510: Jesus, the Living Water | Andy Fetzer

Introduction

Good morning. Thank you, Tim. Thank you. What a beautiful day this has turned out to be. A day that the Lord has made.

Before I begin, I do want to invite you. If you want to go with me to where I do stuff on the other side of the earth, you can go with me in May. Come talk to me. It's in North Asia. Secret Black Ops stuff. It's gonna be awesome.

Great. I did have a couple folks come up to me in the first service and they said, "I'm in." And I was like, "Oh, okay. I guess, I guess we're doing this."

If you haven't been here, my name is Andy Fetzer and it's such a privilege to be able to do this. A little nervous, but I'm always nervous. I mean, if you're not nervous speaking in front of beautiful people, I don't know who you are because, and let's just be honest, that you guys, the first service can't hold a candle to you guys.

Don't tell them that because they're, you know, they're holier because they wake up earlier, but let them have that. Let them have that.

The Context of the Passage

If you haven't been here, we're in the book of John, the Gospel of John. We're in chapter 4. We just started it not too long ago, a couple months, half a year ago. And if you haven't been here, I want to kind of recap what we're doing just as a reminder. If you missed a week or, you know, you just want to get caught up. It's real easy to remember. I would say that there is this called alliteration that we're gonna do.

The first, it's all W's. The first one is John won the word, okay? The word, that's easy. The second chapter has two actually. It's the wine of grace and the whip of truth, okay? Today we're gonna be talking about the woman at the well, John 4. And of course, last week we talked about Nicodemus.

It landed, actually, the first service thought that was a lot funnier than you guys did, so let's scratch that out.

In 2011, I was on a bus with about 25 college students. We pulled up at this church, the church of Photina. I don't know if you have any idea what that means, but I had mixed emotions because I was looking at this beautiful church, but I also was trying to realize what that place actually looked like without this gigantic Greek Orthodox church on it.

I was in the West Bank in Samaria in Israel and I was visiting this particular site, but it didn't look like this that we put a big church on it. And I wouldn't say ruined it, but you just can't, you don't know what it looked like before.

But something happened, something significant happened at this place and at this exact time 2,000 years ago. We have a lot to get into, so we're gonna dive right in and we're gonna start in verse 4 with Barb Red.

The Encounter at the Well

And it says that Jesus had to go through Samaria. Geographically, Jesus did not have to go through Samaria. He could have stayed on the west side, the east side of the Jordan River, made his way up north, then crossed over into Galilee. He did not have to go through Samaria, but he did have to go through Samaria because there was somebody that he was supposed to meet there.

Now, if you know anything about the Jewish-Samarian relationship, it was not very good. They were fighting all the time. They didn't like each other.

The reason for that is the Assyrians came in. This is where your eyes might gloss over, but it will be quick. The Assyrians came in at 722 BC and they fought and they beat them, took the Jews out that they wanted, and they left the Jews there, then imported foreigners in, and they intermarried. The people that were left had a hybrid Jewish, mixed religion—one that only believed in the first five books of the Bible, the Pentateuch. They did not believe in the entirety of the Old Testament.

So, the Jews that came back from exile looked at the Samaritans with skepticism, as sellouts, political rebels, a half-breed mixture of weird Jewish religion. In fact, so much so that they didn't let the Samaritans come to the temple in Jerusalem to worship. So, the Samaritans built their own temple in Jerusalem, which we will look at briefly in just a little bit.

There's a lot of skepticism between the Jews and the Samaritans. And with that, in light of that, Jesus, directed by the Father, in obedience, had to go through Samaria.

It says he came to a town called Sychar, near the plot of ground Jacob had given to his son Joseph. Jacob's well was there, and Jesus, tired as he was from the journey, sat down by the well. It was about the sixth hour.

The writer of John sometimes gets a bad rap for spending so much time on Jesus's deity that he kind of puts Jesus's humanity to the side. But we know from John 1 that the word became flesh, made his dwelling among us. Throughout John's gospel, John talks about Jesus being thirsty or tired.

So, that bad rap that John gets is not warranted. It's high noon, six hours from sunrise, right about noon, the heat of the day. We learn in verse 8 that Jesus is alone. He sent the disciples into town to buy food, most likely the town of Sychar. So, it's most likely that these disciples were walking right by the person Jesus is about to encounter.

It says when a Samaritan woman came to draw water, Jesus said to her, "Will you give me a drink?"

The Samaritan woman said to him, "You are a Jew and I am a Samaritan woman. How can you ask me for a drink? For Jews do not associate with Samaritans."

There could not be two totally different people than this Samaritan woman who Jesus is about to meet and who he just had a conversation with in John 3, Nicodemus. They were completely different.

And the reason why they're back to back is just to emphasize the kind of person Jesus is willing to engage with, willing to invite into conversation with, and willing to invite into a relationship. These people could not be more different.

I’d like to draw a quick contrast between Nicodemus and this woman. Nicodemus has a name and the woman does not. Well, she does have a name. We just don't know what it is. Church history gave her the name "Fotina" or "Fotini." I'm not going to call her that. We’ll get to heaven and realize her real name is like Janus or something like that.

Nicodemus has a name. She has a name. We don't know it, and it's not important. It's not because she's not important; it's just that what's important is drawing a contrast between Nicodemus and this woman.

He's a man. She's a woman. He's a Jew. She is a Samaritan. He is very learned; we learned that a couple weeks ago. She is most likely illiterate, and that's not being mean. Women were shut out of the educational system. She probably didn't read.

Nicodemus was esteemed; she was likely rejected by the community. Nicodemus had authority; she probably didn't have much authority at all. Nicodemus met at night, and she met at noon, high noon, in the heat of the day.

Then, the last contrast is that Jesus talks to Nicodemus about being born again, but he doesn't talk to this woman about being born again. He talks to her about drinking the living water.

In fact, it's interesting that when Jesus has an encounter with someone, he meets the individual where they need to be met. When he met the rich young ruler and had that conversation, what he didn't say was, "You need to be born again." Instead, he told him to sell everything, give to the poor, then follow him. He’d prefer to tell him to be born again, but he didn't.

Or the woman caught in adultery in John 8. He doesn't tell her she needs to be born again or drink living water or sell everything she has. He simply says, "Leave your life of sin."

All of that is the same. All of those things—being born again, drinking the living water, selling everything, giving to the poor, trusting him—are all the same. The difference is, he speaks tenderly to each one of us as individuals. It's beautiful.

There are some similarities between this woman and Nicodemus. They both meet him alone. We assume Jesus was alone with Nicodemus. They both ask questions. They seek to understand who they're talking to. They have a dialogue.

But more importantly, the key similarity is that both are people who desperately need Jesus, even if they don't know it. They seek him.

The Gift of Living Water

In verse 10, in response to the woman saying, "We should not be talking right now. You're a man. I'm a woman. You're a Jew. We should not be having this conversation," Jesus says,

"If you knew the gift of God and who it is that asked you for a drink, you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water."

Jesus here is talking about the gift of God—his mercy, grace, hope, peace, joy, all the goodness of God. But he’s also maybe playing with words. The Jews believed that the ultimate gift of God was the Torah, which she didn't have. She only had the first five books.

He’s basically saying, "If you had the revelation of who I am from the Old Testament that speaks about me, and you knew who you were talking to, this conversation would be totally different." That’s what he says.

But regardless of whether he's playing word games or not, he mentions this idea of living water. He's drawing from Old Testament passages that describe God's love and eternal life as water, living water.

For my people have committed two sins: they have forsaken me, the spring of living water, and they have dug their own cisterns, broken cisterns that cannot hold water. — Jeremiah 2:13

This depicts how we've rejected God's goodness and settled for stagnant, stale water in holes we've dug ourselves. We think it sustains life, but it doesn't. Jesus is saying that the living water is different.

He highlights three components of this living water—there could be more, but I only came up with three.

First, it is unexpected. The woman was minding her own business, doing her daily chores, and Jesus shows up. I wonder what it was for you. Were you minding your own business when Jesus showed up in your life?

Bless you.

For me, I was 14 years old. I didn't have a care in the world. Well, I did have cares, but they weren't that big of a deal—making the soccer team, whether my family would move. My dad was in the military. I’d lived in seven houses by then. It was tough to make new friends, and of course, I had concerns as a kid. But I was just going about my life and Jesus showed up in the person of a young life leader named John Colston who shared Jesus with me. I wasn't expecting it. I wasn't looking for it. Jesus just kind of showed up.

I wonder what it was like for this woman. Did she have friends? Was she loved by anyone? Did her life mean anything? There’s an idea that she is coming to the well at noon. That’s not when you normally come to the well, during the heat of the day. There is speculation that her life wasn't morally great, which we’ll discuss more later.

She thought Jesus was talking about physical water because he said, "If you knew you would have asked me, and I would give you water." She's thinking about physical water, but the spiritual part is even more significant—more depth.

Jesus is referencing Old Testament passages that describe God's love and eternal life as water.

In Isaiah, it says:

With joy you will draw water from the wells of salvation. — Isaiah 12:3

And:

They will neither hunger nor thirst; for God will lead them besides springs of water. — Isaiah 49:10

And:

Come, all you who are thirsty; come to the waters. — Isaiah 55:1

This is a beautiful picture. But Jesus in John 7 states something even better:

"If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, streams of living water will flow from within him." — John 7:37-38

Here, Jesus offers this living water—a powerful, life-giving symbol.

She asks, "Are you greater than Jacob?"

For the word is irony, yes, Jesus is greater than Jacob. She cannot even fathom that he would be. So she’s like, are you greater than Jacob? That's her question.

Here's the irony: Yes, he is. He responds to her, "If you only knew."

He says, "Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I give will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give will become a spring of water welling up to eternal life."

This brings us to the next point about living water: it’s on deserving. Anyone who is thirsty can have it.

There’s nothing special about us. The only thing that makes it special is Jesus, who offers it.

And the third point—and we will unpack this more later—is that this living water is unending.

A few weeks ago, Landon talked about how the gospel gets to you on its way to someone else—that there’s perpetual movement of the gospel. It’s true about this water too—that it bubbles up to eternal life.

Only Jesus and his offer of this living water can truly satisfy our souls.

And she wants this water. Of course she does because she doesn’t want to come to the well anymore.

In verse 15, she says she wants it.

And in verse 16, Jesus says, "Go call your husband."

She replies, "I know I wasn't..." and he responds, "I know you've had five."

And the one you're with right now is not the husband.

When we read that, we tend to think Jesus is condemning her. He is not. He is tender and gentle in the way he approaches her. He’s saying, yeah, what you're trying to fulfill you isn’t working out. Her heart starts to get pierced.

There is speculation about her immorality—that her coming at noon might be because she’s avoiding other women or that she's immoral. But Jesus doesn’t mention her immorality. He just mentions her five husbands.

The Jews believed that three husbands were enough, and more than three was playing with fire—I guess. We don't know if her husbands died or if they divorced her because she was barren. We don't know why she’s been married so many times.

But we do know she didn’t want to be at the well with the other women, probably because of how she viewed herself or was viewed by others.

Despite all that, Jesus meets this woman and is everything she’s ever wanted. He’s everything we’ve ever wanted—if we only knew who he was. If we could truly see him, he is everything we've always longed for.

She goes from physical water to her personal story, then on to theological questions. She asks, “Where are we to worship?”

She’s asking to understand the political and theological differences, and Jesus responds:

"A time is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. Yet a time is coming, and has now come, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth." — John 4:21-23

He explains that true worship will not depend on location but in spirit and truth—that the heart of worship is about what’s inside, not where it happens.

She then makes a remarkable statement:

"I know that Messiah is coming."

"When he comes, he will explain everything to us."

At this moment, I believe she is beginning to realize—that this man at the well, who has spoken tenderly to her, maybe, just maybe, is the one. She hopes.

And Jesus responds:

"I who speak to you am he."

It’s no coincidence that this encounter happened here, where and when it did, for a reason.

In Genesis 24, Abraham sends his servant to find a wife for Isaac. Rebecca comes to a spring, with a jar on her shoulder. The servant asks her for water, and she obliges. Rebecca became Isaac’s bride.

In Genesis 29, Jacob, traveling to find a wife, sees a well, and there’s a conversation. She was a shepherdess, and he fell in love with her.

Exodus 2 tells of Moses sitting by a well, drawing water, and becoming Zipporah’s bride.

And last week, Tim talked about John the Baptist’s testimony that Jesus is the bridegroom—and in John, we've seen that Jesus is better in every way.

Here, in John 4, he is the better bridegroom—a woman who had many lesser bridegrooms now has a true encounter with the bridegroom himself. It was unexpected, she didn’t deserve it, and neither do we.

And he invites her into a relationship, the relationship she’s been searching for her whole life.

He’s the true bridegroom, the one she had been longing for, the one standing right in front of her.

And the same offer he gives to her is available to us—to come, to drink, and never be thirsty again.

What a beautiful, wonderful invitation that is for each of us.

The rails up here are for you if you want to come and have a conversation with the Lord. There are people in the back who would love to pray for you as well. Or you can sit where you are and have a conversation with the one who calls out to you and invites you into a relationship with him.

Amen.