Real relationships with Jesus and others

We have already had two glorious nights at Bethlehem AD despite the rain and all the obstacles that worked against us. Many hundreds of people came out and were blessed last evening. I think we found out who the real brave people on the San Francisco Peninsula are after they came out last evening. Maybe we’ll find out again tonight from the looks of things. Brian Sussman has not done well by us this week, but you can sleep much warmer in your wee little bed PC, because you have definitely made a difference this advent, and others have seen and believed because of you.

Several years ago, I read an editorial in Reader’s Digest, and a little phrase took a different turn. It said, “It’s Christmas and the world breathes a sigh of belief. Again, not relief, but belief again.” I believe you’ve helped our world to breathe a sigh of belief. One of my great heroes is the writer and missionary statesman E. Stanley Jones, who literally burned himself out for Jesus Christ in India. He wrote in his eighties, “Christians have more joy per square inch than anyone else has per square mile.” Whatever our problems, the joy of the Lord is our strength. Christians are often bruised and bloody, but we’re not testing ourselves on a worldly kind of happiness scale. Christians test themselves on the plummet list, depths of spiritual joy.

One of the characters in the Home for Christmas production and play gave these words, “Love’s about a lot more than Junes and Moons. The best of love is whatever lasts through the Junes and the Moons, through all the tough times. That’s the love worth hanging onto.” I agree with that, and that’s the way it is with joy as well. It’s through the tough times that joy becomes more real. Christian joy is worth fighting for, and it’s worth hanging onto.

Today, we come to another key conversation of Jesus. If you’d like to take your Bibles, please locate the Pew Bible that’s ahead of you. This is the unusual conversation of Jesus with the Samaritan woman at a well. And of course, the well is an important life-sustaining source of water in that area of the Near East. It’s imperative for their livelihood. The Jacob’s Well that we read about this morning is a well-established, in fact, perhaps the best-established archaeological place in all of Israel. We know this story well, and again, by knowing it well, we often miss what is really happening here. It’s in John chapter four.

If you’ll turn, please, in your Bibles, we’ll stand in a moment and read this, our magnificent fourth Advent banner. Some of you may not be able to see it because it hangs in the center of the auditorium. But it’s from verse 26 of chapter four: “I am he.” Now, will you please stand with me, and let’s read together. I will read aloud, and you can follow along in your Bibles. Chapter four, therefore, when the Lord knew that the Pharisees had heard that Jesus made and baptized more disciples than John, though Jesus himself did not baptize but his disciples, he left Judea and departed again to Galilee. But he needed (and this is in the Greek, a word that is almost the same as “must”), it was imperative; he needed to go through Samaria. So he came to a city of Samaria, which is called Sychar, near the plot of ground that Jacob gave to his son Joseph. Now, Jacob’s well was there. Jesus, therefore, being weary from his journey, sat thus by the well. Now that’s a very interesting phrase in the original that “sat thus” is a phrase of reference in which the writer is trying to help you understand the weariness of Jesus. In other words, that is the manner that was shown clearly as he sat there, weary from his journey. It was about the sixth hour, which is about high noon in Israel. A woman of 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. Then the woman of Samaria said to him, “How is it that you, being a Jew, ask a drink from me, a Samaritan woman?” For Jews have no dealings with Samaritans. Jesus answered and said to her, “If you knew the gift of God, and who it is who says 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 with, and the well is deep. Where then do You get that living water? Are you greater than our father Jacob, who gave us this well, and drank from it himself, as well as his sons and his livestock?” Jesus answered and said to her, “Whoever drinks of this water will thirst again, but whoever drinks of the water that I shall give him will never thirst. But the water that I shall give him will become in him a fountain of water springing up into everlasting life.”

The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water that I may not thirst nor come here to draw.” Jesus said to her, “Go call your husband and come here.” The woman answered and said, “I have no husband.” Jesus said to her, “You have well said, ‘I have no husband,’ for you have had five husbands, and the one whom you now have is not your husband. In that you spoke truly.” The woman said to him, “Sir, I perceive that you are a prophet. Our fathers worshiped on this mountain, which was Mount Gerizim. You Jews say it is in Jerusalem, the place where we ought to worship.” Jesus said to her, “Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when you will neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem worship the Father. You worship what you do not know; we know what we worship, for salvation is of the Jews. But the hour is coming, and now is, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth; for the Father is seeking such 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 (who is called Christ). When he comes, he will tell us all things.” Jesus said to her, “I who speak to you am He.”

Would you keep your Bibles open as you’re seated, please?

How do you deal with questions in your life? How’s it going? How are you doing? Probably, you have a conditioned response that goes something like this: “Great.” And then you have several pre-programmed instant successes to give them. At this point, Mary just graduated from college. I got a promotion last week. Our dog won Best in show at the county fair last summer. But inevitably, somebody who really loves you pushes in deeper and they ask, “How are you really doing?” And of course, you have a patterned response to that as well. Although these folks are harder to answer than the other ones. “Never better,” we say, and we look away while we’re giving them the answer. And maybe this is a good thing, that there’s a kind of private sanctuary inside our inner soul. This is a very sick world, and there are real dangers and a sense of necessity of having a place of being. Lloyd Ogilvy, my friend, the current chaplain of the United States Senate, writes in his book, “The Bush is still Burning.” The warning flags are up in the safe harbor of our inward hearts. They tell us that it’s a dangerous world out there in the sea of human relationship. Most people can’t be trusted with our inner hearts. We’ve had enough near wrecks with people who misuse the things that we’ve shared. But then he continues in that paragraph.

How many people do you know who, if they knew everything about you, would not leave and instead stay to make life more comfortable rather than uncomfortable? That is a very specific question, isn’t it? Too many times, people have said, “I would have never thought that about you,” and that’s the last time we share anything.

The Samaritan woman in today’s lesson has gross secrets. She’s an outcast and immoral, yet she ends up with the greatest spiritual revelation in the history of the New Testament. In fact, the revelation to her is much greater than that made to Nicodemus, the Rabbi who was a ruler of the Jews and in the Sanhedrin. Can we discover why? What is it about her life and story that make her eligible to be transformed by this instant shocking redirection?

Is it clear what happened in this story? Well, let’s make some applications after we’ve heard the story. Believe me, there’s a bottom line in John 4 that’s so revolutionary. It’s meant to blow your socks off if you’ll get it clear. First, let’s pick up where we left off last week. Remember, the text last week was the word “must” in the Greek. It’s necessary and obligatory.

The technical truth is very simple. After Solomon’s death, the Kingdom of Israel split in two between the Southern Kingdom, Judah, and the northern kingdom of 10 tribes, which is called Israel. A very immoral king of that northern tribe, Israel, built a capital city called Samaria. When that kingdom fell in 722 to the Assyrians, the Assyrians had a policy. They took all the inhabitants of the land as prisoners and took them out of the country. Then they repopulated the land with foreigners. In this case, when they conquered Israel, they took all the Jews away and transported them into the Northern Kingdom Mesopotamians. And we know from 2 Kings that these Mesopotamians began being killed by lions, and they wrote back to the Assyrian government and said, “The God of this country is unhappy. Send us priests so we’ll know how to worship the God of this country.” So the King of Assyria sent priests, probably some of the prostitute priests that were in the Northern kingdom who had built and worshiped in false worship centers during that period of time.

You remember that after Solomon’s death, the Kingdom of Israel split in two between the Southern Kingdom, Judah, and the Northern Kingdom of 10 tribes, which is called Israel. A very immoral king of that Northern tribe built a capital city called Samaria. When that kingdom fell in 722 to the Assyrians, the Assyrians had a policy to take all the inhabitants of the land as prisoners and take them out of the country. Then, they repopulated the land with foreigners. In this case, when they conquered Israel, they took all the Jews away and transported Mesopotamians into the Northern Kingdom.

We know from 2 Kings 17 that these Mesopotamians began being killed by lions, and they wrote back to the Assyrian government and said, “The God of this country is unhappy. Send us priests so we’ll know how to worship the God of this country.” So the King of Asser sent priests, probably some of the prostitute priests who were in the Northern Kingdom and had built and worshiped in false worship centers during that period of time.

But it’s that mixture, these Mesopotamians born in and under the influence of these apostate priests, that we get this apostate religion built around the name Samaria. You remember when the Jews from Judah returned after their captivity? It was the Samaritans who opposed everything they did, so the Jews hated them, and Samaria geographically is in a position between Galilee and Jerusalem. It’s the shortest way as the crow flies, as we say, but the Jews would walk all the way around to par clear over on the other side of the Jordan River rather than go through the Samaritan area. That’s exactly how prejudiced they were. So we see this included example of how we should be responding, Jesus in his humanity leading us as he so often does.

But secondly, the sensitivity of Jesus speaks volumes to the observant person about the slight, seemingly trivial everyday incidents upon which life’s most important events will hinge. I want to be very clear about this: most of the most important events of our lives, in truth, hinge themselves on slight, trivial everyday incidents.

And we unconsciously determine our future by the way we handle these seemingly incidental things: a conversation, an act of physical weakness, weariness, and how we respond at a given moment of time. Our willingness to push beyond something that we think is our own physical limitation. Just know this: the response to these seemingly trivial things in our lives often hinges on what the rest of our life will be.

Thirdly, the Samaritan woman in this conversation amplifies what we’ve seen and known from every conversation we’ve studied so far: that Jesus knows all about me. He knows specifically what’s going on, and that my safety lies in listening to him and being honest with him and with myself.

I love what the Psalmist cries. I’ve often gone back to Psalm 130. “Lord, you have searched me and known me. You know when I sit down and rise up; You understand my thoughts from afar. You scrutinize my path and my lying down, and are intimately acquainted with all my ways. Even before there’s a word on my tongue, You know it well. You’ve hedged me behind and before and laid Your hand upon me, and such knowledge is too wonderful for me.” The first thing the Lord wants us to know is that there’s nothing He doesn’t already know about us, and what a twist of self-deception it is for us to think that we’re thinking thoughts or doing things that God is not acquainted with. That’s our safety.

Thirdly, we need to settle for all eternity that only God can show us our real need, what we are truly seeking versus what is apparent in this frenetic searching that’s going on in our life. Even to ourselves, we generally base our diagnosis on a symptom, thinking, “this must be what I need, I search for it, I run after it, I must have this.” But Jesus looks beyond that level and sees the true need. Isn’t it very interesting how many Christians stereotype people based on the fact of what they symptomatically are searching for? “This man’s an alcoholic, this man is a homosexual, this woman is an adulterer, this person is this.” How quickly we come to exactly the opposite of Jesus, and we stereotype people by their symptomatic frenetic searchings when only Jesus can pinpoint the true need.

Fifth, and obviously, and maybe hardest of all the points in this story, is that God loves us. He comes to release us from self-condemnation. He comes to bring us forgiveness, but he also comes to help us know the potential of who we really are. He comes to really deal not just with our difficulties but to change our attitude about ourselves. There’s a little almost missed part of this story that you’ll almost always miss unless someone’s really taking you through this story. That is the greatest transformation in this woman, who wouldn’t face the other women in the town and came at noon because there wouldn’t be anyone else around. This woman, who is running by her own acceptance of the definition, as immoral and absolutely outcast, when Jesus deals with her, turns around, runs into town, and gets the entire village to come hear. When Jesus really does something, it’s beyond just forgiveness; it’s self-acceptance. It’s one of the critical points I see as different in many of our lives. Jesus not only forgives us and reveals to us through conviction and real honest to dealing with the issues in our life, but he turns us around as different.

And then sixth, of course, in this story, we clearly see that we can never meet the needs of our life with anything short of the power of the Holy Spirit. This is what’s wrong with most counseling. This is what’s wrong, inevitably, even with psychiatrists in most instances. We can point to the problems, and many people cyclically go through it over and over again, and they come over and over again to the same place on the broken wheel.

“Yes, that’s the problem. I see it. I can tell why I got there and I can see how I got there. But where do you go from there? Only by the endowment of power from the Holy Spirit.” That’s why Jesus quickly and even she thinks, “He’s suddenly gotten into theology. He suddenly opened up a whole deal of theology.” Jesus says, “Forget it. The issue isn’t in theology. It isn’t what mountain you worship on. It isn’t what church you go to. It’s whether you’re in vital contact with the Holy Spirit. That’s what you crave. That’s what you must have. You are a spirit, not a body, and you must have a relationship with his spirit.”

Let me ask you a couple of questions. Could you identify the nature of the struggle in your life this morning? And I don’t mean again, the symptomatic stuff that’s going on. I don’t mean this frenetic searching, but can you, by God’s help, really put a finger on what it is that’s happening in your life? Can you identify the struggle?

And then, can you imagine if Jesus were on this earth that he would meet someone like you? Can you imagine how Jesus would deal with this? Do you believe he cares about you? Do you believe that he cares that this thing is dealt with and these areas are transformed in your life? And maybe can you even see in listening to him right here in this little personal opportunity, can you see a stepping stone that he might point you to as he did this woman, as our first step to begin dealing with this ultimate issue?

And then, can you begin to praise him for that? Years ago, we had the book “Prison to Praise” written. I didn’t agree with all of it, but I agreed with the premise. And that is, you don’t start praising after it’s done. The world does that. You get a hundred bucks. “Oh boy, I’m so grateful.” You know, try out in the rain sometime.

I had an interesting experience last evening when Paul and I were kind of dealing with the whole issue. Should we try to open again? People were running around confused. “We’re not gonna do this, are we?” Going back and forth. I had an umbrella there, walking up and down the street, kicking the barriers out to get the lane established.

I was muttering a little bit, kind of cussing spiritually, you know, charismatics cuss a little bit in a different way than other people. I was going through this whole thing about God’s control of the weather. “Has He gone on vacation? Doesn’t He understand this? Doesn’t He care?”

About that time, the Lord just really, very kindly and lovingly did a work in my life about what a privilege it was for me to be involved in this. What a great opportunity it was to just welcome people into an atmosphere. About three seconds after I made the switch, a car stopped in the lane of traffic that I shouldn’t have stopped there and said, “Are you gonna open tonight?”

I said, “Well, we’re kind of battling with this.” And she said, “Well, we’ve driven all the way up from Morgan Hill to see this tonight.” I said, “We’ll be open. Give us 20 minutes. We’ll be open.” It’s interesting how when you begin to praise the Lord for His involvement, though you may not see the specifics, you begin to praise Him that He’s involved in the experience.

If you believe that Jesus is who He says He is, and you believe that He performed miracles, and you believe that He performs miracles, then you believe that in your emotional and mental life, in your physical life, in your social life, in your spiritual life, God wants to get involved today. He will perform in you the things that you need, and He’s interested in the struggle. You simply have to be willing to be involved with Him.

Now, again, I want to come back to this point and close. You have missed the story if you don’t understand that this woman gets a revelation of God that Nicodemus doesn’t get. It is the old statement that is often said in the New Testament, that the prostitutes go in first. That those like tax collectors, publicans, the hated Republicans, they enter in first, and many times the Pharisees and those who have the greatest knowledge are left out. Hear it. Something in your personality determines how much of God’s revelation you receive. That’s true this morning. It isn’t how well the preacher did, whether the choir made an error, whether everything went according to plan. Whatever the excuse you build around it, the fact is that you get what you are capable by being who you are of receiving. We determine the ways by which God can relate to us.

This woman, in spite of all that goes against her in her social complexities and broken relationship, has within her a capacity to bring the Son of God into intimate involvement with changing not symptoms but diagnosing and changing the core issue of her life. The church is at McDonald’s when the revival comes to Samaria. It’s interesting, isn’t it? When the disciples come back and say, “Here’s a hamburger, Big Mac, chocolate shake, and fries,” and Jesus says, “I have meat to eat that you don’t know of.” Probably Peter was the one who said, “When did Taco Bell open in Samaria?” or some brilliant comment like that. Then Jesus said this, “My meat.” And the word meat in the Greek is not a word for flesh. It’s a word for that which sustains life. In fact, the meat of this era was grain, that which sustained life. So when Jesus said that, He said, “Listen, disciples, it isn’t Taco Bell or McDonald’s. What sustains my life is to do the will of Him who sent me and to finish the course.”

What you see is a weary Jesus suddenly reinvigorated by his contact and obedience to the will of God. And you see this woman who, by her own personality, makes it possible for God to enter into her struggle and to bring her not only temporary solutions but life-changing solutions. And she becomes the first of the Christian era.

Would you bow your heads with me in prayer, please? As every head is bowed across this auditorium, I ask a question about five minutes ago, do you even know what the area of struggle is? And again, I’m not asking, can you identify a symptom? I mean, by the Holy Spirit and His work of conviction and revelation, do you get a sense this morning of what the real struggle is? What the real issue is? And with our heads bowed, if you can identify it, if you know exactly where it is and know that something needs to happen there, it’s not frenetic searching that’s going to get you an answer, but there’s got to be a breakthrough in the area of that struggle. May I see your hand all across the auditorium? If you can identify it and know where it is, raise your hand.

God speaks that word to me this morning. No matter who you are and how you got here, and for whatever purpose, God will establish these opportunities, and your life will hinge on how you respond to them. These seemingly trivial things that we do, which become the hinge points of our destiny, and this very moment can be one of those. I’m going to ask everyone to stand, please, and bow your heads.

In just a fleeting moment of time, you’ll be leaving this auditorium, but I’d like every head to bow and every eye to close.

And if you identified the struggle and the necessity of divine intervention this morning, this is what God wants to do. As I said, the question is, do you believe God cares? Do you believe he intervenes? Do you believe he wants to intervene? I’m going to invite those who raised their hands to come and join me at the front.

No singing, pleading, or begging, just quickly move from where you are and stand facing me at the front. Please leave your row, and friends will let you out. God bless you, thank you very much. And it’s not a question of whether we know Christ or not. What we’re saying is that God has spoken through his word, and we are able to get in touch with something that becomes a breakthrough point.

Oh, how key are those moments when God puts his finger on something and says, “I want to deal with this. This is what I want to do in your life. This is where I’d like to start,” and we’re aware of it and honest enough to allow God to work in our lives. This becomes so key. Friends who have come this morning, let me pray with you and then encourage you to have a moment of prayer in the prayer room with some of our friends.

Lord, I thank you for these friends who this morning have acknowledged, like the Samaritan woman, that they see deeper problems and needs than they thought. But they believe in you and that you want to intervene in their physical, spiritual, and social lives, wherever it is necessary. And Lord, you find in these dear friends something you can work with. I thank you for that in Jesus’ name.

Friends, please turn here. Carol will lead you into a prayer. Take a moment to nail down what the Lord is saying and let someone pray with you. I’d like to ask the rest of you to join hands across the aisle, shall we? This great gulf that’s fixed in our church here, down in this center aisle.

Also, note that the time of day is 12.