513: A Holy Distraction | Dave Sloop

Introduction

Thank you, Barbara, and good morning everyone. So glad that you're here. My name is Dave Sloop. I am one of our pastors, and I just wanna say thank you for choosing to be here today.

We have been walking through the Gospel of John, kind of just a handful of verses at a time, and we're continuing our trek through the book. We're in the second half of John chapter four, which really is part two of one encounter that Jesus has with a particular woman that he met at a particular well.

She was a real person, and he met her in a real place. But in order to understand the significance of this encounter that Jesus has with this woman, I want to just give you a little recap of what Andy Fetser talked to us last week.

If you recall, Jesus shows up at this well. In the beginning of John chapter four, it says he had to go through Samaria. And we happen to know that he didn't actually geographically have to go. In fact, the more common path for Jews was to go around Samaria, to avoid it altogether, because they hated the Samaritans, rather. But Jesus had to go because it was someone there that he needed to meet.

He knew her face, he knew her name, he knew her story, as we would come to find out. He gets to this well, and he happens to get there in high noon, which is an incredibly uncommon time to go to the well. All the ladies would come out early in the morning before it got too hot. But she was there in the middle of the afternoon.

Most commentators believe that the reason she was there in the middle of the afternoon, instead of in the morning with all the rest of the town, is that this was a morally compromised woman. She had become a social outcast.

In a moment, Jesus is going to indicate that he knows that she's had five husbands, and the man that she's now with is not even her husband. And therefore, she was an outcast, and she was isolated.

In order to avoid the judging look from people in the community that she lived in, she came at a really inconvenient time, that it was hot and uncomfortable, and she knew no one else would be there. But much to her surprise, someone was there. Jesus was sitting there, tired from the journey, and he asks her for a drink, which was a shocking thing for any man to do to any woman in that culture.

But even more so for a Jewish man to talk to a Samaritan woman. I mean, there was tremendous contempt for that race of people that they looked down their nose at. But even more so, not just a Jewish man talking to a Samaritan woman, but a rabbi, a religious spiritual leader. Rabbis didn't even talk to Jewish women in public, and here Jesus is talking to this woman, and asking her to give him something—a drink. He's thirsty.

And she's surprised at this request, and so she says back to him, how can you ask me for a drink? You're a Jewish man, I'm a Samaritan woman. And he says back to her, if you knew the gift of God and who it was that speaks to you, you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.

And she responds by saying, sir, the well is deep, and you have nothing with which to draw. How will you get this water? Jesus is clearly, he's speaking about the spiritual, and all she can see and think about is the physical.

I'm going to pause here for a second and just point to a trend that has been bubbling to the surface in John's gospel. You see it very clearly in John chapter two, three, and four. It started with Jesus' encounter outside the temple. He's speaking to the religious leaders, and he says, tear down this temple, and I will rebuild it in three days.

Do you remember how the religious leaders respond? Three days? Took 46 years to build this temple. How are you gonna rebuild it in three days?

See, Jesus was talking about the spiritual reality to which the earthly temple pointed. The fulfillment of the sign of the temple, which was the actual meeting place of God.

Jesus came to be a new and better temple in himself. He was the place to meet God, but they couldn't see it.

In chapter three, Jesus has a conversation with a man named Nicodemus. And he says to Nicodemus, what Nicodemus says to him, I can see that you're a teacher sent from God, and Jesus says, you can't see anything. That's really what he says to him. He says, you can't see anything unless you are born from above.

He says, Nicodemus, you can't see or understand spiritual truth unless you're born again. Which is to say, you need my life inside you in order to have eyes to see.

At the beginning of John's gospel, he says, in him referring to Jesus was life, and his life was the light of men. And what John meant by that, I think, is that until we have the life of God in us by his spirit, we cannot understand or comprehend spiritual things. Spiritual truth is spiritually discerned, and we can't see it until we have his spirit.

And so there's just this blindness—they cannot comprehend. Nicodemus couldn't understand what he was talking about.

Then here in last week's story that Andy Fetser walked us through, he says to this woman, as we just discussed, I would have given you living water. And she says, you don't have a bucket. She just, she can't see it.

And shortly after that, he's going to say to his disciples, I have food that you don't know about. And they're going to say, did someone bring him lunch? We didn't see, we missed out.

Jesus wasn't talking about food. He was talking about something. He was talking about the spirit, the ultimate spiritual reality behind everything that we see. But we cannot see it without his help.

When Jesus offers her living water, he's obviously talking about a kind of thirst that subconsciously she knew she had, but she completely missed it. He was talking about this spiritual longing, a spiritual thirst.

In the same way that your body needs continually to be rehydrated, she kept coming back to the well to get more to drink, to quench her thirst. And she'd have to do it again tomorrow and the next day and the next day.

Jesus was suggesting to her that this process at the well had become a metaphor for her own sort of quest to find spiritual fulfillment.

When he offers her living water, it's an unmistakable reference to Jeremiah 2.13, which I would ask you to put up on the screen.

For my people have committed two evils: they have forsaken me, the fountain of living water, and hued out cisterns for themselves, broken cisterns, that don't hold water. — Jeremiah 2:13

And this is precisely what she had done. She was looking to this created world to find something to eternally and spiritually satisfy.

For her, her particular strategy, her cistern, as it were, was intimacy, love, relationships. And it had fallen flat; it was not working.

But when Jesus offers living water, he's not just pointing to an Old Testament Bible verse. Because I want you to notice that he offers her living water. And the only one that can offer the living water is the fountain of living water. He claims to be the source of all life.

And she says, "Give me this water, I want that." Because I don't want to have to keep coming back to this well every single day. It's pretty inconvenient, tiresome, exhausting.

And Jesus says, "I'm not talking about this water." He says, "Anybody that drinks this water is gonna be thirsty again." But the water that I give him, if you drink that, you'll never be thirsty again.

Indeed, the water that I give him will become in him or her, a spring, welling up to eternal life.

She says, "Give that to me." And Jesus says, "Okay, go call your husband." And she said, "I don't have a husband." He says, "I know, you had five. And the one you have now isn't your husband."

She says, "I can see that you're a prophet." She changes the subject conveniently. But eventually, Jesus reveals to her, I'm not talking about your physical thirst; I'm talking about your spiritual thirst.

She had a strategy that she employed to try to experience fulfillment. And can I tell you something today? I don't know all of you, but I know something about all of you, including myself. And it's this, you have a strategy too.

There are places we go to get satisfied. And whether or not you believe in God, here is something that you do believe instinctively. You can't help it, it's just part of being human.

You know that you are supposed to be full. And you go looking to be filled. And you will dig a cistern, hoping that that will be the answer.

But the reality is, everything in this world that we look to, to satisfy, it doesn't work.

Today, we're gonna talk about the living water and what it does. Because what's gonna happen in this story is that this woman is about to experience satisfaction for the first time in her life.

The process that Jesus describes to Nicodemus about being born from above, being born again, it's gonna, the wind is gonna blow in the second half of John chapter four. And her eyes are going to be opened. She's gonna be changed. And so here's what I want to look at today.

The living water, first of all, satisfies. Secondly, it sanctifies. It doesn't just fill us up. It actually changes us from the inside out. And thirdly, the living water saves. Now if we could say that it seeks and then it saves.

So let's take a look first. Let's pick up the passage here, beginning in verse 27. Listen to what John tells us. Just then, the disciples came back. They marveled that he was talking with a woman, but no one said, what do you seek? Or why were you talking with her?

So the woman left her water jar. And she 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. I want to point to a detail that John shines a light on that is not an incidental detail. It says she left her water jar and she went back to town. She came there thirsty. She came there to get the water that she needed every single day, but something else happened that caused her to forget about that water jar and to go back to town with a new joy and a new excitement and a new passion, new life.

What I want to suggest to you that this woman experienced is the all-sufficient, all-satisfying love of Christ, which is better than anything this world has to offer.

Do you believe that? I don't even need you to answer out loud or to tell anybody else, but in the quietness of your heart, I just want you to answer this question for yourself.

Do you actually believe that that's true? That what he offers can satisfy more deeply than human intimacy, than sex, than substance, then adventure, then career success and fulfillment, then wealth, then what he offers—that if you actually tasted this living water, it's better.

Do you believe that? Do you believe, like David, that his love is better than life or that in his presence is fullness of joy?

As the dear pants for water, so my soul longs for you. Or as Paul would say in Philippians 3, what is more? Nothing compares to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus, my Lord, for whose sake I've lost all things.

Filled with an inexpressible joy, taste and see that the Lord is good. Have you experienced that? Have you tasted the satisfaction, the deep spiritual thirst-quenching life of the Spirit of God moving into your life?

It is all satisfying. Now, there's a lot that we could talk about about the satisfaction that Christ's love brings, but I want to point to what she says. You can hear it, when she runs back into town, what is she saying? She says, "Come see a man who told me all that I’ve ever did." How many of you would sign up for that? It doesn't sound terribly appealing. I would like to forget some things that I've done. I don't want you to know all the things I certainly don't want to stand before this holy man and let him tell me all the bad things that I've done, but why is it that she was so moved by this experience of being completely known and completely free?

See, it wasn't just that he knows all her junk. It's that he knew and he offered her living water anyway. So she felt deeply in herself that she was unworthy candidate to receive that kind of love, but he offers it to her regardless.

His love is the most satisfying thing that you and I can experience in this life. And I just wonder if that's something that you believe as you sit here this morning, his love is satisfying.

The Sanctifying Power of Living Water

The second thing that we learn is that the living water, not only satisfies, but he sanctifies. That is to say, he changes us. That living water when we begin to experience the power of his spirit, which by the way, that is what the living water is. It is his life, his spirit in me, actually.

And when we begin to experience that and interact with him, we begin to change from the inside out. I probably quote this verse almost every time that I preach from 2 Corinthians 5:17. But it's so applicable.

Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. Old things have passed away; behold, all things have become new. — 2 Corinthians 5:17

We're transformed. Paul would say it this way in Galatians 2. I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. I have a new life. I have new passions. I have new convictions.

There are things that I do now that I feel bad about that I didn't used to feel bad about when I did them before. The things that he cares about become important to me, not just because I'm supposed to, but because I'm not who I used to be.

See, this woman didn't just learn something new. She became someone new. She was a different person.

Do you see it in the way that she runs back into town? She showed up at the well-dejected, isolated, separate from community. She was a little prickly, bristly, hostile in the way that she responded to the questions that were asked of her. Dodgy, she avoided; she didn't really want to be known at first.

But she goes back. This private shame that she had has turned into this public unashamed joy. And what she's saying to people is, come meet this person. You guys already knew all the things that I've done, but he knew, and I've never even met him.

He loves me anyway. And here's what I think she's getting at. If his love is extended to me in light of what I've done, it's certainly available to you. She was a new person.

The living water not only satisfies; it sanctifies. It transforms you and me. We become someone new. She was born again. But the way, there's a lot of implications for the life of God in us and how we begin to transform.

But the particular thing that John focuses on in this encounter that we're reading about is this almost involuntary need to share God's love with other people. She just had to.

Paul would put it this way, what was me if I don't preach the gospel? It just spills out. Do you know why? Because anyone that drinks the water that I give him, in him, it will become a spring. God's love in your life, his spirit in your heart, it is not a cistern that collects and stays there. It is a spring that bubbles out, and to the degree that you're actually experiencing him, you will have to talk about it to people that you love.

But here's my question. Do you see yourself in this woman? Again, you don't have to answer this out loud. Do you find in yourself the same urge, like I've got to talk about God's love for me, to other people? I have to, I must.

Do you sense that in you? Or are you like one of your pastors here? Who sometimes, even as a pastor, it's not my first instinct when I meet someone to want to share with them about how much God loves them.

Maybe we're scared to offend. We don't want to come across arrogance like we have all the answers. But is there anything arrogant about this woman's proclamation and testimony? She's not talking like she has all the answers. Come meet a man that told me everything I ever did. Could this be the Christ? I don't know. Come check it out for yourself.

All she's doing is sharing her encounter with him, and she has to, she must. Why don't we do this more?

I'd like to share with you three quick reasons. Well, I think we struggle to do this. We struggle to share our testimony with other people, first of all, for the same reason that Jesus' very own disciples completely missed what was happening here.

What you see in this narrative is Jesus finishing up his conversation with this woman, her going back to town. At the end of this story, you see what happens in that town: all these people hear her testimony, and then they're transformed because they came back to meet Jesus for themselves.

But in between, while they're on the way, Jesus has a conversation with his disciples about what's going on. And I want you to hear what Jesus says. I'm just gonna read it, and then I'm gonna summarize it.

Here's what Jesus says. They're trying to get him to eat. In verse 34, 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 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 the sower and reaper may rejoice together.

For here, the saying holds true: one sows and another reaps. I sent you to reap for that which you did not labor. Others have labored. And you have entered into their labor.

Do you know what Jesus is saying here? The most satisfying thing that God in the flesh does in his earthly existence is participate in this process of sowing and reaping unto eternal life.

He is so excited about it that he's no longer hungry. He's the one that sent the disciples into town to get food, and they come back and say, "Eat something." And he says, "I'm not hungry anymore." And they say, "Why not?" And he says, "I have food that you don't know about."

The food that excites Jesus, the spiritual nourishment that he gets. And this is true of you and me too.

The most exciting thing that a redeemed, Christ-filled person can do is to participate in the sowing and the reaping unto eternal life. But we just struggle to do it.

And the first reason that I think that we don't do it is that like the disciples, who are so preoccupied with food, they just miss the greater spiritual reality. It is a picture of being overly preoccupied with this world.

Mark 4:19 would put it this way: The cares of this world, the deceitfulness of riches, and the desire for other things choke the word.

And that's true for you and me too. There is no guarantee that just because Christ is in me, I will constantly be looking to him to be my satisfaction in my joy. It is possible, it is possible to let the world get its claws in us such that our spiritual sensitivity becomes dull.

We aren't experiencing his joy. We're going back to those old cisterns, even though we know they don't work.

Here's a second reason. I think often we don't consider the stakes—how high the stakes are. In fact, at the end of John chapter three, the very last verse in John chapter three, listen to it, it says this:

For the Father loves the Son and has given all things into his hand. Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life. Whoever does not obey the Son shall not see life. And then, hear this: but the wrath of God remains on him. — John 3:35-36

Here are the stakes: every single person that you and I will interact with this week—if they are not someone who has seen Christ for who he really is and has his life in them—the wrath of God remains on them.

How often do we consider that? That the people we go to work with or to school with or that we see at the grocery store are people who are walking dead and they do not know. And we're worried about offending someone.

I want to show you guys a video clip. It's from, are you familiar with the magician duo, Penn and Teller? This is the guy, Penn, is his last name, I think. What's his first name, Tim? Gillette Penn, and he is going to share a story after one of his shows.

Somebody came up and gave him a Bible. He was just reflecting as an atheist how he experienced that man.

Let's roll that clip and then we'll talk about it.

And then he said, I brought this for you. And he handed me a Gideon pocket edition. I thought I said from the New Testament, but I also thought it was Psalms in the New Testament, right? Or Psalms in the New Testament. Just part of the New Testament. A little book about this big, this thick, you know.

He said, I wrote in the front of it and I wanted you to have this. I'm kind of proselytizing. I mean, he said, I'm a businessman. I'm saying, I'm not crazy. And he looked me right in the eye and did all of this. And it was really wonderful.

I believe he knew that I was an atheist, but he was not defensive. And he looked me right in the eyes. And he was truly complimentary. It wasn't in any way, it didn't seem like empty flattery. He was really kind and nice and sane and looked me in the eyes and talked to me.

And then gave me this Bible. And I've always said, you know, that I don't respect people who don't proselytize. I don't respect that at all. If you believe that there's a heaven in hell and people could be going to hell or not getting eternal life or whatever. And you think that, well, it's not really worth telling them this because it would make it socially awkward.

And atheists who think that people shouldn't proselytize, just leave me alone, keep your religion to yourself.

How much do you have to hate somebody to not proselytize? How much do you have to hate somebody to believe that everlasting life is possible and not tell them that? I mean, if I believed, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that a truck was coming at you and you didn't believe it, and that truck was buried down on you, there's a certain point where I tackle you.

And this is more important than that. And I've always thought that, and I've written about that, and I've thought of it conceptually.

This guy was a really good guy. He was polite and honest and sane. And he cared enough about me to proselytize and give me a Bible which had written in it a little note to me, not very personal, but just like you're showing and so on.

And then like five phone numbers for him in an email address if I wanted to get in touch.

Does that convict you like it does me? He says, how much do you have to hate someone to not share with them that you believe that they're dying? That what stands on the other side of judgment is eternal death.

Do we care? Are we, we just don't want to offend? We don't want to come across like we have all the answers. That's not a great excuse.

So I just want to get practical. I'd like everybody to tackle someone this week. At a certain point he said, I'm just going to tackle you. I'm going to push you out of the way because this truck is coming.

Do we with the same urgency understand that we don't know when we will draw our last breath or the ones that we love? All we have to do, take a page from this woman's playbook. She was not sophisticated. She just shared her own experience and she trusted Jesus to do the rest because her only job was, hey, come see this guy.

We can do that. All of us have the ability to do that. You don't have to have all the answers.

And here's the third reason briefly that I don't think that we do this. We struggle to do this because we over-complicate it. We think it's up to us.

But the saving work that needs to occur, it is not your work. It is the work of the Spirit. The Spirit blows where it will. He is the one to open the eyes of the blind, not you, not me.

And that is the third thing that we see from this passage that the living water does: the living water satisfies. It sanctifies and finally, it saves. Maybe it's better to say it seeks and then it saves.

How does the living water seek and save? Well, there is a great verse. It's actually, there's a conversation that King David has with a woman. Slightly different conversation, but it's a conversation with a woman where she talks about water to the king.

And I want you to see what she says to the king. She's trying to bring convictions. I don't have time to get into the story of what she's doing. But put up their 2 Samuel 14:14.

We must all die. We are like water spilled on the ground, which cannot be gathered up again, but God will not take away life. And he devises means so that the banished one will not remain in outcast. — 2 Samuel 14:14

How did this woman find life? Did she find it? No, she went to the same well that she goes to every day.

He met her at the point of her deepest thirst. He came to where she was. And you and I need to understand that the seeking work of the living water—it comes to you, we don't find it. He comes to us. The place of our deepest need.

But then secondly, the living water saves. You know, there's only two times in John's gospel where Jesus talks about his own thirst. Do you know that? One is here at the beginning of John chapter four.

He sits down at the well and he says, "Would you give me a drink?" That is a picture. It says in those few verses right there. He was tired, he was thirsty, and he was hungry. It was his humanity. And this points to the incarnation that God has so condescended that he experiences hunger and thirst.

And he sits there and it's his humanity that becomes the doorway for this conversation whereby he reveals, "I, the one who speak to you." And he, I am the Christ.

His thirst, or his humanity in the beginning of John's gospel reveals who he is to people that could not have otherwise seen him or known him.

But the second occasion of his thirst, it's on the cross. It's John chapter 19. After this, Jesus, knowing that all was now finished, he said, "To fulfill the scripture, I thirst."

See, Jesus said, "My food is to do the will of the one who sent me and to finish his work." He had work to finish. He came to meet that specific woman on that specific day, but there was something else he still had to do to secure her true, real conversion in new life.

That was he had to take our human thirst—our disordered human thirst, which is one of the two evils that Jeremiah 2.13 talks about—that you have dug cisterns for yourself, and it is a fence to a holy God that we have turned from him, the one who has created everything and is the source of everything good.

And we have gone to look for life in other places. It's idolatry. It is loving something, anything more than the one who made us to be filled by him.

We have turned to other things, and he takes that disordered thirst upon himself on the cross, bearing in his body the payment for our sin. He died, he died so that we might live. He became thirsty so that we could be satisfied.

Have you tasted that? I want to close with these two thoughts. One, for those of you who have been following Christ for a long time, and I want to just repeat something that Jesus said to his disciples.

He said to them, "Here's what he said." He said, "Look, I tell you, lift up your eyes and see that the fields are white for harvest."

Friends in Roanoke County, all around there are people that are dying. Would you have the courage just to tell them your own story and leave the rest to God?

And secondly, some of you are here today, and you have never tasted his goodness. You can know it today, and I promise you, it will quench a thirst that you've known intuitively about your entire life that you've never been able to satisfy.

Only Christ can do it. Come to him, pray with me.

Lord, we need you. We are desperate for the water that only you can give. Bring new life, not just to the people in this room, but all around us. Use us, however you see fit, we pray. In a mighty name of your Son, Jesus, amen.