said, everyone who drinks from this water will get thirsty again. But whoever drinks from the water that I will give him will never get thirsty again. In fact, the water I give him will become a well of water springing up in him for eternal life.
[00:17:38] Sarah, the woman said to him, give me this water so that I won't get thirsty and come here to draw water.
[00:17:43] Go call your husband, he told her, and come back here.
[00:17:47] I don't have a husband. She answered, you have correctly said, I don't have a husband. Jesus said, for you've had five husbands, and the man you now have is not your husband, which what you have said is true.
[00:18:00] Sir, the woman replied, I see that you are a prophet. Yeah.
[00:18:07] Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain. But you Jews say the place of worship is in Jerusalem. Jesus told her, believe me, woman, an hour is coming when you will worship the Father. Neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. You Samaritans worship what you do not know. We worship what we do know because salvation is from the Jews. But an hour is coming and is now here when the true worshipers worship the Father in spirit and in truth. Yes, the Father wants such people to worship him. God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and in truth. The woman said to him, I know the Messiah is coming, who's called the Christ. When he comes, he will explain everything to us. Verse 26. Jesus told her, I, the one speaking to you, am he.
[00:18:56] So now we get into the meat of the story, the familiar part. For many of us, Jesus is sitting, resting at the well, and a woman approaches to draw water. Now, we need to remember a couple of things here. The main one is this. It's noon. In this culture, getting water from the well was a normal, daily part of life. It was almost always the women of the family's job, but they usually do it very early in the morning, while the sun is still down, if possible. That's because if you've never done this before, water is heavy and the sun is hot.
[00:19:32] But this woman comes out at noon. That's unusual. Now, maybe she Ended up just needing more water than she thought that morning. Maybe her jar had broken. She needed to borrow one and wait. But more likely, what's most likely in this story, especially as we see how it plays out, she's either unwelcome or uncomfortable in the morning when all the other women from the town are there. I think the story tells us why this is likely the cause. But for the moment, we as the reader are just struck by the fact that this woman comes to the well at noon. That is strange. It's very strange.
[00:20:09] Jesus immediately asks her for a drink. This also is strange. Now you have to understand, this isn't like some Sharia law thing where it was like illegal for him to talk to a woman. But generally speaking, men, Jewish men didn't talk to women unless their husbands or fathers were present. Beyond this, he's a Jewish rabbi and she's a Samaritan, so she is shocked that he talks to her.
[00:20:36] But I think Jesus request here is. Is actually reasonable. Even though it's strange, right? Like it's stinking hot and Jacob's well is incredibly deep. Many archaeologists believe it was actually the deepest well in Palestine at the time. At the time of Jesus. It's still there today. They built a church around it. You can see a picture of it here. And even today, it's well over 100ft deep.
[00:20:58] So Jesus is sitting there by this well, and he has nothing to draw from it. So he asks the woman who shows up if she'll do it for him. She is caught off guard. This is likely because Jesus is immediately identifiable as a rabbi. Even though he was a humble rabbi, he still would have been wearing his prayer shawl. His tassels still would have been visible. A Jewish rabbi is the last kind of person on earth you would expect to ask a Samaritan woman for help.
[00:21:30] For help. Remember, this isn't just a social conversation. Jesus is hot and tired and has no tools to access the well. He's asking the Samaritan to help him, to serve him. And the plain reality is most rabbis simply wouldn't stoop to do this.
[00:21:47] They'd sit there and be thirsty before asking a Samaritan for help. You can imagine her side eye right as he asks for help. And she's like, why are you talking to me? What is this? What are you doing? Why are you speaking to me? And Jesus begins this beautiful back and forth with her. Jesus is the master teacher. We know that he's intentionally leading this conversation. We know that Jesus doesn't have random conversations. He knows exactly what he's doing.
[00:22:20] And we get this combo where Jesus begins to walk this woman through an analogy of his ministry. 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. He would have given you living water. He essentially says, listen, if you knew who I was, you'd be asking me for a drink instead of vice versa. And she kind of looks at him like, what are you talking about? Because that's a weird thing to say, right? Is you'd ask me for a drink. And she goes, why would I do that? What does that mean? The well is deep. You don't have any tools. You're sitting here. Why would I possibly ask you? I think it's safe to assume that at this point, this woman assumes this random Jewish rabbi is setting her up to mess with her. This is the kind of way they would have spoken. Some kind of setup to get a dig in about how he's superior. This must be a lead in.
[00:23:15] And so you notice, she immediately gets defensive.
[00:23:19] What, you think you're better than Jacob, our father, who gave us this well? Our ancestor. I'm Jewish, by the way, just in case you're, like, judging me right now, right? She goes straight into this defensive posture. Jacob himself drank from this well and left it to our ancestors. You think you're better than him?
[00:23:36] She's basically saying she considers herself a daughter of Jacob just as much as this rabbi. Whatever he's planning on saying, this is this sort of preemptive posturing to help deflect whatever hateful thing is about to be said to her.
[00:23:52] But we know that Jesus doesn't care about the conflict between the Jews and Samaritans.
[00:23:56] He doesn't care about the posturing. This is the same Jesus who told the temple leaders that God could create sons of Abraham from stones if he needed to. So he cuts through the bravado. He cuts to the conflict, and he brings about her real need.
[00:24:13] Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again. But whoever drinks of the water that I give him will never be thirsty. And the water that I give him will become in him a spring, a well of water welling up to eternal life.
[00:24:26] This.
[00:24:27] This is just a well. It gives water to thirsty people and animals. But I can fill a need deeper in the human heart.
[00:24:37] The life that my water gives is eternal life, he says to her.
[00:24:42] But the woman misses it, which, by the way, is an incredibly reasonable thing to do. This is not the conversation she was prepared for in this moment. So she answers very literally, if even a little sarcastically. Okay, if you have magic water that will make it so I never get thirsty again, give me some. That'd be great. Yeah, do that. I don't want to keep coming to this. Well, and now Jesus is ready.
[00:25:07] Now he's going to take this woman and he's actually going to give her the living water. He's going to give her what her soul really needs. He has the setup. She's bit. It's time. But it's going to be shocking, and it's going to be painful for her.
[00:25:22] And so he snaps the conversation where it needs to go.
[00:25:27] Go call your husband and bring him here.
[00:25:30] Now, on the surface, this was an incredibly normal thing to say. He shouldn't have been having this conversation with her without her husband or father present. But Jesus is cutting straight to her heart.
[00:25:43] I have no husband, she responds.
[00:25:46] And Jesus knows.
[00:25:50] So in this moment, he cuts.
[00:25:52] He shows her that he sees her.
[00:25:56] He really sees her. He sees, not in front of him, just a woman, not just a Samaritan, but he sees her.
[00:26:07] Jesus shows her that he can see exactly who she is, which includes her sin, her shame, her failure. And so in that moment, he draws up to the surface her deepest shame and failure.
[00:26:24] I know you're not married.
[00:26:26] You're actually a serial adulterer, and you're currently living with a man you're not married to.
[00:26:31] Whoa.
[00:26:33] Now, this part is so key. Jesus has cut through everything else and exposed this woman's deepest heart. And notice by the way he's done this in private without shaming or condemning her. He's simply letting her know that he sees her.
[00:26:50] And so she immediately deflects, because who wouldn't? She tries to take this back to the safe place of theology and cultural differences and the things they can argue about and the things she can get mad about with him.
[00:27:04] And so she goes, well, why do you Jews judge us for worshiping on the mountain instead of in the temple?
[00:27:10] But Jesus won't go there. That's not what this is about. This isn't about Jews and Samaritans. This is about Jesus and this woman. This is about her and her Creator. And so Jesus cuts through the noise again. It doesn't matter how much the Jews and Samaritans fight. What matters is people who worship God with their whole heart.
[00:27:32] So then he brings it to her.
[00:27:35] The Messiah is going to restore all things. Right? It's easy for us to miss this bit of how he baits her because of how it comes out in the English. But he drops these messianic bits to bring her to this part of the conversation. The hour has come. God is doing something new. He's seeking real worshipers. He's pointing her to the coming Messiah. And she, at this point, catches his drift.
[00:27:58] I do know the Messiah's coming. And when he gets here, he'll fix all of this. He will set it all straight. And on the surface, she's talking about the Messiah, fixing the rupture between the Jews and Samaritans and their argument about worship. But at this point, they both know we know as the reader. They're not talking about temples and high places and mountains.
[00:28:23] They're talking about her.
[00:28:26] They're talking about her sin, her separation from God, her shame, her needs. When he gets here, he'll fix this, fix what's broken here.
[00:28:41] And Jesus's response is perfect.
[00:28:44] Yeah, he will.
[00:28:47] I'm him, by the way.
[00:28:50] That's me.
[00:28:52] Oh, my gosh.
[00:28:54] So powerful.
[00:28:56] I love this. I love this story.
[00:29:00] Jesus comes to this woman and offers her the real need of her soul.
[00:29:07] You're coming to the well at noon because your sin has made your life a mess.
[00:29:12] You don't want to talk to me because sin has made Jews and Samaritans separate. But I'm going to cut through all of that and I'm going to offer you the needs of your real soul. I will quench the real thirst in you, the longing in your soul for the broken things to be fixed, the longing for you to be connected to your God. You want to be connected to your Creator when He's right here in front of you. He loves you. Drink from this well and be filled.
[00:29:42] You see, beloved, we will worship a God who sees us.
[00:29:49] Jesus sees you.
[00:29:53] He sees all of you. He sees through every bit of your facade.
[00:30:00] He sees through the smiles we give at church and oh, I'm blessed. He sees through all of it, Sees your struggles, sees your pains, sees your failures, sees the sins and idolatries you run to over and over and over. He sees you, sees the wrongs done to you. The injustice is poured out on you.
[00:30:23] And when he sees you, he seeks you, invites you, cares for you.
[00:30:31] See the gaze of Christ.
[00:30:34] It's so vulnerable, it's so intimate because he knows you and you're exposed in front of Him. You cannot hide any piece of yourself. All the pieces that we bury down that we don't want our friends and our loved ones to see, Christ sees them immediately and automatically.
[00:30:49] And yet his response is not judgment.
[00:30:52] His response is compassion.
[00:30:55] His response is love.
[00:30:57] His response is invitation to forgiveness, to life, to restoration.
[00:31:04] That's powerful.
[00:31:06] It can be painful, can be sharp, can be shameful.
[00:31:12] But God sees you and invites you into real life. You see, beloved, to experience Jesus, to actually experience him, that is to be filled with life and hope.
[00:31:29] It's scary, it's exposing, it's intimate, it's vulnerable. But at the end of the day, he is safe and he is passionate and he is for you.
[00:31:39] There is life in Jesus, beloved. To experience him is to be filled with that life.
[00:31:46] We say this a lot here.
[00:31:50] Our goal when we gather is to help you experience Jesus, to help you be filled to the brim with Him.
[00:31:57] And so it leaves a very real question as you consider your own faith today, beloved, are you experiencing Christ as you think of your life, as you think of your faith, as you think of the way you walk through this world day by day, are you experiencing Jesus?
[00:32:16] Because if you are, it will bear fruit in your life.
[00:32:21] It will do something to you.
[00:32:24] A really great follow up question to that is, are you setting your life up rightly to actually experience Him? Right?
[00:32:32] Are you putting yourself in the places where you'll see Him?
[00:32:36] Do you spend time in His Word? Do you spend time in community? Do you actually regularly attend worship? Do you regularly pray real prayers? Prayers with worship, with confession, with meditation and. No, beloved, all these disciplines I mentioned, they don't exist. So you can somehow like prove your worthiness or your spiritual maturity to Jesus. They exist simply so that you can encounter him and be filled with the life and hope of Jesus.
[00:33:03] You have to start there. You have to start there. That's the order of operation.
[00:33:09] You must experience Christ first before anything else in faith makes sense. It is the only fuel that will actually push you to the other aspects of kingdom life. Look how our text continues, verse 27.
[00:33:23] Just then, his disciples arrived and they were amazed that he was talking with a woman. Yet no one said, what do you want? Or why are you talking with her? Then the woman left her water jar, went to town and told the people, come see the man who told me everything I ever did. Could this be the Messiah? They left the town and made their way to Him. In the meantime, the disciples kept urging him, rabbi, eat something. But he said, I have food to eat that you know nothing about. So the disciples said to one another, could someone have brought him something to eat?
[00:33:52] My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to finish his work. Jesus told him, don't you say there are still four more months, and then comes the harvest. Well, listen to what I'm telling you. Open your eyes. Look at the fields because they are ready for the harvest. The reaper is already receiving pay and gathering fruit for eternal life so that the sower and the reaper rejoice together.
[00:34:13] For in this case, the saying is true. One sows and another reaps. I sent you to reap what you didn't labor for. Others have labored and you have benefited from their labor. Because Jesus has a flair for the dramatic. This is the moment in the conversation when the disciples return with the food.
[00:34:31] And you can see the freeze frame where they walk up and Jesus is leaning over to this woman saying, yeah, I'm the Messiah. And they go, what is happening right now? Why are you talking to her? What's going on? And she just drops her jar and runs away, runs off. And we'll come back to that bit in just a second. But she runs off. And the disciples are sitting there, and you can imagine this transformation. They left Jesus and he was sweaty and exhausted and tired. Go, give me some food, guys. And they come back and he's just smiling and refreshed. And they go, you should eat. And he goes, I'm good, I'm good. And they have this like, did someone feed him? Did someone, like, leave trail, mix with him and not tell me, like, why did I go to that Samaritan market, Right? Like, they're have no clue what's going on. And Jesus leads them through this amazing little image he uses. He uses a parable or metaphor that was common in their day, where he basically says, look, look, you guys like to think about how one person sows, and then months later, someone else comes and reaps. But I'm here to tell you the reaping and the sowing are happening at the same time in the kingdom.
[00:35:39] You put kingdom out there. Kingdom fruit is born immediately, and the reaper and the sower, they celebrate together. That's what I'm full of right now. I'm doing the Lord's work, and it is filling me up. I'm good. I don't need that sandwich. Like, I'm good. That's a beautiful image. As he's telling his followers, look, you hang out with me and you participate in the work of the kingdom. You can assume beautiful kingdom output will happen.
[00:36:10] Overflow ministry is natural mission.
[00:36:14] When you're full of Christ, it just happens. And it works. When you're experiencing Jesus, real and successful mission is the Natural outpouring. And because these people are with Christ, experiencing Him, they should expect to see a real harvest of folk coming to life and freedom. This is because, beloved, evangelism is the natural outpouring of spiritual vitality.
[00:36:40] As Christ pours into you, he pours out of you. When you are finding life in Christ, joining him in mission is the natural outcome.
[00:36:49] And that kind of spirit filled life fueled mission, it's effective, it works, and it's also satisfying.
[00:36:58] Leaves you feeling full, not spent and exhausted.
[00:37:02] Begs us to consider our own faith.
[00:37:06] Are you, beloved, operating out of the overflow of your own spiritual vitality?
[00:37:13] And so it takes our first question and asks us a second question, starting with, are you experiencing Christ?
[00:37:19] Is there vitality to your faith? Are you actually experiencing Christ regularly and finding life and vitality? And if you are experiencing spiritual vitality, is it overflowing out of you?
[00:37:33] Do you have enough that you give to those around you?
[00:37:36] We can easily become what I call spiritual gluttons.
[00:37:40] Where we take in gospel over and over and over and over and over. We go to church on Sundays, we attend gc, we sign up for some cool Bible study like BSF or CBS or Precepts or whatever. But it all terminates on us.
[00:37:54] It's all about our spiritual feeding. And if you spiritually feed over and over and over and over and over and over, but never actually share it with the world around you, hear this beloved, you are simply wasting kingdom potential.
[00:38:09] Wasting it. Beloved, there is enough gospel to go around.
[00:38:14] And if you are finding life in Christ, then you are equipped for effective ministry.
[00:38:21] You're equipped to see the kingdom advance in your life. Don't let the wonderful gospel of Jesus die on the vine of your life. Share him with those who need him.
[00:38:33] Let's end this text and land out today. Verse 39. Now, many Samaritans from the town believed in him because of what the woman said when she testified. He told me everything I ever did. So when the Samaritans came to him, they asked him to stay with them. And he stayed there two days. And many more believed because of what he said. And they told the woman, we no longer believe because of what you said. Since we heard for ourselves and know that this really is the Savior of the world.
[00:39:00] I love this.
[00:39:02] This woman has met the Messiah. She has met the lover of her soul who sees her sin and her shame and offers her the grace of living water.
[00:39:11] And her response is to drop her buckets and run to the city full of life. No buckets, but full full of her Savior. And her immediate response after drinking of the living water of Jesus is to run through the city, the city she was avoiding, the people she hoped not to see at the well. She invites them to the living well to meet the same Messiah so they can be seen, so they can be known and loved like she has been. And this is the amazing part, beloved. It works.
[00:39:49] It works.
[00:39:51] Those folk come to see Jesus and when they spend time with him and they experience him, it works.
[00:40:00] Text tells us Jesus ends up staying here for days in this village, ministering, serving overflow. Ministry works because it is purely and simply bearing witness to what we've experienced.
[00:40:13] It's just bearing witness. We naturally talk about the things that excite us. This is normal human stuff. When we love something, we talk about it in the circles that we exist in.
[00:40:25] When we really love something, we talk about it to anybody who will listen.
[00:40:30] This is what really experiencing Jesus does to us. When we find that kind of life and that kind of love that sees us in our sin but offers grace and forgiveness. We talk about it because it's amazing, beloved. Gospel centered missional living is about bearing witness.
[00:40:49] It's about bearing witness, about saying, hey, guess what happened to me. This is nuts. You know how jacked up my life is. Well, Jesus loves me and forgives me and gives me life and freedom and it's wonderful. It's about bearing witness.
[00:41:01] Look how messed up I was. Remember that? Yeah. Look what God has given me.
[00:41:05] It's not about being smart or eloquent or outgoing. It's not about being able to prove things or being the world's best theologian or being able to prove everyone wrong or to pick apart arguments. It's about saying, look what happened to me. Isn't this nuts?
[00:41:20] God is so good.
[00:41:22] It's about bearing witness.
[00:41:25] It's about sharing your experience, inviting them to find the same life you have found.
[00:41:32] Andy, if you want to come back up, I'm going to land us out with an image that I think is helpful.
[00:41:40] See, the image of the well that Jesus uses here is actually a really common image strung throughout all of scripture. God talks this way a lot because wells were like a way bigger part of life in a world before aqueducts and sewers and running water. Right? If you didn't have a well, you died. And so having good, healthy water systems were the difference between life and death in this world.
[00:42:02] It reminds me of in the book of Jeremiah. In the opening, God is rebuking Judea for its faithlessness and the way they've broken their covenants. And he uses this exact image. And he says, my people have committed evils.
[00:42:17] First off, they've forsaken me, the fountain of living waters. But then they've hewed out cisterns for themselves.
[00:42:24] And these cisterns are broken and hold no water.
[00:42:28] He said of Israel, their faithlessness to him, their idolatry, their seeking after their own pleasures. Was like having a good, perfect, functioning well and going, I don't want that. I'm going to board it up and I'll go over here and I'll dig out a cistern to catch rainwater. But I'm going to do it so badly that every time it rains, the water will drain out of it. This is how God explains Israel's faithlessness. And the way they run to back to the same sins and idols over and over he goes, you have rejected the well of living water. And you're relying on cisterns that leak.
[00:42:59] That will kill you.
[00:43:01] That will kill you.
[00:43:03] Why do that when you have this well, this good well? Beloved, is this not the picture of our lives?
[00:43:11] Don't we turn from the goodwill of our sweet Jesus over and over and over. The minute life gets hard, the minute we get anxious, the minute we're stressed, the minute we're scared, the minute we're angry. How easy is it to turn from what we know is the well of living water and grace and forgiveness and life and vitality. And turn back to our old patterns and idols and sins and behaviors that comfort us and make us feel a little in control.
[00:43:39] How easy to turn from the well and turn back to empty cisterns. As though they will help us.
[00:43:48] Beloved, if that's you today, I want to encourage you as we land to just remember this truth.
[00:43:57] You don't have to live that way.
[00:44:00] The well that fills your spirit, that fills your soul, that fills your mind day by day. That doesn't have to be brackish, muddy water.
[00:44:09] You don't have to turn to a broken, gross system. You don't have to remain dry. You don't have to remain trapped in the brokenness and curses of this world. And the failures and shame of your own sin. You can walk in freedom and life and forgiveness. Today, if you're in this room when you don't know Christ, you can turn to him for the first time. You can drink of the living water and you can find the freedom that woman found.
[00:44:34] But if you're in this room and you've been following Christ, I'm going to go out on the limb. And I'm going to confess that for many of us who still need to be reminded to return, to turn away from our idols, to turn away from the comforts of our sins and turn to the Jesus who loves us and cares for us and offers us life, you don't have to live that way.
[00:45:00] Jesus sees you and he offers you grace.
[00:45:06] Beloved, come to the library of your soul. Come drink deep. Come find life. Come be filled. And then you too can join in the work of sharing him with the world in you.
[00:45:20] Because Christ pours into you and fills you up. He will pour out of you. Love it. Take a few minutes to connect with the Lord in whatever way your heart needs today. You can do that by sitting in your chair, praying. If you want to get on your knees, if you want to come up to the front and pray at the altar, if you want to grab one of the pastors, whatever you need to do, I would encourage you. Let's take a few minutes, just a few short minutes to connect with Christ.
[00:45:44] Do the work that he's doing in your heart today, and then we'll continue our time of communion.
