Testimony

Daniel Brown Potter

Sermon • Submitted 6 months ago • Presented 6 months ago

0 ratings

· 4 views

Notes

Transcript

Christian Story and the Human Heart

Good morning church,

God Will Save His People

If you were with us last week you remember that we took a 30,000 foot view of the story of the OT and the promise that God would save His people. This promise was that the seed of the woman would crush the head of the serpent. Then several generations later the Lord promises to Abram that he will give him land (The promised land) and as many descendants as there are stars. Once the people of Israel were in the millions, but under captivity in Egypt the Lord delivered them from slavery and the Lord promised to Moses to be their God, if they kept the law. Through the mercy of God, they were redeemed from their hard heartedness and stiff necks and God was faithful to his promises. This divine loyal love was seen clearly in the promise that God made to David, that the lLord would establish His Kingdom on earth and that the Son of David would sit on the throne forever. Sound familiar?

God will redeem them, and be with them.

Redeem: Get back on the throne, Be the ultimate lawgiver & keeper, have dominion over the land, and crush the head of the serpent.

Q: What do you learn about Jesus through this story?

Q: What stands out to you now, that did not stand out before?

John 4:1–6 ESV

Now when Jesus learned that the Pharisees had heard that Jesus was making and baptizing more disciples than John (although Jesus himself did not baptize, but only his disciples), he left Judea and departed again for Galilee. And he had to pass through Samaria. So he came to a town of Samaria called Sychar, near the field that Jacob had given to his son Joseph. Jacob’s well was there; so Jesus, wearied as he was from his journey, was sitting beside the well. It was about the sixth hour.

John 4:7–15 ESV

A woman from 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.) The Samaritan woman said to him, “How is it that you, a Jew, ask for a drink from me, a woman of Samaria?” (For Jews have no dealings with Samaritans.) Jesus answered her, “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.” The woman said to him, “Sir, you have nothing to draw water with, and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water? Are you greater than our father Jacob? He gave us the well and drank from it himself, as did his sons and his livestock.” Jesus said to her, “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never be thirsty again. The water that I will give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.” The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water, so that I will not be thirsty or have to come here to draw water.”

vs. 10

The obvious background, however, is the Old Testament. There God declares: ‘My people have committed two sins: They have forsaken me, the spring of living water, and have dug their own cisterns, broken cisterns that cannot hold water’ (Je. 2:13)—that is, they have rejected the fresh, ‘running’ supply of God and his faithful goodness, choosing instead the stagnant waters of cisterns they themselves prepared, discovering even then that their cisterns were cracked, and leaving them with nothing to sustain life and blessing. But the prophets look forward to a time when ‘living water will flow out from Jerusalem’ (Zc. 14:8; cf. Ezk. 47:9). The metaphor speaks of God and his grace, knowledge of God, life, the transforming power of the Holy Spirit; in Isaiah 1:16–18; Ezekiel 36:25–27 water promises cleansing. All of these themes are picked up in John’s use of ‘water’ or ‘living water’ in this gospel

Vs 13-14

John 4:16–26 ESV

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

vs. 16 Go call your husband.

Jesus confronts her to the core. Evidently the living water that Jesus was offering to must be preceded by her drawing water from her own cistern. Read Jer. 2:13

Jeremiah 2:13 ESV

for my people have committed two evils: they have forsaken me, the fountain of living waters, and hewed out cisterns for themselves, broken cisterns that can hold no water.

You see that these two evils are two sides of the same coin. They *forsook* the lord AND they hewn cisterns that can hold no water.

Jesus is revealing to this woman that she does not have an emotional problem, or a social outcast problem. Her deepest issue is that she has a worship problem. She has forsaken the worship of god and has begun to give herself, find meaning and value in, crate and identity around lesser things.

Then

vs 20

She immediately resorted to pulling out the hot button political conversation. She is pulling out her religious resume and wanting Jesus to approve of it.

vs. 23

This oxymoron is a powerful way of asserting not only that the period of worship ‘in spirit and truth’ is about to come and awaits only the dawning of the ‘hour’, i.e. Jesus’ death, resurrection and exaltation, but also that this period of true worship is already proleptically present in the person and ministry of Jesus before the cross. This worship can take place only in and through him: he is the true temple (2:19–22), he is the resurrection and the life (11:25). The passion and exaltation of Jesus constitute the turning point upon which the gift of the Holy Spirit depends (7:38–39; 16:7); but that salvation-historical turning point is possible only because of who Jesus is. Precisely for that reason, the hour is not only ‘coming’ but also ‘has now come’.

There is an invitation to know and see yourself the way that God see you. And the Lord, being God, knows that you were created to worship him! That all of your days you would live in the fullness of Joy that is found in His presence, using your gifts and talents for his glory,

The path to the Well and the path back from the Well

John 4:39 ESV

Many Samaritans from that town believed in him because of the woman’s testimony, “He told me all that I ever did.”

μαρτυρέω [martureo /mar·too·reh·o/] v. From 3144; TDNT 4:474; TDNTA 564; GK 3455; 79 occurrences; AV translates as “bear witness” 25 times, “testify” 19 times, “bear record” 13 times, “witness” five times, “be a witness” twice, “give testimony” twice, “have a good report” twice, and translated miscellaneously 11 times. 1 to be a witness, to bear witness, i.e. to affirm that one has seen or heard or experienced something, or that he knows it because taught by divine revelation or inspiration. 1A to give (not to keep back) testimony. 1B to utter honourable testimony, give a good report. 1C conjure, implore.