In Ancient Israel, after the time of King David and King Solomon, there was a civil war in Israel. The northern ten tribes rebelled against the House of David, who continued to rule the two southern tribes of Judea and Benjamin from Jerusalem. The Temple built by Solomon remained in Jerusalem. So to keep people from visiting Jerusalem, King Jeroboam, the leader of the northern kingdom of Israel, made two golden calves to be worshipped. One was placed in Bethel near the border of Israel and Benjamin, and the other in Dan in the far north, north of the Sea of Galilee. And so, for several centuries the people of the Northern Kingdom worshipped at Bethel and did not worship in Jerusalem.
Eventually, the northern kingdom fell to invaders and many of the people were carried away as slaves to Assyria and Ninevah. Many of the remaining people moved to the Jerusalem area, which in turn fell a hundred and fifty years later to the Babylonians. But where the northern tribes simply faded away, the Judeans that were taken prisoner to Babylon stuck together, united by their worship of God. And seventy years later, they came back, rebuilt Jerusalem and a new Temple, and even gained their independence for a couple of centuries before the Romans conquered them about 60 years before Jesus’ birth.
The land of the north became the land of a mixed group of people. There were people who had managed to avoid being taken prisoner by anyone, there were settlers who had returned from Ninevah and Babylon, there were Greeks, there were people from many of the towns and cities of the Persian and Babylonian empires who had settled. Their descendents had intermarried and they still worshipped on the mountain at Shechem, the former capital of the northern kingdom. These people became known as Samaritans, the people who lived in Samaria, which was the name used in the New Testament for this region north of Jerusalem and South of Galilee. Today, it is the northern part of the “West Bank” which was once part of Jordan.
The Samaritans continued to worship as they had in the old days when the Northern Kingdom ruled from Shechem. Their religion was almost Jewish – but not quite. For example, they believed that the mountain of Shechem was where God wanted the Temple, not Jerusalem. And so Samaritans continued to worship at this mountain. And so, in Jesus’ day, good Jews had nothing to do with Samaritans, not even using pitchers or plates that had been used by a Samaritan, because, to the Jews, the Samaritans were contaminated, evil, dirty, nasty. They weren’t pure – They were outsiders – not Jewish, not to be trusted, not cousins in the Jewish faith, but traitors to the faith. Good Jews preferred to walk down to Jericho in the Jordan Valley 3000 feet and up that valley when going to Galilee rather than walk the more direct route that went through Samaria. They were even ruled by a different man under the Romans than the Jews were. The Jews of the day looked at the Samaritans like you’d look at the other side of your family, the unsavory side of the family, the side of the family that was filled with nar-do-wells, criminals, and cheats. They avoided them and never invited them to family reunions.
But the Samaritans would not go away. In fact, about 750 Samaritans still exist near Shechem and worship on the mountain, even today. But the name of the village at the foot of the mountain of Shechem had changed its name over the centuries. It was known in the New Testament as Sychar.
Jesus and his disciples had to leave Judea and they were at tremendous risk if they took the Jericho-Jordan Valley road, so they took the road through Samaria and they came to Sychar, where the ancient well of Jacob was located. They had arrived at the very town which was the ancient center of Samaria, the land the Jews considered most traitorous to God. It was here that a woman would have an encounter that would change her eternal destiny and the eternal destiny of her entire village.
The time was just about noon, so the disciples went into the town to buy some food, while Jesus, the Rabbi, (or teacher) rested beside the well.
Now wells like this are not nicely surrounded with stone and concrete like modern hand-dug wells. They are deep holes in the ground, and usually you have to walk down a narrow set of muddy steps to go 10 or 15 feet down to put your bucket or clay jug or waterskin in the water. Gathering water from a well was considered woman’s work – and was definitely not something that a high-class Rabbi should do, with the chance of slipping and falling in the water, losing dignity and getting his nice clothes muddy. So Jesus, for the sake of his disciples, followed the social convention and asked the first woman he saw to get him a drink.
This was shocking to the woman. Strange Jewish men don’t ask Samaritan women for drinks – and especially not Jewish rabbi's of the day because the Samaritan might touch the water and get it all yucky.
(We laugh, but I remember a time when some people were kept out of swimming pools and certain drinking fountains because they were different from the ruling class of people. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, ask your grandparents.)
She was carrying a jar of water and planning on filling it from the well. We’ve found these jars – they weighed 40 pounds or so when empty. And the town near Jacob’s well is dry other than the well. She would have walked a half-mile or more to draw that water for her house, at a time when only a handful of the most luxurious Roman households had running water.
Jesus plays a polite word game and teases with the woman. “If you knew the gift of God and who it is that asks you for a drink, you would have asked him and he would have given you living water.”
In her answer, you can almost hear how tired and exasperated she is. “Sir,” the woman said, “you have nothing to draw with and the well is deep. Where can you get this living water? Are you greater than our father Jacob, who gave us the well and drank from it himself, as did also his sons and his livestock?”
She’s pointing out that the well is good, that Jacob – who was the ancestor of all Israel and Judea – had dug the well originally and drank from it, and so did his sons and their livestock. So stop telling me how you’ve got some sort of water that is better!
Jesus answered, “Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I give them will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give them will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”
Have you ever been dry in your spirit? Have you ever felt like life was passing you by and you’re sitting beside a dusty road, with a cup full of dust and sand when you’d like cool water to drink? Have you ever had a time when your spirit feels like drying up and blowing away on the wind because there’s nothing left to love, nothing left to give you joy, nothing left to hope for? Jesus was promising to give the woman that sort of spiritual water that would give her eternal life, an abundant life, a life full of joy and purpose and passion and excitement that would never end. But, just like many people, she can’t see this and can only see the dry world around her, the dull drudgery of drawing water from the well, the dust flying in the world’s wind that has almost taken away her soul.
The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water so that I won’t get thirsty and have to keep coming here to draw water.”
She’s had enough of this game Jesus is playing. You try living in a place where you have to walk a half mile or more from your house, carrying a couple of five gallon pails for water, then walk down ten or fifteen feet on slick steps and climb back up to the top carrying those 80 pounds of water. Then, you need to carry the water back to your house another half mile, and there’s this suit-and tie fellow from New York that you KNOW thinks you’re a hick, a man who looks at you as you’re climbing up the steps in your dirty clothes and says, “Give me a drink of water", and then proceeds to tease you about some sort of magical water canteen that he’s carrying with him – yet he’s the one who asked you for water on this hot summer day! I’m surprised she didn’t slap him!
But Jesus realizes that she’s had enough, so he asks her to go get her husband.
More embarrassment and anger on her part. “I don’t have a husband.”
How can she tell him the story? She’s been married five times. The good one died. The others – two divorced her because she wasn’t pretty enough, one divorced her because he didn’t like her cooking – and she’d left the other one after he beat her when he was drunk. And now, the man she was living with and working for hadn’t even bothered to marry her, but at least he was a good farmer, even though he treated her as his slave.
But then, the magical thing happened.
Jesus said to her, “You are right when you say you have no husband. The fact is, you have had five husbands, and the man you now have is not your husband. What you have just said is quite true.”
And she thought. "HUH? How did he know this? I’ve never met him before in my life, and the people in the village don’t even know about anyone except my last husband! He IS a rabbi – maybe he’s actually a prophet!"
And just like that, her attitude changes.
“Sir,” the woman said, “I can see that you are a prophet.
And then, it sinks in that she can get a question answered that has bothered her from this man whom God speaks to.
“Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain, but you Jews claim that the place where we must worship is in Jerusalem.” She’s asking which is right.
And Jesus tells her that it doesn’t matter where you worship God, but how you worship God is what is important.
“Woman,” Jesus replied, “believe me, a time 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, for salvation is from the Jews. Yet a time is coming and has now come when the true worshipers will worship the Father in the Spirit and in truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks. God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in the Spirit and in truth.”
It doesn’t matter where you worship. The real question is are you worshipping the Father in the Spirit and in truth. Are you really worshipping or are you going through the motions? Do you have a new Spirit from God, do you connect to God through your Spirit, has your worship gone beyond duty and facts and rule-following and become love?
Do you really believe, deep down in your heart, that God loves you and will do anything for you? Do you really believe, deep down in your heart, that God is worth following? Do you really believe, deep down in your heart, that God will never, ever let you down, but always has your best at heart? Do you worship God in the Spirit and in truth?
If so, why haven’t you ever walked up to the altar and kneeled at it? If so, why haven’t you ever broken down in a service and said, “Do with me what you want to do with me, for Father you know best!” If so, why haven’t you had the guts to tell your neighbor and your friend and your nephew about what God has done for you and just why going to church is so important to you?
It is hard to worship in the Spirit and in truth. It means deeply understanding that God doesn’t need you or me. It means deeply understanding that God doesn’t have to do anything for you or me. It means deeply, achingly deeply understanding that our very lives depend solely on the fact that God has decided that you and I are important and so He sent His own Son, Jesus the Christ, to die so you and me and God could be on good terms once again.
And He did this despite of everything we’ve done to disobey His rules. He did this despite the fact that we ignore Him most of the time. He did this despite the fact that we’ve gone away from Him time and again, every day, every hour, and we won’t do anything outside of our comfort zone if some random person who doesn’t even like us very much would look at us and make fun of us.
The woman said, “I know that Messiah” (called Christ) “is coming. When he comes, he will explain everything to us.”
Then Jesus declared, “I, the one speaking to you—I am he.”
Just then the disciples returned. The woman, though, she left her water jar and ran back to town and began telling everyone: “Come, see a man who told me everything I ever did. Could this be the Messiah?” She had found the man who knew God, she had found the one man who understood her, she had found the answer to her life, the cure for her depression, the stimulant for her tired, aching back, and the future of her life and that of all her friends in the village.
They came out of the town and made their way toward him.
Meanwhile, Jesus is there and the disciples are handing him a sandwich, telling him, “Rabbi, eat something!”
But Jesus is sitting there grinning, looking at the woman going into the village, and he says, “I have food to eat that you know nothing about.”
And so the disciples, ever confused, never the sharpest tools in the shed, ever wondering, never quite getting it, are saying to each other “Did someone else bring him some food? Did we miss a McDonald's around here somewhere? Did Domino’s deliver while we weren’t here?”
And Jesus just laughs at them and says, ““My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to finish his work. Don’t you have a saying, ‘It’s still four months until harvest’? I tell you, open your eyes and look at the fields! They are ripe for harvest. Even now the one who reaps draws a wage and harvests a crop for eternal life, so that the sower and the reaper may be glad together. Thus the saying ‘One sows and another reaps’ is true. I sent you to reap what you have not worked for. Others have done the hard work, and you have reaped the benefits of their labor.”
And, of course, Jesus is talking about the harvest of souls and He's pointing His disciples to all those lost people around them. Jesus is bringing souls home to His Father in Heaven, keeping them from being burnt as worthless chaff in the fires of hell and He wants His disciples and us to join Him in that harvest. Jesus is filled with joy and he doesn’t care about his empty tummy because there is nothing like the joy of leading someone out of a terrible life into the wonderful world of eternal, abundant, God-filled life. How do I know this? Because most Sundays except when I’m sick, I don’t eat anything until after I get back home from my second church at Monroe Chapel at 1 o’clock, because God’s joy gives me that food I need to preach for you!
Many of the Samaritans from that town believed in him because of the woman’s testimony, “He told me everything I ever did.” So when the Samaritans came to him, they urged him to stay with them, and he stayed two days. And because of his words many more became believers.
They said to the woman, “We no longer believe just because of what you said; now we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this man really is the Savior of the world.”
This woman – she changed her town. Because this one woman talked with Jesus – and realized what his words meant, her town was saved from Hell. A couple of years later, after Stephen's persecution in Acts Chapter 8, the disciples scattered, and some went to the heart of Samaria, coming back here and a mass revival broke out because the seeds had been sowed by this woman, this woman who had been married five times and was now living with a man who would not marry her. Because this one woman told what Jesus had said to her to other people, the town turned to Jesus.
I know that you’ve had a hard time the last week, the last month. I know that your family isn’t doing as well as you’d hoped several years ago. I know that you aren’t as happy as you tell everyone when you walk in here. I hear you lie: “How’re you doing?” “Fine, fine.”
If I know this, what do you think God knows about you? What does Jesus know about you and your life? What does the Holy Spirit say about you? How are you worshiping in the Spirit and in truth when you are lying to the people of God?
The greatest problem we have in the church is this idea that everything is all right. We are thirsty, we are hungry, we are hurting and we will not share it with God in front of other believers. And so we don’t worship in the Spirit and in truth. We worship a little bit, bottled up in our selves, afraid to let go and tell the truth.
If we are ever going to change the world around us – and we all agree that the world has many problems – there are a few things we need to do:
First of all, we need to stop playing the game. We need to lay it all out before Jesus at the altar rail, admitting we are on the edge, admitting we are ready to break in despair, admitting that this is not the world we want and asking Him to take over in our lives, our loves, and our world around us.
Second, we need to get real about what is important in this life and the answer is that everything in this life is going to disappear in a few short years. The only things that are important are eternal things – like will you and I walk and talk in Heaven one day? Will your grandson and granddaughter be there walking and talking with us? Will those folks you saw last week in the grocery store parking lot, will that tired waitress, will your friend from the auto store or the feed store or the man you met at Sandy’s hardware be there to sit around and talk with us?
Everything else will be gone in a few years – our jobs, our homes, our country. Will our friends, neighbors, and family also be gone - or will they be with us in Heaven? That is what is important in this life!
Third, we need to stop granting the devil and his allies so much power. I’ve heard enough of blaming Hollywood, of blaming young people, of blaming politicians for our problems. The simple truth is that the reason our world is dying is because we Christians have failed to step forward and bring people into God’s Kingdom. Can you imagine a country where 9 out of 10 people actually were mature Christian believers who loved God and loved other people like themselves – instead of pointing out what is wrong with the country every day, in every Facebook post, in every conversation? Change starts with us, with each of us understanding deeply what Christ taught and leading others to understand. Like the woman at the well, when we realize that God knows everything we’ve ever done, we should run into the village and tell everyone about this Jesus we’ve met!
But it begins with our prayers, coming to the Altar rail, getting down on our knees, begging and pleading with God to take over, and praying with passion. Come to the altar or bow down at your computer during this song and pray to the God who created you and me.
VIDEO SONG: https://youtu.be/S9q-08aTNh8
Change begins with ourselves. The most difficult prayer in the world is to pray for God to change yourself – but it is the most important prayer. It is where it all begins.
I will pray and I will pause after each line. If you agree for yourself, say “Yes, Lord” during the pauses.
Let us pray:
Heavenly Father,
- Today we want to change for the better. ...Yes, Lord!
- We have been attending this church for a while. -- Now we want to become your people. ...Yes, Lord!
- We have been learning about your Son for a while. -- Now, we want to commit our lives to following Him. ...Yes, Lord!
- We have been moved by your Holy Spirit occasionally – Now we want to truly learn how to listen to that Spirit. ...Yes, Lord!
- We have occasionally asked you what to do – Now we want you to work through us, taking control of us. ...Yes, Lord!
- Before, we have loved some people. --Now, we want you to guide us to love all people. ...Yes, Lord!
- Before, we did works for you out of duty. -- Now, we want to do works because of gratitude. ...Yes, Lord!
- Before, we worked hard to be good enough for you. -- Now, we simply want to relax in your love, knowing that you always love us regardless of what we do or don’t do. ...Yes, Lord!
- Until today, we have told few people about your love. -- Now, we ask for your help that we may tell all people about your love. ...Yes, Lord!
- Until today, we looked at Your Son as an important part of our lives. -- Now, we ask for your help that He may become our lives. ...Yes, Lord!
- Until today, we were fumbling around, seeking you and struggling. -- Now, we ask for your help that we may worship you in the Spirit and in truth, knowing you as Our Father, ...Yes, Lord!
Amen
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