[0:00] All right, how are we? Love it when you guys are rowdy. Fuzz me up. All right, I'm pumped tonight because I get to teach from this great passage.
[0:14] This is a brilliant passage. Many of you would have heard it before, maybe some of you haven't. It's a great passage because it speaks of Jesus Christ who pursues sinful, broken people.
[0:27] That this woman is sexually active, sexually broken, confused, ignorant, socially outcast woman.
[0:40] And Jesus pursues her for relationship with the Father in heaven. And it's an incredibly encouraging passage for us tonight and very relevant to us here today.
[0:51] So why don't I start, I'm going to give you a little bit of a historical geographical context just so that we know where we're at in this story. And then we'll jump into the passage together. So what we need to know is that Jesus is coming to this area called Samaria.
[1:05] And Samaria lies along the Mediterranean coast with Galilee to the north and Judea to the south. And historically it was a very rich in Jewish culture and religion, very pure kind of religious city.
[1:22] And what happened was 720 BC, so 720 years before Christ, the Assyrians, this massive superpower from Assyria, came in and they conquered Samaria.
[1:37] And what they did was, what was common back in those days and even today in places like Sudan and other places, they took a large majority of the Samaritans, these people who lived there, and they deported them to other countries.
[1:52] They left some of them there and then they imported their own people there. And it was in a bid to kind of wash out the entire culture, religion, kind of set up, societal set up of that whole place.
[2:07] So that's what they did. They took about two thirds of the people away. They brought in their own people. And then the people who are left are left with a choice, aren't they? They can either stay pure, stay true to their God, to their religion, to their culture, or they can compromise.
[2:28] They can intermarry in with these conquering people who have come in. They can compromise their religion. They can syncretise their religion with the religion of these conquering people.
[2:38] And that's what happened. 2 Kings 17, I think it is, says that very quickly they compromised. And they started marrying into these Assyrian families and they started compromising their own religion.
[2:51] So it got to the point where they wouldn't recognise the whole Old Testament. They would just recognise the Penetra, the first five books of the Bible. And that kind of thing was happening. And so you can imagine for the Jews all around, and particularly for those Jews who got deported out of there, transplanted out of there, when they eventually earned their freedom back or when they escaped or when they made their way back, they were very angry with the original inhabitants who had compromised in this way.
[3:18] That their religion and their culture was so important to them and these people had gone and compromised. So from that point onward to Jesus' time and beyond, there was a massive rift between the Jews and the Samaritans.
[3:36] Massive rift. You think about kind of the rift between maybe in North America in the last century with blacks and the whites, similar in South Africa, this kind of thing, this massive segregation of people, races.
[3:58] And so it got to the point where the Samaritans built their own temple. Just a bow of example. Samaritans built their own temple because they thought, well, the Jews have rejected us. We can't go to Jerusalem and worship there.
[4:08] We're not welcome. So they built their own temple. And a bunch of Jews, in response to this, got together and they invaded and completely destroyed the temple. And there was kind of back and forward, back and forward from then on in.
[4:20] Massive rift between these people. It got to the point where if you wanted to travel from Galilee down to Judea and Samaria's in the middle, Jews, a good Jew, would travel an extra four or five days' walk around by the sea so they wouldn't have to go through Samaria.
[4:38] That's the situation that we find ourselves in today. So let's take a look at it. We'll start at verse 1. No, we won't.
[4:50] We'll start around verse 3. It says that Jesus left Judea and started back to Galilee, but he had to go through Samaria.
[5:02] So he came to a Samaritan city called Sychar, near the plot of ground that Jacob had given to his son Joseph. Jacob's well was there and Jesus, tied out by his journey, was sitting by the well and it was about noon.
[5:15] So you see that Jesus, as we've seen in the last few weeks in Matthew, Jesus is just busting all of these cultural, social, religious norms, these boundaries.
[5:25] He's breaking out of them. He's gone to Samaria and he hasn't just gone there. He's gone there deliberately to show the Jews around him that it wouldn't make you unclean, it wouldn't make you sinful to go in among these people.
[5:36] In fact, it says here that he went to Samaria because he had to go to Samaria. Verse 4. But he had to go through Samaria.
[5:47] Why did he have to do that? It doesn't say explicitly, but I think he had to be in Samaria because he had an appointment with a woman. Now he's never met the woman before.
[6:00] She's never met him. They don't know each other. But Jesus, in his superior knowledge of the situation, perhaps he was given a word of knowledge from God, maybe just as the God-man, he knows what's going on.
[6:14] We'll see later that he's got incredible insight into her situation. Either way, he's got an appointment at the well. So that's why he's there. In the middle of the day, in this enemy territory of Samaria, he is at the well around noon.
[6:31] It's interesting, he is there by himself. We'll notice in the next couple of verses that he's arranged it this way. He sent his disciples off to get some lunch, but I know that men aren't completely switched on all the time, but it doesn't take 12 guys to pick up a sandwich.
[6:48] He's done this deliberately. He sent his 12 disciples off and it wasn't because he needed some alone time because the well is a point of huge social interaction. He's there because he wants to meet this woman and he wants to meet her alone.
[7:05] So he's there, it's about noon, and we read on. Verse 7, A Samaritan woman came to draw water and Jesus said to her, Give me a drink.
[7:19] We read that his disciples had gone into town to buy food. Now this woman has come to the well in the middle of the day on her own.
[7:32] You mightn't pick this up straight away, but this is a very weird situation for her to be in. You see, going to get to the well to get water was something that you did with the gals.
[7:42] This is like a social thing. It's like going to a cafe. So the gals get together and they get up nice and early in the morning because it's a hot climate there in the Middle East and they go out before the sun gets up and they get the water and take it home for the day's use.
[7:57] So this is something the gals do together. It's a social time. It's a time to catch up on the gossip. It's the time to do something together. And yet we find this woman here in the middle of the day at noon by herself.
[8:11] Why? The reason is because she is hated by everyone else in Samaria.
[8:22] She's hated by everyone else in her town. The Samaritans are the most hated people on earth at this time and she is the most hated of the hated.
[8:34] She's a social outcast and we'll see that the reason for this is that she's had five husbands, five failed marriages. Now she's shacking up with a guy in an extramural affair with a guy and it's made her a social outcast.
[8:50] The girls talk about her behind her back. The girls are threatened by her because of the amount of men that she's had, the amount of marriages she's ruined and so she's here today at the well because she is completely outcast.
[9:02] Verse 9. The Samaritan woman said to him, to Jesus, in response to his request for some water, how is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?
[9:24] Jews do not share things in common with Samaritans. Jesus is exploding the social norm. Here's why. Not only would Jews not walk through a Samaritan town, not only would they not interact with Samaritans, not only would they not even mention the word Samaritan in their speech, but rabbis would not ever, ever speak to women.
[9:50] Men wouldn't speak to their wives in public in Jewish culture. That would have been seen as really weird for a man to speak to his wife, let alone a Jewish rabbi speaking to a Samaritan woman.
[10:04] It didn't happen. There was a group of teachers at the time called the Bleeding Pharisees because every time they were walking down the street and they saw a woman, they would shut their eyes.
[10:15] They couldn't even look at a woman and so they would run into things like buildings and goats and stuff. This is how the culture was. We've got to get our minds around this if we're going to understand how incredible this story is, that Jesus is alone with a woman, a Samaritan woman, a Samaritan sexually active, sexually immoral woman at a well and he asks her for a drink out of her cup, which is an additional insult because he would become unclean by touching something that she had drunk out of.
[10:47] So it's completely ridiculous, this situation. And she notices it. She says, how is it? This is crazy. How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink from me, a woman of Samaria?
[11:04] Jesus answers, verse 10, 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.
[11:20] The woman doesn't get this. He doesn't realise, she doesn't realise who Jesus is. Like who would? She doesn't get it. And she's like so many of us today, I think. We live in a very spiritual culture right now.
[11:33] Maybe a more spiritual culture than any we've ever seen in the history of the world. Very spiritual. The stats will say that most people believe in God. Like upwards of 90% of people in the West believe in God.
[11:47] But they have absolutely no idea who he is. They'll pray to him, but they don't know who they're praying to. He's probably an amalgamation of many different gods, but we are very spiritual people and she is the same.
[11:59] She is not an atheist. She's a very spiritual person, but she doesn't realise who Jesus is. And so she misses the whole point. Because she doesn't realise who Jesus is, she doesn't see this gift of God.
[12:13] He says, if you knew the gift of God that was in front of you, but she doesn't, she doesn't know it. And he says, if you had realised what this gift was, if you had realised who I am, that I am Jesus, that I am the Messiah, that I am God in human flesh, you would have asked me for something.
[12:31] For what? Living water. Right throughout the Old Testament, living water is a metaphor for salvation.
[12:43] Relationship with God. That a relationship with God is like walking through a desert and finding a glass of crystal clear, cool water, and drinking that water is like experiencing salvation.
[12:56] But she doesn't realise who he is and so she doesn't ask. Verse 11, the woman said to him, Sir, you have no bucket.
[13:11] The well's about 200 feet deep. They found it today, it's still 100 feet deep, it's a deep well. You have no bucket and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water?
[13:22] Are you greater than our ancestor Jacob who gave us this well and with his sons and his flocks drank from it? She still doesn't get it. She's interested because in a desert country you hear about living water, about flowing water and you're interested, right?
[13:40] But she doesn't get it. She still has no idea what he's talking about. Verse 13, let's keep tracking through. Jesus said to her, everyone who drinks of this water from the well will be thirsty again.
[13:53] But those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. That water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.
[14:08] Here's the picture, here's the analogy. Jesus knows, just as we do when we think about it, that everyone on this earth is thirsty. Every single person has in themselves somewhere a thirst for something more, a thirst for satisfaction.
[14:30] Every one of us will go out throughout our life trying to satisfy that thirst with something. Now Christians know that that thirst can only be satisfied, can only be quenched by having a relationship with Jesus.
[14:44] Only then will you find true fulfilment. And only in heaven, in eternal life, in living water will you find eternal fulfilment so that you'll never thirst. You can probably list a few things that you try and quench your thirst with, even if you are a Christian, you try and quench your thirst with other things, things apart from God.
[15:08] Jesus knows that about this woman as well. I mean you can just, you could list them off, you know. People try and quench their thirst with drugs, with alcohol, with sex, with relationships, with more normal things like job fulfilment or ladder climbing or, you know, building that house or doing that renovation.
[15:30] We all try and quench this thirst with something. And for this woman it's in sex and relationship. She's had five husbands. She's sleeping with some guy now who's not her husband. And so Jesus wants her to quench her thirst with living water.
[15:47] But she doesn't get it. Jesus knows that we weren't made to have our thirst quenched by anything other than God.
[16:00] She doesn't get it. The woman said to him, Sir, give me this water so that I may never have to be thirsty or have to come here or keep coming here to draw water.
[16:15] It's a terrible situation she's in. She hates having to go to that well day by day in the middle of the day on her own as a social outcast.
[16:26] She hates the other girls going out without her and interacting without her. She hates the fact that she has to come to this well. And for what?
[16:36] To satisfy this guy who she's sleeping with but who doesn't love her enough to marry her. This guy who doesn't really love her just uses her for her body. She hates this.
[16:48] So she says, where can I get this water? Where can I get this water? If I'm never thirsty again it means I don't have to come here again.
[17:00] And Jesus' analogy here while you might be getting it this girl wasn't and he knows it so he moves on. He never comes back to this water thing again. It's just not breaking through.
[17:10] She's spiritually blind she's spiritually deaf and she's not hearing him. So he moves on and he comes from another angle. Verse 16 he says to her go and call your husband and come back to me.
[17:29] He comes at this angle because he needs to break her. Have you ever had this kind of conversation with someone before? Maybe you're trying to tell someone about Jesus and they're just completely oblivious to what you're saying.
[17:41] They're just completely blind or they refuse to hear what you're saying and so you go and you reach for an angle that you just want to get through and break through that hard outer shell that people have.
[17:53] Sometimes you need just a prophetic word from God to break into people's lives so that they might see their need for Jesus. And so he does it.
[18:04] He goes to this raw nerve that she's got. He says go call your husband. Very blunt. Very to the point. He knows that she is trying to quench her thirst for God with men.
[18:21] And so he goes to that raw nerve. What's her response? She tries to avoid the question. She tries to sidestep it a little bit. She says to him I have no husband.
[18:35] Kind of a lie. Half truth. Jesus said to her you are right in saying I have no husband for you have had five husbands and the one you have now is not your husband.
[18:48] What you said is true. She sidesteps. She tries to get around the main point the main hindrance to her coming to know God.
[18:58] This situation that she's in with these five husbands. that Jesus brings it out into the light. I think it was a Supreme Court judge in America or a judge somewhere who said that sunlight is the best disinfectant.
[19:17] That sometimes in order to cure a situation we have to drag it out into the light. Just in the passage before in John 3 19 Jesus says this and this is the judgment that the light has come into the world and people have loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil.
[19:42] For all who do evil hate the light and do not come to the light so that their deeds may not be exposed. That's the situation here.
[19:54] You might be familiar with the situation in your own life that we hate our dark deeds being exposed. And this is often a big reason why people don't come to Jesus.
[20:05] They know that they've got stuff in their life, stuff in their closet, secrets that if they were brought out to the light it would be too much. Well I think it would be.
[20:17] So Jesus says the reason people don't come to the light don't come to me, Jesus, is because they don't want their evil deeds to be exposed. That's what this woman has done. She's tried to keep these deeds for Jesus but he brings them out.
[20:31] He wants her to come out to the light. He wants her to bring herself, her sins, everything to him for healing that she might receive eternal life.
[20:43] It's one of the big things we need to do when we become a Christian is to repent and just let it all out to confess our sins to God and so receive forgiveness.
[20:55] forgiveness. She's had five husbands, she's had five failed marriages and now she's sleeping with a guy who probably is married to someone else.
[21:05] It's probably an extramarital affair. Jesus wants her to repent. He wants her to change. Verse 19 the woman said to him, Sir, I see that you are a prophet.
[21:24] Our ancestors worshipped on this mountain but you say that the place where people must worship is in Jerusalem. She keeps avoiding it. I think that's what she's doing here. He's like, let's talk about your extramarital affair and she says, while we're talking about affairs, let's talk about where I should go to church.
[21:40] She completely changes the subject. And the cool thing is, or the strange thing to me, if I was having this conversation with you, I'd say, forget about church, we're talking about this affair you're having.
[21:52] You need to stop. Jesus doesn't do that. He just goes with it. He never comes back to the husband issue. He pursues her. He wants to get to the bottom line and he gets to it in the next passage.
[22:08] The bottom line. Verse 21 Jesus said to her, woman, believe me, the hour is coming when you will worship the father, neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem.
[22:20] You worship what you do not know, like so many people today. We worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews.
[22:30] This is something the Jews didn't understand. They thought that salvation was for the Jews, for them to keep. Jesus says, no, salvation is from the Jews, to go out into the whole world.
[22:42] God is spirit and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.
[23:05] What's the bottom line? What's Jesus' bottom line here? He's saying that the father is seeking worshippers just like this woman.
[23:17] Can you believe that? Jesus said himself when he was, that the Pharisees came to him and they were knocking him for hanging out with the hookers and the drunks and the tax collectors and he said, the doctor doesn't come for those who are well but for the sick.
[23:34] Jesus comes for people like this woman. He comes for people like you and like me. That the father is seeking worshippers just like this socially outcast, sexually promiscuous, spiritually confused, blind, deaf woman.
[23:54] That's who the father is seeking. It's a beautiful thing, is it not?
[24:07] And he says to her verse 21, there is coming when you will worship the father. He says to her, you will worship the father.
[24:19] This is like so many of our stories who have become Christians. We spend a lot of our time trying to avoid Jesus, trying to sidestep Jesus, trying to keep our deeds from coming out into the light but we learned a few weeks ago in the salvation series that God keeps pursuing us, that God will not let this woman go.
[24:35] that if God wants to get you, he will get you. And so he pursues and pursues this woman just as he has pursued us, this sexually promiscuous sinner that no one else wants.
[24:56] God will pursue her until she worships the father in spirit and truth. God will tell you a story to illustrate this point that Jesus wants sinners.
[25:12] Jesus is pursuing broken people, not perfect people. So many of us put out this, we've got kind of two sides to ourselves. We've got the real person who we really are on the inside and then we've got the person we project who we want people to see.
[25:29] Is that right? Can I get an amen on that? It's true. And so many of us who come into the church, so many people from outside come into the church and see a bunch of people projecting a perfect image and think, well, this isn't for me.
[25:46] Jesus isn't for me. God doesn't want me. He wants perfect people like these. And it's not true. Here's the story. There's a guy named Matt Chandler.
[25:58] He's an American guy and just, I think, one of the best preachers in the world. And he tells this story. I think it's really powerful. I'm just going to rip it off. He was first year in college and he was sitting next to this woman day by day, 26-year-old woman, got to know her and it turns out that she was a single mum, divorced, and she had this little girl and she was currently in an extramarital affair with another guy at the moment.
[26:30] So he got talking to her and found that she didn't really know much about Jesus and so he kind of invested in her and told her about Jesus and counseled her on the wisdom of this affair that she was having.
[26:42] And him and his buddies would go around to her house and babysit her daughter and they forged this kind of relationship. And pretty early on in the piece he invited her to a Christian concert which as we know is code for evangelistic rally with music and that's what it was.
[26:59] So it was completely shady and it was awesome. It was his friend who was the musician and the guy was a really good musician so they sat through this concert which is fantastic and then the minister got up and gave his talk.
[27:14] And he got up and said I want to talk to you about sex. It was around a thousand college young adults. I want to talk to you about sex.
[27:27] And Matt Chandler says this was the to this day is the worst handling on a biblical understanding of sex that he's ever heard. And the guy was really kind of in your face and he was like you know sex is all great until someone gets syphilis.
[27:45] Everyone's having a good time until you get herpes. And then he talked a little while longer about sex and the dangers of sex.
[27:57] And partway through his talk he got a rose. By way of illustration he got this perfect rose. Beautiful thing. And he said I need you guys to pass around this rose.
[28:10] This beautiful rose. And so he passed out the rose and it got handed around to around a thousand people. And he got to the end of his talk and he's like I need the rose. Someone give me the rose. And this guy came up with it and it's completely broken in half and the petals are all off it.
[28:26] And he's like now who would want this? Who would want this? Like the rose represented a perfect pure young woman or man and then as they've been passed around and used who would want this?
[28:46] And Matt Chandler said that in the midst of this he just got so angry with this woman sitting next to him who had been sexually promiscuous and it was all that he could do to just not get up and say Jesus wants the rose.
[29:02] Jesus wants the rose. That's the point of the gospel. Jesus wants the rose. Like this guy didn't even understand the basics of our faith.
[29:15] faith. The Bible says that God made Jesus who knew no sin to be sin so that we might be the righteousness of God. That while we were enemies of God Jesus died for us.
[29:34] That Jesus wants the rose. rose. If you could look at yourself in reality and not see the projection of self that we put out you would see a very broken rose.
[29:56] The stems broke and the petals are all out. That's the way we are. love. But Jesus pursues broken roses.
[30:08] Jesus pursues people like that. If you're sitting here tonight and you came into here thinking I'm going to be the only broken person in this room, you were wrong.
[30:22] Many of us who are Christians who have tasted this eternal life, this living water, are slowly being renewed, slowly being made into the likeness of Jesus but it's never going to be perfected before heaven.
[30:36] It will be perfected in heaven. But please don't think that Jesus doesn't want the broken rose. That's why he died. That's the point. And he shows us that in this interaction with this woman, this broken outcast woman.
[30:58] So the woman says to him, let's finish it. verse 25, she knows something. I know that Messiah is coming who is called Christ.
[31:11] When he comes, he will proclaim all things to us. The woman knows that the Messiah is coming. She knows that there's a promised one who's coming to make all things right, who's coming to offer salvation to all people.
[31:25] She's waiting for that guy to come, for that Messiah to come. And Jesus responds, we know the end, but it would have been an incredible twist. Jesus responds, I am he, the one who is speaking to you.
[31:45] Friends, Jesus is the Messiah. Jesus is the promised one. Jesus is the Son of God. He's capable of offering us living water.
[31:57] eternal life. And he comes not to give it to the perfect people, but he comes to give it to the broken, the hurting, the socially outcast, the sexually promiscuous.
[32:15] The doctor doesn't come for the well, but for the sick. Right at the end of the Bible, I'll finish with this. Revelation chapter 21, I think it is.
[32:29] We get a view into heaven. We get a view into what happens when Jesus rolls up the history of the world. There's this great passage right at the end.
[32:43] See if I've got it. It's Revelation 22. Revelation 22. Jesus says this. We've heard what he said to the woman. Now see what he says at the end of the world.
[32:56] He says, It is I, Jesus, who sent my angel to you with this testimony for the churches. I am the root and the descendant of David, the bright and morning star. The spirit and the bride say come.
[33:10] Hear these words of invitation if you don't know Jesus. The spirit and the bride say come. And let everyone who hears say come. And let everyone who is thirsty come.
[33:23] Let anyone who wishes take the water of life as a gift. Let me pray for us.
[33:38] Our dear Jesus, we thank you. We thank you so much that you came to bring unrighteous and broken people to know you. Our Lord, you could have just come for the perfect people.
[33:51] You could have just come for the religious people. You could have just come for those who are righteous and upright, for those who kept the law, for those who read their Bible every day, for those who didn't sin sexually, for those who didn't drink too much, for those who had black histories, for those who wouldn't bring it out to the light.
[34:11] You could have come for those people only, but you didn't. You came for the sick, for the broken, for the blind, for the hard hearted.
[34:26] Lord, please help us not to miss this tonight. Father in heaven, I pray now that you would speak into the lives of those of us here who are very broken.
[34:43] Firstly, to those who are here who don't have living water in their life, who don't have eternal life, who haven't accepted Jesus.
[34:58] Father, I thank you for the great doctrine of expiation, that when we come to you, our slate is wiped clean, that all of our sins that have made us dirty, sins past, present, and future are wiped away, that you give us a clean slate, that when we wash in the blood of Jesus, we're made white, we're made new, we're made pure.
[35:21] I pray that those who are here who haven't experienced that washing would experience it tonight. We thank you for this beautiful passage.
[35:34] We thank you for all that you've done and all that you're going to do in this place. We pray it in Jesus' name. Amen.