The Lord’s Day Evening
August 7, 2011
“Our Loving God and His Going Son!”
John 4:1-42
The Reverend Mr. Elbert McGowan, Jr.
(Brian Sorgenfrei) We’re going to be reading from John 4. Starting in verse 1:
“Now when Jesus
learned that the Pharisees had heard that Jesus was making and baptizing more
disciples than John (although Jesus Himself did not baptize, but only His
disciples) He left Judea and departed again for Galilee.
And He had to pass through Samaria.
So He came to a town of Samaria called Sychar, near the field that Jacob
had given to his son Joseph. Jacob’s
well was there, so Jesus, wearied as He was from His journey, was sitting beside
the well. It was about the sixth
hour.
A woman from Samaria
came to draw water. Jesus said to
her, ‘Give Me a drink.’ (For His
disciples had gone away into the city to buy food.)
The Samaritan woman said to Him, ‘How is it that You, a Jew, ask for a
drink from me, a woman of Samaria?’
(For Jews have no dealings with Samaritans.)
Jesus answered 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 have
given you living water.’ The woman
said to Him, ‘Sir, You have nothing to draw water with, and the well is deep.
Where do You get that living water?
Are you greater than our father Jacob?
He gave us the well and drank from it himself, as did his sons and his
livestock.’ Jesus said to her,
‘Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks of
the water that I will give him will never be thirsty again.
The water that I will give him will become in him a spring of water
welling up to eternal life.’ The
woman said to Him, ‘Sir, give me this water, so that I will not be thirsty or
have to come here to draw water.’
Jesus said to her,
‘Go, call your husband, and come here.’
The woman answered Him, ‘I have no husband.’
Jesus said to her, ‘You are right in saying, ‘I have no husband’; for you
have had five husbands, and the one you now have is not your husband.
What you have said is true.’
The woman said to Him, ‘Sir, I perceive that You are a prophet.
Our fathers worshiped on this mountain, but You say that in Jerusalem is
the place where people ought to worship.’
Jesus said to her, ‘Woman, believe Me, the hour is coming when neither on
this mountain nor in Jerusalem will you worship the Father.
You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation
is from the Jews. But the hour is
coming, and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in
spirit and truth, for the Father is seeking such people to worship Him.
God is spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and
truth.’ The woman said to Him, ‘I
know that Messiah is coming (He who is called Christ).
When He comes, He will tell us all
things.’ Jesus said to her, ‘I who
speak to you and He.’
Just then His
disciples came back. They marveled
that He was talking with a woman, but no one said, ‘What do you seek?’ or, ‘Why
are You talking with her?’ So the
woman left her water jar and went away into town and said to the people, ‘Come,
see a man who told me all that I ever did.
Can this be the Christ?’ They
went out of the town and were coming to Him.
Meanwhile the
disciples were urging Him, saying, ‘Rabbi, eat.’
But He said to them, ‘I have food to eat that you do not know about.’
So the disciples said to one other, ‘Has anyone brought Him something to
eat?’ Jesus said to them, ‘My food
is to do the will of Him who sent Me and to accomplish His work.
Do you not say, ‘There are yet four months, then comes the harvest’?
Look, I tell you, lift up your eyes, and see that the fields are white
for harvest. Already the one who
reaps is receiving wages and gathering fruit for eternal life, so that sower and
reaper may rejoice together. For
here the saying holds true, ‘One sows and another reaps.’
I sent you to reap that for which you did not labor.
Others have labored, and you have entered into their labor.’
Many Samaritans from
that town believed in Him because of the woman’s testimony, ‘He told me all that
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 His word.
They said to the woman, ‘It is no longer because of what you said that we
believe, for we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this is indeed the
Savior of the world.’”
(Elbert McGowan) Let us pray one
more time.
Father, I need You. I need Your
Spirit to give me boldness, to give me passion, to give me wisdom and to utter
the things of the Lord. We all need
You and we need You, Holy Spirit, to apply these truths to our hearts so that we
may be conformed to the image of Your Son and our Savior, Jesus, who is the
Christ. And so help us to glean from
this passage, this passage of things that You would have us to, that a dying
world may see a loving Savior. Help
us, Lord Jesus. Amen.
Our vision for what something should look like must impact how we behave in the
present. Let me say it another way,
that what you see about something in the future, it has this way of shaping how
you and I behave in the present. Two
examples – let’s take a couple who’s newly engaged and all of a sudden this
engaged young lady envisions herself in her wedding attire.
She envisions the people who will be there as she and her new husband
make their covenant vows. She
envisions what type of flowers she wants.
She envisions what type of food she wants her guests to eat.
She envisions how she wants her hair.
And immediately after the engagement, she diets, she works out, she tried
on a hundred dresses, she sends out invitations, she tastes food from different
restaurants. What about a new couple
expecting the birth of a child? They
envision bringing that child home.
They envision the child having diapers and wipes and its own room and its own
crib. And once they find out they’re
pregnant, they embark upon nine months of realigning their entire life because
they perceive a vision, something bigger than they can imagine.
I want you to do something for me. I
want you to think about the kingdom of God and I want you to think about what
the kingdom of God will look like when it is consummated by the return of the
Lord Jesus. I want you to envision
who we shall be standing next to, shoulder to shoulder, bowing before one common
Savior, singing His praises forever.
I want you to envision who will be there with us, according to the Scriptures,
not according to who we want there or who we think should be there, but when we
open up the Bible and we see from the Bible - who does the Bible say will be
there with us on that great day, that we shall spend eternity with?
John sees a vision.
John sees a multitude too numerous to count.
John sees people from every nation and tribe and tongue.
John sees people who were scorched by the rays of the sun.
John sees people who went about in this life hungry and thirsty.
John sees them who had no shepherd in this life with a shepherd in the
next and with food in the next and with shelter in the next and with drink in
the next. Jesus seems to think that
former adulterers and prostitutes and drunkards, those lame and crippled and
blind and unwise according to the world’s standards – the poor, the addicts, the
beggars – that they all have a place in the kingdom of our Lord and Savior Jesus
Christ. And because Jesus tells us
in John chapter 5, Jesus says, “I only do what I see My Father doing.
My Father loves Me and He is pleased to show Me what He is doing and
whatever He does, that is what I do in My earthly ministry.”
And so you see Jesus Himself getting a vision of what the kingdom looks
like, and then in His earthly ministry, guess what – He behaves in such a manner
as to make that future reality present, right now.
In other words, Jesus beholds the glorious day when the nations will be
paraded in front of Him, when the nations will be given to Him as His
inheritance. It makes perfect sense
that when we read the Scriptures we see Jesus moving towards those same people
to make that a reality now.
That’s what Jesus is doing tonight.
He’s moving toward someone who is broken, who is an outcast, who is no doubt a
horrid sinner, and He does not ignore her.
He does not go around her. He
goes straight to her. And if we’re
honest, that type of ministry is intimidating.
It is hard and it is perplexing and it is taxing.
This whole idea of moving towards the broken, moving towards people who
are racially different, politically different, religiously different,
economically different. In all the
ways in which we can make their differences stand out, we look at that and we
think, “No way. You want me to go
there?” And what Jesus says is, “Yes
way. Look at Me.
The servant is not greater than the Master.
The servant must do what the Master does.”
And so in this passage what Jesus is saying is, “Saints, be spurred on in
your doing. Be not afraid.
Be faithful, even though it’s hard.”
So what does Jesus teach us here?
If we are going to take this seriously, what does He teach us?
The first thing He says - be adamant about taking the Gospel there, wherever
“there” might be, be adamant about
it. Jesus says, expect adversity.
Jesus says, anticipate God’s working.
And finally, have an attitude of eagerness.
So it’s four “A”s – be adamant, expect adversity, anticipate God’s
working, and have an attitude of eagerness.
BE ADAMANT
First thing, Jesus shows us He is adamant about taking the Gospel over and up
there. In verses 1 and 2 we see that Jesus has to leave Judea because He’s
getting more popular and causing an uproar and He chooses not to deal with that
right now and so He wants to retreat.
He wants to go back to where He was initially.
And so when you look at it in verse 1 and verse 2, it says that Jesus
left Judea in the south and departed again for Galilee, sixty to seventy miles
north. But the text says that, verse
4, “He had to pass through Samaria.”
Now Samaria was right in between, right in between Judea and Galilee.
And the text says He had to go through Samaria in order to get seventy
miles north.
Now, let’s look at why John says He had to.
Option number one is, perhaps this is the only way.
Perhaps the only way to get north is to go due-north.
That’s not really true though.
Read any commentator and you will realize that there was another way that
most devote Jews took and it involved traveling east from Jerusalem, crossing
over the Jordan, traveling north along the Jordan, crossing back over the Jordan
in the north to go west again in order to get to Galilee.
That was the most taken route.
And so when it says that Jesus had to go to Samaria, no, He didn’t have
to because it was the only way there.
We know from historians that there was another way that was frequented by
the Jews so option one doesn’t work.
Option number two – maybe He went there because it’s the shortest way.
Going due north saved Him about thirty to forty miles, but since when
does Jesus do things because of its convenience?
He goes and dies on a cross.
He tells religious leaders, “You are of your father, the devil.”
Then He heals people on the Sabbath knowing that this is going to cause
an uproar. Jesus doesn’t make
decisions in ministry because it’s convenient.
If it’s convenient, then why die on the cross?
Why go and do that if it’s convenience?
I think it’s option three and it’s when we let the Biblical text and the context
of the passage inform us as to why Jesus had to go to Samaria.
And if you know John chapter 3 then you know Jesus’ encounter with
Nicodemus. And Jesus tells Nicodemus
this. He says that – let me find it
– verse 14 chapter 3 – “As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so
must the Son of Man be lifted up that whoever believes in Him may have eternal
life.” In other words, what is Jesus saying to Nicodemus?
Jesus is attempting to get him to jog his mind.
Go back into your Old Testament and you remember when the Jews grumbled
because the Edomites would not let them pass through their land and so they
grumbled at the Lord and the Lord sent fiery serpents that bit them but the Lord
told Moses, “Hey, erect this serpent and put it in the clear sight of My people
and that though they may be bitten, they can look to this for salvation.”
In other words, they must look outside of themselves for deliverance.
And what Jesus is saying to Nicodemus is, “Someone greater than Moses is
here. Someone greater than that
bronze serpent is here. God is not
going to put up another bronze serpent; He’s going to put up His bruised Son on
a cross and so that My people can look to the cross and be saved.”
And then in one sweeping verse, Jesus takes this idea that the Jews were God’s
covenant people and in one verse, one verse, “I don’t just love them that way, I
love the world this way.” Look at
one verse down, verse 16 – “For God so loved the world that He gave His only Son
that whoever would believe in Him should not die but have everlasting life.”
What Jesus is saying is, “Nicodemus, My love extends far beyond
Jerusalem. It extends far beyond My
Old Testament covenant people.” All
of a sudden, Jesus is saying, “I will be raised up and this world will look at
Me and they will see and believe and be saved.”
You know what Jesus does?
Right after His interaction with Nicodemus, where does He go?
He says, “I’m not just going to talk about it; I’m going to show you.
I’m going to show you because I’m going to leave Jerusalem and go where?
To the Samaritans. I’m going
to show you that I am expanding your vision of the kingdom of God and yet those
people up north, your enemies, those half-breeds, those people who have
perverted themselves by intermarrying with Gentiles, those people who have
established their own place of worship here so that they don’t have to come to
Jerusalem, those people who have their own version of the Bible that does not
consist of everything else you have in your Scriptures, those people right up
there where animosity and tensions are high,” Jesus says, “Yep, I love them
too.” And He leaves Jerusalem and He
heads right up there. I think that’s
why He had to go to Samaria. It
wasn’t because it was convenient, it wasn’t because it’s the only way, it was
because God’s love extended even to them, even to this woman, even to this woman
broken by her sin, even to this woman who was a public disgrace, Jesus says, “My
love is deep for even her.”
Therefore He leaves.
What does this mean for us? This
means that if Jesus is adamant about taking the Gospel out there, over there, up
there, down there, it means that we as believers, we must as well.
In other words, the kingdom of God is like a mighty river.
It’s begging to be unleashed and it is not to be made into a stagnant
lake. God’s love wants to roam and
break forth and move even to the unmovable.
Even to the people who we want to do away with, Jesus says, “No, My love
wants to go even there.” This is why
RUF exists because men, faithful men, our founders saw a void.
They saw a segment of society unreached, and they said, “We have to go
there, beyond the walls of our church; we have to take the Gospel there and
there and there and there!” That’s
why I’m here, because of Bebo Elkin standing in a committee meeting about church
planting and standing up and saying, “Why don’t we do RUF at Jackson State?
The Gospel needs to go there!”
This is why the Lantern Clinic exists.
You have the working poor in our nation who don’t make enough money for
adequate healthcare. They are
overlooked because they are unprofitable.
But you get a group of people out of this church who see a need, who see
a people group who are overlooked, and they go and set up a clinic so that those
people over there might benefit from the kindness of the Lord.
This is why home and world missions exists, because you have people who
see and pray and go and send. They
have this burden for the expansion of the kingdom.
We have to be adamant about taking the Gospel there.
This could be co-workers, people in your own neighborhood, the poor that
we overlook. God says we take the
Gospel there.
EXPECT ADVERSITY
The second thing Jesus shows us is that adversity is to be expected.
Now it’s a given that in this world, the world is hostile to God, that
ministry is not easy, and if someone says it’s easy, run.
It’s hard. It’s taxing. And
you see it in John’s gospel. As
Jesus gets more popular, He is more hated.
And if you ever engage in this type of ministry, you will realize that it
is hard. And what we tend to think
is – race, culture, economics, politics, religion, those things are what make
ministering to those people hard.
And Jesus says, “Uh-uh, that’s not it.”
Behind what we see and can sense that there are some things even more
difficult than we are competing against and it’s not race, it’s not money.
What we see here, Jesus exposes us to a woman so different.
She has malfunctioning eyes and ears.
She has misappropriated affections and she has misinformed religious
faith. That behind the differences
that lie between she and Jesus, that their lies some greater things.
And it’s this idea that this woman can’t see or hear correctly.
How do we pick up on that? First of
all, it’s a tool that John used throughout his gospel, that Jesus presents clear
truth and it’s completely misunderstood by people.
In other words, He comes to Nicodemus and says, “You must be born again.”
Nicodemus is like, “What?! Do
I go back into my mother’s womb?
What are You talking about?” He
missed it. Can’t see, can’t hear,
can’t understand. You see it in the
temple when Jesus goes and says, “Destroy this temple and in three days I’ll
raise it up.” “What?!
It took us forty-six years to build this.
What are You talking about?”
And the same thing happens here.
Jesus goes to this woman and He says, “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
have given you living water.” And
the woman replied in verse 11, “Sir, You have nothing to draw with and this well
is deep. Where do You get this
living water?” Missed it.
And it gets worse. Jesus goes on to
tell her, “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but whoever
drinks of the water that I will give him will never be thirsty again.
The water that I will give him will become in him a spring of water
welling up to eternal life.” Now it
is obvious what Jesus is doing here.
He is saying, “Someone greater than Jacob is here!
I have water that satisfies your soul and not just your body.
Do you know who you’re talking to?
Do you know who is in your midst?
Because if you did, you would have said to Me, ‘Sir, satisfy me!
I am searching and longing and I am still left thirsty!’”
The woman missed it again. He
is saying that Jacob’s well is no match for His.
He is saying that someone greater than the father of Israel is here.
He is saying that He will permanently supply water for her soul.
He is saying that she will be satisfied with Him and what He offers.
And the woman says, “Give me this water now so that I will not be thirsty
again or have to come here to draw water.”
Completely missed it – she can’t see and can’t hear and can’t appropriate
what Jesus is saying.
But there are misappropriated affections.
Jesus poignantly goes to her and says, “Go call your husband and come
here,” and the woman answered Him, “I have no husband.”
Jesus said to her, “You were right in saying, ‘I have no husband,’ for
you have had five husbands and the one you now have is not your husband.
What you have said is true.”
All of a sudden Jesus is showing us something, that when our faculties don’t
work correctly and we can’t see and hear, then what we do, we latch onto other
things for contentment and satisfaction, and this woman is latching onto men.
She’s chasing it, and one man after another, disappointment after
another, disappointment after another, she’s finding that they cannot supply the
deepest need of her soul. Finally,
misinformed faith.
And I wish I could write a book on this – the weird things you hear when people
realize you’re a pastor. I mean,
you’re sitting in Starbucks writing and small talking and all of a sudden
somebody, “What do you do for a living?”
“Oh, I’m a pastor.” And right
there, as soon as they find that out, here comes the religious questions.
That’s what’s going on here.
This woman perceives that He is a prophet.
“Okay, well now I need to show that I’m religious.”
And her faith is misinformed.
She is caught up in physical worship.
Does it happen here or down there?
And Jesus says, “Neither, but the day is now here for you will not
worship there or in Jerusalem, that the Lord is seeking worshipers who will
worship Him in spirit and in truth.”
In other words, Jesus is saying that “Your entire perception of relationship or
relating to God is bent, it’s skewed.
There is some truth in there because you do perceive that I’m a prophet,
but it’s skewed.” That’s the
adversity – dealing with the human heart, dealing with fallen man.
That makes it hard.
But there’s something else that makes it hard and we see it in our passage by
way of the disciples’ reaction to this woman when they see that Jesus is talking
to her. And you see that when the disciples came back they marveled that He was
talking with a woman. They marveled.
And one commentator has said that that word marveled, it is very much
dependent upon the context; that it can be marveled in a sense of “Wow” or it
can be marveled in a sense of “Man, why are you talking to them?”
And that’s what’s going on here.
The disciples come back and they see Jesus interacting with this woman
and they thought it and they thought it and they felt it but they would not say
it. That makes ministering to those
people hard, right? It’s not just
adversity here with them but it’s adversity even amongst your own people.
Once you get to the heart of the matter, we realize that those people are
just like us, that they were in darkness as we were, that they have
misappropriated affections as we do, and their theology isn’t there, so we need
not be afraid of the other barriers that keep us from engaging them.
We know the secret. We know
that we are dealing with a fallen person with misappropriated affections and
misinformed religious faith. That’s
it!
Now by way of illustration, let me give you an example of how this works.
Some of you know that my father is a recovering crack cocaine addict.
My father is a deacon at Redeemer now and is restored and has been sober
for seven years and he’s a believer.
But do you know how this came about?
It’s because my mother heard Mike Ross on the radio preaching the Gospel in 2001
and my mother went to Trinity Presbyterian Church on Northside Drive, the only
African American in that church, and my mother joined that church and my father
made a profession of faith and joined that church.
And do you want to know what happened?
For the first time in my life my mother went to the leadership of the
church and said, “We need help! We
need help! This is what’s going on
in my home.” And do you know that
those elders went to crack houses and got my father?
Do you know that those elders went into my mother’s home and poured out
pain medications that my father was taking?
Do you know that they drug tested my father before service every week?
Do you know that they found him a Christian rehab to be in?
All of a sudden, it doesn’t matter that he’s black, it doesn’t matter
that he’s on crack. What matters is
they understood the Gospel and they understood the cross of Christ.
And when we move towards broken people in broken situations and the Spirit of
God is at work, God gets glory through our faithfulness.
And what God is calling us to, and I do say us, myself included, is to
move towards those people. I
wouldn’t be standing here if those men had not been faithful.
And the text says that many Samaritans came to faith because Jesus
pursued one person. If I had to tell
you that I became a believer and three cousins of mine had become believers and
one who is resting with the Lord right now who died of lupus last year, all
because the Gospel came into my home through those men.
That’s powerful. And that’s
what you see happening here. Jesus
is not afraid and He pushes through adversity and He calls us to do the same
thing.
ANTICPATE GOD’S WORKING
The last two points – I need to make this very quick.
Jesus tells us to anticipate God’s working.
In other words, believe, believe that you’re not just out there alone
doing this, that someone is going before you.
That in two instances in Matthew chapter 9 and Luke chapter 10, we get
this phrase, “the harvest is plentiful; the laborers are few.”
In Matthew it’s in Capernaum.
In Luke it’s said about Jerusalem.
In other words, Jesus goes into Capernaum, He says, “The harvest is plentiful.
Look, look out here and see!”
He does it again in Jerusalem. You
want to know what John does right here for us?
Look at what he says. Look at
what Jesus says. Verse 35 – “Do you
not say that there are yet four months, then comes the harvest?
Look, I tell you, lift up your eyes and see that the fields are white for
harvest.” Where is Jesus saying
this? In Samaria!
He is saying this in Samaria amongst those people, those broken
half-breeds. Look at them.
There is a harvest to be had even there.
Jerusalem, Judea, and Samaria as well!
Why? Why is the harvest to be had?
Jesus says it – verse 38 – “I sent you to reap that for which you did not
labor; others have labored and you have entered into their labor.”
In other words, Jesus is saying when we go, we are not there alone, that
the Father and Son and Spirit have went before us and we are going there to get
in on the work that they’re already doing.
That’s why our RUF exists.
It’s not because we’re good preachers; it’s not because we’re young and hip;
it’s not because we’re faithful and available.
It is this. It is because God
is going before us on our campuses.
It is because the Spirit of God is going before us and then raising up students
who desire Him and who want to know Him and who want to love Him and who want to
serve Him. And what Jesus is saying
right now, even amongst them, there’s a harvest to be had.
In other words, labor in faith.
AN ATTITUDE OF EAGERNESS
Last thing – He says the attitude we should have is eagerness.
And Jesus says, “My food is to do the will of Him who sent Me and to
accomplish this work.” In other
words, Jesus is saying that, “This mission that I’m on right now, it’s food to
Me. I delight in it.
This is not a burden. It’s
taxing but it’s satisfying.” And
Jesus is saying the same thing to us, that though it may be hard, if we firmly
believe that God is working before us, that we can even enjoy ministry even when
it’s hard and even amongst people that make it hard.
Jesus is calling us as the church, and I do say us, myself included, to
move towards the brokenness to expect adversity, to anticipate God’s working
even there, in those places, and to be eager about it.
Let’s pray.
Father, thank You for Your Word and thank You that You speak to us and You
challenge us; You challenge me.
Thank You for the harvest to be had in places where we did not see and could not
imagine. Thank You for not
abandoning us. Thank You for going
before us, Holy Spirit. And I do pray that You will use our time in this text to
shape us, to have us ask the hard questions about our lives and our own
priorities. Thank You for this
church and for the many, many people here to get this.
We love You and we thank You.
Amen.
Now receive the Lord’s benediction.
Now may the God of peace, who brought again from the dead our Lord Jesus Christ,
the great Shepherd of the sheep, by the blood of the eternal covenant, may He
equip you with everything good that you may do His will, working in us that
which is pleasing in His sight, through Jesus Christ, to whom be glory and honor
and dominion, forever.
First Presbyterian Church,
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